Solitude and Speechlessness: Renaissance Writing and Reading in Isolation 9781487519322

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SOLITUDE AND SPEECHLESSNESS: RENAISSANCE WRITING AND READING IN ISOLATION

ANDREW MATTISON

Solitude and Speechlessness: Renaissance Writing and Reading in Isolation

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

©  University of Toronto Press 2019 Toronto Buffalo London utorontopress.com Printed in Canada ISBN 978-1-4875-0404-5  rinted on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper with vegetable-based P inks.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: Solitude and speechlessness : Renaissance writing and reading in isolation / Andrew Mattison. Names: Mattison, Andrew, 1976– author. Description: Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: Canadiana 20190095563 | ISBN 9781487504045 (hardcover) Subjects: LCSH: English literature – Early modern, 1500–1700 – History and criticism. | LCSH: Social isolation in literature. | LCSH: Solitude in literature. | LCSH: Authorship. Classification: LCC PR411.M38 2019 | DDC 820.9/003—dc23

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario.

Contents

Acknowledgments  vii Introduction: Writing in Solitude  3 1  Lyric Futures: Hidden Ambitions in the Sidney-Pembroke Circle  20 2  Nameless Orphans: Ambitious Poetry in an Age of Modesty  45 3  The Peril of Understanding: Forms of Obscurity  69 4 The Lure of Solitude: Melancholy and Eremitism as Literary Dispositions 100 5  The Naked Sense of Retirement: Cowley, Marvell, Traherne  132 6 Literary History in Isolation: Bacon, Hofmannsthal, and Historical Memory 169 Conclusion: Reading in Solitude  196 Notes  203 Bibliography  235 Index  253

Acknowledgments

The great Renaissance philologist Isaac Casaubon, who spent his final years in England with his closest scholarly friends scattered across Europe, is one of literary scholarship’s many wanderers, a predecessor to Germaine de Staël, Erich Auerbach, and Edward Said. Mark Pattison’s surprisingly lively ­biography of Casaubon shows how much the analysis of old texts has always been an art of correspondence, its solitary and collaborative elements negotiated by the diplomacy of the personal letter. Unlike Casaubon’s, most of my friends and colleagues do not insist on corresponding in Greek or Latin, but I have relied on them to an equal degree and often at similar distances. Melissa Valiska Gregory has been a thoughtful, inquisitive, generous, and ingenious interlocutor throughout this book’s composition. Lara Bovilsky provided essential advice, insightful observations, sharp turns of phrase, and countless necessary emendations. I have depended as much on Sara Lundquist’s benevolence and patience as on her institutional astuteness. Gary Bouchard, Mary Baine Campbell, Wai Chee Dimock, Jeff Dolven, Christina Fitzgerald, Charlene Gilbert, Natalie Hefner, Thomas King, Rebecca Olson, Mysoon Rizk, Marjorie Rubright, Alan Stewart, John Watkins, and Matthew Wikander gave important suggestions and help. I am grateful to Suzanne Rancourt for her interest in and support for this work. I have benefitted while writing this book from a Faculty Fellowship from the University of Toledo Humanities Institute, a University of Toledo Publication Subvention Award, and the assistance of the staff of the Newberry Library, where I am a Scholar-in-Residence. The isolation inherent in reading works of the distant past has been most apparent to me in teaching, and I am indebted to my students, as always, for their outspokenness about the strangeness and surprise of such reading. Part of chapter 3 was previously published as “A Figure and Fate Shared by Early Poems of Tourneur and Middleton” in Notes and Queries 64.2 (June 2017), 325–28. I presented earlier versions of several parts of this book, and received useful responses, at the annual meetings of the Shakespeare Association of America, the Renaissance Society of America, and the Modern Language Association.

SOLITUDE AND SPEECHLESSNESS

Introduction

Writing in Solitude

Gabriel Harvey was taken aback when, in the spring of 1573, he was denied the degree of Master of Arts by Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, where he had been a fellow for three years. According to letters he wrote to the college master, the issue was not Harvey’s academic ability but his s­ ocial behaviour. Another fellow named Osborne, he reports, had accused him of not being “familiar like a fellow,” and claimed Harvey “did disdain everi mans cumpani.” Harvey protests that he was merely doing what he thought was appropriate to his position: I made him anser that I was aferd les over mutch familiariti had mard al: and therefore where as I was wunt to be as familiar, and as sociable and as gud a fellow too, as ani, seing sum to be sumwhat far of, and other not to like so well of it, as it was ment, I was constrained to withdrawe mi self sumwhat the more, althouh not greatly nether, out of often and continual compani. Marri so, that at usual and convenient times, as after dinner and supper, at commenti fiers, yea and at other times too, if the lest occasion were offrid, I continuid as long as ani, and was as fellowli as the best. What thai cale sociable I know not: this I am suer, I never avoidid cumpani: I have been merri in cumpani: I have bene ful hardly drawn out of cumpani.1

Harvey was the son of a ropemaker, and his class likely played a role in the difficulty and self-consciousness with which he attempted to assimilate to university life. But behind his protest that he is “as fellowli as the best,” there is a hint in this letter of a broader sense of confusion about what the relationship might be between sociability and the arts of reading and writing that a fellow of Pembroke Hall was expected to practise. His assumption that a more scholarly life meant a less sociable one makes a certain sense, after all. Preparing to be judged on the basis of his academic achievement, Harvey failed a criterion he did not know existed.

4  Solitude and Speechlessness

It is worth asking whether or not this criterion still functions now in the assessment of scholars. The American Association of University Professors has warned against what they see as “an increasing tendency” among administrators and tenure and promotion committees to judge faculty members in part on the basis of their “collegiality,” a term that they stress has no clear definition, and, if poorly defined, threatens to suppress productive disagreement as well as a traditional element of academic culture: “Gadflies, critics of institutional practices or collegial norms, even the occasional malcontent, have all been known to play an invaluable and constructive role in the life of academic departments and institutions.”2 The AAUP’s reference to “the occasional malcontent” demonstrates that this issue is not merely about dissent, but about the same issue that Harvey ran up against: the limits of tolerance within an academic community for those who belong to it intellectually and professionally but not necessarily socially. It is intriguing that the AAUP sees this issue as having arisen more frequently since the 1990s, because the same period has witnessed considerable emphasis in scholarship and other academic practices (and non-academic life as well) on collaboration, community, and other potential synonyms for the sociability Harvey did not know whether he possessed. This emphasis often acknowledges its opposition to what is sometimes seen as a traditional, perhaps outmoded sense of reading, writing, and scholarship as solitary practices. In a recent issue of PMLA, four Pennsylvania State University faculty – Michael Bérubé, Hester Blum, Christopher Castiglia, and Julia Spicher Kasdorf – defend the significance of a community reading project they have organized in part by devoting much of a page to castigating the book reviewer Ron Charles for his complaint about the synchronization between marketing and reading in the Harry Potter phenomenon. To Charles’s lament that the “contemplation, independence, and solitude” he associates with reading is lost in internet-based enthusiasm for the Potter novels, Bérubé et al. reply: “Unfortunately, such reactions are all too common in ‘serious’ literary culture, a habitus inhabited by people who think of themselves as solitary readers and who like it that there is something exclusive about reading literature, something precious that will be lost if too many people do it (especially if too many people do it at the same time).”3 Thinking of reading as solitary is easily conflated with a reactionary snobbishness. In studies of Renaissance literature, there has been a noticeable scholarly trend in which emphasis is placed on those points of connection and collaboration within communities of writers and readers that had sometimes been overlooked by previous generations of critics and editors. This trend has been driven not only by changes in historiography

Introduction: Writing in Solitude  5

(influenced particularly by Michel Foucault) and in the theory of authorship (influenced by Roland Barthes) but also by the sense – sometimes overtly, sometimes more subtly adopted – that collaboration is, in itself, better. Julia Reinhard Lupton describes her book Thinking with Shakespeare as dedicated to the places in the works of Shakespeare and Hannah Arendt “in which divergent forms of life – the lives of men in their political plurality, of humans in their domestic multiplicity, of animals in their biodiversity, and of objects in both their durability and their decay – enter into world-building and future founding relationships with each other.”4 She confesses that this work of observant, naturalistic critique led her in an ethical direction she did not expect: “This book, somewhat to my surprise, has ended up being about virtue.” Her surprise suggests that Lupton, and perhaps critics in general, are still struggling to come to terms with the extent to which a critical preoccupation with sociability as a dominant or even inevitable concern of literature is tied to the very old notion that sociability represents human nature at its best. This interest in community is related to a broader emphasis on social context in literary criticism since the early 1990s. One result of both trends has been a rethinking, and often an outright dismissal, of the familiar idea of the solitary poet. Critics such as Jack Stillinger, Arthur Marotti, Jeffrey Masten, and many others have assured us that the idea of solitary writing is a chimera of literary history, an outgrowth of Romanticism that ignores the social purposes and collaborative origins of literary texts.5 My intent in this book is to recover the relationship between poetry in the broad sense it had in the Renaissance (which often included drama and prose romance) and solitude, not in the terms of individual genius but through discussion of the isolation that is palpable within and surrounding literary creation and reception. That relationship, in fact, is not exclusively or even predominantly about the personal dispositions of poets: it is about whether or not the primary value of literary works should be thought of as social. The alternatives to these social values are disparate and sometimes elusive, but all the more powerful for their being able to adapt themselves to new social circumstances and even to be resuscitated in literary works that have dropped out of circulation. Emphasis on an extrasocial reception allows for the emergence of kinds of literary achievement and literary ambition that are distinct from either social status or financial profit. It is a muted form of ambition easily missed, and as I stress in my discussion of obscurity in chapter 3 of this book, a text judged through non-social criteria allows literary failure and success strangely to coincide. It is true, as Stillinger and Masten argue, that the extent to which well-known writers worked on their own has often been overstated by their admirers, and this book is not intended to return to an orientation

6  Solitude and Speechlessness

of literary history around a few singular geniuses. On the contrary, I will demonstrate throughout these chapters that the isolation inherent in Renaissance literature is most clearly manifest when canonical and non-­ canonical texts are understood in conjunction. This broader approach, I suggest, is surprisingly compatible with recognition of the isolation of poetic labour and achievement. The necessary correction of an occasional critical overemphasis on authorial singularity has occluded the association in the Renaissance – not universal but consistently apparent – between solitude and the work and disposition of a poet. That association is an old one, grounded firmly in Vergil’s depiction of a lonely Orpheus (here in Thomas May’s 1628 translation): But he seven moneths (they say) Weeping besides forsaken Strymons waves Under the cold, and solitary caves To ruthlesse rocks did his mishaps lament, That trees were mov’d, and Tygers did relent.6

The familiar idea of the power of Orpheus’s voice over nature is here associated directly with his solitude, and indeed to the indifference of the same natural world: the rocks are “ruthlesse” even as the “trees were mov’d.” Such a bereft Orphean figure seeking consolation in the natural landscape was a motif easily adaptable to Renaissance contexts. Thomas Stanley echoes that image in his translation of the first poem from Luis de Góngora’s Soledades, printed as “The Solitude”:   he, whose right to beauty might remove The Youth of Ida from the Cup of Jove, Shipwrackt, repuls’d, and absent, did complain Of his hard Fate and Mistresses disdain, With such sad sweetness, that the Winds, and Sea, In sighs, and murmurs, kept him company.7

The power of the “sad sweetness” of the shipwrecked youth’s complaint induces a natural response that both ameliorates and reinforces the youth’s solitude, nature thus keeping him company but only to echo his loneliness. The “Orphan of the Hurricane” in Marvell’s “The Unfortunate Lover” is similarly shipwrecked alone, and, though Marvell’s terms are grimmer than Stanley’s, his “Orphan” is likewise comforted and isolated by nature: And as one Corm’rant fed him, still Another on his Heart did bill.8

Introduction: Writing in Solitude  7

These sympathetic but inhuman surroundings for poetry and for the lyric subject can also be abstracted into mythic or allegorical figures. In Wye Saltonstall’s image of Ovid’s funeral in exile, for example, the only mourners are “the Muses, together with Venus and a hundred little Cupids.”9 Ovid is Orpheus’s Roman parallel: his solitude is defined by the presence or absence of human or inhuman sources of consolation, but its larger significance is measured through its relation to poetry. Ovid’s exile, like Orpheus’s song of despair, serves to connect natural or pastoral surroundings with the unsympathetic reception of poetry. As Touchstone puns in As You Like It, “I am here with thee and thy goats, as the most capricious poet, honest Ovid, was among the Goths” (3.3.5–7).10 Touchstone does not say that Ovid found solitude conducive to writing poetry, implying only that it forced him to confront the lack of an appreciative audience. Solitude, in the examples in this book, is a context for reading as much as it is for writing. The authors I discuss here did not necessarily work alone and without collaborators or supportive initial readers. However, their uncertainty about the future circulation of their writings, their doubts about readers’ capacity to understand what they have set down, their anticipation that their writings and ideas might be used for purposes other than those intended, and, more broadly, the unpredictability of the long life of a literary text, can all be figured in poetry, prose, drama, and criticism through tropes, images, and characterizations of isolation. This isolation is a condition shared by text and author, and that can pass from either to the other; it includes the solitude in which a poem awaits its possible reception, and it also functions as a flexible metaphor for the inherent remove of an audience from the act of writing. The figure of the isolated, misunderstood, or misjudged poet is a Renaissance preoccupation, parallel to and sharing modes of representation with the wandering and complaining youth, the eloquent melancholic, the exemplary hermit, the homeless orphan, the retiring stoic, and other literary types for whom physical or intellectual isolation does not prevent influence over others. The separateness of a poet and of a poem are best understood not as emerging from the contexts of composition or the marketing conventions of the book industry but as a way to conceive of literature in relation to an uncertain world. One of the causes of the isolation of writers and texts is the possibility, if not certainty, of unsympathetic or uncomprehending reading. Because reading is unpredictable, literary works have a necessarily uncertain and unstable relation to audience, but such instability can reflect the nature of poetry itself as an outgrowth and representation of the solitary disposition. Sidney hints at this parallel in Astrophil and Stella, in which he places two sonnets next to each other that, individually and together, establish

8  Solitude and Speechlessness

skepticism toward reading as a corollary of solitary impulses. The first, Sonnet 27, acknowledges that a courtier’s shrinking from sociability is inherently hard to read. Like Harvey at Pembroke Hall, Astrophil fears being subjected, however unjustly, to unsympathetic interpretations of his quietness: Because I oft in darke abstracted guise,   Seeme most alone in greatest companie,   With dearth of words, or answers quite awrie, To them that would make speech of speech arise, They deeme, and of their doome the rumour flies,   That poison foule of bubling pride doth lie   So in my swelling breast that only I Fawne on my self, and others to despise:   Yet pride I thinke doth not my soule possesse, Which lookes too oft in his unflattring glasse: But one worse fault, Ambition, I confesse, That makes me oft my best friends overpasse,   Unseene, unheard, while thought to highest place   Bends all his powers, even unto Stella’s grace.11

The surprise on which this poem turns is the reversal of the expected relationship between pride and ambition: since Astrophil’s ambition is to win Stella’s grace, to which he (like, he stresses, his company) is unworthy, he associates ambition with humility, and his friends are mistaken in reading his silence as pride. But insofar as ambition is normally understood as an aspiration for public achievement – an assumption I will question in my first chapter – it is a further surprise that his ambition is “Unseene, unheard,” and the latter term particularly redirects attention back to the false interpretations of Astrophil’s withdrawal dreamed up by “them that would make speech of speech.” Conversation is a challenge to Astrophil’s state, and those that depend on it are not only separated from him but are unable to make sense of his silence. Solitude (here that of being “alone in greatest companie”) and speechlessness result in, but are also represented by, the inability to be read. The isolating effect of failed or rebuffed reading is immediately reinforced in the next sonnet, number 28: You that with allegorie’s curious frame,   Of other’s children changelings use to make   With me those paines for God’s sake do not take: I list not dig so deepe for brasen fame.

Introduction: Writing in Solitude  9 When I say “Stella,” I do meane the same   Princesse of Beautie, for whose only sake   The raines of Love I love, though never slake, And joy therein, though Nations count it shame.   I beg no subject to use eloquence, Nor in hid wayes to guide Philosophie: Looke at my hands for no such quintessence; But know that I in pure simplicitie,   Breathe out the flames which burne within my heart,   Love onely reading unto me this art.

In Sonnet 27, Astrophil resented being read as thinking of himself when he was thinking of Stella. But in 28 he shows that even recognizing his relation to Stella leaves those trying to make sense of him in doubt.12 Sidney is right that the mechanics of reading allegory – the mental substitution of a person or thing for another or for an idea – is neither controlled by nor dependent on the specific indications a text gives of allegorical reference, and thus it might be unpredictably at play in a work such as Astrophil.13 But there is still a strange interpretive hole at the heart of this sonnet: the only thing that is not negative is the insistence that the name Stella means “the same / Princesse of Beautie.” If the sonnet is not allegorical, though, what does “same” signify? Is Penelope Devereux – who is traditionally identified with Stella and whose married name (Rich) Sidney puns on in several sonnets – an identity that can be contained within that “same” or not?14 The last line seems to address this question. In keeping with his earlier insistence that “all my deed/But Copying is, what in her Nature writes” (sonnet 3, lines 13–14), Astrophil in Sonnet 28 describes himself as taking dictation from Love (not that dictation and copying are the same process – their parallel use in Astrophil acknowledges the tense interrelation of speech and writing). But the whole sonnet’s negativity about interpretation implies a second meaning of the last line: that Love is not only alone in reading Stella but similarly alone in reading Astrophil. If the only possible reading is through love, and neither allegory nor (as in sonnet 27) personal acquaintance allows access to that love, then the sonnet seems to close itself off from reading altogether. This resistance to reading in sonnet 28 redoubles the defence of speechlessness in Sonnet 27 – the conversation with peers and the discursive transmission enabled by literary circulation are both under suspicion. The two sonnets together imply an analogy between Astrophil’s social speechlessness among his friends and his reticence in the face of broader readership. The connection between speaker and poem implies that texts that shrink from reading can stand in for subjects who are, like Astrophil, “alone in greatest company”: literary works that

10  Solitude and Speechlessness

are subject to wanderings their authors cannot control or anticipate, written by poets who labour without obvious reward. The precarious relation to readership implied by these two sonnets is also behind some explicit images of writing as a solitary endeavour, such as the turn from elegy to the problem of literary ambition in Milton’s ­Lycidas. Milton defines ambition only in partial relation to fame, but in clear opposition to the pleasures of social discourse:   Alas! What boots it with uncessant care To tend the homely slighted Shepherds trade, And strictly meditate the thankless Muse, Were it not better don as others use, To sport with Amaryllis in the shade, Or with the tangles of Neaera’s hair? Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise (That last infirmity of Noble mind) To scorn delights, and live laborious dayes; But the fair Guerdon when we hope to find, And think to burst out into sudden blaze, Comes the blind Fury with th’abhorred shears, And slits the thin spun life. But not the praise, Phoebus repli’d, and touch’d my trembling ears; Fame is no plant that grows on mortal soil, Nor in the glistering foil Set off to th’ world, nor in broad rumour lies, But lives and spreds aloft by those pure eyes, And perfet witnes of all-judging Jove; As he pronounces lastly on each deed, Of so much fame in Heav’n expect thy meed. (64–84)15

This remarkably difficult passage describes the poet (and the priest – the poem does not clearly distinguish between these two vocations) as beset on all sides with reasons to abandon his task.16 Love presents gratifications more immediate, while the delayed ones of fame are countered by the possibility of early death. Though the desire for fame is associated with the “clear spirit” and “noble mind,” those things do not make such desire virtuous, as Apollo sternly reminds the poet. So long, it seems, as the “sudden blaze” poetry is supposed to achieve depends on others’ praise, hoping for it will be suspect, and in this sense the rejection of the company of Amaryllis and Neaera is parallel to the rejection of readership as the purpose and evaluative context of poetry. Milton thus carefully separates the kind of “laborious” poem he is writing from the school poetry he calls “Rural ditties” exchanged

Introduction: Writing in Solitude  11

under the eyes of “Old Damoetas” (lines 32 and 36). “Laborious” hints at a georgic context that might displace the pastoral one, and it anticipates his final transformation of poetry into sectarian polemic in the section of the poem that “foretells the ruine of our corrupted Clergie” (headnote).17 But the idea of labour only addresses the poet’s perspective; it does not solve the problem Apollo presents: that there is no audience save God that can judge the poem according to the standards of the labour with which it was constructed. Even if Milton is indeed prepared ultimately to defer to God’s judgment of his work, he knows there will be readers in the meantime – Lycidas was published three times in his lifetime – but their readings do not govern the task of composition. For a critic, such an attitude toward reading requires a rather humble approach, in which the text’s distance from view is accepted but not necessarily given priority over interpretation. The shift in Lycidas from a communal but naive scholastic poetry to a harder, lonelier adult one echoes the similarly pastoralized autobiography in “December” of The Shepheardes Calender, in which Colin recalls being encouraged by his “shepherd peres” and “A good olde shephearde, Wrenock” to apply himself to “song and musicks mirth” (lines 39–41) but has been induced by misfortune and unrequited love to “hang my pype upon this tree” (141). That Colin’s silence does not exclude a continuing poetic career, however, is suggested both by Spenser’s further work in other genres and by E.K.’s mysterious gloss on an emblem not actually present in “December,” “The meaning whereof is that all thinges perish and come to theyr last end, but workes of learned wits and monuments of Poetry abide for ever,” an idea redoubled by the epilogue’s promise that the Calender “shall continewe till the worlds dissolution.”18 Since the “song and musicks mirth” that came out of Colin’s relationship with his fellow shepherds has explicitly been identified with the things that “perish and come to theyr last end,” the poetry that will “abide for ever” must be differently identified. Social context, Colin and E.K. acknowledge, may allow a poet to win immediate praise but must be put aside as poetry reaches for its long-term legacy and final meaning and value; doing so allows for new categories of readership, but within a less predictable and also less intimate model of reading. Spenser and Milton did seek to be read widely in the future, while some of the other poets I will discuss here made no such intent clear. But the cultural awareness of the possibility of long-term reading affects the practice of poetry in broad ways, not only for those poets who desired it and had confidence they would achieve it. For the most part, I will discuss such longterm reading in the abstract terms in which Renaissance poets generally imagined it. In my last chapter, however, I will address a specific example of highly unpredictable reading over a gap of centuries – Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s invocation of Francis Bacon – to demonstrate that such reading

12  Solitude and Speechlessness

isolates literary eras from each other as much as it connects them. We often think of literature as bringing people together. But literature also reminds its readers of the estrangements created by reading outside of an immediate social connection or across divisions of time, place, or social status. The form in which literary success arrives, as Milton worries, is disconcertingly removed from the motivations for composition. That remove affects the definition not only of audience but also of reading and comprehension.

• My approach in this book is not a composite of cultural history and close reading as they have been practised in opposing critical camps. My intention is instead to provide a historical context in which textual evidence of writers thinking about reading can reveal otherwise obscured intersections and patterns of literary history. I think of this approach as countermaterialist: acknowledging the material history of texts without giving it interpretive priority. This approach helps define the role of the reader in relation to a text whose readership is understood to be unpredictable and to span a long period of time. A common complaint against close reading is that it places a text in isolation.19 I would counter that the isolation of texts from their contexts is itself a concern of Renaissance writers; it is not a modern invention whose application is anachronistic. This i­solation is primarily brought about by the unpredictability of readership, and I might call what I am aiming for in this book not close reading but strange reading: a reading that acknowledges that I and most other readers of a text are strangers to its author. As a stranger, I am a member of a readership whose potential is present for virtually any text (and I will try, in this book, to give non-canonical texts the same kind of reading as familiar ones): even the writer of a sparsely circulated manuscript cannot be confident that only friends and like minds will see it. The Renaissance understandings of readership and authorship were interdependent, and we should not give either precedence over the other, nor should we assume that they are weighed by the same evaluative and interpretive criteria. In a study of unfinished works, Stephen Dobranski argues that emphasis on the author’s and reader’s roles in creating meaning can be compatible: When viewed as moments of exquisite authorial control, omissions seem to suggest that a text was created by an “author,” a single individual who oversaw the production and could finesse even the most subtle poetic ­nuances. But, if early modern readers were then expected to make something meaningful out

Introduction: Writing in Solitude  13 of a text’s missing pieces, Renaissance omissions seem to imply that readers shared responsibility for the author’s work.20

The idea that readers were “expected to make something meaningful” out of a text avoids the problems that emerge when we assume that texts carry meaning placed in them by their authors. But the idea of “shared responsibility” is too harmonious an image for a process that is unpredictable and conflict-ridden. Readers can be necessary for a work’s future and still interfere with the way that future is imagined and brought about by authors or by other readers. We see this interference in the difficulty critics have in establishing the respective roles of authors and readers in the creation of meaning. Dobranski’s collaborative model is not sufficient to address the critical problem that has emerged over the definition of authorship. Part of that problem is essentially rhetorical; authorship as a topic draws an accusatory tone, as critics wonder why old ways of imagining authors continue to persist despite historical and theoretical evidence against them. Thus, Nina Levine argues: Studies that define the author/authority against a popular collective tend to assume, and even naturalize, a version of authorship epitomized by canonical writers such as Shakespeare or Jonson and centered on the image of a solitary author who is imagined to work with a sprezzatura that all but erases the labor of composition.21

Levine gives no examples, so it is not clear what studies she has in mind, nor the era in which they were written and thus whether she sees this as a past or ongoing problem. Nevertheless, she makes several suppositions worth addressing, and which bear on the central concerns of this book. Levine’s phrase “solitary author” in opposition to her own model of drama as “collective enterprise” implies that solitude as a conceptual or contextual accessory to writing is incompatible with collaboration. But if we recognize, as Dobranski would suggest, that texts are shaped by many people – including scribes, compositors, and readers themselves – then collaborators are often strangers to each other: theorizing these different kinds of contributions as coauthorship does not eliminate the potential loneliness of writing or reading. While it is certainly true that emphasis on literary genius once obscured the extent of collaboration in the production of literary texts, Levine’s assumptions demonstrate that the inverse is true as well: attention to collaboration can overstate the extent to which writing is a social activity. Still, Levine is right to raise the very difficult question of who we are talking about when we define authorship. The 1616 and 1623 folio editions

14  Solitude and Speechlessness

of Jonson and Shakespeare imply a particular model – or rather two related models – of what it is to be a dramatic and poetic writer; can we accept those models as representing an important aspect of Renaissance literary thinking without declaring them universal or ideal? On the other hand, can we accept a broader, more varied understanding of authorship while still recognizing the considerable influence Jonson, Shakespeare, and other writers published in single-author folio collections (such as Spenser, Sidney, and Daniel) had over how authorship was imagined from the mid-1590s on? Jonson’s 1616 folio does inform my understanding of the emergence of literature as a distinctive category, including its indications that the shifting cultural roles of drama and poetry are interconnected. Accordingly, I will treat these genres together here, with some attention to the process by which genres are applied and renovated in writing, printing, and reading. Lyric poetry, particularly in its printed forms, is the genre that reflects the clearest tensions between the immediacy of personal communication, the shared assumptions of social circulation, and the unpredictability of long-term reading, even though its print history and cultural functions connect it to prose romances and treatises, drama, and epic. Recent work has seen a broader account of literary sociality than had held sway in the 1990s. Catherine Nicholson’s work on estrangement and eccentricity is a welcome correction to the “myth” that “eloquence is the essence of sociability.”22 Similarly resisting simplistic models of social normativity, Daniel Juan Gil adopts the neologism asocial, which he uses to account for treatments of sexuality and desire that do not necessarily conform to a social dynamic beyond that of a particular desiring pair: “the emotions represented in literary texts sketch the grammar of a nexus of bodily connections” that is “neither social nor antisocial but asocial in that it represents a form of emotionally mediated interpersonal bonding that grows out of fundamental contradictions within early modern social life and then leaves those contradictions behind.”23 Gil’s work is a reminder that a more thorough and nuanced interpretation of a literary text can result from letting go of the expectation that a work will reflect broadly evident modes of social engagement. Part of literature’s value, and more specifically poetry’s, is its capacity to record ideas present in a culture but at odds with its dominant patterns of thought. However, Gil’s term asocial, despite his care in separating it from ­antisocial (which Nicholson uses prominently), still implies a dichotomy I wish to avoid, as does the more thorough division suggested by Henry Sussman in his documentation of “the writer’s status as an outsider” and “the unique combination of freedom and constraint attending this position.”24 As Sussman acknowledges, “The notion of the outside is one of those hopelessly murky constructs – like justice or kindness – on which

Introduction: Writing in Solitude  15

our basic senses of situation, identity, and propriety feed, but which are inherently damaged.”25 Just as Astrophil is “alone in greatest companie,” the outside can overlap with the inside, and it is not my intention to imagine an opposition between social and nonsocial (or antisocial) behaviour. The long tradition of resistance to the social does not, in fact, depend on such a distinction. Philostratus says of his philosopher-hero Apollonius, who did not speak, “He was not however socially unattractive during the time of his silence, but when spoken to he replied with his eyes, his hands, or by motions of his head; and he did not seem unsmiling or gloomy, but retained his love of society and his kindness.”26 This smiling asceticism does not counter the removal from society effected by Apollonius’s speechlessness, but it does complicate it. Complementarily, Diogenes of Sinope’s disdain for social norms often took the form of gregariousness and primitive communality, as when he advocated an economy of sharing to the corpulent Anaximenes: “Let us beggars have something of your paunch; it will be a relief to you, and we will gain advantage.”27 The Cynic’s rudeness is both social and antisocial, individualist in the service of the collective. My sense is that the social dynamics of Renaissance writing allowed for something like this tempered and self-challenged withdrawal, and in this sense I would separate Renaissance solitude from the modern Waldenian tradition, even as modern debates over the relationship between solitude and a healthy emotional life demonstrate that we are still uncertain about how to make sense of a solitary figure within a social context.28 Because of this continuing uncertainty, I appreciate Michael Cobb’s recent call to recognize singleness as a distinctive way of relating to the world and to individuals within it, and his warning against the “miscasting of singleness as a terrible condition worth our pity and obfuscation,” even though I do not share Cobb’s individualist understanding of literature.29 Individualism implies pride and perhaps defiance, emotions that do not fit well with the melancholics, hermits, retirees, and poets of uncertain future I  am chronicling here. Such wanderers and scribblers accept solitude as inevitable and often natural to them, but it is not really an orientation. And I am interested in the singleness not only of people but also of texts: among many other examples of literary loneness, I discuss in chapter 3 poems by Cyril Tourneur and Thomas Middleton that were printed but that each survived the Renaissance in one copy; in chapter 6 I discuss a poem by Francis Bacon often cited, fairly or not, as his only real poem (or perhaps his only good one). The modes of literary isolation I discuss are not all the same in kind or degree: some of them represent the possibility of a literary readership that is imagined in opposition to social connections, and others, representing a yet deeper isolation, are resistant to readership itself. This variety reflects

16  Solitude and Speechlessness

the ways solitude was understood. Petrarch notes a distinction between the isolation of the whole person and that of the mind in his treatise De Vita Solitaria: Solitude is considered threefold, if I grasp the matter rightly: that of place, with which my present discourse is specially taken up; that of time, as in the night, where there is solitude and silence even in public squares; that of the mind, as in persons who, absorbed in deepest contemplation, in broad daylight and in a crowded market-place, are not aware of what is going on there and are alone whenever and wherever they wish.30

Petrarch particularly recommends the last as a skill the solitary can work on: I have learned to create a solitude among people and a haven of refuge in the midst of a tempest, using a device, not generally known, of so controlling the senses that they do not perceive what they perceive.31

Petrarch concisely expresses many of the features of literary isolation: rightly or wrongly, it tends to be perceived as exceptional, a way of being that comes naturally to thoughtful reading and writing people but not to most people. It is, to some extent, willful. And it involves the manipulation of perception: isolation is related to the mechanism by which imaginative people create the alternative worlds of literary representation. The texts I consider here have two things in common: a way of imagining the world and time that is apart from dominant, characteristically social modes; and a recognition that language, because of its inherent relation to distant times and places through etymology, literary influence, and the possibility of future readership, has an inherently nonsocial element that poets, dramatists, and thinkers can (and sometimes must) draw on. This exception to the influence of social context over meaning has, I believe, implications for literary interpretation beyond the texts and issues I discuss in this book: it is a reminder that literary texts – particularly poetry and drama – are capable of carrying across time modes of thought that are not otherwise apparent in the cultural history of a past era. But texts also carry their own estrangement from their point of origination. This estrangement helps make reading an isolating activity, but it is also the activity for which texts are created, and in this sense they are oriented toward their own future. Reading has no moment. It always represents the conjunction of multiple times, and, as disconcerting as that experience can be, its lack of specific temporality is its chief strength as a means of access to the past. Stephen Greenblatt has said that he “began with the desire

Introduction: Writing in Solitude  17

to speak with the dead.”32 I do not share that desire – I would not know what to say to the dead – and I believe that Greenblatt has underestimated the significance of reading as a means for relation between distinct eras. I emphasize speechlessness in this book as a complement and corollary to solitude to encourage the recognition of the kinds of meaning that literary texts can contain that conversation cannot. The first three chapters examine three different implications of the assumption that a poet’s readers will not be limited to the poet’s friends. The first proceeds from this division between social circle and literary readership by calling for a re-examination of the idea of literary ambition, which, I argue, is largely separate from social ambition. To write ambitiously is to seek to be read, admired, and imitated in ways that might not have any direct benefit to the author. To emphasize the split between readership and patronage, I focus on one of the most influential patronage complexes of the time: the literary circle associated with Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke. Building on this distinction between an ambitious author and an ambitious text, the second chapter focuses on the independent life of the latter by noting the limitations on the singularity of an author’s name and an author’s style, placing Edmund Spenser and George Herbert in relation to poets who struggled to acquire the name of an English poet. Both name and language, I argue, prove insufficient as means to document the unpredictable life of a poem, which wanders across eras and media on its own. The third chapter focuses not on the fact of readership but on the understanding available to an audience, discussing poems that seem to acknowledge an intent to withhold meaning from their readers. I compare poems that have proved difficult to read or to interpret, as measured both by their internal qualities and by the history of critical responses to them, with those that seem intended to be difficult to read and those that have been, for most of their history, unread. Centring around Donne, Jonson’s criticism of him, and his relation to George Chapman, the chapter also considers poets who have not been able to overcome the inherent resistance to reading that obscurity impels and find an audience. Obscurity, even when it does not lead to a lack of readership, still functions analogously to the forces that separate texts from readers altogether. The fourth and fifth chapters turn from the isolation of texts to those of persons. As we would expect from the previous chapters’ separation of social context and readership, the desire for solitude is not incompatible with literary achievement or ambition, but it does raise a problem of how to conceive of an audience for modes of thought that seem to depend on a retreat from the world. The fourth places the drive for a thoughtful and eloquent solitude in an affective context: melancholy, which I define

18  Solitude and Speechlessness

primarily as a love of solitude. Focussing on both poetic and dramatic contexts for the instinct to retreat from the world, including melancholic characterization and imagery in works of Thomas Kyd, Robert Southwell, Shakespeare, and Milton, the chapter compares melancholy’s productivity for poetic and rhetorical matter to the mild paradox of the eloquent hermit, who influences the world by retreating from it. I also touch, here and elsewhere, on Harvey’s problem: the solitary impetus embedded in the practice of scholarship. The fifth chapter, concerned with the second half of the century, finds melancholy no longer as frequently invoked in an era in which solitude is often defended on its own terms. The chapter examines retirement and retreat in the poems of Cowley, Marvell, and Traherne. Each of these three poets represents an increasingly extreme example of the idea that underlies much of this book, a sort of antibestseller: the work of literature that succeeds in part by avoiding readership. The final chapter considers the separation between texts and readers from the latter’s point of view, and thus requires the largest historical scope. Informed by my somewhat frustrated attempt to determine why Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s curious 1902 prose work “Ein Brief” takes the form of a letter addressed to Francis Bacon, the chapter compares Hofmannsthal’s treatment of literary history (and what I argue is its neglect by his twentieth-century critics) to the nature and function of that history as discussed in Bacon’s Advancement of Learning and as revealed by Bacon’s own relation to his readership. Reflecting the problem of authorial identity considered in chapter 2, I discuss the alienating conception of literary history that emerges when we consider Bacon in an unfamiliar role: as a poet. Doing so enables me to make a case for the significance of the inherent anachronism of reading old works, an acknowledgment I believe cuts against both traditional and recent critical approaches. The term “close reading” implies that the goal of reading is to eliminate the gap between old texts and modern readers; I believe that acknowledging that gap is e­ ssential to interpretation. On the other hand, skeptics of interpretation themselves often prefer the closeness of interaction with a surviving material object to consideration of a text that essentially resides in the past. In this final chapter, I respond to Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht as an e­ xample of this emphasis on intimacy within material understandings of l­iterature. In his book The Powers of Philology, Gumbrecht argues for the a­ esthetic effectiveness of imagining the context of a surviving fragment; for ­Gumbrecht, the doubt of the philologist is emblematic of aesthetic e­xperience itself, but only ­because the philologist seeks the material presence of the ­fragmented original. Against Gumbrecht, I argue that interpretation is valuable for the same reason that leads theorists to be skeptical of it: it carries a reminder of the essential distance of reader from text.

Introduction: Writing in Solitude  19

Bacon’s poetry illustrates a kind of isolation that is peculiarly apparent to a literary critic – the odd status of works that are remembered but not well, a status shared by a number of the works I discuss in this book alongside better known texts. Marking the isolation of these texts, and noting the ways the same kind of isolation also extends to major works of literature, requires an immersion into the mechanics of forgettability. This immersion is the direct converse of the process by which works are remembered, a process that, as Barbara Herrnstein Smith describes it, can be imagined in biological terms. A text, Smith says, achieves canonical status through a series of continuous interactions among a variably constituted object, emergent conditions, and mechanisms of cultural selection and transmission. These interactions are, in certain respects, analogous to those by virtue of which biological species evolve and survive and also analogous to those through which artistic choices evolve and are found “fit” or fitting by the individual artist.33

Smith’s twin analogies imagine the text as tying together processes understood in scientific terms and aesthetic ones as well as mediating between collective activities and those of the “individual artist.” Both of these binaries are ones subsequent critics have tried to collapse, by stressing the social rather than purely aesthetic aims of artwork and the collaborative nature of cultural production, and also by introducing a critical ethics of re-evaluation. But Smith’s analogies are effective in part through what they exclude: by imagining “continuous interactions,” they implicitly leave neglected texts in a state of social isolation. From the perspective of the act of composition, however, stressed in Smith’s second analogy, the future relations to readers of a text are uncertain, and from the perspective of a critic, the past relations to readers may be unrecoverable. So the sense of literary history as an ecosystem can never be a perfect analogy; as I discuss particularly in chapter 5, a single well-placed reader can counteract centuries of neglect of a work, which is certainly not true of an extinct species. These moments of discovery demonstrate that the interaction between reader and text, even if influenced by the text’s presentation, the name of its author, and similar components, is still ultimately a meeting of solitary figures. The reputation of a literary work cannot fully counteract the state of isolation in which the work travels from its point of composition to its point of interpretation.

Chapter One

Lyric Futures: Hidden Ambitions in the Sidney-Pembroke Circle

Etymologically, ambition means “going around”: it derives from the political necessity of seeking votes door to door.1 There is an unexpected purposelessness embedded in the word, which suggests wandering or circling back rather than moving determinedly toward a goal. Renaissance suspicion of ambition seemed to involve an awareness of that implication. The aristocratic author (probably William Cavendish, Second Earl of Devonshire) of the anonymously published Horae Subsecivae says: An Ambitious man is in a kinde of continuall perambulation, or perpetuall courting of advancement, not respecting the meanes, Bribery, Flattery, Humility, Popularitie, seeming Severitie or Austerenesse. Any of which, so they conferre, and conduce to his owne ends, whether for Titles, or Pre-eminence, or Estimation, shall bee disguises good enough for the present occasion ... Aspiring ambitiously to places beyond their worth, makes them scorned: obtaining, hated: and missing of their hopes, wretched.2

To Cavendish, ambition’s lack of clear definition, its inherent multiplicity, makes hypocrisy inevitable. He thus separates ambition from the desire to be recognized for a specific accomplishment: “the ­desire of glory in it selfe is not ill, but it is the excesse, or defect that makes it so.”3 Indeed, ambition’s dividedness means that it is never focussed on a specific or achievable goal; Cavendish compares the ambitious man to someone trying to visit the location of the sunrise, who is “alwayes going forward, but not comming neerer to his desire.”4 He shows the ambitious man as someone to be disdained but also pitied, who sacrifices his place in the world and the support of his peers in pursuit of an urge that cannot be satisfied. It is with that loneliness and fruitlessness of ambition in mind that I ­address ambitious poetry, which bears a relationship to the kind of social

Lyric Futures  21

ambition Cavendish derides but cannot be subsumed within it. Literary ambition is an elusive object of study. The boldness of Spenser’s announcement of himself (through his mouthpiece E.K.) as the “newe poet” or Milton’s desire to create “things unattempted yet in Prose or Rhime” is rare in poetry, particularly lyric poetry.5 Many poets were quick to renounce ambition, sometimes by name. Nevertheless, I believe that, if we define literary ambition as the impulse to write things that strangers will read, admire, remember, and imitate, there is far more ambitious Renaissance poetry than we sometimes recognize, and some of the poets who most fervently denied they were ambitious and argued against ambition were indeed quite interested in the possibility of a poetry that could matter beyond the occasion that inspired it and the readers who encountered it in its earliest forms. The etymological, peripatetic sense of ambition is more helpful to understanding Renaissance literary ambition, and to seeing how widespread it is, then the modern goal-oriented sense. Ambition often isolates: it is a claim of distinction from one’s peers. Literary ambition not only isolates a text from other texts, it also isolates it from its author’s social situation, through future publication and readership. This isolation is both the mechanism and a corollary of the experience of writing ambitiously, which can itself be alienating. To call a poem ambitious is to stress its potential reception by a later, unpredictable audience at the expense of its immediate, predictable one. That dissonance between multiple potential readerships may be initiated within the text. Poems often refer to their potential audience in ways that are at odds with their initial circulation, and we should not dismiss the terms in which a poem addresses or figures its audience on the basis of what is known about its earliest readers. It is true, as Wendy Wall argues about a particularly popular lyric genre, that Elizabethan “sonnet writers use poetic transmission as a thematic topos in their verse,” and that this topos is part of a larger phenomenon in which “Renaissance narratives allegorize the creation and distribution of lyric poetry.”6 And yet, in a way that Wall acknowledges “seems peculiar,” “the trace of private circulation registered in the sonnets continued to be produced in printed works,” leading her to conclude: “While it may seem natural to argue that print generates a realm of objectivity and thus distances the writer from his or her own work ... print allows instead for the construction of the writing figure.”7 To Wall, this phenomenon owes in large part to the desire to continue, and indeed to reconstruct in more secure ways, the fictive possibilities created by the manuscript exchange. But her observations also manifest how flexible this figurative use of the modes of poetic circulation could be. One of the questions on the minds of Renaissance poets was what happens to a poem after it is written, and they were not limited, in their consideration of that

22  Solitude and Speechlessness

question, to the likeliest future of the particular poem they were writing. In this sense, literary ambition may be realized on the level of irony and of metaphor and not necessarily of explicit statement or identifiable action – a poem might express its ambition through figurative modes at odds with its stated aims. Ambition, then, is a double means of separation from immediate context: it looks toward an anticipated but uncertain readership, and it manifests in ways not immediately apparent. Ambition is not commonly associated with a goal that gives no concrete benefit, but poetry’s peculiar nature gives it distinctive goals. Francis ­Bacon stresses that the ethics of ambition depends on achievability; it is helpful to the ambitious and their patrons so long as progress is smooth, for it “maketh Men Active, Earnest, Full of Alacritie, and Stirring, if it be not stopped.”8 Ambitious people are not dangerous unless “they be check’t in their desires,” whereupon “they become secretly discontent, and looke upon Men and matters, with an Evill Eye; And are best pleased when Things goe backward.” This sense of the term is strikingly ill-suited to the writing of poetry, which is always checked by its very nature while poets anxiously wait for invention’s cooperation, biting their truant pens, beating themselves for spite, as Sidney describes that process in Astrophil 1. Such difficulty affects better poets more: as Meric Casaubon says, “They are seldome good Poets, that can be Poets when they will.”9 Even poetry’s stated goals confront its likely failure. Love poetry frequently assumes its addressee will reject it, as Spenser’s Colin Clout complains that his ­Rosalind “of my rurall musick holdeth scorne,” and “laughes the songes, that Colin Clout doth make.”10 Praise poems never praise enough; thus, Mary Sidney has Piers say of Astrea, who stands in for Queen Elizabeth: Words from conceit do only rise, Above conceit her honour flies,   But silence, nought can praise her.11

The ideal poetry of praise would be silence, because its subject flies “Above conceit” – above the mechanisms by which poetry is created (or alternately because, as Edward Herbert complains, most poetic praise is undeserved, when “each common Poet strives to raise / His worthless Patron”).12 This idea can be generalized – poetry is insufficient or inappropriate for its most obvious purposes, but can still be suitable for others. An ambition appropriate to poetry must thrive on this possibility for redirection. Part of Bacon’s purpose in stressing the utility of ambition is to defend it from its widespread negative associations. But the word turns up frequently in ironic or deliberately surprising uses to mean the desire to be good at something that does not bring honour. In Dryden’s image of

Lyric Futures  23

a breathlessly shouting “ambitious actor, who will dye upon the spot for a thundring clap,” the joke depends on the foolishness of ephemeral applause as the goal of ambition.13 This kind of usage could also criticize political or social ambition, as when Menenius, in Coriolanus, accuses Brutus of being “ambitious for poor knaves’ caps and legs” (2.1.62); Menenius questions the honour of position by reducing it to the mere deference of the poor. Jaques in As You Like It tells his patron, Duke Senior, that he is “ambitious for a motley coat” (2.7.43); his joke is reinforced by Jaques’s praise of the fool Touchstone as “noble” and “worthy.” Ambition in poetry is a bit like ambition in foolery: it can lead to social isolation rather than advancement, but it resembles other ambitious activities in requiring all one’s wit and skill in the service of a difficult task. In this sense, a less clearly social kind of success is possible: the interested reading of people outside of a poet’s social circle, real or aspired to. The possibility of an unexpected audience unites poems by genre that are otherwise separated by differences in the class, circumstances, or gender of their authors, and can collapse the differences between manuscript and print that are sometimes taken as a limit on the interpretive and evaluative means that might be employed by contemporaneous or later readers.14 Renaissance readers’ broader evaluative context can be seen in the terms with which printers refer to manuscripts, which suggest that distinctions between them based on their merit and value as writing are neither purely authorial nor independent of author, because what matters most is their quality. The 1623 Shakespeare folio claims on its title page to be “Published according to the True Original Copies,” just as Milton’s 1645 Poems is “Printed by his true Copies”; the printers are asking their readers to imagine the printed editions in relation to the manuscripts from which they were made, and distinguishing those that are more appropriate to be copy-texts. That distinction is not necessarily about accuracy to an authorial original, however: the “true” often found on title pages seems to signify not just authenticity but a kind of value. In the dedication to his 1591 edition of Astrophil and Stella, Thomas Newman complains that “being spred abroade in written Coppies, the book had gathered much corruption by ill writers.”15 Those bad copyists contrast with Sidney not because Sidney has authority as the progenitor of the texts, but because he was good at what he did and they were not. Print and manuscript align in purpose when the poetry is particularly good; Newman says he printed Sidney’s sequence because it had “the generall commendation of all men of judgement, and [was] reported to be one of the rarest things that ever any Englishman set abroach.”16 Readers in manuscript are serving Newman as scouts for valuable poetry. This is of course an elusive category from a scholarly perspective, but also one that cannot be avoided for both interpretive and historical

24  Solitude and Speechlessness

reasons: Newman is right that Renaissance readers are conscious of value and ability, and we should be too. Broader references to authenticity can similarly be read in terms of value. Nicholas Ferrar says of Herbert’s Temple, which he arranged to be printed from a copy of a manuscript Herbert sent him, “The world therefore shall receive it in that naked simplicitie, with which he left it,” implying that he sees the printed edition as conveying not just the text or the intention but the whole form and purpose of the manuscript.17 Ferrar’s statement also shows that the importance of the specific way Herbert’s manuscript is presented – “naked simplicitie” – is in part its capacity for preservation in print. One manuscript can be valued over another because of its suitability for posterity. Posterity has advantages to offer the rare things “men of judgement” find: it is sometimes a more appreciative audience than the one coveted by poets concerned with social advancement. The distance between writer and reader in poems repeatedly recirculated for a long time only adds to the obstacles confronting those who turned to poetry as a way to rise out of the middle class, a different aim from aristocratic advancement within a court.18 John W. Huntington, in a detailed study of those obstacles, argues that the aims of “poor poets” must be separated from either aristocratic poets or those who used poetry to advance a political or religious agenda. Huntington sees poetry as social in function, but not necessarily tied simply to advancement; poets like Chapman, Spenser, Jonson, and Lanyer share an “idea of the high social value of poetry itself, not just a device for some other end.”19 If this value is contained within poetry, however, and if it is transferable to alien social circumstances, it should be distinguished from values that are social in the more immediate sense of personal rank or membership within a circle of friends. Posterity provides a value for poetry beyond social circumstances, but it is a value that, for the poet at the point of writing, is abstract. Thus, posterity does not counter the social isolation of poor poets, but, in a way, reinforces it. It also serves to separate a text from the material evidence of its history: accepting the built-in multiplicity of a text’s potential futures allows its inherent ambition to be essentially obscure. The distinctiveness of literary ambition arises out of the discomfort of fame. Even Petrarch, sometimes regarded as a patron saint of ambitious lyric poetry, insisted that he sought truth, not fame. In his late treatise On His Own Ignorance, he comments slightingly on the envy of other writers for his success: For there is one empty thing that they envy: my reputation, small as it is, and the fame I have won in this life, which is perhaps excessive when measured by my merits or by the general custom that rarely celebrates the living. It is on this fame that they have fixed their sidelong gaze. If only I could have

Lyric Futures  25 foregone it, both now and often in the past! For I recall that it has done me more harm than good, winning many friends, but also countless enemies.20

But Petrarch says that even his envious colleagues recognize that the fame is distinct from the poet: “they formed a council, not to condemn me, whom they love, but to condemn my fame, which they hate.”21 This separation tempers the insistence, nearly universal among Renaissance lyricists, that they do not seek fame: the judgment of literary enterprise is understood even by the envious to be distinct from public reputation. Poets’ denial of literary ambition is indeed ubiquitous. But the awareness of future reading undermines their claims, to the point that these denials can simply become one of the conventional gestures of ambitious and non-ambitious poets alike, able to be deployed, like many poetic conventions, with or without irony. A truly unambitious poem would not have to deny its ambition: poets do so when the structures, figures, and themes they employ make their poetry look like it might be ambitious. To deny ambition is to address posterity, even with resistance, as Samuel Daniel (a poet particularly anxious about the possible functions of poetry) illustrates.22 When Daniel asserts in his sonnet sequence Delia that “M’ambitious thoughts confined in her face / Affect no honour but what she can give mee,” the denial acknowledges the possibility of the thoughts, in the form of poems, seeking out honour from posterity.23 Delia 4, in the same mode, shows that the denial of ambition is addressed to posterity:   These plaintive verse, the Posts of my desire, Which haste for succour to her slowe regarde: Beare not report of any slender fire, Forging a griefe to winne a fames rewarde.   Nor are my passions limnd for outward hewe, For that no collours can depaynt my sorrowes: Delia her selfe, and all the world may viewe Best in my face, how cares hath til’d deepe forrowes.   No Bayes I seeke to deck my mourning brow, O cleer-eyde Rector of the holie Hill: My humble accents crave the Olyve bow, Of her milde pittie and relenting will.   These lines I use, t’unburthen mine owne hart;   My love affects no fame, nor steemes of art.

There is a collision in this poem between the bold address to Apollo, the “cleer-eyde Rector” of Helicon, and the pedestrian metaphor of poetry as “Posts of my desire.” Post can refer either to letters or to the men who carry

26  Solitude and Speechlessness

them – the poem’s future as communication with the beloved is workmanlike and as slow as her own regard, against the immediate intercourse with the god, who is hearing the poem as written. The final couplet introduces a third, not yet mentioned purpose – “t’unburthen mine owne hart” – which explains the other two. The three explicit audiences – the god, the beloved, and the self – share in their intimate awareness of his suffering and their capacity to alleviate it. General readers are carefully excluded on both grounds. At the same time, “all the world” is still present here, surveying this private speaker, making those excluded readers witnesses to their own exclusion. Daniel nods at the public perception of his privacy. In retrospect, we might expect the poem to acknowledge readers, because it was, in fact, read.24 His 1592 edition of the sequence includes a prefatory note addressed to Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, in which Daniel tries to explain the division between his poems’ inner purpose and a broader relationship with readers as the fault of a printer who had brought the poems out unauthorized: Right honorable, although I rather desired to keep in the private passions of my youth, from the multitude, as things utterd to my selfe, and consecrated to silence: yet seeing I was betraide by the indiscretion of a greedie Printer, and had some of my secrets bewraide to the world, uncorrected: doubting the like of the rest, I am forced to publish that which I never ment.25

There is a conflict between keeping “private passions ... from the multitude” and seeing them “consecrated to silence”: the former sounds like carefully restricted coterie circulation (presumably not restricted enough, if the “greedie Printer” ended up with them); the latter like avoidance of circulation altogether. Daniel also admits that the printer did him a favour by publishing Delia with Astrophil, thus connecting Daniel to the countess’s brother Philip, “whose unmatchable lines have indured the like misfortune,” and who “hath registred his owne name in the Annals of eternitie.” That admission – the pleasure taken at the connection to Sidney, sweeter because it is unsought – resolves the contradiction of the poems’ exclusion of readership. Daniel wants the connection to Sidney without the embarrassment of publication, and thus to be a great poet, just not an overly scrutinized one. That goal means placing himself in literary history. His resistance to publicity might still be sincere – no doubt his anxiety at having his representations of intimate feeling examined by strangers is real – but it exists within the context of a larger ambition. Daniel makes clear to the countess that he is responding to Sidney’s own practice of denying literary ambition, since Sidney is the era’s chief model for both humility and poetic accomplishment. In Astrophil and Stella 90,

Lyric Futures  27

Astrophil insists that, contrary to what he fears Stella might think, his goal is not the celebration of his poetic talent: Stella thinke not that I by verse seeke fame,   Who seeke, who hope, who love, who live but thee;   Thine eyes my pride, thy lips my history: If thou praise not, all other praise is shame. Nor ambitious am I, as to frame   A nest for my yong praise in Lawrell tree:   In truth I weare, I wish not there should be Graved in mine epitaph a Poet’s name:   Ne if I would, could I just title make, That any laud to me thereof should grow, Without my plumes from others’ wings I take. For nothing from my wit or will doth flow,   Since all my words thy beauty doth endite,   And love doth hold my hand, and makes me write.

In Astrophil’s voice, Sidney gives two reasons to believe that he is not writing for fame: his debt to other poets, from whose wings his own plumes are plucked, and the origin of his poetry in love, which he insists has provided his sole impetus. But both of these contexts are offered as negatives: the debt to other poets does not imply a community of fellow writers sharing their work, only the impossibility that one of them could be singled out for praise. The reference to the “epitaph” suggests a posthumous future that, Sidney acknowledges, will depend on others’ judgment, regardless of his “wish” (I will discuss the problems of “a Poet’s name” in the next chapter). Death provides the context for praise here, and love does not, as no response from Stella is anticipated in this poem, and Astrophil’s love for Stella, not Stella herself, holds the poet’s hand. If she praises not, the poem declines to seek any audience at all. What is left is the “history” of Stella’s lips, a metaphor that suggests a constrained form of literary ambition in opposition to that sense of refusal. The purpose of historical writing is both clear and limited; as Daniel says in his History of England, the historian’s goal is not necessarily to interpret but “to recite things done ... for example, and instruction to the government of men.”26 The equivalent for a history of lips is words that will “her beauty endite.” As the OED documents, indite and indict are originally the same word: both suggest speech to be repeated or written down. Both also have a legal implication that can be summoned for poetry, and for Sidney’s reputation; Lodowick Bryskett puns on this implication in “A Pastorall Aeglogue upon the Death of Sir Philip Sidney,” dividing

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up the offices of a judicial court among prosopopoeic pastoral figures: “Griefe will endite, and sorrow will enforce / Thy voice, and Eccho will our words report” (33–4).27 Sidney combines this legal transcription with historical documentation. The history of Stella’s lips is a writing of the lips for posterity: a record. The context of that record will be determined by Sidney’s future legacy – symbolized by his grave – not by his own actions. Since Sidney’s record acknowledges its debt to other poets, it is reasonable to expect later poets to follow his model, as they did. To seek no praise beyond Stella’s is still to hold the poem out to posterity, albeit with a decorous reluctance and an acknowledgment that the poem’s interests, in a strange way, are separate from the poet’s. Daniel, like other poets in the Pembroke circle, wishes to have his literary goals understood in relation to Sidney, but there is remarkably little direct evidence of Sidney’s intentions for his literary work. The Defence avoids the question, claiming that Sidney has “slipped into the title of poet” without meaning to, and that his advice will not help an ambitious poet achieve fame, since, “as I never desired the title, so have I neglected the means to come by it.”28 None of his surviving letters mentions his Defence, Arcadia, or Astrophil and Stella, three of the most influential literary works of the Elizabethan era.29 The discussions of these works by his friends and relations are mostly posthumous, and they tend to oppose the possibility of literary ambition to Sidney’s exemplarity, which is their primary emphasis. Fulke Greville’s A Dedication to Sir Philip Sidney argues repeatedly that Sidney had no ambitions for his writing beyond his own circle and his own lifetime. It is well known that Greville’s account of Sidney is not particularly trustworthy. But the logic of Greville’s arguments show a struggle with the implication of posterity for writing and particularly for literary judgment. His fear is that literary ambition isolates the work from the man. In discussing Sidney’s early education, Greville claims that Sidney sought an unusual degree of learning but never intended to turn it to writing that would last: “he purposed no monuments of books to the world out of this great harvest of knowledge.”30 He says about Arcadia, which he regards as Sidney’s greatest work: “he bequeathed no other legacy but the fire to this unpolished embryo; from which fate it is only reserved until the world hath purged away all her more gross corruptions.”31 (There is no other verification of this claim, however, including in Sidney’s will, which does not mention his writings.)32 To make this point, Greville limits Sidney’s poetic achievement, excluding non-pastoral lyric. G.A. Wilkes notes that “there is no occasion on which Greville ever refers to Sidney’s authorship of Astrophil and Stella, in 1586 or in the forty-odd years that follow.”33 After Astrophil was included in the 1598 edition of the Arcadia, this omission goes from being a casual assumption that the Arcadia was what really

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mattered to a more aggressive redirection of Sidney’s reputation.34 The argument that Sidney was too noble to be an ambitious poet seems to depend on suppressing some of his best work. This contradiction is representative of broader issues within Greville’s arguments against literary fame. Greville establishes that social success and literary fame are not fully compatible, and uses that opposition to argue against the latter – but in ways that tend to defeat themselves, as his point about Sidney shows. Greville’s claim is not that Sidney thought little of his work but that whatever exemplarity resides in the work must defer to that within the man: Again, they that knew him well will truly confess this Arcadia of his to be, both in form and matter, as much inferior to that unbounded spirit of his as the industry and images of other men’s works are many times raised above the writers’ capacities; and besides acknowledge that howsoever he could not choose but give them many aspersions of spirit and learning from the Father, yet that they were scribbled rather as pamphlets for entertainment of time and friends than any account of himself to the world: because, if his purpose had been to leave his memory in books, I am confident in the right use of logic, philosophy, history and poesy – nay, even in the most ingenious of mechanical arts – he would have showed such traits of a searching and judicious spirit as the professors of every faculty would have striven no less for him than the seven cities did to have Homer of their sept. But the truth is, his end was not writing even while he wrote, nor his knowledge moulded for tables or schools, but both his wit and understanding bent upon his heart to make himself and others, not in words or opinion, but in life and action, good and great.35

Greville’s argument that Sidney had no literary ambition is circular. He warns those who like the Arcadia that they should admire its author more than they do the work, and then relies on its alleged inferiority as proof that Sidney did not intend it as a lasting monument, because if he had it would have been better. Greville offers Sidney’s lack of academic success in particular as evidence of his indifference to literary posterity: he was so exemplary that if he had wanted fame for his writings it would have come earlier. Greville complains frequently of his inadequacy as an imitator, for example in relation to the model of poetry put forward in the Defence: “it would have proved as easy for me to have followed his pattern in the practice of real virtue as to engage myself into this characteristical kind of poesy in defence whereof he hath written so much as I shall not need to say anything.”36 In a sentence syntactically tortured to avoid claiming to have Sidney’s worth in any capacity, Greville still intimates that Sidney’s

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exemplarity in virtue and in poetry are inseparable from each other. This dual deferral indicates a problem with Greville’s conception of the role of literature in what he calls Sidney’s “memory” – Sidney’s poetry is an entertainment whose admirability should defer to the greater admirability of his character, leaving it permanently provisional and undermining Greville’s own praise for it, particularly as posterity is concerned. Indeed, Greville seems to deny to those of us who did not know Sidney personally the capacity to judge his written work. In fact, Greville wrote eloquently and extensively about literary ambition, though always with the same tension between the celebration of poetic ability and the condemnation of poetic fame reflected in his writings about Sidney. Gavin Alexander describes the treatment of memorialization as a “key paradox” that “runs through Greville’s writings”: “he presents Sidney and Elizabeth as examples to posterity; but when he conceives of monuments or epitaphs they must simultaneously present the dead as examples to the living, and tell the living that life is vanity.”37 To Alexander this problem comes out of Greville’s difficulties in defining virtue, particularly in relation to Sidney’s twin models of the life of action and the life of writing, and in claiming his own role in Sidney’s posterity. But I would stress that we can equally see this problem of memorialization as one of interpretation. Greville is struggling with the same problems modern critics do – how to reconcile the profound difference between a coterie poet’s initial and posthumous modes of reception, and more broadly whether and how non-coterie readers matter for determining poetry’s value and meaning. His avoidance of the evaluative role of literary posterity is insistent enough to demonstrate his awareness of that role: after all, he is addressing Sidney’s posthumous admirers in print. Greville cuts off the possibility of the evaluation of Sidney’s poetry by posthumous readers out of fear that we will admire it too much, and thus conclude that it is ambitious (and that it is the most important thing about him). Greville is certainly aware that much of that evaluation will depend on a poem’s treatment by other poets. His own poetry reflects the same division over poetry’s final role and evaluative criteria as his writing on Sidney does.38 Despite his lack of explicit reference to Astrophil, Greville’s poetry reveals both its influence and a struggle to come to terms with its example. If Greville wants us to imagine his attempting to write as well as Sidney while acknowledging that he cannot, the poetry hints at a similar sense of deferral. In Caelica 80, Greville divides people, and poets, into two categories: Cleare spirits, which in Images set forth The wayes of Nature by fine imitation, Are oft forc’d to Hyperboles of worth,

Lyric Futures  31 As oft againe to monstrous declination;   So that their heads must lin’d be, like the Skie,   For all Opinions arts to traffike by. Dull Spirits againe, which love all constant grounds, As comely veyles for their unactivenesse, Are oft forc’d to contract, or stretch their bounds, As active Power spreads her beames more, or lesse:   For though in Natures waine these guests come forth;   Can place, or stampe make currant ought but worth?39

This is one of Greville’s more difficult poems, but the references to “Hyperboles” and, even more so, “imitation,” the Latinate translation for mimesis, indicate that his distinction between clarity and dullness of soul is imagined in relation to poetry, and specifically to two different models of poetic representation. One model aims at “fine imitation”: a precise rendering of an acutely observed world; the downside of its fineness is the necessity of hyperbole and of an over-precise chopping up of the world into mappable segments, as if these thinkers’ heads were lined like an astronomer’s chart (according to the OED, the oldest meaning of “declination” is the astronomical one, so the word anticipates “Skie”). The dull model is a passive copying of nature (a bit like Coleridge’s aeolian harp), which depends on external forces to move an observer whose love of everyday things would tend to make the resulting poetry accurate but boring. The depictions of clear and dull spirits in this poem are not actually parallel; while clear spirits represent nature’s ways finely, dull spirits are defined by their disposition to “love all constant grounds” – to prefer the quotidian and ordinary, because it covers over their own mental inactivity. In keeping with Sidney’s sense of poetry as difficult to write, both personalities create separate obstacles for it: clear spirits’ perception of worth means they must magnify their descriptions to express it, even to the point of tropes that monstrously distort the nature of what is described (“monstrous” in its meaning of a forced combination, an unnatural hybrid). Dull spirits’ efforts depend on the vicissitudes of the limited activity that enters their lives. The purpose of poetry in this poem is to “set forth / The wayes of Nature.” The poem comments interestingly on the process of mimesis: the more finely a poet perceives the world, the more exaggerated his figurations of it must be, so that representation is conditioned as much by a poet’s nature as by the nature of the represented object. Clear spirits must resort to hyperbole because, in order to write, they have to measure their extraordinary perceptions in a context they can communicate to others. Dull spirits he compares to another form of measurement: the values of coins (“currant”). Nowadays a coin’s value is independent of its metallic

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content, but then we also have MFA programs that mint poets; to Greville, the title of poet (which he himself does not claim) will not make a poet any more than stamping a worthless piece of metal makes it sterling. Greville’s concern about the relationship between poetic practice and a poet’s nature colours his resistance to literary ambition. He gives “clear spirits” an important enough function – mapping their own superior understanding of the world as astronomers map the sky – to suggest that his humility should not limit their remit. Greville’s well-practised humility is connected to his neo-stoic streak, which he took further than other members of the Sidney-Pembroke circle.40 His criticism of the hubris of knowledge in Treatie of Humane Learning follows this same pattern. Each of the arts in turn is questioned in comparison to the principle by which Greville wishes to live: Musike instructs me which be lyrike Moodes; Let her instruct me rather, how to show No weeping voyce for losse of Fortunes goods. Geometrie gives measure to the earth below;   Rather let her instruct me, how to measure   What is enough for need, what fit for pleasure. She teacheth, how to lose nought in my bounds, And I would learne with joy to lose them all: This Artist showes which way to measure Rounds, But I would know how first Mans minde did fall,   How great it was, how little now it is,   And what that knowledge was which wrought us this! (stanzas 32–3)

The topic here is pedagogy, and clearly the instructive capacities of these arts reflect on that of Greville’s own poem. But each art fails: its real instruction is the wrong one, and Greville wishes for a better one he will not get. The whole poem is a plea for a certain kind of principled relation to knowledge, not a guide to achieving that relation. Like Sidney (and Horace), Greville thinks of the purpose of poetry as instruction, but he is limiting it to a very specific sort. Significantly, all of the instructions he wishes his poetry to give are negative. His warning against over-investment in arts and sciences is strongest when directed against poetry: Poesie and Musicke, Arts of Recreation, Succeed, esteem’d as idle mens profession; Because their scope, being meerely contentation,

Lyric Futures  33 Can move, but not remove, or make impression   Really, either to enrich the Wit,   Or, which is lesse, to mend our states by it. (stanza 111)

When Greville says these arts are best “esteem’d as idle mens profession,” does he merely mean they should not be pursued as a means of making a living, or that they should not be a vocation at all – should not take up too much of a gentleman’s time and thought? The conflation of poetry and music is significant, because music was sometimes considered to be so technical as to pose a threat to the serious musical student who did not wish to be a professional musician. Henry Peacham thus urges his gentleman students not to try too hard to learn the technical aspects of music: I might runne into an infinite Sea of the praise and use of so excellent an Art, but I onely shew it you with the finer, because I desire not that any Noble or Gentleman should (save at his private recreation an leasureable houres) proove a Master in the same, or neglect his more weighty imployments: though I avouch it a skill worthy the knowledge and exercise of the greatest Prince.41

So knowledge of music is good, but mastery is bad; why this is Peacham does not say. He is not generally against gentlemen spending significant time on their hobbies; in fact, his book Graphice, on painting and drawing, is also addressed to gentlemen scholars, and includes advanced topics such as perspective and foreshortening as well as extensive technical information about the preparation of pigments and water colours.42 The problem seems to be that music is not “weighty” enough, so perhaps his concern is the same as Greville’s: that music and poetry both are “meerely contentation”: that is, they content their audience but do no more. The idea of a skill that is worthy of a prince, but only when pursued to a limited degree, suggests that excellence carries a kind of risk. Castiglione makes a similar argument about chess, in stronger terms: “It is truely an honest kynde of enterteynmente” but it hath a fault, whiche is, that a man may be to couning at it, for who ever will be excellent in the playe of chestes, I beleave he must beestowe much tyme about it, and applie it with so much study, that a man may as soone learne some noble scyence, or compase any other matter of importaunce, and yet in the ende in beestowing all that laboure, he knoweth no more but a game.43

This view demonstrates the problem of thinking of poetry as an entertainment, a category that can easily be regarded, as Castiglione regards chess, in opposition to the higher branches of learning. Castiglione might well

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believe that a courtier who is too good a chess player demonstrates by that skill that he has misused his time and efforts. But since some of the most celebrated poets are also – like Sidney – celebrated courtiers, the same logic is not being widely applied, even if in theory it ought to be (but in theory it could be applied to almost anything, since vast knowledge of a topic always implies neglect of other topics). Greville, though, wants to focus on the uses of music and poetry in relation to their internal content. After specifying that music is best used in church, he similarly clarifies the appropriate use of poetry, music’s twin: The other twinne, if to describe, or praise Goodnesse, or God she her Ideas frame, And like a Maker, her creations raise On lines of truth, it beautifies the same; And while it seemeth onely but to please, Teacheth us order under pleasures name;   Which in a glasse, shows Nature how to fashion   Her selfe againe, by ballancing of passion. (stanza 114)

Poetry “seemeth onely but to please,” but is actually doing more, so it is not mere contentation after all. Beautifying truth sounds like a fairly noble pursuit, which might lead a reader to question why, if poetry at its best “shows Nature how to fashion / Her selfe,” it was necessary to introduce that claim by limiting poetry to “Recreation,” and similarly why it is twinned with music, which does not produce the mirroring effect that turns out to be poetry’s redemptive quality. Limits must be placed on poetry not because it is trivial but because it threatens to be too important. Greville’s concern about literary achievement does not come strictly from the embarrassment of its perceived professionalization: achievement is suspect whether it aims for fame or for literary accomplishment in itself. This sentiment helps explain his downplaying of Sidney’s poetic achievement in the Dedication. But of course fame heightens the problem. In his poem An Inquisition upon Fame and Honour – which argues, as we would expect, that the latter is a better goal than the former – Greville emphasizes that literary fame tends to be subject to dispute anyway, and therefore not very reliable: Nor is it by the Vulgar altogether, That Fame thus growes a wonder of nine dayes; The wise and learned plucke away her feathers, With envious humors, and opposing wayes:   For they deprave each other, and descrie,   Those statues, and beards, these Augurs traffick by.

Lyric Futures  35 Plato (tis true) great Homer doth commend, Yet from his Common-weale did him exile; Nor is it words that doe with words contend, Of deeds they vary, and demurre of stile:   How to please all, as no words yet could tell;   So what one act did all yet censure well? For proofe, what worke more for the publike good, Than that rare Librarie of dead mens treasure, Collected by the Aegyptian royall blood? Which Seneca yet censures at his pleasure;   No elegance, nor princely industry,   But rather pompe, and studious luxury. Nay, his owne epithete Studious, he corrected, Inferring that for pride, not Studies use, The luxurie of Kings had them collected: So what in scorne of Criticall abuse,   Was said of bookes, of Fame will prove the state,  That Readers censures are the Writers fate. (stanzas 48–51)

It is not a coincidence that the warning about the fleeting praise of poetry, centred in Plato’s expulsion of the poets “from his Common-weale” in The Republic, metamorphoses into the suspicion that learning, even at its most impressive, can be for purposes of cheap prestige. This is an instance of the significant negativity that accompanies Greville’s call for humility: his suspicions of learning for its own sake and for the sake of fame are stated in nearly the same terms. At the least, Greville is ambiguous – and probably ambivalent – on the subject of specifically literary ambition, a division that, given his accomplishments as a poet – including in print – seems almost inevitable. In his arguments against excessive concern with place and praise and his insistence on the irreplaceability of natural talent, he makes a surprisingly good case for separating literary from social ambition, even though that means doing the one thing he says we should never do: separating the judgment of the writer from that of the person. Ultimately, his misgivings about putting too much emphasis on Sidney’s poetry in the Dedication have to do with his anxieties about the proper memorialization of Sidney’s virtue, and despite them, he is convinced that there are among poets clear and dull spirits, that it is better to be among the clear ones, as Sidney was, and that it is a worthy aspiration to try to emulate that poet-knight in that respect as in others. His simultaneous discomfort about such emulation demonstrates that poetic achievement is a challenge to

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the social order whether or not it is used in the service of social mobility. Literary ambition counters Greville’s thesis that acquaintance is necessary for judgment, but that thesis was always troubled. Ambition merely reinforces the capacity that literary ability and achievement already have to isolate poets from their poems and poems from poets’ social circumstances.

• Greville’s distinction between clear- and dull-spirited poets interacts uncomfortably with both Renaissance and modern accounts of poetry’s function. Rhetoric defining and defending poetry was itself divided into two distinct strains – respectively regarding the nature and function of poetry – which were both complicated by the difference in talent Greville raises. This division recasts the role of medium (including print) in determining the function of poetry, as well as its relation to social purpose and social status. The practical concerns of praise and patronage, even if they sometimes motivate the composition, circulation, or printing of poetry, have little role in broader accounts of what it is. Poetry can fulfill certain social functions but stubbornly resists being defined by them. In theory, poetry was understood as natural, universal, and deeply human, and that transcendence of function allows for a generalization that crosses both social and material differences between modes of circulation. Daniel says: Every language hath her proper number or measure fitted to use and delight, which, Custome intertaining by the allowance of the Eare, doth indenize, and make naturall. All verse is but a frame of wordes confinde within certaine measure; differing from the ordinarie speach, and introduced, the better to expresse mens conceipts, both for delight and memorie.44

But the universality of such a definition becomes complicated when the idea is placed into a historical context, as George Puttenham tries to do. For Puttenham, the history of poetry must demonstrate its universal significance while accounting for change. In the first chapter of his Art of English Poesie, primitive culture establishes the former: Poesie was th’originall cause and occasion of their first assemblies, when before the people remained in the woods and mountains, vagarant and dispersed like the wild beasts, lawlesse and naked, or verie ill clad, and of all good and necessarie provision for harbour or sustenance utterly unfurnished: so as they little diffred for their maner of life, from the very brute beasts of the field.45

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Puttenham’s history is somewhat ambiguous; indeed, there is a grammatical crux here. In Frank Whigham and Wayne Rebhorn’s modernized edition, the second clause is punctuated “when, before, the people”: Whigham and Rebhorn read the era under discussion as simply before some indeterminate point, an undifferentiated long time ago.46 The sentence makes better sense, though, if “when” is functioning as a relative pronoun (“when before” equivalent to “before which”): the people were in the woods and mountains before the time of their first assemblies. Poetry is the bridge between these two eras. Far from existing for social purposes, poetry predates society; it emerges out of the primitive awakenings of human nature and gives the first social assemblies their reason for being. But this history can still allow for differences between practices in various times and places: the American, the Perusine & the very Canniball, do sing and also say, their highest and holiest matters in certaine riming versicles and not in prose, which proves also that our maner of vulgar Poesie is more ancient then the artificiall of the Greeks and Latines, ours comming by instinct of nature, which was before Art or observation, and used with the savage and uncivill, who were before all science or civilitie, even as the naked by prioritie of time is before the clothed, and the ignorant before the learned.47

It is remarkable that Native American and Peruvian uses can “prove” the instinct behind the current English model (in this case regarding rhyme). To Stephen Greenblatt, in fact, this passage is simply anomalous as a reflection of English thinking about aesthetics; Greenblatt quotes the passage above only to declare that to most writers in the broadly humanistic tradition it was “more reasonable and logically consistent to conclude, as others did, that the savages of America were without eloquence or even without language,” a conclusion that humanists “needed to reach.”48 If this is true, then Puttenham’s distinctive view shows in itself the extent to which the Renaissance understanding of the nature and global history of poetry could not be reconciled with social thinking. On the other hand, Puttenham recognizes about Greek and Latin poetry that the customs of nation and era can override this natural instinct. So, though there is a relationship between the ancient status of poetry and its claim for cultural authenticity, immediate historical context can easily pull it in one direction or another. In Chapter 8 of Book 1, Puttenham tries to account for the particular social function of English poetry, lamenting that its routes to preferment are not what they had once been: “For the respectes aforesayd in all former ages and in the most civill countreys and commons wealthes, good Poets and Poesie were highly esteemed and much favoured of

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the greatest Princes.”49 But princely favour does not actually follow from his argument from nature, which makes poetry prior to princely rule itself. For Puttenham, there seem to be two definitions of poetry at work at once: one universal and based in nature, the other social and based in praise. This duality raises the same question that follows from Greville’s distinction between clear and dull spirits: how fundamental, really, is the social role of poetry compared to the inherent nature of poetry or of the individual poet? Puttenham’s history suggests that poetry’s role in preferment is a compromise introduced in the process of adapting to an era less supportive of its natural functions. Poetry, then, is the most natural form of making and of representation, but also responds to social hierarchy in the modern world by taking on the new function of winning princes’ favour. If that latter function is perceived as primary, then there is a contradiction here, one that is reflected in modern criticism. Frank Whigham, arguing for the priority of social ambition in Renaissance literary life, summons Puttenham not only as an object of study but as an ally in his claim that poetry’s aims are, first and foremost, social: The Arte is indeed a manual of courtly conduct, as [Daniel] Javitch was perhaps the first to say, but one that was itself subject to the censoring pressures it so eloquently describes. Puttenham aimed to anatomize the techniques of artful courting: both strictly poetic ones (a distinction I think he would have thought only artful) and sociopolitical ones necessary for the daily purposes of the courtier, both poetic and oratorical – that is, political.50

Whigham’s parenthesis places the limitations on aesthetics that he is arguing for back into Puttenham’s head. Whigham assumes that Puttenham’s contradictions mean that his occasional deference to ideas of poetry’s timelessness is disingenuous, and his interest in courtesy culture his true aim. But the contradictions are Puttenham’s response to a fundamental problem of poetry in the period: that its ancient origins and current social functions do not fit together well. If he is inconsistent, it is not because he is dissembling but because the question is a genuine point of confusion for him and for the culture generally. Renaissance poets were aware that courtesy culture included a function for poetry, but that function was never sufficient to account for either its theoretical nature or its practice.

• Puttenham’s complaint about the insufficient value placed on poetry in the England of his time is instructive. When poetry’s alleged social functions are revealed to be insufficient or unrewarding, its more universal functions and

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its relation to a wider but less defined audience in posterity reassert themselves. I do not think of this larger audience as strictly correlated with print readership, but print carries a much stronger tendency than manuscript transmission for personal preferment to defer to the judgment of posterity. As John Huntington has argued, the unusual poetic career of Aemilia Lanyer is a particularly significant example of this tension between patronage and print audience.51 The evident futility of Lanyer’s attempt to advance her social status by writing poetry leaves her positioned to reveal the function of posterity for the purpose and worth of a poet, and the separation of this function from social negotiations. Lanyer’s decision to print her poems is not the culmination of her social ambitions, but the mark of their failure and subsequent redirection toward a broader but less immediately gratifying ambition. The printed book, in this sense, addresses the possible remove between writer and reader doubly: in the way that all books do, since they are available to be read in unexpected circumstances, and in another way that marks the distinctive loneliness of an ambitious female poet. Susanne Woods, comparing Lanyer to Ben Jonson, shows how Lanyer’s adoption of Jonson’s rhetoric of literary ambition is qualified by social insecurity: For all the praise and deference he gives his social superiors, whether men or women, Jonson speaks to his patrons as an equal. As [David] Riggs notes, “Jonson projected his own code of values on his prospective patrons,” creating a coterie of virtuous like-minded intellectuals which he both defined and celebrated. He derives his authority through the community he creates. Lanyer also seeks to create authority through community – a distinctively and assertively female community. While many of the strategies she uses are familiar from Jonson and the patronage poetry of her time, there are some interesting differences. The first is her apparent inability to bridge the social gap between herself and her dedicatees, and her use of that inability to obscure the audacity of “A Womans writing of divinest things.” The second is her set of strategies for rendering female gender a source of authority.52

Woods maps Lanyer’s ambition on to Jonson’s, but with the exception that she imagines it in the terms of community rather than readership – that is, in specifically social terms. In this sense, I believe Woods understates Lanyer’s similarity to Jonson.53 Because a dedication is a request, not an acknowledgment of a specific role in the production of a book, Lanyer’s cluster of aristocratic names documents the desirability of the kind of social connection Woods sees as central more than it enacts it. The book’s reference to social ambition, even the innovatively gendered version of social ambition it implies, is essentially negative, taking the form of the recognition of a lack; the only positive ambition that inheres within the book itself is a literary one.

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Lanyer’s model of a female literary career cannot really be generalized, however. Catherine Gallagher has argued that broad diversity of the circumstances of and approaches to writing, including women’s writing, was more largely accepted than we now sometimes assume: Lanyer was able to create a new model for literary ambition because there was no d ­ ominant model.54 This diversity shows up in critical difficulties in assessing the ­relationships between gender, content, means of circulation, and reputation. Gavin A ­ lexander says, about Mary Wroth, that depictions of female ­eloquence in the Renaissance tend “to concentrate on the woman behind the words,” and argues that Wroth “accepts and embraces this sort of reading of female eloquence, and makes it impossible not to find her bodied forth by her fiction.”55 But such a conclusion depends on which of Wroth’s works are under discussion and in what context; Jeff Masten describes her sonnets in particular as “relentlessly private, withdrawing into an interiorized space,” and sees that withdrawal as reflected in the sonnets’ evident lack of circulation.56 The disparity suggests that genre can overwhelm c­ ircumstances; ­different works by the same poet lead us to a different sense of purpose, when the social aims of the poet seem insufficient to account for the poems. Print compounds this difficulty, as demonstrated by the lack of scholarly consensus over the significance of the printing of Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum in 1611. Janel Mueller sees Lanyer’s decision to publish as consonant with her creation “of a fully cognizant feminist poetics” that grasps “the radical social and political implications of the new order” in English Protestant thinking.57 Su Fang Ng responds to such arguments: “By overemphasizing Lanyer’s feminism, we lose sight of important class tensions within the poem (that partly arise from her own class aspirations) and obscure the complexity of her poem as she negotiates the patron-client relationship.”58 In the same vein, Jonathan Goldberg (arguing that critics have missed Lanyer’s expressions of desire) reminds us that Renaissance attempts to identify print as a masculine environment show by the effort necessary to do so that less restrictive models were plausible.59 Part of the issue here is defining the audience; Ng stresses that we should not underestimate Lanyer’s attention to her male readers.60 Indeed, it seems that part of Lanyer’s purpose in turning to print is to open herself up to this uncertainty of readership – the possibility of a manifold relationship to audience over time. This is in itself a kind of ambition – but one not necessarily tied to social advancement, and thus somewhat independent of Lanyer’s predicament as a female poet seeking patronage. Lanyer acknowledges the multiplicity of audience she can expect in print, and the corresponding limitation of the book’s immediate assistance to her. Though Salve Deus consists largely of dedications to aristocratic women, she insists that “no former gaine” from these women “hath made me write ... Nor any future profit is expected”; whether this is true or not

Lyric Futures  41

(Ng emphasizes Lanyer’s financial need at the time), she wants readers to associate her work with purposes other than a quest for preferment.61 Print helps separate the work from the problem of advancement, since it is not the medium most closely associated with social negotiation, but Lanyer seeks a literary context as well that will emphasize indifference to profit, and finds it, as Daniel did, in Sidney and his family. In “The ­Authors Dreame to the Ladie Marie, the Countesse Dowager of Pembrooke,” Lanyer’s dreamer asks Slumber for the name of the beautiful figure around whom poetic spirits seem naturally to gravitate: This nymph, quoth he, great Penbrooke hight by name, Sister to valiant Sidney, whose cleere light Gives light to all that tread true paths of Fame, Who in the globe of heav’n doth shine so bright; That beeing dead, his fame doth him survive, Still living in the hearts of worthy men; (137–42)

There are two things that particularly interest Lanyer about Sidney: his unusual relationship with his patron and his posthumous reputation. The former’s role is clear enough: Sidney’s patron was a woman and a close relative, and a form of female patronage based in affection is important to Lanyer. But the latter is a reminder that Sidney’s representation of “true paths of Fame” includes posthumous circulation in print. Even if the purposes of publication are different for a female poet, Lanyer positions herself in relation to poetic history in a way that downplays the significance of both gender and the decision to publish.62 The result is that the literary relationship of influence and emulation takes precedence over the social relationship created by Lanyer’s connection to Sidney through his sister. However, Lanyer is not able to put forward this model of published, female, Sidneyan writing without ambivalence. The book, particularly the title poem, is characterized by its sometimes uncertain attempts to do multiple things at once, reflecting the reality that Lanyer’s literary and social ambitions don’t quite coincide. Peculiarly, the title poem’s dedication to the Countess of Cumberland centres around Lanyer’s refusal to write what the countess had asked for (which is evidently the “Description of Cooke-ham,” the last poem in the volume): And pardon (Madame) though I do not write Those praisefull lines of that delightful place, As you commaunded me in that faire night, When shining Phoebe gave so great a grace,

42  Solitude and Speechlessness Presenting Paradice to your sweet sight, Unfolding all the beauty of her face   With pleasant groves, hills, walks and stately trees,   Which pleasures with retired minds agrees. (17–24)

The apology for not praising “that delightful place” suits a poem so reluctant to embrace its own topic, but it is not clear whether the issue here is that Lanyer is avoiding her assigned subject or preferring another. Its major theme is its robust defence of women, but Lanyer seems unwilling to emphasize her own authority in making this argument, because to do so would be to undermine one of her own claims: that women are ethically protected by the male claim of authority over them. The Eves Apologie section is a defence through weakness: But surely Adam can not be excusde, Her fault though great, yet hee was most too blame; What Weaknesse offerd, Strength might have refusde, Being Lord of all, the greater was his shame: Although the Serpents craft had her abusde, Gods holy word ought all his actions frame,   For he was Lord and King of all the earth,   Before poore Eve had either life or breath. (777–84)

With higher social position comes greater responsibility. That defense winds its way, somewhat surprisingly, to the overzealous pursuit of learning:   No subtill Serpents falshood did betray him,   If he would eate it, who had powre to stay him? Not Eve, whose fault was onely too much love, Which made her give this present to her Deare, That what shee tasted, he likewise might prove, Whereby his knowledge might become more cleare; He never sought her weakenesse to reprove, With those sharpe words, which he of God did heare:   Yet Men will boast of Knowledge, which he tooke  From Eves faire hand, as from a learned Booke. (801–8)

Adam’s fault is the scholar’s arrogance, then, not the lover’s indulgence, and Lanyer strongly suggests that that fault is a masculine one. Men find knowledge in books and claim credit for it. The suggestion helps, then, with the

Lyric Futures  43

defence of her own book, which supplies an alternative model of print publication, and through it of learning and of poetry: hers is the new “learned Booke” from which new kinds of knowledge can be gained (though creating such a book risks having the credit stolen again). The admission that learned books carry ethical risks defends Lanyer’s authority by citing its limits. Her example complicates, though, the role Lanyer’s publication has in the social conventions that govern both the production of poetry and the roles of women. Mueller has aptly described the conundrum that accompanies the embrace of Lanyer as an early feminist: Lanyer “holds essentialist ideas of ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’ as innate features of the female and male sexes” that are at odds with modern disparagement of “notions that ­‘human nature’ has significant traits outside of culture.”63 On the other hand, her sense of Lanyer’s overall contribution seems to come into play because “Lanyer takes more seriously – that is to say, more historically – the radical social and political implications of the new order broached in the gospel narrative of primitive Christianity than would any other English thinker or writer of either sex until a quarter century later.”64 So, according to Mueller, Lanyer’s commitment to a non-social definition of gender, and her exploration of those “innate features” that define Renaissance sexual difference, does not prevent her overall point about gender from being social. I would turn the self-contradiction Mueller notes the other way: the book’s interest in critiquing and revising social norms comes in part through its acknowledgment of poetry’s potential movement away from its original social context, particularly when printed. Discord regarding the social context of poetry is latent within the text – conflict between literary and social ambitions that seem to undermine, or at least to moderate, each other. Sidney is Lanyer’s example, an example that also demonstrates that the mechanisms of social preferment are neither strictly tied to gender nor entirely separable from it. Lanyer works toward a path through poetry to a model of preferment that is not exactly masculine but allows for some of the advantages of male social mobility, but the problem with this path is that the only way for her to overcome resistance to circulation of a woman’s poetry (at least comparable to that of the most influential male poets) lies outside of the coterie altogether, in print. Greville, Daniel, and Lanyer share interests that lead them away from print and toward it at once. Each presents a model of authorship explicitly identified in relation to Sidney, and each acknowledges Sidney’s resistance to publication – Daniel by comparing his own reluctant appearance in print to Sidney’s, Greville and Lanyer by stressing that Sidney’s fame stems more from his personal qualities than from his poetry. Each also notes the importance of the regard of a single patron (particularly the Countess of

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Pembroke, heiress to the Sidneyan legacy) over general fame. And yet, despite all of that, each is led, sooner or later, eagerly or reluctantly, into print. For these poets, print is a strangely half-social space, which can seem like a land of exile into which one can be forced by social failure (which is why it is so risky for Lanyer), a state where the living and the dead can coexist on the same terms (as Daniel tentatively tried to do with Sidney), and even a refuge from the rigidly hierarchical and gendered social world. Print, in this sense, can stand in for that aspect of posterity that is most significant to poetry because least predictable. Lanyer’s unusual case makes this relation to posterity clearer, but it is available regardless. Daniel alludes to this function of print in “To the Reader,” published at the start of his Certaine Small Workes of 1607:   I know I shalbe read, among the rest So long as men speake english, and so long As verse and vertue shalbe in request Or grace to honest industry belong: And England since I use thy present tongue Thy forme of speech thou must be my defence If to new eares, it seemes not well exprest For though I hold not accent I hold sence. (59–66)

Daniel makes clear that he is concerned about his posthumous reception, including possibly well into the future, after the language has changed. He imagines future readers thinking his poetry “not well exprest,” because he knows it will sound archaic to their (our) ears. He gives two responses to this problem: that England and its national literary “industry” will carry with it a sense of the history of the language, knowledge of this history enabling future readers to place Daniel’s poetry in its proper context; and that, despite changes in “forme of speech,” the “sence” of the poem should still be apparent: it will still be interpretable. Daniel anticipates a specific future readership, inseparable from the continued history of poetry, of language both poetic and quotidian, and of prosody; he insists that his poems will still have meaning even if prosodic practices shift and they no longer “hold ... accent.” Print gives him access to a readership most interesting to him because of its difference from him, its unknowability, and its distance from his own social context. In this sense, paradoxically but also appealingly, print can be more private, less scrutinized, than manuscript circulation. Because print is available at any point, including well in the future, to literary works inclined toward posterity, that privacy can make it an effective medium for ambitious poetry, but is also emblematic of posterity’s tendency to isolate literary texts from social context.

Chapter Two

Nameless Orphans: Ambitious Poetry in an Age of Modesty

The judgment of future readers has value for poets, as I have said, but that value is rather abstract. Once a poem exists and is in circulation, the unpredictability of its future becomes in itself an intellectual problem for the poet. This problem manifests as a kind of isolation, both of the poet, who may not have a personal relationship or even much in common with potential readers, and of the poem, which is isolated by its past and potential future circulation from its author and from the milieu that produced it. In this chapter I will describe two related ways that poetry demonstrates awareness of its isolation. One is the complex equivocation with which poets discuss the institution of the name of a poet, which refers at once to the title of poet as a professional distinction, the strong association of a particular group of names with the history of poetry (defined to some extent as that thing that Homer, Vergil, Horace, Petrarch, and Chaucer did), and the name attached to a particular poem as the often tenuous connection between that poem and the person who wrote it. The other is the independent relationship that any poem has with literary history, including its use of modes of language associated with particular poems and its bequest of such language to future poems. Both would seem to join a poem to its author: names are the way we signify an author’s attachment to a text, as in the frequent metonymy of an author’s name for a literary corpus; habits of language are often the basis for such attributions. I will argue in this chapter that both name and personal style not only fail to unite author with text, they essentially do the opposite, allowing the poem a solitary life apart from its author, named or otherwise. The poet’s name, even if it superficially identifies the poem with its author, is also an emblem for the poem’s independence. That role of the name, however, is in tension with the tendency of poetry and poets toward a persistent namelessness. As Spenser shows in the

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envoy poem printed at the start of The Shepheardes Calender, anonymity, far from the opposite of attribution, is an opportunity to reflect on the significance of names. That poem imagines the name of the poet as akin to a gentleman’s parentage: when the name is missing, the poem must make its own way in the world. The envoy poem explicitly connects the poet’s name to his authority while simultaneously defending anonymity. The opening pages of the Calender tiptoe around Spenser’s name but are full of the names of other poets, including Sidney, Gabriel Harvey, L ­ ydgate, Vergil, and Chaucer.1 They also contain the initialled but seemingly unreadable sobriquet E.K., which has been much discussed.2 If this proliferation of names did not sufficiently call attention to the lack of Spenser’s, the envoy poem does so even more pointedly:   Goe little booke: thy selfe present, As child whose parent is unkent: To him that is the president Of noblesse and of chevalree, And if that Envie barke at thee, As sure it will, for succoure flee   Under the shadow of his wing, And asked, who thee forth did bring, A shepheards swaine saye did thee sing, All as his straying flocke he fedde: And when his honor has thee redde, Crave pardon for my hardyhedde.   But if that any aske thy name, Say thou wert base begot with blame: For thy thereof thou takest shame. And when thou art past jeopardee, Come tell me, what was sayd of mee: And I will send more after thee.

The work has a title; if it is refusing to give its “name,” it must be withholding its surname, as it were: the name it shares with its progenitor.3 The name of the work refers back to the name of the poet, but without response. Instead, the word “immerito” – “unworthy” – is appended to the poem. Seemingly playing on the more usual term attached to anonymous poems, ignoto (which indicates that the author’s name is as unknown to the scribe or printer of a poem as it is to the reader), the idea is suggestive because it is incomplete. It leads a reader to wonder, unworthy of what? If the Calender is successful, will it earn an authorial name, acquiring for Spenser that merit he now lacks, or will it render his name that

Nameless Orphans  47

much more obsolete? Does the word look forward toward possible praise and fame the poem may receive, or backward to the “base” background of its author? The absence of the poet’s name does not prevent the work’s reception from reflecting on its author, who anticipates hearing “what was sayd” of him, not of the book. The lack of a name also does not prevent the book from becoming part of a larger corpus; when Spenser sends more poetry after the Calender, he plans to identify those works as being by the same author (which he did).4 On the other hand, the withholding of the name is specifically associated with the shame of composition and publication – not because publication is inherently embarrassing, but because of the fear of an unsympathetic reception.5 The name of a poet, reflecting ability and reception in different ways, is a source of anxiety, pride, and the unity of an authorial corpus whether the poet’s personal name is supplied or not. Spenser’s simile of a wandering orphan (or, more precisely, a foundling) signals that this split between personal reputation and literary future can be imagined as a profound isolation. Spenser asks his poem to seek the protection of its dedicatee even while ­acknowledging that Sidney cannot block inquiries into the poem’s birth. In this context Spenser’s periphrasis seems significant: although Sidney is named on the Calender’s title page, he is not named in this envoy poem. In its position in the front matter of the book, this double withholding of names anticipates one of E.K.’s primary preoccupations. One of the emphases of his commentary is the identification of Spenser’s various pastoral names, ­including Colin Clout, who stands in for the unnamed author. He defends the significance of this renaming early in the introduction, in referring to the old famous Poete Chaucer: whom for his excellencie and wonderfull skil in making, his scholler Lidgate, a worthy scholler of so excellent a maister, calleth the Loadestarre of our Language: and whom our Colin clout in his Æglogue calleth Tityrus the God of shepheards, comparing hym to the worthines of the Roman Tityrus Virgile.6

E.K. suggests that Spenser’s pastoral renaming is analogous to Lydgate’s praise of Chaucer, even though it is seemingly opposite, since Lydgate praises his “maister” by name and Spenser anonymously refers to one earlier poet using the pastoral name associated with a different one. Naming and declining to name can function equivalently. Spenser’s envoy poem participates in a long tradition, but the orphan metaphor draws particularly heavily on the opening of Ovid’s Tristia, the quintessential poem of exile, much admired in the English Renaissance. Ovid writes self-contradictorily of naming in that poem, claiming that Tristia can benefit by circulating without his name because he is under

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censure for his authorship of Ars Amatoria, even though in making that claim he is admitting the connection. Ovid works through that paradox by playing on the multiple meanings of the Latin words nomen and titulus: donec eram sospes, tituli tangebar amore,   quaereundique mihi monis ardor erat. carmina nunc si non studiumque, quod obfuit, odi,   sit satis. ingenio sic fuga parta meo. tu tamen i pro me, tu, cui licet, aspice Romam:   di facerent, possem nunc meus esse liber. nec te, quod venias magnam peregrinus in urbem,   ignotum populo posse venire puta. ut titulo careas, ipso noscere colore:   dissimulare velis, te liquet esse meum. clam tamen intrato, ne te mea carmina laedant:   non sunt ut quondam plena favoris erant. siquis erit, qui te, quia sis meus, esse legendum   non putet, e gremio reiciatque suo, “inspice” dic “titulum. non sum praeceptor amoris;   quas meruit, poenas iam dedit illud opus.”7

Three translations of this poem were published between 1570 and 1640; collectively, they show how Renaissance readers struggled to account for Ovid’s self-contradictory treatment of naming. The first two, by Thomas Churchyard and Wye Saltonstall, respectively, render this passage as follows: Whyle fortune smylde with smirking cheere of fame I had desyre, And noted name on every syde, I sought for to acquyre[.] A fayned verse lo now I make, and hate my hurtful lore, Let it suffice, sith that my wit, forsaketh me therefore. Yet go thou one and in my steede the royall Rome to see God graunt that there as none of myne, they may account of thee, And though thou there a straunger be, thinke not unknowen to come But that amids the mighty towne thou shalbe knowen to some. Thy colour wil disclose thy craft, although thou weare no name, By deepe deceite or otherwyse by skill to cloke the same. In privy wyse yet passe thou in my verse may els offend, The wonted grace it clearly wantes, which I to verse did lend. To reade as myne if any shal, unworthy therefore deeme, And from his handes to cast away to the by hap shal seeme, Tel then thy name: thou art not he of love that taught the lore, That wicked worke hath felt the paynes that it deserv’d before.8

Nameless Orphans  49 When I was happy, I did covet fame, And had a great desire to get a name. But now both verse and study I doe hate, Since they have brought me to this banisht state. Yet goe my booke, thee in my place I assigne, And would to God I could not call thee mine. Though as a stranger thou dost come to Rome, Thou canst not to the people come unknowne: Hadst thou no title, yet thy sable hew, If thou deny me, will thy author shew. Yet enter secretly, least some doe disdaine My verse, which is not now esteem’d by fame. And if by chance some when they heare me nam’d, Doe cast thee by out of their scornefull hand, Tell them that I doe teach no rules of love, That work was long since punisht from above.9

Both of these translations are based on the text available at the time, in which the passage quoted above has a significantly different third line: “Carmina nunc simulo, studiumque, quod obfuit, odi,” which explains why both Churchyard and Saltonstall have the poet hating poetry.10 The line as it appears in modern editions, with the following line completing the thought, would yield a translation such as, “It is enough that I do not hate poetry and study, given the trouble they caused me.” The crux is significant, since it affects – even governs – the meaning of “peregrinus” four lines later, which both Churchyard and Saltonstall render as “stranger,” as does Zachary Catlin in a translation of the same era as Saltonstall’s: And though thou com’st a stranger into Towne, Yet never thinke that thou canst walke unknowne. For say thou want a name, and would conceale thee As though not mine, thy colour will reveale thee.11

The poem’s father, as it were, is a citizen – even while in exile – and thus, within the metaphor, it should be one too, and its arrival in Rome ought to be a homecoming. The poem arrives as a foreigner (peregrinus means simply “from elsewhere,” but is a common word to describe a non-citizen) because it is concealing that parentage, and yet Ovid has no faith in that concealment, since the poem will be revealed by its “color.”12 The term can be understood as referring to Ovid’s distinctive and recognizable style, but also suggests ethnicity or class, in line with the idea of parentage. If the poem cannot walk alone, then its status as a stranger is caused by its estrangement

50  Solitude and Speechlessness

from the poet, not its lack of citizenship. This muddles what exactly Ovid is withholding from the poem, identified both as nomen and titulus. Both of these words have associations with parentage, tribe, and class, as opposed to the simpler vocabulum, which refers etymologically to what someone or something is called (nomen, on the other hand, is how one is known: Latin nomen and nosco, and by extension English name and know, are cognate). There is something natural, then, about Renaissance editors’ and translators’ exaggeration of Ovid’s rejection of his own poem: it wanders as a stranger not because it is not a citizen of Rome or because it is unrecognizable as Ovid’s, but simply because its author sends it out into the world. Ovid’s treatment of the relationship between the name of a poem and the name of its poet, like Spenser’s, implies that anonymity and attribution are not necessarily opposed within an array of ways to distinguish the writer of verse. This treatment of a name specifically as withheld, rather than merely left off, adds an important aspect to the period’s interest in anonymity as understood in recent criticism. In the service of a Foucauldian aim to undo the heroic associations sometimes attached to authorship in the Romantic and later periods, critics have neglected the possibility of a relationship between anonymity and literary ambition. The most detailed recent study of Renaissance anonymous publication, by Marcy North, shows both the necessity and the limitations of paratext – particularly what Foucault called the “author-function” – for understanding what exactly we are reading when we read a poem.13 North carefully positions herself in the tradition of Foucault while questioning his assumption that anonymity can only be understood in opposition to the signed authorship Foucault thinks of as primary: In addition to using anonymity as the symbolic primal antithesis of the author-function, Foucault uses a rhetoric of power and sovereignty in describing the author-function that suggests that the text is subject to the author, that the name has been applied to the text or has taken control of the text, and that there is a text beneath the author that has an existence apart from the author-function ... [Foucault’s concession that] a text always bears a number of signs that refer to the author ... merely reemphasizes the distinction between texts with authors and those without, consigning those texts without recognizable authors to a category of writings without interpretable production and presentation functions ... His use of anonymity as a straw man is unfortunate, but the concept of the author-function taken alone offers a paradigm of socially specific functionality through which one can study alternative types of authoring.14

Despite Foucault’s inattention to anonymity, then, North regards it as supporting an essentially Foucauldian challenge to authorship: “Although the study of anonymity enhances our knowledge of early authorship, it

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also requires us to reevaluate the privileged position of the individuated author in history and, at times, to ask whether the ‘author’ is really a unified enough figure or concept to have a coherent history.”15 North’s most strongly voiced arguments are negative: her accusations throughout her book that “modern scholars have pulled the conventional paratexts that designate a book producer’s identity into the primary text for interpretation.”16 The book is as much an argument about modern criticism as it is a discussion of Renaissance conceptions of authorship. Mark Robson’s essay “The Ethics of Anonymity” similarly focuses on critical treatment of anonymous works, arguing that anonymity demonstrates that all authorial attribution represents an ethical dilemma for critics and indeed for readers.17 Robson demands we recognize that an authorial attribution is something we are placing on a text rather than deriving from a text, and thus that “it is always already in relation to that which it has not constituted.”18 But Robson does not make clear when that ethics kicks in: does it apply to contemporaneous readers and printers, whose acknowledgments and speculations are often important for the attributions modern scholars apply to anonymous texts? Robson gives several examples of Renaissance texts that mock arrogant confidence in false attributions, but that mockery might itself imply an opposition between this slipshod attribution and a more judicious version.19 Is there a difference between the ethics of an attribution that dates from the first century of a book’s existence and a later one, or between a manual ascription, intended for private purposes but later noted by scholars, and an attributed second or third edition of a work first published anonymously? When Spenser says he will “send more after” his first major publication, he might be asking his readers to look for later, attributed work and make the connection to the Calender. Anonymity can be a fragile status: attribution, far from something actively foisted upon a text, can slip into it by a variety of different means and motivations. The result is that, if a poem is a wandering orphan, its namelessness, however typical it may be, adds to the disconcerting instability with which it travels between contexts. In keeping with the teasing references to named and unnamed poets in the Calender, Spenser’s sequel of sorts, Colin Clouts Come Home Againe, comments obliquely on the play of knowledge and ignorance that governs the attribution of lyric poetry. In the description of the royal court in Colin Clouts Come Home Againe, Spenser pays tribute to a number of courtly poets using pastoral pseudonyms, some obvious and some not: “good Harpalus now woxen aged” is understood by the editors of the Yale Shorter Poems to be George Turberville, “Corydon though meanly waged” to be Edward Dyer, but certainty is impossible now and seems only slightly more plausible to the reading public of the printed edition at the time.20 As if to acknowledge this doubt, before concluding with praise of

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the universally recognizable “Astrofell” of whom “Amongst all these was none his Paragone” (450–1), Spenser pays tribute to “Alabaster throughly taught” (400) and, at length, “a new shepheard late up sprong” (416), to whom he entreats, “Then rouze thy feathers quickly Daniell” (424). Why are William Alabaster and Samuel Daniel named in so different a manner from their fellow court poets? The Yale editors account for this discrepancy only by quoting Spenser’s concession that Alabaster is “knowen yet to few” (401), but that distinction explains nothing: if the knowledge of who these people are is so important, why use pseudonyms for any of them?21 Even if the obscurity of Alabaster and Daniel is what distinguishes them, that is the reverse of what we would expect: little-known poets, it seems, must be introduced by their names, while famous ones do not need them. But the juxtaposition raises broader ­issues about naming itself. To include the two actual surnames, not least because it undermines the pastoral mood, draws a different kind of attention to the earlier use of pseudonyms, reinterpreting the latter as names withheld rather than given in a different form. In this sense, the various names in this passage have a similar function to E.K.’s identification of the pastoral names in the Shepheardes Calender, which place obscured and revealed identities in juxtaposition; pseudonyms are no longer merely a convention of the genre if the same poem can include real names alongside them. Spenser confidently relies on the logic by which poets can be identified and celebrated without using their names, only to undermine that logic. Pseudonymity, anonymity, and attribution all carry similar problems, able to be understand in the same terms. This fluidity is reflected in printer’s practices. The intermediate state between anonymity and ­attribution might be attribution by initials, though, as North documents, this practice is part of a long and tangled history. On George Gascoigne’s use of initials to refer to patrons and rivals, she observes that “one could not ­replace the initials with names without destroying a tension b ­ etween discretion and exposure that the text successfully cultivates.”22 In this sense, initials were not merely abbreviated names, but “maintained a kind of ­typographical symbolism, an illusion that they were abbreviated names.”23 Indeed, they could function similarly even when an attribution was given. The print ­history of Robert Southwell’s works illustrates this phenomenon (as North notes, recusant authors were particularly subject to complex games of putative attribution, including reversal of initials and similar manipulations). Southwell’s first published work was his Epistle of Comfort, published anonymously in 1587; his only other publication while still living was ­Marie Magdalens funerall teares, published with no name on the title page but with the initials SW (for South-Well) following

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the dedication. Shortly after his death, Saint Peters Complaint was published anonymously, followed by Moeoniæ. Or, Certaine excellent poems and spirituall hymnes: omitted in the last impression of Peters complaint; being needefull thereunto to be annexed, as being both diuine and wittie. All composed by R.S.24 ­Several new editions of Saint Peters Complaint and Moeoniæ ­followed rapidly, all continuing the previous attribution or non-­attribution of the previous editions of the same book, and it was clear that the printers of the Complaint associated it with Moeoniæ, because one copy of the Complaint contains John Busbie’s prefatory epistle from ­Moeoniæ.25 Thus, the ­Complaint is being attributed by initials in a different book simultaneously with its own anonymous publication, the line between the two books capable of being blurred. The contents of the two books, along with Mary Magdalen’s Funerall Teares, were combined into a 1616 English College Press edition attributed to R.S., which was then expanded to Robert Southwell for the next edition from the same press in 1620. Anonymity, in this sense, is not so much the status of a work but a paratextual convention able to be applied regardless of context, with the name of a poet often lurking adjacent to an anonymous book. Depending on the circumstances, anonymity can be read as the withholding of a name already known as much as it can be the proffering of a text without any signal of authorship, and title pages and signed dedications do not in themselves determine the meaning of authorial names. In thinking about an ambitious poet such as Spenser, or any poet self-­ conscious about the possibility of being widely read in print, there are two principal lessons to be drawn from this indeterminacy of anonymity’s status. One is that we should not assume that because anonymity is more common than attribution across the English print industry as a whole that it is necessarily the primary or default status of literature as imagined by both writers and readers. Anonymity always threatens to turn in an instant into a meaningful lack, whether because the poem defines its origins through its namelessness, as The Shepheardes Calender does, or because it is identified with the poet despite its namelessness, as Ovid expects of the Tristia. The other lesson is that anonymity is itself available as a means to influence the short-term or longterm relationship between a work and its audience, and as a result, it is fully compatible with literary ambition as I defined it in my first chapter. ­Indeed, awareness of the complexity of the way readership can be imagined, an awareness that can manifest in the modest withholding of an author’s name, indicates the focus on being read by strangers that characterizes ambitious poets. For these poets, their work is best understood through Spenser’s image of the poem as wandering orphan, a representation in which the poem speaks for the poet, thus tying their fates together, even as it also serves as a discomfitting reminder that the poet cannot control the poem’s reception.

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• Anonymity and naming are thus closely related as ways of characterizing ­literature’s relation to readership, which helps explain some of the R ­ enaissance preoccupation with the name of a poet, a term that seems to mean much more than mere attribution. Poet as a vocational title is not something that can simply be claimed; it is understood in relation to the names of the great poets of the past, who collectively define what the title means. At the same time, having the name of a poet, or being thought of as seeking it, seems to be risky. Gascoigne says, “I chalenge not unto my selfe the name of an ­English Poet,” and yet this does not prevent him from writing and ­publishing ­poetry and guides to writing poetry.26 He also, significantly, places himself well above the mass of English versifiers in ability: “Surely I smile,” he says in his guide, “at the simplicitie of such devisers which might as well have sayde it in playne English phrase,” but choose inverted syntax; the authority of the guide, his smile indicates, arises from his position of superiority over these simple devisers.27 Gascoigne wants people to know that he is good at writing poetry, but fears that people will think him to be claiming the title of poet.28 This anxiety remains perceptible in the following generation: Sidney, unable to deny that he has such a name, still insists that he “slipped into the title of poet” without meaning to, thus getting around the embarrassment of literary ambition.29 A distinction must be made, it seems, between ability and reputation, or even between reputation as a measure of ability per se and as a broader determination of identity. To think this issue through means accepting the ambiguity that name has: it is used to mean both a kind of title and a ­personal name recognizable as that of a poet, and those two meanings are essentially opposed – a poet can emphasize personal authority at the e­ xpense of professional status (as Gascoigne does) or vice versa. It would seem, then, that the name cannot necessarily apply in the same way to literary and social identity, and this divergence further raises a problem for the relationship between either of those identities and lyric persona. Lyric autobiographical self-presentation is both a version of and an alternative to the name of an English poet. The name is a problem because it is a marker of at least three things that do not coincide comfortably: the subjective perspective a poem represents, the object of critical evaluation, and the vessel of literary reputation. The name is a signal of isolation in two directions – naming separates a poet from his or her peers, and it separates the poem from its author by substituting the monumental stability implicit in the title of poet for the immediacy of the act of writing. To say, in the first person, that one does not seek the name of a poet is to regard the acquisition of that name as removing one’s poems from one’s own control. In that sense, the ambiguity of Gascoigne’s formulation reflects a genuine

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confusion – the title of “poet” and an individual poet’s name are hopelessly entangled. As I have argued, both attribution and anonymity can serve as emblems for the loneliness and uncertainty of poetry-writing, and both have similar relationships to poetic language, which is isolated from its initial writing by subsequent reference and reception regardless of whether the name of its author is brought along with it. The name of a poet is simultaneously the primary structuring point of poetic history and something that does not actually matter to writing or reading poetry. The opening pages of Puttenham’s The Arte of English Poesie suggest a similar disjunction to Gascoigne’s. Puttenham stresses the etymology of the word poet, which is, after the Greek, “as much to say as a maker.”30 The comparability of the act of making to divine creation and the originality of poetic invention leads Puttenham to claim in his opening paragraph that “the very Poet makes and contrives out of his owne braine, both the verse and matter of his poeme,” unlike “the translator, who therefore may well be sayd a versifier, but not a Poet.” That distinction is more than just a technical one; the significance of original making “giveth to the name and profession no smal dignitie and preheminence, above all other artificers, Scientificke or Mechanicall.” The claim for both the name of poets and their profession is not redundancy or mere elaboration, because Puttenham’s etymological analysis suggests that the word “poet” matters in itself, and the profession is elevated by its name more than the reverse. With all of this discussion of naming, then, it is striking that Puttenham’s book is itself anonymous. Its anonymity, in fact, is emphasized in the printer Richard Field’s dedication to Lord Burghley in the 1589 edition; Field observes that anonymity is an obstacle to the very act of dedication: “This Booke (right Honorable) comming to my handes, with his bare title without any Authors name or any other ordinarie addresse, I doubted how well it might become me to make you a present thereof” (Field also notes that he is overriding the text’s explicit dedication to the queen).31 The omission of Puttenham’s name interferes with the social negotiation that confers aristocratic authority on a text through patronage, but not, evidently, the far older authority attached to the word poet. In this sense, the value conferred when a poet is called poet applies even without the poet’s personal name. Gascoigne denies he wants the title of poet, but later poets demonstrate that explicitly seeking it does not necessarily mean much. By the seventeenth century, it was more common for a poet to seek reputation through print, but the same uncertainties surrounding the relationship between attribution and fame continue. Unlike coterie poets who sometimes sought commonality with the great poets without the scrutiny of fame, seventeenth-century print poets sometimes hoped for fame even when the name of a poet was out of reach. George Wither complains in his Britain’s Remembrancer, a book-length poem about the plague, that more established

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“Poetasters” are not willing to handle the subject, but also not willing to credit him for doing so: Dar’d none of all those matchlesse wits to tary This brunt? That his experienc’d Muse might cary This Newes to after times; and move compassion, By his all-moving straines of Lamentation? What, none but me? me onely leave they to it, To whom they shame to yeeld the Name of Poet?32

Wither imagines himself in opposition to a poetic community, not part of one. His sense of isolation, left alone to pursue his topic by those who deny him a poet’s name, speaks both to who he is and what he writes about. Wither readily admits elsewhere that he does not really deserve that name, but such admissions only add further confusion to this distinction between someone who writes poems and someone named as a poet. Wither is a fascinating example of the extent to which fame and reputation could be separated; John Aubrey tells a story, much repeated since but probably false, that when Wither was captured by royalists early in the civil wars, “Sir John Denham went to the king, and desired his majestie not to hang him, for that whilest G.W. lived he [Denham] should not be the worst poet in England.”33 Even if it never happened, the joke shows Aubrey’s assumption that being well known for writing poetry and being celebrated as a poet were two different things. One could become well known, in fact, through the denial of a poet’s name. Indeed Wither relied on the Remebrancer for advancement for much of his life, despite the pessimism within it about its effect on his reputation.34 His lament at not having the poet’s name serves a diminished version of the same purpose as having one. That the denial of the name is lamented does not make its acquisition the goal. In his earlier collection of satires, Abuses Stript, Wither insists (truthfully or not) that he is not writing with the goal of gaining a poet’s name: For know you Muses Darlings, Ile note rave, A fellowship amongst you for to have: Oh no; for though my ever willing heart, Have vow’d to love and praise You and your Art; And though that I your stile doe now assume, I doe not, nor I will not so presume; I claime not that too-worthy name of Poet; It is not yet deserv’d by me, I know it.35

Once again, Wither imagines a “fellowship” among poets from which he is excluded. He is franker than most about the loneliness that exclusion

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from a poet’s name can cause; he dedicates Abuses Stript to himself, saying in a dedication presumably written specifically for printing, “for my owne sake I first made it, and therefore certaine I am I my self have most right unto it.”36 As Field does in his edition of the Arte of Poesie, Wither indicates that the act of dedication is connected to the name of a poet, but here it is not sufficient for his name to be on the title page: without a name recognized for poetry, the dedication becomes moot. He writes for himself because readership would depend on a title he cannot have. Attributed publication then, does not guarantee a name, and print’s relation to reputation is extraordinarily difficult to negotiate for those who do not already possess the name of a poet. The career of John Taylor illustrates the ways that print, in the course of providing new opportunities for ambitious writers to make a name for themselves, recapitulates a longstanding uneasiness in the definition of the name of a poet. A witty ferryman who called himself “the Water-Poet,” Taylor assembled a folio edition in 1630 that seems designed both to make a case for himself as a poet of significance and record the challenges of doing so. The commendatory poems and other prefatory materials in the book make much of the discrepancy between Taylor’s class and occupation and his literary aspirations; Abraham Viell tells Taylor, “Thou dost write well, although thy means be ill,” and Thomas Brewer asks: Was ever knowne to any time before, That so much skill in Poesie could be, Th’attendant to a Skull, or painefull oare?37

Taylor’s folio contains several passages musing on the value of a poet’s name, and its denial. The book includes a scurrilous verse battle with William Fennor, who notes the importance of geographical context to reputation: I’d wish thee sayle unto some forraine Places, Where they have never heard of thy disgraces: The Baramoodes Tongue thou dost professe, The name of Poet there thou may’st possesse:38

Taylor responds by questioning Fennor’s right to that name: Thou saist thou hadst thy title from the King Of riming Poet: I beleeve it true. What name would best befit thee, well he knew, He call’d thee not a Poet, for devising, Or that thou couldst make ought worth memorizing, He call’d thee riming Poet, note why ’twas, And I will shew thy picture in a Glasse:

58  Solitude and Speechlessness He gave thy Poetry not Reasons Name; But Rime, for he knew well his words to frame.39

So the name of a poet is associated with “Reasons Name” and with what is “worth memorizing” and distinct from mere versification. It may influence or be influenced by patronage, but the mere fact of patronage – even the king’s – is not sufficient to confer it. Taylor returns to the theme in his “description of a Poet and Poesie, with an Apology in defence of Naturall English Poetry,” which emphasizes the model of Sidney, “his times Mars and Muse,” and attempts again to restrict the name of poet: The man that takes in hand brave verse to write, And in Divinitie hath no insight, He may perhaps make smooth, and Art-like Rimes, To please the humours of these idle times: But name of Poet hee shall never merit, Though writing them, he waste his very spirit:40

As much as Taylor stresses his uniqueness as a poet, this idea does seem to speak for the time: a poet’s name is only meaningful if the title is restricted, but because of that necessity it seems continuously to be restricted simultaneously too much and not enough. Thus, “name of Poet” refers more to an ideal than an achievable goal, one whose definition leaves poets in a continually uncertain position, reluctant to be seen as aspiring to a title they must define as narrowly as possible. This uncertainty results in part from the tendency to imagine the title in a hostile environment, with both individual poets and poetry as a whole challenged by skeptics and critics. Print history, far from fixing and memorializing the authority of poets, further emphasizes the provisionality of any defence of a poet’s title. The result is that the predicament that Ovid’s exile and Spenser’s anonymity induce for their poems – forcing them to wander without the surety of an authorial name – is a condition of poetry in general, whether or not it is printed anonymously. The name of the poet means two different things: attribution and vocational title. They are related through their joint role in fame and reputation, and through the strange named anonymity that comes to poets like Wither who have one kind of name without the other. Attributed but unfamous poets, like anonymous ones, send their work to lonely and uncertain fates unprotected by an authorial guardian. Anonymity and attribution can speak similarly to the significance of a poet’s name and, as such, the distinctiveness of an authorial presence, even at times within the same book. Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex

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Judæorum contains multiple names and personal titles; the title page identifies the book as “Written by Mistris Æmilia Lanyer, Wife to Captaine Alfonso Lanyer Servant to the Kings Majestie,” and most of its poems are titled after their named dedicatees: “To the Queenes most Excellent Majestie,” “To the Lady Elizabeths Grace,” and so on.41 However, the book’s third poem, “To all vertuous Ladies in generall,” takes its unnamed addressees as an opportunity to reflect on naming itself. At the end of the poem, Lanyer imagines the elevation of her virtuous ladies to heaven: Where worthy Ladies I will leave you all, Desiring you to grace this little Booke; Yet some of you me thinkes I heare to call Me by my name, and bid me better looke, Lest unawares I in an error fall:   In generall tearmes, to place you with the rest,   Whom Fame commends to be the very best. Tis true, I must confesse (O noble Fame) There are a number honoured by thee, Of which, some few thou didst recite by name, And willd my Muse they should remembred bee; Wishing some would their glorious Trophies frame:   Which if I should presume to undertake,   My tired Hand for very feare would quake. Onely by name I will bid some of those, That in true Honors seate have long bin placed, Yea even such as thou hast chiefly chose, By whom my Muse may be the better graced; Therefore, unwilling longer time to lose,   I will invite some Ladies that I know,   But chiefly those as thou hast graced so. (lines 71–91)

The rhyme between “Fame” and “name” in the middle of these stanzas overflows its immediate context: the two words are woven throughout. There is a clear relationship between these virtuous ladies’ calling to Lanyer and Fame’s reciting some of them “by name,” but that relationship is not determined by fame itself. Lanyer has these unnamed ladies calling to her by name not because she is hoping her name will be remembered, but because proper communication about the names fame remembers should itself be by name. Name is the word for the mediation between writer and reader in this poem. If we could extrapolate from Lanyer’s understanding

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of that term, it would follow that any time an anonymous poet anonymously invokes the famous, Fame somehow registers the absence of both names. Lanyer’s deferral to fame acknowledges that naming is determined by others, but also that it is essential to a poet’s relation to the public world. A book filled with names thus uses anonymity to make an argument for names’ importance. That argument functions also as an implicit defence not only of the names in the book’s many other dedications but, more importantly, of the poet’s name on the title page. If an attributed book can still provoke Fame’s attention in the same way that namelessness can, then the wandering, orphaned fate Spenser anticipates for The Shepheardes Calender is not necessarily restricted to anonymously published books.

• Josua Poole’s The English Parnassus, a guide to writing poetry intended for students, demonstrates the efficacy to a poet of both names and namelessness (the book was published in 1657 but its preface, signed “J.D.,” indicates that it was written years earlier and printed posthumously);42 likewise, it alternately celebrates and ignores literary fame. The book consists primarily of quotations, arranged alphabetically by topic and without attribution (and often, in the style of many commonplace books, with no indication of where one quotation ends and another begins).43 With the purpose of imitation in mind, Poole often notes the metrical context for his quotations; for Amaz’d, for example, he quotes from Donne’s fourth satire, with a dash to indicate the incompleteness of the line: I more amaz’d than Circe’s, prisoners, when They felt themselves turn beasts – – – – ;44

Not all are in verse, however: Poole quotes the following phrases from John Earle’s Micro-cosmographie: Child. A man in a small letter. Natures short hand. Stenography. The best copy of Adam before he tasted Eve or the apple. Natures best picture newly drawn, which time and much handling dims and defaces.45

Poole seems to regard the metaphors as being of a sort suited to poetry, regardless of their actual source. The form of imitation he has in mind, then, is not merely prosodic but also rhetorical. Consistent with that purpose, the book also contains a list of simple epithets, also alphabetical, without a context.46

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These imitative exercises make use of anonymity, but Poole places them into a context that pulls the book in the opposite direction. In the book’s verse proem, he invokes the same nominality of poetic reputation that is so important to Wither and Taylor. Like Gascoigne, Poole stresses that he is not a poet but can teach poetry anyway: Though I dare not make title to that tree That growes upon the banks of Castalie, Nor on Parnassus top had ever Theam Presented by the Muses in a dream, Or with my teeth unbarkt the laurel graffe, Yet can I lend the weaker brains a staff For their supportment, ...47

Indicating what he associates with that title he is not claiming, he emphasizes one name in particular as a model for his scholars and for all poets, in making a case for the effectiveness of poetry where other forms of rhetoric might fall short: Many have been which Pulpits did eschew, Converted from the Poets reading pew: And those that seldom do salute the porch Of Solomon, will come to Herberts Church; For as that English Lyrick sweetly sings, Whilst angels danc’d upon his trembling strings. A verse may find him who a Sermon flies, And turn delight into a Sacrifice.48

The last two lines of this passage are a quotation from Herbert’s “The Church-Porch.” The praise of Herbert and the quotation of him suggest two different ways of imagining his influence on future poets, who can imitate his language and model themselves after him personally almost as separate activities. A modern reader can follow Poole’s example in two ways: by thinking of imitative and imitable language as a model for poetic influence that can supplement or take the place of the personal authority of the named poet; and by taking Herbert as a particularly good example of such a model. To be known by language but not by authorship is a kind of lonely fame suitable for poetry in an era when it cannot depend on its author’s name for protection. This halfway approach to the quest for a poet’s name helps address an old conundrum over Herbert’s ambitions, which are made difficult to assess by the lack of clarity of his intentions for the future reception of his

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poetry. It also reveals a relationship in genre between Herbert’s sacred poetry and the love poetry of Spenser or Donne (even while Poole emphasizes Herbert’s sacredness, he also ties him closely to such secular poets by quoting all in conjunction). Herbert’s attitude toward language, and his willingness to imagine his sacred purpose turned to the service of language itself, reveals a poetic potential equally applicable to love poetry. In the end, he is frank about his ambitions: they are directed not to the name, but to the language of the poetry – bequeathed (as Poole demonstrates by reusing it) to other poets – and to the thoughts that language communicates. That this language, like Spenser’s Calender, can travel without a name as guarantor allows poetry-writing and poetic thinking to be at once a public and solitary activity. Accepting the impossibility of controlling or predicting the future uses of poetic language means that a poem’s successes and failures are undergone by the work, not the poet, who is isolated from the interactions the work will have with future readers and future reuses of its imitable characteristics. Though Herbert’s name ended up prominently displayed on the title page of his book, his own authorization, as Nicholas Ferrar’s preface acknowledges, lies in his dedication, which describes the poems as “not mine” (because they are God’s).49 The Temple itself is a challenge to the definition of a poetic corpus through the poet’s name, and yet it reconstitutes the significance of such a corpus through a shared goal and basis for the poems within. That goal is an ambitious one, but Herbert’s biography opposes such literary goals to social ambition. The traditional account of Herbert’s life (recently complicated in various ways) is one of striking downward mobility: that he was born in a castle and died in a dilapidated parish house.50 Along with Herbert’s apparent lack of participation in the decision to print it, Arthur Marotti emphasizes the disconnection between The Temple as Herbert wrote it and as it appeared in print, reading the final volume and its reception through Ferrar’s prefatory note, which emphasizes Herbert’s piety: Posthumously glorifying its humble author through the print medium, it offered a model other religious writers of lyric verse could, and did, follow. After Herbert, at least as far as the religious lyric is concerned, print was the proper medium for its dissemination – one sign of how print culture paradoxically both made the private public and demarcated private life itself more clearly as a social space.51

Marotti describes the book as unified in its purpose in a way that is manifest in its reception. Its transformation of the possibilities for printed poetry

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still depends on the clarity of its own goals, which in turn depend on how well Ferrar actually represents them. But The Temple’s treatment of its author’s life is polyvalent. Ferrar places the poems within a now-familiar narrative of priestly self-denial: “Quitting both his deserts and all the opportunities that he had for worldly preferment, he betook himself to the Sanctuary and Temple of God.”52 Herbert says something a bit different about his opportunities in “Affliction” (1), addressing God: Whereas my birth andspirit rather took The way that takes the town; Thou didst betray me to a lingring book, And wrap me in a gown. I was entangled in the world of strife, Before I had the power to change my life. Yet, for I threatned oft the siege to raise, Not simpring all mine age, Thou often didst withAcademick praise Melt and dissolve my rage. I took thy sweetned pill, till I came where I could not go away, nor persevere. (37–48)

These stanzas, and this poem as a whole, undermine Ferrar’s narrative in several ways, by showing that Herbert’s turn away from social ambition is a struggle, not a resolute “quitting” of his opportunities; that that struggle was motivated by afflictions, including social failures, which lends a whiff of sour grapes to Herbert’s rejection of ambition; and that the choice before him was actually threefold, between the social prominence of his family, the academic life of the “book” and “gown,” and the church. This poem, like many in The Temple, does suggest that social advancement was still on Herbert’s mind, even if he was no longer seeking it. ­Michael C. Schoenfeldt argues, in a study of Herbert’s use of the language of courtesy, that Herbert examines his troubled relationship with God through the model of the social transactions between courtiers and lords: “Herbert takes a discourse of social control and finds in it a lexicon for investigating his own subjectivity and for expressing his bond with God.”53 Schoenfeldt reads “Affliction” as an excoriation of God in the form of the rant of a “disgruntled Renaissance courtier,” centred around “The accusatory force of the verb designating his monarch’s action towards him – ­‘betray.’”54 Contrary to readings that limit the poem’s boldness by resolving this accusation into Christian humility, Schoenfeldt reads its extraordinarily difficult final line – “Let me not love thee, if I love thee

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not” – as a “refusal to be meek,” which is “suspended uncomfortably between rebellion and submission.”55 Schoenfeldt’s emphasis on the social, however, occludes one aspect of Herbert’s critique. Schoenfeldt argues that “Affliction” “demonstrates how the failure to subordinate the things of this world to their divine referents ... releases the potential energy of confusion and rebellion latent in the complete fusion of social and divine service.”56 The failure is very real in this poem, but the fusion was never complete, as the poem acknowledges. The literary side of the three-way conflict intervenes in the relationship between divine and social service it explores. The “book” is prevented from being a simple reference to academic success by the word “lingring.” Herbert accuses God of mollifying him with “Academick praise,” as if the possibility of advancement within the university distracts him from his sacred purpose. But that possibility only explains “lingring book” if we understand books through their uses rather than their contents.57 Herbert is discussing the kind of book that lingers beyond its material form and its immediate context: the book lingers in the mind, and God’s betrayal is, in part, letting it do so, and yet, despite its lingering, not allowing the book to have real use: “what thou wilt do with me / None of my books will show” (55–6). In other poems (particularly the two titled “Jordan”), Herbert suggests that language itself, in its potential to represent but also, separate from that potential, in its beauty, functions as a force within his mind that sometimes coincides with divine purpose and sometimes doesn’t. That sense has to be available to the “lingring book” as well. Whatever Herbert seeks from books is not conventional ambition, which he carefully avoids. Far from seeking the name of a poet, Herbert is reluctant to use the word poet at all; in “The Church-porch,” he asks his audience to “Hearken unto a Verser, who may chance / Ryme thee to good” (lines 3–4), a jocular self-deprecation that mocks the expected opposition between poet and rhymer (as seen in the Taylor-Fennor conflict). In a more solemn mode in “The Altar,” Herbert allows an ambiguity between himself and his work that seems to anticipate the contradictions of being a famous sacred poet: each part Of my hard heart Meets in this frame, To praise thy Name: (9–12)

The opposition of the poet’s heart and God’s name allows for a deflection away from the poet’s name. The “frame” itself, however, is not the body; it is the book, and not the physical codex but the assemblage of words. The

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difficulty of effectively gathering together the parts of the “hard heart” into that frame is the central drama of The Temple as a whole. A high point in this drama is “The Forerunners,” a poem that assembles the potential and threat specific to poetic language into a quasi-autobiographical narrative. It is an attack on and defence of poetry at once, documenting poetry’s capacities and limitations. Though it discusses poetry at length, it says nothing about audience. It is an entirely internal conception of what poetry is; “all within,” the key phrase of the last line, establishes the boundaries of the whole poem. And yet, it contains within it not only the justification for poetry but also for an inward-directed ambition. “The Forerunners” explains why the “lingring book” was able to distract Herbert from sacred purpose in the first place, rethinking the relationship between poetic identity and poetic tradition that is responsible for the period’s concerns over the name of a poet. “The Forerunners” begins with the poet’s aging body, but that physical emphasis gives way to an ethics of words, which both inhabit and spring from the head and are treated with the fond concern of a parent: The harbingers are come. See, see their mark; White is their colour, and behold my head. But must they have my brain? must they dispark Those sparkling notions, which therein were bred?       Must dulnesse turn me to a clod? Yet have they left me, Thou art still my God. Good men ye be, to leave me my best room, Ev’n all my heart, and what is lodged there: I passe not, I, what of the rest become, So Thou art still my God, be out of fear.       He will be pleased with that dittie; And if I please him, I write fine and wittie. Farewell sweet phrases, lovely metaphors. But will ye leave me thus? when ye before Of stews and brothels onely knew the doores, Then did I wash you with my tears, and more,       Brought you to Church well drest and clad: My God must have my best, ev’n all I had. Lovely enchanting language, sugar-cane, Hony of roses, whither wilt thou flie? Hath some fond love tic’d thee to thy bane?

66  Solitude and Speechlessness And wilt thou leave the Church, and love a stie?       Fie, thou wilt soil thy broider’d coat, And hurt thy self, and him that sings the note. Let foolish lovers, if they will love dung, With canvas, not with arras, clothe their shame: Let follie speak in her own native tongue. True beautie dwells on high: ours is a flame       But borrow’d thence to light us thither. Beautie and beauteous words should go together. Yet if you go, I passe not; take your way: For, Thou art still my God, is all that ye Perhaps with more embellishment can say. Go birds of spring: let winter have his fee;       Let a bleak paleness chalk the doore, So all within be livelier then before.

My reading of this poem focuses on its acknowledgment of its connection to secular lyrics: both poet and poem are forced by the history of poetic language to mediate between secular and sacred literary worlds. It is also an attempt to reflect the poem’s tone, which seems to be the most elusive thing about it for critics. “The Forerunners” is funny (from the excellent “behold my head” to the knowing, self-mocking “perhaps” in the last stanza), and it is also wistful about the possible ultimate futility of a life caught between sacred purpose and poetry as a secular tradition.58 The primary interpretive question is how complete the poem’s deferral to its repeated quotation can be.59 The notion that “Beautie and beauteous words should go together” leaves open the possibility that “beauteous words” still refers to something richer than the simple words the poem quotes three times. As “Affliction” (1) tells a version of Herbert’s life story in relation to an unfair God, this poem tells a version in relation to language. Like that poem, too, it uses the vocabulary of the courtier – forerunners run before a king or lord – but by questioning all metaphors, including this one, it does so with greater irony, and the king here is not God but death. This is not a narrative of the life of “one who takes the town.” The first and last stanzas establish clearly the location of the whole story: the forerunners make their mark on the head, inside of which the drama of the love and potential loss of language happens. The mind is Herbert’s “best room”: a private space. The head becomes a geography, in which multiple constituencies, including the forerunners of the unwelcome visitor, interact in conflict. These interlopers attempt to “dispark” the brain’s capabilities, to

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remove them as deer are removed from a park by a warden. A pun connects the removal of the “sparkling notions” to the notions themselves, allowing us to read “dispark” as “dis-spark,” a bit of linguistic virtuosity that is itself an example of the kind of sparkling Herbert has in mind. With what, then, have death’s forerunners left his mind? The pale, still functioning versions of the old sparks seem under threat of displacement by the psalm quotation that is repeated throughout the poem, Thou art still my God. The sparks win out in a sense, since Herbert places the quotation in contexts that reassert his own poetic control over prosody and grammar, but not necessarily over meaning. The quotation has two different prosodic functions, appearing both in rhyme position and at the beginning of the line, and three grammatical functions: in the first instance, Thou art still my God is accusative; in the second it is vocative; and finally nominative. The shifting grammar prevents the simple truth of the statement itself from becoming primary – it is always serving a sentence’s purpose, not its own. It also causes the quotation to function like a name – the phrase is addressed as a respondent and depicted as both subject and object of actions. That distortion of ordinary quotation and movement away from rhetoric is heightened by the grammar of “Yet have they left me, Thou art still my God”: the quotation is not spoken to its audience (which is the poem’s speaker) but “left” to him, like a scrap of paper on the floor after movers have emptied a house. The continuing personal use of these five words requires them to be reduced to an object, an action attributed to the forerunners themselves, whose identity outside of the poem’s conceit is never really made clear. Unlike “The Collar,” in which the quotations of “Child” and “My Lord” end a narrative in past tense, or “Jordan” (1), in which “My God, My King” is something Herbert intends to say in emulation of honest shepherds, “The Forerunners” does not place its quotation in time: it is not something the poet has read or will remember, but only a thing he somehow possesses without using it, its purpose unstated and seemingly mutable. This condition makes the quotation the opposite of the marks made by forerunners, which are signs with a clear occasion (the arrival of the lord), a clear purpose, (preparation for that arrival), and a clear audience (the lord’s subjects). Language, in this poem, does not have such clarity. It is not necessarily communicative at all. But it is still important: the addressee of much of the poem, language is given as the reason for writing poetry. “Then did I wash you with my tears,” Herbert says to his metaphors: language is the beneficiary of his poetry. If that is so, and the location of language is within the mind, then language in general is like the phrase Thou art still my God, a medium for the working out of internal processes. Language here is something to be turned about and repurposed within the mind; it is not social discourse. On the other hand, his bidding

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farewell to language indicates that, just as it had a past before he incorporated it into his poetry, it will have a future beyond his poetry, influenced for the better, he might hope, by the use he has made of it but with a great deal at risk if it abandons him. The continuing history of poetic language is the sole point of escape from the closed system of the mind. But the poem ends with the mind in isolation.60 The gentle joke of the final stanza reinforces and explains its distance from the social. The word “livelier” makes us think of a party going on, as winter outside marks the door with snow, reinterpreting and supplanting the forerunners’ white paint. But the mark here is still the white hair on Herbert’s head; the partiers are his thoughts, and, like those with which Shakespeare’s Richard II peoples the little world of his prison cell, he can metaphorically treat them as a crowd, but doing so still leaves him solitary. The poem allows a function for the poet within that solitude: the redefinition of language, one that Herbert hopes will have continuing impact, even if he fears that words and metaphors will return to their secular and sordid purposes. This fear, of course, is right: Herbert’s expertise in language does indeed allow his language to be reused for purposes other than his own through the kind of imitation and rethinking that Poole – despite his deference to Herbert’s priestly function – encourages, and also through interpretation within a secular purpose (such as mine here). Herbert imagines his task in relation to language, not in relation to readers, but part of poetry’s function seems to be to record the historical status of a language, allowing not only it but other poems to be read by future readers. Sweet phrases and lovely metaphors cannot defer entirely to psalmic language, or there would be no poetic history – no sequence of poets, one following another, modelling their craft, imitating their own models, challenging the previous generation and the sequence itself. Participating in that ongoing history can be more important to poets than fame or advancement, and the names of the English poets, as Poole’s invocation demonstrates, are the structuring points of that history even though it can and does function without them. The deferrals of “The Forerunners” anticipate its own subsequent history: the movement from the white head to the language that is contained within it, but also shared with other poets, is parallel to the movement of the poem itself. The language of a poem is tied to a poet in two ways – it emerges out of his head and it reflects on his name – and both of those connections are overrun, distorted, and often obscured by the galloping traffic of literary history. The name of a poet will play a role in the relationship between that history and an individual work, but one that is inherently unpredictable, uncontrollable, and often unnoticeable.

Chapter Three

The Peril of Understanding: Forms of Obscurity

George Chapman addresses the preface of his Achilles Shield “To the understander,” to whom he begins, “You are not every bodie.”1 Chapman’s point is partly to insist that his aim is not necessarily to expand the audience for the Homeric epics he is translating and printing in bits and pieces, but to translate it more precisely for those who are up to the difficult task of interpreting his compressed fourteeners, who must be distinguished from “idle capacities” not “comprehensible of an elaborate Poeme.” Chapman thus raises the question of how a work defines its audience and its relation to that audience, particularly in print: an “understander,” he goes on, is someone to whom “(as to one of my very few friends) I may be bold to utter my minde.” Understanders substitute for a sympathetic circle of friends, and if the poem is intended for understanders rather than readers generally, then – e­ ven if most who would not understand will not bother to read – ­there is at least a possible category of readers who do not understand, the equivalent of those excluded socially from the circle, except that in this case they are witnesses to their own exclusion. Even in print, then, a poem can close itself off from part of its audience, not by restricting it socially through limited circulation, but by restricting comprehension. Chapman’s acknowledgment hints at a willing difficulty, in which inappropriate readers will be held at bay simply by the challenge of reading. Obscurity presents risks to the poet, however, even to a manuscript poet, as John Donne mostly was. According to William Drummond of Hawthornden, Ben Jonson believed “that Done himself for not being understood would perish.”2 This statement has often been noted by critics, generally with the assumption that Jonson’s judgment is based on an incomplete understanding of Donne’s poetry.3 Jonson undoubtedly knew Donne and his work well, however; three of his epigrams are about Donne or addressed to him, and he commented to Drummond about several specific poems. In addition to the sheer difficulty of reading Donne, Jonson’s

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comment seems to refer to the mystery of Donne’s attitude toward p ­ oetry, which Jonson alludes to elsewhere in the Conversations, saying that Donne “since he was made Doctor repenteth highlie & seeketh to destroy all his poems.”4 That desire baffles Jonson as it does many of Donne’s readers, but these parallel instincts – n ­ ot to be understood and not to be circulated – ­coincide in a resistance to readership. Such resistance is particularly striking for a prolific and widely circulated poet who is, despite less interest in print than Jonson had, undoubtedly ambitious in the scope of his work and his renovations of genres. With that problem in mind, I will discuss in this chapter some of the interests and interpretive difficulties of poetic obscurity in the Renaissance as a context for this apparent instinct to hold something back from the reading public. Obscurity is not unified in motivation, form, or effect: I define it as a disconnection between writer and reader that arises from the poet’s relation to audience rather than readers’ incidental confusion, and that is either acknowledged (explicitly or implicitly) or is interpretable (textually or contextually) as willful. A poem that many readers struggle to explicate or interpret is not necessarily obscure, but such a circumstance is the first sign of obscurity. In some cases poets simply declare their obscurity or claim that it derives from inherently difficult subject matter; others hint at self-awareness by alluding to earlier obscure poems; still others have a difficulty that is most apparent in later responses and explications but that, at least in retrospect, can be seen as anticipated by the text. Self-consciously difficult poems have much in common with others whose obscurity emerges out of their reception history, early and late. This instinct to withhold results not in avoiding being read altogether (Chapman was eager to publish, while Donne did print some poems and participated actively in the circulation of his manuscripts), but in the use of difficult language, puzzling ironies, stretched metaphors, opaque ­allegories, or unusual topics to restrict accessibility to future readers. I  ­follow Chapman’s lead in associating understanders with friends and thus ­obscurity with social removal. But I will also suggest, as Jonson seems to about Donne, that obscurity in the sense of interpretive difficulty has something in common with the obscurity of lost and forgotten poems, and in that sense it is related to the uncertain fate of circulating or printed poems I discussed in my first two chapters. The twin possibilities of being ­misread and not read influence poems’ composition, circulation, and interpretation in similar ways. Obscurity is both a response to and a reminder of this unpredictability of readership. As Jonson noted to Drummond, Donne declines to reveal himself in his poetry. But Jonson, at least to some extent, shares Donne’s difficult relation to audience, though he imagines it in different terms.5 George Rowe

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observes that Jonson explored throughout his career “the problematic and often antagonistic relation between audience expectations and perceptions, on one hand, and authorial intention, on the other – t­he question of how a literary work is to be judged and interpreted”; other critics have discussed this issue regarding particular works.6 Donne, especially later in his life, worried about it less, willing simply to tell readers they wouldn’t like his poetry, as he does in the first of The Anniversaries: Shee, shee is dead; shee’s dead: when thou knowst this, Thou knowst how wan a Ghost this our world is: And learnst thus much by our Anatomee, That it should more affright, then pleasure thee. (369–72)7

Donne addresses directly what his reader will learn from him. But the lesson is only fear  – ­the poem’s pedagogy seems to have no other content. This is a strange way to imagine both an anatomy (which ought to have some instructional purpose) and a poem, and it implies a reading of the Anniversary as a whole as a critique of education, or even a denial of education. Later in this chapter, I will propose a broader version of this reading, since, as I will suggest, this poem has many more ways than this to restrict its accessibility to readers. This challenge to audience might lead us to rethink what Jonson means when he says that Donne will “perish” for obscurity. If to perish can be not to be understood, and being understood is akin to the consolations of friendship, then a poetry that frightens its readers more than pleasing them might perish and exist at once, lingering in a death in life that ­preserves the poem, not as a monument, but as a kind of artefact – o ­ r, to use one of Donne’s favourite metaphors, a relic – ­to be interpreted by the right reader at some indeterminate future point. This fate is closer to the etymoogical meaning of “perish,” which derives from perire, to wander astray or be lost. The etymology allows it to be a continuing rather than terminal event. So it is in Donne’s “The Prohibition,” in which a mistress is warned:   But thou wilt lose the stile of conquerour, If I, thy conquest, perish by thy hate.   Then, least my being nothing lessen thee,   If thou hate mee, take heed of hating mee. (13–16)

The warning is that, like a conqueror who needs the conquered to govern the lands she has taken, the mistress’s relation to the speaker will not end with his death through her rejection – ­the gerund in “being nothing”

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implies that an ongoing existence as nothing will continue to lessen the mistress. In poetry as in love, judgment reflects on the judge, and similarly, Donne’s perishing will occur not because he is forgotten but by an active indifference. To “perish,” then, might be to be unread or to have an ongoing literary existence that still evades readers: in other words, to be obscure. Chapman, Jonson, and Donne all hold themselves out to readers with a reluctance deriving from concern about readers’ understanding and its effect on the way writers are defined. Of these, Donne is certainly the least accommodating; Jonson is quite right about him in this regard. I will return to him later in this chapter as an exemplar of obscurity, but one whose difficulties speak to other poets in their sense of themselves as poets. Understanding defines a poet, so without it the poet will perish, but this condition is not necessarily final, and is not necessarily incompatible with a more circumscribed understanding. “You are not every bodie,” Chapman reminds his understanders – ­misreading is necessary to frame and realize understanding. The threat of perishing by being misunderstood thus correlates with the kind of reading that defines a poet. Obscurity can make poems disappear, but can also make them last. It is attractive to the readers who can overcome it, but alienating some readers in hope of a sympathy with others is a risky endeavour. This relation between the forces that make poems difficult and those that make poems unread means that obscurity requires a broad critical view – ­as a condition that can become more apparent over time, it tends to be muddled when understood in strictly contextual terms (and indeed I will cite below several poems whose obscurity has itself been the object of critical disagreement informed by differing approaches to context). Obscurity by its nature assumes multiple readerships and thus multiple contexts. Despite Jonson’s warning about Donne, then, the possibility of misreading cannot be considered an inherently bad thing. Misreading is a natural consequence of obscurity, and obscurity is to some extent natural to poetry. René le Bossu comments that the moral of an epic is distinguished from its matter by the hiddenness of the former: “The Moral and the Instructions which are the End of the Epopéa, are not the Matter of it. These things are left by Poets in their Allegorical and Figurative Obscurity.”8 There is no doubt, however, that some poems are more obscure than others, some obscure enough to pose problems for their literary value. Obscurity can seem inherent to a work rather than the result of reading it in a particular context: Lycophron’s Alexandra, for example, has been known for its impenetrability at least since Statius referred to “the lurking places of dark Lycophron,” and the poem retained that reputation in the Renaissance as it does in the present.9 To judge a poem obscure is often intended as disparaging, but the rewards of persisting with obscure texts are often

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cited; one frequently shared anecdote involves a lord foolishly throwing away a book of Persius because “it was worth not his pains to imploy himself about an Author, who had writ in so dark a stile, as if he had a mind not to be understood.”10 To write obscurely may be necessary or appropriate to a subject, but it still risks the anger or dismissal of readers. Obscurity thus represents a relation between reader and text, and by proxy between reader and writer, that is distinctive and yet essential. ­Obscurity raises responses – ­including misreading, indifference, and the baffled dismissal of the Persius anecdote – w ­ hich it forces us to consider valid even as they challenge our general conceptions of what reading consists of. That challenge is pertinent to recent critical debates over the theory and history of reading. In an influential essay, Roger Chartier suggests “two approaches” to the history of reading that are necessarily linked: reconstructing the diversity of older readings from their spare and multiple traces, and recognizing the strategies by which authors and publishers tried to impose an orthodoxy or a prescribed reading on the text. Among these strategies, some are explicit and rely on discourse (in prefaces, prologues, commentaries, notes), and others implicit, making of the text a machinery that by necessity must impose a comprehension held to be legitimate. Guided or trapped, the reader invariably finds himself inscribed in the text, but in turn the text is itself inscribed variously in its different readers.11

The tension between these two final forms of inscription is the central theme of the essay, and Chartier finds readers to win out over texts’ a­ ttempts to control them, because “texts or words intended to mould thoughts and actions are never wholly effective and radically acculturating,” and thus, “the act of reading cannot be effaced in the text itself.”12 Chartier presents his approach to “distinction and divulgation” in reading as a “choice between two models,” with its only alternative a Foucauldian one in which “Every textual or typographic arrangement that aims to create control and constraint always secretes tactics that tame or subvert it,” with those same tactics constrained by “tradition, authority, or the market.”13 Either way, Chartier assumes that the goal of authors is to control reading, and readers can either submit or resist. Obscurity reverses this relation, however: the goal of an obscure text is to make understanding difficult, and readers who successfully divine its meaning may reasonably feel they are thwarting rather than succumbing to the author’s intentions by comprehending what was intended to be poorly understood. Chartier’s two models are not sufficient to explain the literary modes I  have discussed throughout this book, because the examples I have

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focussed on tend to understand the literary text as, to use Spenser’s metaphor from the Calender, an orphan, subject from the start to treatment its author cannot control. Authors frequently comment wistfully on the impossibility of controlling or predicting reading (Chartier notes several examples of this awareness of the inevitability of heterogenous reading, particularly in Fernando de Rojas). In the case of obscurity  – ­as Chapman hints by comparing his understanders to close friends in a publicly disseminated printed edition – ­the only control asserted is through an exclusion acknowledged to depend on the capacities of readers, not of the author. This winnowing of readership might sometimes look like a means to construct a smaller but properly controlled group of readers, but only if the excluded readers are assumed not to matter. But they do matter: as soon as Chapman concedes that “not every bodie” is an understander, the understanders are reminded of their misunderstanding fellows. Because obscurity threatens to close off readership altogether while leaving the definition of proper readership ambiguous, it is effectively a concession, not an assertion, of authorial control. Obscurity welcomes misreading. Chapman is one of the period’s leading defenders of poetic obscurity, although the scope and motivations of that defence have been debated. His social connections, his interest in hermeticism, and his zeal for difficult poems led some twentieth-century scholars to conclude that he was a leader, alongside Ralegh, Thomas Harriot, and Marlowe, of a “School of Night” dedicated to occult study; Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost and some of his sonnets were then said to be mocking them.14 Recent ­critics have questioned both claims, and I would suggest that we are better off examining Chapman’s interest in anticipating misreading than seeking out his possible attempts to speak to a knowing inner circle. Indeed, if the “School of Night” argument – p ­ art of a trend in the 1930s in which ­hermeticism was seen everywhere  – i­s itself a misreading, it is one that speaks to the mechanisms of literary obscurity. F.E. Hutchinson, in a 1934 review of Elizabeth Holmes’s Henry Vaughan and the Hermetic ­Philosophy, questions some of her assertions of hermetic influence, asking about a reference to herbal cures, “Is it after all so much of a secret?”15 But many secrets are not secrets: Renaissance bookstalls seemed to be full of Books of Secrets, Secret Histories, and the like, as if the word “secret” denoted not a closely guarded conspiracy but a kind of publicity that relies on secrecy’s frisson.16 Perhaps this state of affairs is what allows the word “hermetic” to slip from its Renaissance meaning to the modern sense of linguistic obfuscation; the OED, interestingly, does not distinguish between them, but merely adds an afterthought to its definition of “hermetic”: “Relating to or dealing with occult science ... Also, unaffected by external influences,

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recondite” (and even that does not seem to cover the sense of, for example, H.D.’s late book of poems, Hermetic Definition).17 That shift is just barely apparent in the Renaissance; Matthew Stevenson, for example, has a poem in his 1654 collection in which a young woman wonders at her lover’s absence: Sorrow and solitude in this small space Have figur’d age on my Hermetick face. Go happy Paper be my Mercury, And having kist his hand bring it to me.18

The reference to Mercury as messenger makes sense figuratively because of Mercury’s association with Hermes, even though that association is not actually present here.19 The woman’s “Hermetick face” is so in the sense that it is unreadable, but the older meanings of the term remain in the background.20 Chapman’s hermeticism, though much earlier, is akin to Stevenson’s; it is not of the technical sense we might associate with Giordano Bruno or John Dee, but it is perched, in a way not atypical of the period, between occult esotericism and the withholding of meaning for rhetorical or aesthetic purposes.21 Chapman’s obscurity continues to be debated, and part of the problem is that obscurity does not function as a distinctive element of poetry with a consistent interpretive implication.22 Chapman is frank about it, however. In the epistle to Matthew Roydon that serves as a preface to Ovids Banquet of Sence, he makes a distinction between obscurity that arises out of rhetorical or logical confusion and that which is natural to a topic: Obscuritie in affection of words, & indigested concets, is pedanticall and childish; but where it shroudeth it selfe in the hart of his subject, utterd with fitnes of figure, and expressive Epethites; with that darknes will I still labour to be shaddowed; rich Minerals are digd out of the bowels of the earth, not found in the superficies and dust of it; charms made of unlerned characters are not consecrate by the Muses which are divine artists, but by Euippes daughters, that challengd them with meere nature, whose brests I doubt not had beene well worthy commendation, if their comparison had not turned them into Pyes.23

Euippes’s daughters are the Pierides, who (according to book 5 of the ­Metamorphoses) were turned into magpies after challenging the muses. Their beauty was commendable before they made hubristic claims for it: the implication is that the value of figurative language is determined through its effective expression of poetic matter. This dependence on the

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end of rhetoric is easy to overlook; David Wilson-Okamura, in a discussion of poetic style, thinks of this preface’s claim for obscurity as “partly ... disdain for the mob” and partly “a defense of ornamentalism.”24 But those concerns are surpassed by Chapman’s interest in “fitnes” and expressiveness. To think of obscurity as expressive, indeed, is to insist on its fitness, for it can only express what is properly obscure in the first place. Chapman’s poem The Shadow of Night, an apocalyptic vision of Queen Elizabeth as a goddess sent to renew the world by destroying it, functions as both evidence of and an argument for the necessity of obscurity, which is largely its topic as well as its mode.25 Part of the confusion it engenders comes from its dual treatment of night, which is destructive and productive, hellish and pleasingly melancholic. Chapman anticipates this duality in his dedication to Roydon, in which he thinks of the pursuit of knowledge as source of both pleasure and pain: “It is an exceeding rapture of delight in the deepe search of knowledge, (none knoweth better then thy selfe sweet Mathew) that maketh men manfully indure th’extremes incident to that Herculean labour: from flints must the Gorgonean fount be smitten.”26 Once again, he invokes friendship in relation to obscurity in his praise of “sweet Mathew,” but admits that the difficulty of his subject means that he is treating his friend as Eurystheus treats Hercules (or perhaps reader and writer are jointly Hercules, and Eurystheus is knowledge itself). In Chapman’s vision of a world that has lost its way, confusion is cause, symptom, and a side effect of the cure for sin. Night, ultimately in the heroic role, is also the source of the world’s inability to perceive its situation. There are two Nights, figured as mother and stepmother: A stepdame Night of minde about us clings, Who broodes beneath her hell obscuring wings, Worlds of confusion, where the soule defamde, The bodie had bene better never framde, Beneath thy soft, and peace-full covert then, (Most sacred mother both of Gods and men) Treasures unknowne, and more unprisde did dwell; But in the blind borne shadow of this hell, This horrid stepdame, blindnesse of the minde, Nought worth the sight, no sight, but worse then blind, A Gorgon that with brasse, and snakied brows, (Most harlot-like) her naked secrets shows: (63–74)

Both Nights cover and hide, and, surprisingly, it is the wrong night, the “stepdame Night,” that also reveals: “her naked secrets shows.” So the confusion that stepdame Night engenders is mitigated not by revelation, but by a more determined hiding.

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This essential opacity extends even to the poem’s relationship with its preferred readers, whose commonality with the poet includes his obscurity. Chapman calls on readers to join him in his loyalty to night, a loyalty described as a mode of writing:   All you possest with indepressed spirits, Indu’d with nimble, and aspiring wits, Come consecrate with me, to sacred Night Your whole endevours, and detest the light. Sweete Peaces richest crowne is made of starres, Most certaine guides of honord Marinars, No pen can any thing eternall wright, That is not steept in humor of the Night. (376–7)

Though Chapman addresses the “whole endevours” of people with ­“aspiring wits,” he still defines the aspirations of those people as a “pen” that “can any thing eternall wright.” These readers are also potential writers, and have secrets themselves; the reading they are capable of, then, would be a dark reading – ­I would call it a strange reading – ­in sympathy with Chapman’s dark poetics. Obscurity’s fitness is measured in two dimensions, arising defensibly (in Chapman’s judgment) when it is appropriate to the poet’s nature and also to the subject; otherwise it is an affectation. Obscurity is thus revelatory of both the object and act of representation, incorporating an expressive uncertainty into the mechanism of reading.

• Obscurity may rise out of poetic matter, but it cannot be thought of as an aspect of matter. On the contrary, obscurity is an attribute of a text’s relation to reading that results from the collision of style, subject, and circumstance, the latter often influenced by chance – a­ work can be rendered obscure by forces beyond a poet’s control or awareness. As J­ onson’s warning about Donne suggests, the two meanings of “obscure” are related: a poem that cannot be understood may become one that nobody reads or knows about. In this sense, Jonson raises the question of what role readers’ understanding plays in determining whether a poem is, in Chapman’s terms, “eternall,” or in those of William Webbe, “worthye the posteritye.”27 Worth is difficult to measure, but it is possible to identify poems that posterity has rejected. The role of understanding in the work of posterity is demonstrated by a pair of circumstantially connected poems, by Cyril Tourneur and Thomas Middleton, that are exceptionally difficult to read and were also forgotten almost immediately upon being

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published. Obscurity is their fundamental and definitive status, not a difficulty overcome by the right understanders. The afterlives of the unread necessitate a constrained intertextuality: the only engagement these poems seem to have is with previous literary history, though they hint elusively and strangely at one with each other. They constitute an example of the fate Jonson fears for Donne, but they also represent an extreme that is part of the matrix of outcomes obscurity invites: a poem that closes off interpretation from some readers risks shutting out readers entirely. The primary link now between Tourneur and Middleton is a misattribution: The Revenger’s Tragedy, now assigned by consensus to Middleton, was for centuries thought to be by Tourneur.28 But they have something else in common. Early in their careers, they both wrote long, darkly styled poems on grim topics, Tourneur’s The Transformed Metamorphosis and Middleton’s The Ghost of Lucrece, which were published in the same year, 1600, by the same printer, Valentine Simmes, without a bookseller specified. Neither book appears in the Stationer’s Register, both survive in a single copy (Tourneur’s now located at the British Library and Middleton’s at the Folger), and were unknown until discovered by chance, Tourneur’s in 1872 and Middleton’s in 1920. The Transformed Metamorphosis has much in common with Chapman’s The Shadow of Night, particularly the contradictory association of obscurity with occlusion and revelation, with sin and virtue; The Ghost of Lucrece belongs to a different tradition but shares Chapman’s and Tourneur’s condemnation of a lustful world. The failure to find understanders is not the sole responsibility of authors; those tasked with the circulation of a text play a role. Simmes was a somewhat disreputable printer, as W. Craig Ferguson documents: penalized repeatedly for printing monopolized, unlicensed, or banned books, he was eventually prohibited from printing altogether and ended his life in poverty. Ferguson notes that Simmes “began dabbling in the printing of Catholic books” around 1595, but sees “no reason to believe that his interest was other than mercenary, just as it was likely that the wage and not sympathies involved him in the Marprelate printing” somewhat earlier.29 He was interrogated more than once for these activities (possibly on the rack, Ferguson speculates). First, though, Simmes gradually moved from printing controversial pamphlets to plays and poems, an aspect of his business that seemed to peak in 1600 with the first quartos of Much Ado about Nothing, Henry IV, Part II, and Dekker’s Shoemakers’ Holiday. He printed Chapman’s An Humerous Dayes Myrth in 1599 (but none of Chapman’s poetry) and Samuel Daniel’s collected works in 1601; his largest project was his edition of Florio’s translation of Montaigne in 1603, for ­Edward Blount.30 Simmes printed the first quarto of Hamlet in the same year, another book that barely survived the Renaissance, and one whose obscure history, as Zachary Lesser has observed, both mirrors and conditions the

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strange ways the edition has been read since its discovery.31 Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Iudaeorum is an underread Simmes book as well, and may illustrate that Lanyer’s deserved importance to the feminist recovery project, like Hamlet’s being Hamlet, has occluded the larger pattern of forgetting and rediscovery that Simmes’s editions repeatedly set into motion. If Simmes was a skilled but somewhat marginal printer, indifferent to marketing and with a literary bent, it is not that surprising that he is associated with these struggling young poets in search of patronage, that he printed their books in short runs without registration, or that Tourneur and Middleton quickly moved on to other printers, which might have helped make second editions less likely. There are several similarities between these two poems, however, that suggest that what they have in common is not merely circumstantial, the strangest of which is that they are the earliest two texts (and among very few altogether) in which the adjective “Phlegethontic” appears, and both spell it similarly, with no second h. It means something similar to each poet – ­a hellish quality of apprehension that can help render and evaluate the unspeakable – ­and I suspect that they knew of each other’s interest. The word vanished for the same reasons that these poems did: obscurity of both meaning and circumstance. Phlegethonticism as Tourneur and Middleton treat it is almost a synonym for obscurity: it both destroys and reveals meaning, and is a means of judgment that implicates the judge. For Tourneur, the word is particularly important, and it reflects his awareness of his own dark style and subject. The Transformed Metamorphosis, which decries and seeks to remake a world tainted by sin, has been known for its obscurity since Swinburne declared it “worthless as art and incomprehensible as allegory.”32 Tourneur acknowledges its difficulty, framing the poem with explicit references to the challenge of writing and reading and the lack of rewards his work is likely to bring. One of several prefatory poems (much of the edition is made up of prefaces and postfaces) is headed “The Author to His Booke,” which begins: O were thy margents, cliffes of itching lust;   Or quotes to chalke out men the way to sinne;   Then were there hope, that multitudes wold thrust   To buy thee: but sith that thou dost beginne To pull the curtaines backe, that closde vice in;   Expect but flowts, for t’is the haire of crime,   To shunne the breath that doth discloude it sinne.   What? (will he say) a recluse from the time? (lines 1–8)33

The self-consciousness of the opening metaphor, in which the printed margins are reimagined as the “cliffes” of danger represented by more

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popular books, is a feature of the whole work. Tourneur’s questioning himself in the third person, as if inserting a reader’s thought, only adds to this self-consciousness and frames his correct prediction that his allegorical revelations of sin will win him no glory. The frame of the poem invites an interpretation grounded in its ­obscurity: the poem’s subject, Tourneur says, is “a heav’nly taper’s death” ­(“To the reader,” line 24). The “Prologue” continues this theme, and further associates the darkness of the poem’s style and subject matter with that of hell. This dual darkness is connected throughout the poem to the river Phlegethon, one of the four rivers of the Greek underworld. As the etymology of its name indicates, the Phlegethon is permanently aflame, thus functioning as a dual reference to dark and to light. The prologue depicts the poem wandering through a hellish world whose darkness both perpetuates and reveals the difficulty caused by Tourneur’s youth in perceiving his sinful surroundings: O who perswades my willing errorie,   Into this blacke Cymerianized night? Who leades me into this concavitie,   This huge concavitie, defect of light,   To feele the smart of Phlegetontike sight? O who, I say, perswades mine infant eie, To gaze upon my youth’s obscuritie? (Prologue, 1–7)

The Phlegethon serves as a synecdoche for the world Tourneur wanders in but also illuminates it. The “concavitie” is hell, and also the hellish sinful world, but since the result is the revelation not only of sin but of Tourneur’s own “obscuritie,” the “concavitie” seems also to be the poem itself. “Obscuritie” here means difficulty in seeing rather than in being perceived, just as “errorie” means, in its etymological sense, wandering, but given all the questions, the open-ended form of the “Prologue” allows both to function in their alternate senses: the obscure error is also the meandering impenetrable poem. It is fitting, then, that “Phlegetontike sight” becomes a motive – a­ n orienting or perhaps disorienting concept – ­for the whole poem. Variations on this phrase appear seven times in the poem and its framing verses. The moon, which, as in Chapman, is the model for the poet’s own bringing of light to darkness, is thrown from its proper function by a “Phlegetontike fire” that fills the heavens (main poem, line 10), later identified as the “Phlegetonticke flame” of “the lights that should truth animate” but fail to do so (27; 25). The poet’s own viewpoint from which to see and condemn the metamorphosed world is a “stedfast rocke” that “brookes

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the Phlegetonticke shocke” (92; 94). Much of the middle of the poem is taken up with an allegory of the mansion of Apollo’s herald, “Whose deepe foundation’s raisde from Phlegeton” (179). This Mercurial mansion (if Mercury is the herald Tourneur has in mind) is deceptive, and thus reveals “Phlegetontike sight” to be at once the ability to see through such deceptions, the sight taken in by them, and finally the punishment for succumbing to the illusion: Who ere’s deceiv’d by this illusion,   Must surely fall into this deepe abisse, Downe to the horror of deepe Phlegeton,   Whose fi’ry flames like vultures gnaw on flesh; Yet iote of it never consumed is. O let no wight trust to this worldly sheene: For such joyes hate, of God best loved beene. (211–17)

Given the previous associations with the Phlegethon, it makes metaphorical sense that it would be the specific site of punishment for succumbing to the illusions its flames reveal. The river burns us for our failure to make use of its illumination. Reinforcing this figural logic, the epilogue returns to the idea that the only way to combat the influence of Phlegethontic light is to reveal it: Now are the pitchie Curtains (that enclosde   The heav’nly radiance of Apollo’s shine) Drawne backe; and all that in hels cave reposd,   Are dauncing chearely in a silver twine,   With heav’n’s Urania, shaming Proserpine. Hell’s Phlegetontike torches are put forth: And now the Sunne doth face the frosty north. (epilogue, 1–7)

By this seventh use, “Phlegetontike” has started to seem like an earworm whose repetition might be beyond Tourneur’s control. But the insistent iteration still highlights how apt the Phlegethon as Tourneur treats it is as an emblem for his own dark style: it is a flame that can hide, reveal, or distort according to the judgment of the viewer and the context in which it is viewed. The river is thus an effective figure for both obscurity of style and obscurity as lack of readership: the poem is consumed by the mechanism that allows it to reveal the sinful world. The Phlegethon and its corresponding adjective are not as central for Middleton, nor does he display the same debt to The Shadow of Night, but he uses the burning river in a similar twin role figuring punishment

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and revelation. The Ghost of Lucrece is a complaint in the style of Daniel’s Rosamond that alludes repeatedly to Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece. It is less obscure in its narrative and imagery than Chapman’s or Tourneur’s poem, but it presents similar difficulties in understanding its purpose: it is criticizing something, but it is hard to say exactly what. In Middleton’s case that is because of an uncertain temporality: the poem suggests a relationship between Middleton’s era and Lucrece’s, whose corruption is the broader part of Lucrece’s complaint, without specifying what that relation is. That there is one is made clear by the poem’s address, in its Prologue, to the multiple Lucreces, either of Middleton’s time or timeless, who will serve as the poem’s putative audience: Reach me a quill from the white Angells wings, My paper from the Via Lactea, My inck from Joves-high-Nectar-flowing-springs, My Muse from Vesta: Awake Rhamnusia; Call up the Ghost of gor’de Lucretia:   Thrice hath the trumpet of my pens round stage   Sounded a Surge to her bloudie age. Sad spirits, soft harts, sicke thoughts, soules sod in teares, Wel-humourd eies, quicke eares, teare-wounded faces, Enrouled-Vestals, Dians Hemispheres, Rape-slaughtered Lucreces, all martyrde Graces, Be ye the audience, take your tragicke places:   Here shal be plaide the miseries that immures   Pure Diamond hearts, in Christal covertures.34

The Prologue excludes most readers from true understanding, since the only appropriate judges of the poem’s subjects must be victims of rape themselves. The metaphor of pen and ink, to which Middleton returns later in the poem, connects that exclusion to composition: Middleton is imagining an audience for his own act of writing defined otherwise than his likely audience in print. That the latter turned out to be rather exclusive anyway is thus appropriate. Middleton invokes the Phlegethon in two of the posthumous Lucrece’s most fervid apostrophes. The first finds her readying herself for revenge: Come spirit of fire, bred in a wombe of bloud, Forgd in a furnace by the Smith of hell, Begot and formed in that burning floud, Where Plutoes Phlegotonticke tennants dwell:

The Peril of Understanding  83 And scalded spirits in their fiery cell,   Breathes from their soule the flame of luxurie.   From that luxurious clime I conjure thee.35

Later Lucrece, as speaker of the poem, acknowledges that the poem itself must come out of Tarquin’s spirit and his moral infirmity, represented by lust but figured by fire. That dependence makes the task of writing the poem complicit in the scandal it documents: Loe, under that base tipe of Tarquins name, I cypher figures of iniquitie, He writes himselfe the shamer, I the shame, The Actor hee, and I the tragedie, The stage am I, and he the historie:   The subject I, and he the ravisher,   He murdring me, made me my murderer. O Lust, this pen of mine that writes thee lust, Lies blasted at the sulphure of thy fire, The quill and fethers burnt to ashie dust, Like dust and ashes flies before Desire, Unable to endure thy flamd attire:   “For in the skie of contrarietie,   “The winners life is, when the loosers die. If I proceede: O fierie Incolants, Of that vast hell, which Pluto tearmes his haule, Tarquin, companions, ye I say that haunts The bankes of burning baths, to you I call, Send me Prometheus heart t’endite withall:   And from his vultures wings a pen of bloud,   Thrice steept and dipt in Phlegetonticke floud. Then shall I stamp the figure of the night On Tarquins brow, and marke him for her sonne36

Tarquin’s act is reduced to writing, which implicates the poem but also potentially makes it more potent as linguistic action. The crime is also connected specifically to writing for the stage, allowing Lucrece’s pen, which fuels the fire of its own destruction by writing the word “lust,” to take on a more contemporary association (though not necessarily with Middleton himself, since his dramatic career had not yet begun). The pen draws from

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the Phlegethontic flame to write what cannot otherwise be written, but is also in danger of its own judgment and destruction from that flame. So the Phlegethon has a role for Middleton strikingly similar to the one it has for Tourneur: it marks the threat against itself raised by the poem’s own poetic means. Middleton’s indictment of the pen makes the lack of evidence for reading rather poignant: the only marginalia in the sole surviving copy is a few verses of doggerel evidently written by a child.37 An audience of understanders, already marked as unlikely by the poem’s insistence that its true readers can only be other Lucreces, seems to be absent. Phlegethonticism thus speaks to the particular form of obscurity that unites these poems. Its own origins are naturally murky. The Phlegethon was known from its mention in Plato and elsewhere, and is included in Thomas Elyot’s dictionary.38 But a possible influence for these preoccupations is a similar iteration, though less pronounced and not yet adjectival, by Jasper Heywood, translator of several of Seneca’s plays (and Donne’s uncle). The Phlegethon is mentioned twice in Heywood’s translation of Thyestes, at the beginning as Tantalus is lamenting his being called out of hell, and at the end as the focal point of the punishment Thyestes seeks for himself and Atreus.39 Heywood adds a monologue for Thyestes to the end of the play, identified in the 1581 edition as Heywood’s own composition, which reinforces the Senecan associations with a third reference to the river: Thou filthy floud of Lymbo lake, and Stygian poole so dyre, From choaked chanell belche abrode, Thou fearefull freate of fyre, Spue out thy flames O Phlegethon: and overshed the grounde. With vomit of thy fyry streame, let me and earth be drownde, (f. 39v, sig. F7v)

The fiery vomit of the Phlegethon joins with Thyestes’s voice to create a flame of judgment. Heywood’s amendment to Seneca’s play conflates the function of the translated images of the flaming river into a more efficient figure that allows judgment and punishment to come out of the same throat. Heywood adds a similar original monologue, in the voice of Achilles, to Troas, seeming to draw from the imagery of Thyestes even in this distinct context: Now mischiefe, murder, wrath of hell draweth nere And dyre Phlegethon floud doth bloud require Achilles death shall be revenged here With slaughter such as Stygian lakes desyre40

These two added monologues suggest that the Phlegethon is helpful to Heywood in imagining a hellish Senecan world that would otherwise be

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unimaginable in a Christian context, in one instance through the river’s apocalyptic capacity to overflow its banks and the world, and in the other as having its own moral force. Tourneur and Middleton further develop this Phlegethontic capacity into a flame that joins with the poet’s pen to destroy, remake, hide, and reveal the things that reflect its light. I have already suggested that there is no finality to Jonson’s sense that Donne would perish for obscurity, and no single meaning, but the threat Jonson invokes is real. Tourneur and Middleton acknowledge that to write the unspeakable is to implicate one’s own pen – t­he Phlegethontic flame burns the one who tries to wield it, even in the service of justice. Making use of obscurity to reveal the confusion of sin risks succumbing to its own special form of damnation, which is to be unread. This circumstance, in which both poems’ engagement with their readers is constituted by an absence (reified by the childish scribbles in Middleton’s poem) carries lessons for the critical response to obscurity. Lack of reading is not an essential element of obscurity, but its potential is. Reconstructing the initial purpose and audience of these poems would yield little of substance; their own strangeness responds best to a strange reading that makes use of critical distance from the circumstances of the texts’ production to reveal their deeper engagement with a literary history their authors could not anticipate. They are best remembered in the context of their being so thoroughly forgotten.

• Even if Tourneur’s sense of the ethics of writing is influenced by Middleton, his style and themes owe much to Chapman. One obstacle to consensus over the larger significance of Chapman’s obscurity, however, is that it has seemed to many critics to hinge on Chapman’s comparability, or lack thereof, to Donne, even while the two poets’ goals for their poetry do not seem congruent. Raymond B. Waddington, responding to this history, observes somewhat reluctantly that the mechanism of obscurity is similar in both cases: Chapman, like Donne, “uses heavily figures of substitution (such as periphrasis and antinomasia); makes a single image carry multiple rhetorical functions; tends to compress rather than amplify or reiterate; and organizes frequently by contraries, antitheses, and paradox.”41 But Waddington insists that because Chapman’s poems are essentially allegorical, and Donne’s for the most part are (according to Waddington) in a satirical mode, the differing ends to which these mechanisms are put makes the comparison superficial: “Donne’s whole manner of truth-telling smacks more of shared commonplaces than of wisdom handed down from above.”42 My own sense of Donne’s relation to truth is more expansive

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than Waddington’s, but there is no doubt that his philosophical approach differs from Chapman’s, and thus that the ultimate end of obscurity differs as well. The interpretive problem remains comparable, however, and Chapman’s form of obscurity still seems closer to Donne’s than does that of more typical satire: both contrast, for example, to the obscurity of a poem such as Gabriel Harvey’s “Speculum Tuscanismi,” which shows the calculated double meanings of a poet who is satirizing some great lord and wishes to hide, or pretend to hide, which one.43 What Donne and Chapman share is not a goal or a taxonomic category, but a particular attitude toward divisions among potential readers and the anticipation of a particular readerly attitude in response. These attitudes reflect on the instability of the writer-reader relationship. Obscurity is, as Jonson complains, one of Donne’s defining features. Critics comment on its seeming centrality to his poetic style and the inevitability that readers, contemporaneous or modern, will confront it: Catherine Gimelli Martin says of his analogies “that continue to perplex, astonish, and even outrage their readers” that “Donne himself is openly unapologetic about the metaphysical obscurity into which this technique so often plunges his meaning and intentions.”44 Richard B. Wollman relies on Donne’s obscurity in arguing against Arthur Marotti’s view of him as strictly a coterie poet: “Donne’s conceits were built to last; their obscurity was a functional part of how the poet sought in manuscript to ‘preserve frail transitory fame’ for ‘future times.’”45 R.V. Young argues that Donne uses obscurity and concealment as modes of political representation, reading the Elegies as poems in which “Donne’s flirtation with the grotesque, the obscene, and the blasphemous conceals what were, in Elizabethan England, more dangerous transgressions”; to accomplish this purpose he is “deliberately obscure.”46 Though often discussed in relation to particular poems, Donne’s difficulty is such an essential element of his reception history that it inevitably pertains to his entire poetic corpus – t­here is no consensus about which of his poems are most obscure but no lack of consensus about his obscurity in general. His difficulty tends to be seen as coming out of a stubborn indifference to literary norms, and is thus frequently connected to the challenges of his versification; the editors of the Donne Variorum place Jonson’s comment in this context in suggesting that Jonson “surely had the Satyres in mind when he remarked ‘that Done for not keeping of accent deserved hanging’ and may have been speaking of the Satyres when he said to Drummond that ‘Done himself for not being understood would perish.’”47 Similarly, the much-discussed eighteenth-century disparagement of his poetry refers to both of these supposed flaws in conjunction. Thomas Birch, in his Life of Tillotson, says that Donne’s “poetical works

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shew a prodigious fund of genius under the disguise of an affected and obscure style, and a most inharmonious versification.”48 Birch’s connection between genius and discord is the idea of “disguise”: he imagines that Donne wants his genius present in his poems but still leaves it scarcely recognizable there. Obscurity has continued to be as often a subject of the disparagement of Donne’s poems as of their praise; Janel Mueller, discussing the critical history of Metempsychosis and its displacement of The Anniversaries as “Donne’s principal poetic blunder,” observes that “In the critical history of the Metempsychosis the one constant has been the difficulty of the poem.”49 These difficulties have been connected to a particular elusiveness his poems seem to have for criticism. John Lyon sees this critical history – ­in which, he feels, “Donne has never been comprehended in anything approaching the fullest sense” – ­as the culmination of a refusal to engage with posterity, in contrast to Jonson, that is apparent from Donne’s own lifetime onward.50 Despite the possible connection to his versification, however, we should not see Donne’s difficulties as stylistic or capricious; they arise from fundamental aspects of the way he thinks. This is essentially Katherine Eggert’s view of Donne, as presented in her recent book on the problem of truth in alchemical thinking. Eggert reads several of Donne’s secular poems as addressing the relationship between the physics of transubstantiation and the physics of alchemy, both of which Donne rejects but still finds attractive. Donne, in Eggert’s reading, reconciles these conflicting instincts through “evasive tactics” that allow both of these great falsehoods to “take on the quality of something both terribly pressing and terribly diversionary ... In his secular poems, Donne provides the alternative of both preserving the old system of learning that one knows to be wrong and also forgetting its errors.”51 “Air and Angels” for example, “is a poem less about any real prospect of feminine refinement and more about how far we are willing to entertain theories we know to be untrue.”52 Eggert’s reading of this poem relies on a sense of Donne’s obscurity that takes three forms at once: Eggert reads Donne presenting “a scale of material analogy” that his own logic then undermines; her conviction that the poem abandons its own argument is another sort of obscurity, conflating reading and misreading; and finally, there is certainly an inherent elusiveness in a poem that seems so indifferent to truth. Certain of Donne’s poems raise particular problems of interpretation through their combination of an advanced understanding of a philosophical history with Platonic, Aristotelian, and Augustinian roots and a mode of figuration in which tropes decline to resolve into direct comparisons. In a previous study, I connected “A Nocturnall” and “The Extasie” to Donne’s interest in “mystique books” (“To His Mistris Going to Bed,”

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41) and to an obscurity of representation and indeed of perception itself: I argued that “The Extasie,” after it establishes love as dependent on the eye, then questions the capacity of the eye to contain the image of the beloved it ostensibly reflects.53 Like Eggert, I focussed primarily on Donne’s secular lyrics and the problems of interpretation they raise by refusing to prioritize either their often sardonic and self-questioning treatment of love or the contemporary philosophical problems they engage through metaphors, similes, and analogies. However, the indifference to being understood Donne demonstrates in these poems applies to his later work as well, including the Holy Sonnets and the Anniversaries. I suggested about Tourneur and Middleton that lost poems have in common with difficult poems a crucial kind of isolation: obscurity of thought and obscurity of circumstance are complementary in their relation to readership. That commonality is apparent in regard to a lost poem of Donne’s, in which elusiveness of context and difficulty of interpretation coincide. In 1899 Edmund Gosse published three previously unknown poems he attributed to Donne, found with his Holy Sonnets in the Westmoreland manuscript, which is now in the collections of the New York Public Library. Their existence has presented a challenge to conceptions of the sequence as unified in meaning, purpose, or time of composition. Since the mid-twentieth century critics have generally accepted the position of Helen Gardner that most of the Holy Sonnets are relatively early, written in or before 1609, contrary to the seventeenth-century belief that they date from after Donne’s ordination in 1615.54 But one of the Westmoreland sonnets has been understood to refer to the death of Donne’s wife, and since they do not appear in manuscripts that were created earlier, the possibility exists that they are significantly later than the others, meaning that even if Donne intended a sonnet sequence, he did not necessarily write the entire sequence at the same time.55 The last of the three, “Oh, to vex me,” presents particular problems. Its placement last in the Westmoreland sequence might suggest a late date; its theme of the torment of religious doubt, however, is difficult to reconcile with the persona Donne presents in his sermons and other works from the end of his life. Achsah Guibbory was perhaps the first to call the sonnet “undatable,” as opposed to merely difficult to date.56 The Donne Variorum documents both the arguments that have been made for specific dates and the flaws in those arguments, only to conclude that “we are left with little upon which to base a theory about when the majority of the Holy Sonnets were written,” and that the three included only in the Westmoreland manuscript allow for the possibility of “years” passing between this initial group and the composition of the last, including “Oh, to vex me.”57 This problem has a profound effect on the interpretation of the poem, as

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P.M. Oliver notes in arguing that the sonnet’s exclusion from most sequences supports his position that the Holy Sonnets as a whole present their speaker as a fictitious persona: “If an undeniably early manuscript of ‘Oh, to vex me’ were ever discovered, we would find the poem’s confession much less disturbing.”58 To Oliver, however, the poem contradicts the printed sonnets by being “harder to read ... as fiction”; it sounds autobiographical, which makes its air of doubt disturbing to virtually any narrative of Donne’s religious life, regardless of date.59 Oliver’s hypotheticals imply that the uncertainty about the sonnet’s meaning is incidental to its sparse circulation history, but I am not sure that is the case. The insertion of the idea of fiction is not as instructive as the actual historical fact that the sonnet that would have made early interpretations impossible was conveniently missing. Its lack of readership coincides with its opacity. The poem places doubt in two contexts: abstractly in the opposition of contraries and concretely in the experience of fever. Both are provisionally resolved through a reversal at the end: Oh, to vex me, contraryes meete in one: Inconstancy unnaturally hath begott A constant habit; that when I would not I change in vowes, and in devotione. As humourous is my contritione As my prophane love, and as soone forgott: As ridlingly distemperd, cold and hott, As praying, as mute; as infinite, as none. I durst not view heaven yesterday; and to day In prayers, and flattering speaches I court God: To morrow’I quake with true feare of his rod. So my devout fitts come and go away Like a fantastique Ague: save that here Those are my best dayes, when I shake with feare.60

The difficulty of this poem begins in its fourth word: who is the sonnet’s “me”? Is he, to use the names Donne gives the parts of his life in a letter to Robert Ker, Jack Donne or Doctor Donne?61 Private Donne or public Donne? Or is he none of the above: a fictional character, or an everyman? Given that the poem is explicitly about the inconsistency of faith, its relation to Donne’s life seems essential, but that relation is unknowable. This poem has most often been read in the context of Donne’s other Holy Sonnets, but the analogy between his “contritione” and his “prophane love” invites a comparison with his secular poems. The analogy itself has both literary and psychological resonances, though the latter are surely

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not definitive: the variances of contrition and love share in their b ­ asic undiagnosability. The analogy between them enables and explains the reversal at the end: this poem can be mapped on to a love lyric backward, with what is worst in love being best in contrition. Still, the final couplet remains deeply elusive. “A fantastique Ague,” after all, can mean either a fever resulting in delirium or a fever that is imaginary (whether hypochondriac or feigned). In this sense, the poem can compare the crisis of faith it describes as much to the poetic depiction of “prophane love” – ­love as imagined – ­as to the actual experience of it.62 The reference to “prophane love” implies a relation to Donne’s own love lyrics. The turn to fever is curious, however: though love fever is of course a common trope, it is not one of Donne’s preferred images. The poem that comes closest to it is “Sapho to Philaenis,” and that poem’s feverish imagery is rare enough for him that Helen Gardner considers it evidence that he did not write it; Marotti agrees.63 Elizabeth Harvey, however, strongly criticizes these arguments as “based more on moral objections than textual evidence,” and reads Donne’s other poems with an eye toward why Donne might “choose to speak in the feminine voice.”64 If we believe as I suggest that the “Ague” in “Oh, to vex me” refers to “prophane love,” however, then Donne does seem to retain at least a minimal interest in love fevers, but the poem shares with “Sapho to Philaenis” a reference to love fever without a clear statement that John Donne ever experienced that phenomenon. For this reason, I take the doubts that have been raised about “Sapho” as acknowledging that it does not fit with Donne’s typical lyric persona, and not just because it has a female speaker. By interfering with the interpretation of the lyric speaker, “Sapho to Philaenis” constitutes an important species of his obscurity that reflects not indirectly on that of “Oh, to vex me,” as it demonstrates that Donne’s “me” was as much challenged by his “prophane love” as it is by religious doubt. The two poems are complements: the early poem is a problem because it does not read as a depiction of Donne’s familiar lyric persona; the late poem is one because it does not distinguish sufficiently between that persona and that of the other Holy Sonnets. The conceit of this allegedly un-Donne-like poem is that Philaenis’s likeness to Sappho endorses the urgency and rightness of their coupling: My two lips, eyes, thighs, differ from thy two,   But so, as thine from one another doe; And, oh, no more; the likeness being such   Why should they not alike in all parts touch? (45–8)

The speaker acknowledges, particularly at the poem’s end, that this conflation of self and other threatens not only the relationship between them (is

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it a relationship or a gaze into a mirror?) but her own identity. The fever of love turns out to be a symptom of the separation of self from self: O cure this loving madnesse, and restore   Me to mee; thee, my halfe, my all, my more. So may thy cheekes red outweare scarlet dye,   And their white, whitenesse of the Galaxy, So may thy mighty,’amazing beauty move   Envy’in all women, and in all men, love, And so be change, and sicknesse, farre from thee   As thou by comming neere, keep’st them from me. (57–64)

There may be moments in these passages when we are not sure to whom “me” refers, but that is the point: it is only by the conflation of “thee” and “me” into an expanded “me” that the fever is cured. At its worst, then, the fever is both a lack and a dissolution, and as such it glosses the “fantastique Ague” of “Oh, to vex me,” a fever either proceeding from or infecting the imagination that interferes with the basic lyric function of assigning a particular imagination to a particular person or persona. “Me” seems like the clearest of poetic references, and yet both of these poems show that its meaning can be obscured by the qualities assigned to it. Donne’s claim in “Oh, to vex me” is that the only difference between the crisis of faith he writes of now and the love fevers he wrote of previously is that what was then worst is now best. It follows that the reversal reveals instability in his earlier poems: contrition undoes the logic of love. Jonson said that Donne, following his ordination, wished to destroy his poems. I believe he may have done so, not physically, but by creating a palinode that explicitly reverses the meaning of his earlier secular poems and renders the entire trajectory of his life  – t­he bridge he constructed between the figures of Jack Donne and Doctor Donne – u ­ nreadable. “Oh, to vex me” isolates the poet from readers’ understanding, and thus its obscurity threatens to extend beyond its own textual boundaries and pull Donne’s corpus of verse out of his readers’ hands. That the poem took almost 300 years to enter the circulating canon of his other works and was left out of the posthumous printed collections is the culmination of its own self-negation. The problem of reading Donne is anticipated by an uncertainty he expresses about being read, particularly in his later poems. His ambivalence about and sometimes outright resistance to readership is a lifelong preoccupation, though it takes different forms at different stages of his poetic career. I have already noted that Donne further complicates the possible futures of his poems in the Anniversaries, whose obscurity is based not so much on compressed or ambiguous conceits as on a broader thematic

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elusiveness. These poems’ challenge to readers is evident both internally and externally. It is a different kind of challenge than that of, for example, “A Nocturnall” or “The Extasie” – n ­ ot a mode of figuration that challenges interpretation, but a rhetorical mode that challenges the expectations of didacticism the Anniversaries explicitly raise and resist. The Anniversaries are a meditation on the difficulties of teaching. Though they are written with lessons to offer, they acknowledge the paradoxes inherent to the Horatian assumption that poems ought to teach, nearly mocking readers who expect to be taught by them. As Barbara Lewalski concedes, at the heart of both Anniversaries is a disturbing falsehood: These poems may continue in some degree to repel or antagonize us as readers by reason of Donne’s hyperbolic insistence upon the uniqueness of Elizabeth Drury, even though we recognize that we are to take Elizabeth as image of God. Of course we know that she is not the only or even the most excellent image of God that might be celebrated, despite the fact that Donne’s speaker, framing his remarks in terms of a particular occasion, vehemently asserts that she is precisely that.65

Lewalski regards this antagonistic approach as a side effect of the collision between occasion and subject, and insists that the poems have a coherent symbology as long as they are read in an exclusively metaphysical frame of reference. She is quick to move past her own acknowledgment that the ­poems have the potential to repel readers; I suggest instead that this conflict with audience is one of their central concerns. In this sense they speak to Donne’s larger corpus: his conflicted opinion about the future of his work is clear in them. They belong loosely to the same genre as ­Chapman’s The Shadow of Night – ­long, didactic poems lamenting the decline of the world in sternly worded iambic pentameter couplets – a­ nd, like that poem, seem to hedge their potential pedagogical failure by announcing a restriction of their audience. As the only poems Donne prepared for the press himself, they somewhat undermine the notion of his commitment to manuscript circulation and coterie readership; on the other hand, he expressed regret for printing them, retracting his apparent reversal. Still, his insistence that his purpose is to frighten his readers rather than entertain or even ­enlighten them means that perhaps we should rethink the standard narrative that Donne regretted printing them because he was disappointed in their reception. The Anniversaries were indeed poorly received, according to letters Donne wrote to Henry Goodyer and George Garrard. Donne was both defensive and embarrassed; he said to Garrard, “the fault that I

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acknowledge in my self is to have descended to print any thing in verse” – ­a decision that opened his poetry to a public criticism to which it hadn’t been previously subject.66 Most of the criticism, though, was for “having said too much,” as he says to Garrard, which may be because he “never saw the gentlewoman.” But, as he put it to Goodyer the same day, since he had not met Elizabeth Drury, “it became me to say not what I was sure was just truth, but the best that I could conceive.”67 This is interesting logic: a poet who does not have access to the truth is compelled to present an ideal instead. Since the poems do not acknowledge that Donne “never saw the gentlewoman,” his defence suggests a basic unreadability: without knowing the circumstances of their composition, it would be impossible, within Donne’s logic, to know whether he is even writing truth, much less what truth. That Donne said too much is a censure that anticipates much of the difficulty in the poems’ interpretation in subsequent centuries. Whatever the role Elizabeth Drury plays in the poems, it is clear that their interest lies at least partly beyond her.68 But the obscurity and ambiguity with which Donne pursues that larger interest seems to lead scholars to accuse each other of overreading. John Carey’s account of the Anniversaries, sweeping away all previous attempts as misreadings “ignoring Donne’s frank explanation” that the poems represent the “idea of a woman,” tries to allow Donne’s literary and social ambitions to fit neatly together.69 Describing the poems collectively as “a voyage into undiscovered spaces of hyperbole,” Carey considers that exercise to explain the poems’ seeming affectlessness, and the extreme abstraction attached to the female figure at their centre, while advancing the poet’s dual ambition by “recommending himself ... to a new patron” while relishing “writing dizzy cadenzas of praise.”70 For Marotti, on the other hand, the poems are purely social in aim, and their alleged failure in print reflects a corresponding lack of literary adaptability: “Donne resisted making the necessary adjustments demanded by the more public circumstances of print and suffered the consequent misinterpretations and unsympathetic criticism.”71 Like Donne himself, Marotti thinks of the poems as unreadable by strangers who happen upon the print edition, but he sees that unreadability as incidental to the subject and form of the poems. Both of these accounts censure critics for reading the poems too variously, holding that their meaning is largely constrained within a particular issue. In this sense, both are attempts to limit interpretation, not to expand it, as if in agreement with its initial detractors that Donne had said too much: that his considerations of the circumstances of his time are too broad and too deep, distracting readers from their real purpose. Carey and Marotti both underestimate the poems’ self-awareness about the difficulty

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of reading them. I agree with Catherine Gimelli Martin that the poems are best read as what they are in print: a public statement aimed at a broad audience, not a private or internal meditation.72 On the other hand, her sense that the First Anniversary is primarily “contributing to a renewed debate” in response to Bacon’s dismissal of the principle of a world in decay seems insufficient.73 This account does not capture Donne’s tone, which is at once didactic, angry, and aloof; or the breadth of his condemnation of human learning, which seems equally contemptuous of both sides of the debate to which Martin refers. If Donne said too much he did so knowingly, whether or not he later regretted it. The poems take an explicitly hostile relation to readership. In The First Anniversary, Donne expects to be like a doctor whose advice is unheeded: Nor smels it well to hearers, if one tell Them their disease, who faine would think they’re wel. (441–2)

Just as diagnosis will not comfort sick people who deny their illness, the poem’s warning will be ignored until it is too late. But the same metaphor is used to suggest that even those who listen to it will not benefit. Education, Donne insists, will not function as a purgative or physic to heal the world, which is too sick to be cured: She to whom this world must it selfe refer, As Suburbs, or the Microcosme of her, She, shee is dead; she’s dead: when thou knowst this, Thou knowst how lame a cripple this world is. And learnst thus much by our Anatomy, That this worlds generall sickeness doth not lie In any humour, of one certaine part; But, as thou saw’st it rotten at the hart, Thou seest a Hectique fever hath got hold Of the whole substance, not to be contrould, And that thou hast but one way, not t’admit The worlds infection, to be none of it. (235–46)

The world can only understand itself in relation to someone who is departed from it, like a suburb without a city; the failure of education and the failure of medicine are thus conflated. The poem acknowledges its own insufficiency: it is like medicine given to a patient who is sure to die, and it will achieve its purpose in being ignored and misunderstood. It acknowledges its own lateness, and its prophecy is proven correct by its readers’ failure to read out of it a conduit to its ideal.

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Earlier, Donne says that what we might learn from his Anatomy is that “The heart being perish’d, no part can be free” (186). By way of the poem’s embrace of death through the death of Elizabeth Drury, this line provides an unintended gloss on Jonson’s sense that Donne would “perish” through his resistance to understanding. In this poem such perishing seems to be inevitable. Donne says to the world: Her death did wound, and tame thee than, and than Thou might have better spar’d the Sunne, or Man; That wound was deepe, but ’tis more misery, That thou hast lost thy sense and memory. ’Twas heavy then to heare thy voyce of mone, But this is worse, that thou art speechlesse growne. Thou hast forgot thy name, thou hadst; thou wast Nothing but she, and her thou hast o’repast. (25–31)

Elizabeth Drury is dead, and thus the world has lost its “sense and memory.” The sense and memory was not Drury herself, however, but the world’s understanding of itself through her – ­the world, after all, forgets its memory, not hers, and forgets its own name, a name that had been preserved in the memory of her. The world is “speechlesse growne” because it has lost the capacity to speak of her and to speak like her: to value and reflect her learning and wisdom. The world’s losing the ability to speak in the voice of the dead is the very thing that Donne and Jonson both knew would happen to Donne: he would be as present in the world as any memorialized dead person, but the world would not speak of him in a voice commensurate with his own. If Jasper Mayne writes truly, this is indeed what happened. Mayne laments in an elegy included in the 1633 collected poems: Who shall presume to mourn thee, Donne, unlesse He could his teares in thy expressions dresse, And teach his griefe that reverence of thy Hearse, To weepe lines, learned, as thy Anniverse, A Poëme of that worth, whose every teare Deserves the title of a severall yeare.74

The person who would mourn Donne must contain within himself the learning the Anniversaries do, except that that is impossible, because the Anniversaries decline to teach: they show their learning and Donne’s without transmitting it to readers. Mayne records the event Donne anticipates in the Anniversaries themselves. The world’s speechlessness, its inability to speak in a way that reaches the standard of his own voice, is his perishing.

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Mayne’s word “learne” reflects on a conflict that appears in the first Anniversary and is further developed in the second. Despite the didactic tone of some parts of both poems, in the second Donne condemns “Authors” who expend, and induce in their students, enormous labour “To know but Catechismes and Alphabets / Of unconcerning things, matters of fact” (281–5). The question this accusation raises is whether learning can be rescued from the inherent arbitrariness and obscurity engendered by its reliance on the esoteric, trivial, and abstruse. Taking up a term familiar from attacks on humanist education, Donne exhorts these authors: When wilt thou shake off this Pedantery, Of being taught by sense, and Fantasy? (291–2)

This accusation has somewhat different, and broader, implications than the ones in the first poem. The word pedantry was new (pedant was somewhat older): early instances tend to be translations, and Donne’s is the first cited use in the Oxford English Dictionary that is not directly identified as derived from another language.75 Despite its priority, there seems to be little comment on what exactly it might mean.76 Pedantry is often understood as greater concern with the acquisition or display of learning than with its appropriate application, but that does not seem to be Donne’s thinking here, since he treats the subject matter itself as pedantic – t­ his pedantry is located not in pedants but in their learning. That relationship between the nature of matter and that of the person who conveys it is parallel to the definition of obscurity. If obscurity claims what Chapman calls “fitness,” it also implies the failure of a more transparent attempt to convey the same concepts, and there is a similar problem with pedantry, an accusation that calls teaching itself into question. Because of the shift from author to subject inherent in the word, I am not sure that pedantry is a natural evolution from pedant. The only published uses of the word before Donne’s are derived from Italian, and I believe the Italian word, pedanteria, is behind Donne’s usage here. The metrical context of Donne’s “pedantery” and the rhyme with “fantasy” places the stress on the second and fourth syllables, matching the Italian pronunciation, unlike the modern pedantry with first syllable stressed. Donne might, then, be thinking of the word’s appearance in Italian in ­Sidney’s Defence of Poesie. The Defence begins with an anecdote about an overly enthusiastic Italian horseman of his acquaintance, John Pietro Pugliano, who told him that horsemanship was so complex and essential that “skill of government was but a pedanteria in comparison.”77 The ­anecdote defends Sidney’s interest in the theory and practice of poetry by implying that a courtier has a kind of right to be particularly interested

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in the discipline in which he is practised, even if it means placing it too high in the hierarchy of appropriately courtly activities; at the same time, Sidney makes clear that Pugliano is a rather ridiculous figure. Pedantry is an accusation whose willful indifference to learning makes it able to be turned against the accuser almost inevitably. To use the word at all is to doubt that genuinely essential learning can be distinguished from an overly abstruse erudition. The problem with the accusation of pedantry is that both accuser and accused can be seen as questioning the connection between teacher and student necessary for real education. Donne’s knowing uses of the word and its relatives inhabit pedantry’s indefinability and tendency to reflect on its speaker. The opening lines of “The Sun Rising” establish the conceit in which the sun, by separating lovers at dawn, is exceeding its role, which Donne hubristically shrinks throughout the poem: Busie old foole, unruly Sunne, Why dost thou thus, Through windowes, and through curtaines call on us? Must to thy motions lovers seasons run? Sawcy pedantique wretch, goe chide Late schoole-boyes, and sowre prentices, Goe tell Court-huntsmen, that the King will ride, Call contrey ants to harvest offices; Love, all like, no season knoews, nor clyme, Nor houres, dayes, months, which are the rags of time. (1–10)

Helen Gardner associates this use of “pedantique” with Marlowe’s translation of Ovid’s description of the sun: “Thou cousenst boyes of sleepe, and doest betray them / To Pedants that with cruell lashes pay them.”78 In her logic, the pedantry of those reading time by the sun in Marlowe can, in Donne’s adaptation, somehow drift back on to the sun itself, as if its rays give it complicity in the deeds done in its name. The sun becomes responsible for the triviality of timekeeping, and then love renders the sun voiceless by asserting the uselessness of the knowledge it conveys. There is a very similar logic behind the idea of pedantry in general: a free movement of accusation between the personality of the scholar and his subject matter that goes in both directions. According to Drummond, Jonson said about John Owen, headmaster of King Henry VIII’s School in Warwick and a published epigrammist: “Owen is a pure pedantique Schoolmaster sweeping his living from the posteriors of litle children, and hath no thinge good in him, his Epigrames being bare narrations.”79 It is not clear whether Owen’s profession of mindless child-spanking causes his dull poetry or

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they both derive from the same aspect of Owen’s character, but in a sense it doesn’t matter: to call him “pedantique” is to address his essential self (hence Jonson’s “pure”), that he “hath no thinge good in him,” and that essence is bound to turn up in various forms. Donne’s condemnation in the Second Anniversary is broader, and it represents the danger of the poem’s idealization of its subject – ­because she is dead, and because she is given no continuing, saint-like role beyond her death, the poem is founded in a kind of nihilism. Drury works on the world like Chapman’s Night: not only are the revelation of and cure for sin located in the same entity, but that entity is an absence. This nihilism lends some justification to the accusation Jonson mentioned to Drummond (probably referring to the First Anniversary) “that Dones Anniversarie was profane and full of Blasphemies that he told Mr. Donne, if it had been written of the Virgin Marie it had been something to which he answered that he described the Idea of a Woman and not as she was.”80 Jonson’s feeling is not merely that Mary is a better object of the poems’ hyperbolic praise than Elizabeth Drury, but that Mary’s role in the world’s redemption would allow some relief from Donne’s sheer negativity. ­Jonson was clearly unconvinced by Donne’s reply – ­reasonably, since the poem’s conflation of a single, dead person with “the Idea of a Woman” results in the hopelessness of its entreaty to emulate her. But, just as some of Donne’s poems imply a definition of “perish” that qualifies Jonson’s use of that term against him, so he gives in the Second Anniversary a better response than the one Jonson reports him to have given in person. Donne acknowledges that the necessity of idealizing the subject is always painfully close to, as his other critics would put it, saying too much, which Jonson gives the name “blasphemy.” It is given the same name in the opening of the Second Anniversary, in which Donne – ­recalling the idea from the First Anniversary that the world “Thought it some blasphemy to say sh’was dead” (51) – ­announces: that a yeare is runne, Since both this lower worlds, and the Sunnes Sunne, The Lustre, and the vigor of this All, Did set; t’were Blasphemy, to say, did fall. (3–6)

Jonson’s idea for the poem assumes that its subject is somehow mobile, able to be reassigned, its blasphemies converted to truths by substituting one ideal woman for another. Donne has already anticipated this use of the term – ­or, if the conversation between them took place before the second poem was written, responded to Jonson’s criticism  – a­ nd refuted it, by pointing out that blasphemy lies in saying, in the literal meaning, not in

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the underlying truth. If a metaphor can be blasphemy, if blasphemy can lie in the distinction between comparisons to a setting sun or a falling sun, then blasphemy is itself a species of obscurity: a statement that is prone to being misread. Being accused of blasphemy is quite similar to perishing for not being understood. But Donne also declares that the accusation of blasphemy is inevitable: if Elizabeth Drury is the sun’s sun, and it is thought “some blasphemy to say sh’was dead,” then the Second Anniversary is still in the position of the people he alluded to in the first who are unable to admit the death of a monarch. Donne’s response to this predicament is to deliver a truth that is not quite truth, because it is an admitted idealization, a truth he knows the world will reject, and which is itself a rejection of the world. This truth is negative: it is the absence of the ideal from the world. Would not its success, then, be the culmination of the poems’ prediction: the world’s indifference to them? The Anniversaries live in, document, and turn back upon themselves the speechlessness of the world in the face of the insufficiency of conscience. To understand them is to acknowledge what they cannot say. There is a problem here regarding intention: reading for a poet’s intent to be unreadable can lead us into an interpretive Charybdis from which no meaning can escape. Jonson did raise questions about Donne’s intentions in his chats with Drummond, but he also considered them anomalous, not to be applied to obscure poetry in general. Obscurity can represent a variety of different goals: to speak selectively to a narrower readership, to seem smart, to reflect the difficulty or strangeness of a subject. Donne’s is distinctive to him, and reflects his deeply held ambivalence about readership. His obscurity still has lessons for the condition of poetry more broadly, because Jonson was right about the risk of perishing: thinking too complexly about poetry’s relation to audience threatens to eliminate that relation altogether, and with it meaning and teaching. Donne might agree with Jonson that to be unread would be an appropriate fate for his poems (hence Jonson’s belief that Donne wished his poems destroyed). That they have not been is a testament to the persistence of interpretation itself, and the extent to which obscurity constitutes a draw to reading as much as an obstacle. Donne’s obscurity is apparent to both early and late readers but makes sense to the latter in a way that it could only seem off-putting to his actual friends. The anti-pedagogical logic of obscurity emerges at the distance of a stranger’s reading.

Chapter Four

The Lure of Solitude: Melancholy and Eremitism as Literary Dispositions

In this chapter and the one that follows I turn from modes of isolation pertaining to the practice of writing to those that are sought for their own sake. These two categories are not really distinct, however. The inclination toward isolation can inhere similarly in both persons and texts, and it can also be rhetorically transferred between them; the solitary inclinations of a text can contextualize or justify those of an author (and vice versa). The terms with which such inclinations in people are understood are generally emotional ones rather than circumstantial, but they still bear on possible analogies between people and literary works. Melancholy, in particular, which often manifests either as a desire to be alone or the lonesomeness of a situation, can be characteristic of a person, a genre, a style, or a conceit. Long associated with the writing mind and the writing life, melancholy helps explain why people write and why writers are particularly responsive to the lure of solitude. That association affects every aspect of the production and reception of writing: melancholy is a context for writing, reading, and judgment. John Stephens says that the most virtuous reason for a poet to publish his poems is that “he may excuse (by them) his silent nature; and be accounted better, as a Melancholy Poet, then a speechlesse foole.”1 Stephens imagines print as an intervention in social reputation: being known as a poet causes one’s speechlessness to be interpreted as a productive melancholy, demonstrating the influence of the type of the melancholy poet and the ubiquity of speechlessness, understood as a kind of social alienation, as the condition of both melancholics and poets. Despite the social risks of printing and of being a poet, the combination is not as damaging as modes of melancholic presentation that do not have literary justifications.2 S­ tephens’s formulation suggests that being known as a poet lends a hint of respectability to an otherwise disreputable way of being, and that there is a parallel between print and

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social interaction as twin disturbances of a poet’s essentially solitary and opaque existence. As Stephens’s quip shows, the melancholy of Renaissance poets is a peculiar phenomenon, equal parts private and public, differentiating a way of presenting oneself to the world (either personally or in writing) as much as an internal state. The melancholy associated with poets is a particular subset of a highly adaptable and often ambiguous cultural phenomenon: melancholy is simultaneously a medical diagnosis, a personality quirk that can be imagined with shame or pride (sometimes by the same people), a literary type, and an experience available to anyone but particularly associated with poetry, scholarship, and similar intellectual activities. Because melancholy is often poetically productive, it can be at once the object of envy and disgust, and thus helps explain some of the contested status of poetry in Renaissance England: there seems to be some suspicion that melancholy inheres within poetry. But melancholy also demonstrates the attractiveness of the isolation of writing and reading: the lure of solitude is a symptom and justification of the melancholy disposition. This chapter argues that poetic melancholy is defined more by an external ­characteristic – ­solitude – ­than by internal ones. Melancholy looks toward the fringes of society, particularly the extreme externality occupied by outcasts and hermits. I will discuss this pull toward the outside through both poetry and drama, in which it has an urgent manifestation that reflects back on lyric. I find elements of it in the poetry of Southwell, Spenser, and Drayton and in the plays of Jonson and, particularly, Shakespeare, who draws out an essential component of melancholy by implicitly associating it with hermits. These strands culminate in the three-way connection suggested by Milton’s “Il Penseroso” between melancholy, poetry, and thought. Milton solves a problem for defences of melancholy (and of hermits) by identifying a distinctly non-Catholic way that the solitary outsider can have lasting significance: prophecy. The major texts on the subject in the period reflect the same ambiguity Stephens does between melancholy as a state of being and as the shared identity of intellectuals. Robert Burton considers poets’ melancholy as a subset of that of scholars, which he treats at first in strictly physical terms, as the product of “a sedentary, solitary life.”3 He must eventually concede, however, that poor prospects have something to do with it – ­“’tis the common fortune of most Schollers, to be servile and poor.”4 This seems to be especially true of poets, to whom poverty is not only endemic but somehow natural: Poverty is the Muses Patrimony, and as that Poeticall divinity teacheth us, when Jupiters daughters were each of them married to the Gods, the Muses

102  Solitude and Speechlessness alone were left solitary, Helicon forsaken of all suters, and I beleeve it was, because they had no portion. Calliope longum caelebs cur vixit in aevum? Nempe nihil dotis, quod numeraret, erat. Why did Calliope live so long a maid? Because she had no dowry to be paid. Ever since all their followers are poore, forsaken, and left unto themselves.5

Despite its classical roots, however, Burton leaves no doubt that poets’ poverty, and thus their misery, is of social origin. Most people of sufficient learning do not become poets, because: our ordinary students, right well perceiving in the Universities, how unprofitable these Poeticall, Mathematicall, and Philosophicall studies are, how little respected, how few Patrons; apply themselves in all hast to those three commodious professions of Law, Physicke, and Divinity, sharing themselves between them, rejecting these Arts in the meane time, History, Philosophy, Philology, or lightly passing them over, as pleasant toyes, fitting only table talke, and to furnish them with discourse.6

There is something self-fulfilling about all of this: poets and scholars are poor because there is no preferment in those disciplines, but there seems to be no preferment in them because poverty comes naturally to the muses – ­the social neglect of poets must then be merely a recognition of their organic poverty. Burton also neglects to explain why there are poets and philologists, given that university students can easily perceive that there is no profit in being either. His omission reflects an acquiescence to the attractions melancholy creates: there will always be poets, whether they are wanted or not, because there will always be melancholics. Several connections Burton leaves out help account for the assumptions behind the judgment of melancholy poets: between melancholy and solitude, between melancholy and the forms of literary language, and between solitude and the speechlessness Stephens (not uniquely) identifies with poets. Melancholy had long been far more than a condition correlating with literary and learned activity; it explains but is also produced and shaped by that activity, which mediates its relation to the pleasures of solitude. It is often thought of circularly in that way, particularly in hostile contexts: the didactic Anniball in The Civile Conversation, George Pettie’s translation of Stefano Guazzo’s courtesy book, argues that “the pleasure of solitarinesse ... is counterfeite,” because it is not a universal pleasure but merely “agreeable to melancholike persons”: the distinctiveness of melancholics is

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evidence that there is something suspect about the things they like. Those unfortunates, however, turn out to have acquired this pleasure because they “either by long studie, and great contemplation, or by som other accident, got an habite and custome to be melancholik.”7 So solitary contemplation leads to melancholy, which causes a perverted pleasure in solitude, which leads back to solitary contemplation. Defenders of solitude, too, acknowledge its relation to melancholy even while claiming it to be superior, as George Mackenzie does: “if melancholy or silence possesses any thing in their nature, which can be thought excellent, certainly solitude enjoys the same in a more eminent measure; for these make but parcels of that noble state, silence being but a solitude in discourse, and melancholy a solitude in humour.”8 For Mackenzie, melancholy is solitude (but only insofar as it “can be thought excellent”). Marsilio Ficino, like Guazzo, claims that melancholy both leads to and follows from intellectual activity; scholars were led to their scholarship and to melancholy by the nature of their birth: both Mercury, who invites us to investigate doctrines, and Saturn, who makes us persevere in investigating doctrines and retain them when discovered, are said by astronomers to be somewhat cold and dry (or if it should happen to be true that Mercury is not cold, he is nonetheless often very dry by virtue of his nearness to the Sun), just like the melancholic nature, according to physicians.9

The influence of Mercury and Saturn, then, makes scholars want to work on scholarship, and also makes them melancholy. But at the same time, “frequent agitation of the mind greatly dries up the brain,” leading to more melancholy.10 Ficino also acknowledges that there may be something about thought itself which, separate from its physical effects, is sympathetic with melancholy: “for the pursuit of the sciences, especially the difficult ones, the soul must draw in upon itself from external things to internal as from the circumference to the center ... black bile continually incites the soul both to collect itself together into one and to dwell on itself and to contemplate itself.”11 The act of thinking through difficult things is analogous to the physical operation of melancholy, and also leads, almost by an independent process, to melancholy, which then invites that same kind of thinking. Douglas Trevor argues that Ficino had less influence on sixteenth-century England than Galen, whose more strictly humoral account largely held sway within medical discourse.12 Outside of medical contexts, however, the idea of a melancholy that is merely a natural accompaniment to intellectual activity is more prevalent, and along with it the broader possibility that melancholy has value. Even Burton, in the midst of a section

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titled “Against Melancholy,” is willing to admit that “amongst many ­inconveniences, some comforts are annexed to it,” and indeed that those comforts are useful ones.13 Melancholics by their solitary nature are less of a burden on society: Feare and sorrow keepe them temperate and sober, and free them from many dissolute acts, which jollity and boldnesse thrust men upon: They are therefore no sicarii, roaring boyes, theeves or assassinates. As they are soone dejected, so they are as soone by soft words and good perswasions reared. Wearisomenesse of life, makes them they are not so besotted, on the transitory vaine pleasures of the world.14

There is a certain resignation to this admission in the midst of the part of the Anatomy devoted to cures for melancholy – ­it is often, Burton concedes, incurable.15 But its “comforts” hint that melancholy is part of the fabric of social life, neither to be despised nor cultivated. This tendency of melancholy to drift from medical contexts toward a less negative and largely intellectual concept helps create a space for its complex artistic and literary associations. Melancholy is a subject of reflection for poets, scholars, and thinking people, conducive to the creation of a distinctive species of language. It is noted for its compatibility of pleasure or joy with sadness – i­t often takes the form of pleasure in sadness. But melancholy’s relations to learning and language prevent it from being strictly internal, even if it is the object of more scrutiny than sympathy. Melancholy is a solitary experience understood in essentially public terms, as conditioned not by a shared conceptual framework but by a consistent yet mutable figurative vocabulary. Literary references to melancholy are not necessarily representations of a social phenomenon but potentially constitute a literary topos that is only partially conditioned by its relation to a familiar personality type.

• Renaissance poets associated the solitary withdrawal conducive to writing poetry with both melancholy feelings and melancholy landscape. The relationship between those two things can be understood in a variety of ways, and much recent criticism has understood it to be an essential, indeed almost automatic connection.16 But I would suggest that the discourse of melancholy as informing or inspiring literary activity is more self-conscious about its own figuration than this model would suggest. Melancholy may function according to a chemical logic, but it is an illustration of rhetorical logic, and writers who make use of the former may do so as part of a self-aware exploration of the latter.

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Poets who associate themselves with melancholy demonstrate a particularly sharp version of this interest in humoral rhetoric. John Davies of Hereford describes a poet who, seeking solitude, finds his own melancholy reinforced by his surroundings. Davies introduces the connection through a pun on the word “find” that associates the quest for solitude with the quest for self-knowledge: Finding my selfe (before I would be found) Neer lost in Laborinths of haplesse love, I got me to a melancholy grove To descant on Loves-griefs to heavy Ground17

The heavy Ground, its heaviness reflecting the melancholy of the grove, serves both as inspiration and proxy audience for the song of “Loves-griefs,” even as it is also the figurative analogue for the emotional state of the singer. Such doubleness is logically necessary, given that the poem that results from this collaboration between singer and surroundings cannot continue to rely on a melancholy environment but must contain that environment within it. Similarly, in Drayton’s obscure satire “The Owle,” the “solitarie Owle” (line 749) is described repeatedly as melancholy – ­“No signe of joy did in his lookes appeare, / Or ever mov’d his melancholy cheere” (101–2).18 That melancholy is freely transferred between the owl and his surroundings and audience: he lives in a “melancholy seate” (1111), but also clearly shares sympathies with the sorrowful and solitary poet-­narrator. This sympathy is partly literal and partly rhetorical.19 The experience that directly allows an understanding to be exchanged between the narrator and the landscape (including its birds) is a melancholy vision (such hallucinations are sometimes associated with melancholy as a medical condition, but also benefit its putative relation to prophecy). Curiously, however, the crucial communication of that vision is linguistic rather than visual. It is: a trance: Wherein me thought some God or power divine Did my cleere knowledge wondrously refine. For that amongst those sundry varying notes, Which the birds sent from their melodious throats, Each sylvan sound I truly understood, Become a perfect linguist of the wood: (41–8)

This trance is a melancholy state of being, but it is also the state of poetic inspiration. The two ideas are joined by an adaptable language as the point

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of connection: to be “a perfect linguist of the wood” is to both experience and conceptualize the shared melancholy of poet and landscape. The “perfect linguist” is not, however, one who enters entirely into the (perhaps humoral) communications of the wood, because one of the functions of a linguist is to translate. Drayton’s speaker’s melancholy allows him to perceive the language of melancholy in two senses: its own means of communicating itself and its rhetorical imitability. This linguistic connection has particular relevance for poetry beyond the inspirational motive Drayton depicts. In Humphry Mill’s Poems Occasioned by a Melancholy Vision, melancholy, as Stephens predicted, is both context and justification for a single-author published poetry collection. Melancholy informs the inspiration, content, structure, and final published form of his book, all of which arise from the same kind of melancholy vision Drayton describes. Mill represents it in physical terms: My eyes did fail, my tongue grew speechlesse to, My eares were stopt, my breath grew short, my feare Did so increase, I knew not what to do:20

The symptom of the melancholy fit is speechlessness, but its literary effect is a specific kind of poetry grounded in the figurative terminology associated with melancholy. In the preface to the book, Mill describes his melancholy muse in distinctly literary terms: She began to plucke at the wings of Time, but seeing the feathers fal so fast of themselves, she stept upon vanitie, which shee found to be nothing but the ruines of time, so staid not there; then beeing cloathed in mourning weeds, and in a melancholly humour, with a sad tune, shee sings a Tragedie of Darknesse; but Light comming in, she changes her note, putting on fresh garments, falles in love with him and sings his praise.21

His muse is explicitly humoral, but has learned how to express her humorally derived insights from traditional literary genres: a sense of tragedy perhaps also informed by Spenser’s Complaints (given the reference to “ruines of time”) giving way to love lyric. Mill confirms that association with genre in his subsequent book, A Nights Search; addressing the distinct muse of that book, he says, “Thy melancholy sister’s gone before,” and describes the earlier book’s apparently mixed reception.22 So the melancholy he had described as an aspect of his own experience within a poem easily becomes an element of the genre of that poem, essentially separate from

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him. Melancholy’s physical, social, and literary roles are interchangeable even as they seem to have different degrees of inherence. Mill’s self-consciousness about the adaptability of melancholy to literary rather than personal types points to a critical difficulty: investigating melancholy is as much a question of figuration as a question of being. Because the humours are understood through analogy and transferred epithet even though theoretically they are inherent, they constitute a problem of representation. The dramatic type of the humorous man helps clarify this problem: on the one hand, the humorous man contains his humour in himself; on the other, he is there not merely to be laughed at but to apply his own humour to an understanding of the broader dramatic situation. Shakespeare has Hamlet comment jokingly on this role. Anticipating the arrival of the players, Hamlet describes some of the standard roles they can play (which, incidentally, fit nicely with Jaques’s, Touchstone’s, and Rosalind’s in As You Like It, which I will discuss at length below): “the Humorous Man shall end his part in peace, the Clown shall make those laugh whose lungs are tickled o’th’sear, and the Lady shall say her mind freely, or the blank verse shall halt for’t” (2.2). The proper functioning of each role, including their being allowed to proceed as they should and getting the reaction from the audience they deserve, is necessary in order to keep the “blank verse” flowing – ­which is meant literally but also stands in for the proper progression of the play as literature.23 The types must occupy the stage harmoniously to keep the mechanisms of dramatic representation working properly. The distinction between a type of person and a type of dramatic role has sometimes been lost in criticism, perhaps because the dramatic humorous man is not often enough understood in relation to the specifically literary melancholy that poets like Mill show can condition an entire work without necessarily reflecting on the author. The Renaissance understanding of humoral passions has occupied a prominent role in the materialist turn in literary criticism since the 1990s, particularly in scholarship on Shakespeare and other dramatists.24 The materialist approach, however, elides the literary workings of melancholy in two ways at once: by contextualizing a solitary disposition in the social terms to which it is often explicitly opposed, and by reading the distinctively literary tropes by which melancholy can be associated with and compared to virtually anything as reflecting a set of inflexible associations derived from medical and alchemical thinking. Though I disagree with this approach, I find it useful for thinking through the interpretive question arising from the melancholic identification in part because the instinct to read tropes as instantiations of epistemic continuities draws attention, perhaps reluctantly, to the tropes themselves;

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and in part because such work has depended heavily on the depictions of the humours in the plays of Shakespeare, who is indeed ­notable for the prominence and variability of his depictions of melancholy. The reliance on figuration in depictions of melancholy demonstrates the efficacy of the strange reading I advocate in this book, since the history of these tropes is not resolvable in strictly materialist terms. Meanwhile, Shakespeare’s approach to character, which is dependent on but also somewhat resistant to the norms of theatrical types, allows for a treatment of melancholy that is broader than, but bears interestingly on, that of self-described melancholic poets. In an influential but controversial study, Gail Kern Paster explicitly questions the relationship between the natural philosophy that suggests metaphors of melancholy to poets and the figural language with which poets understand and depict melancholic experience. Paster’s sense of humoral logic is as a socially determined epistemic relation that trumps, and even empties of meaning, individual tropes that attempt to rethink it.25 For Paster, the melancholic relation between subject and environment must itself be understood in strictly physical terms.26 Her most prominent example is the competition between Hal and Falstaff in 1 Henry IV to describe Falstaff’s “humor”: falstaff: ’Sblood, I am as melancholy as a gib cat, or a lugged bear. hal: Or an old lion, or a lover’s lute. falstaff: Yea, or the drone of a Lincolnshire bagpipe. hal: What sayst thou to a hare, or the melancholy of a Moor-ditch? falstaff: Thou hast the most unsavory similes, and art indeed the most comparative, rascalliest sweet young Prince. (1.2.72–80)

Paster insists that this group of similes is not rhetorically but epistemically determined: Rather than a proverbial set of loose associations, the simile context constructs an epistemic set, a natural class, that ... places Falstaff’s aging body in a particular analogical relation to its physical environment – ­one composed of animals, sounds, and elemental liquids, all of which would be accepted by an early modern audience as literally (if maybe laughably) describable in terms of melancholy. This exchange, I propose, reveals a difference between modern and premodern ways of knowing about and feeling oneself related to the physical world.27

The key word in Paster’s reading is “literally,” of which “laughably” is a parenthetical qualification – s­ he reads the joke here as being about F ­ alstaff’s

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biochemical composition, not about “unsavory similes.” P ­ aster’s interest, as she acknowledges here, is in the literal, and in figurative relations only insofar as they represent literal ones: comparisons of melancholy to animals or the earth, she argues, stem from a belief that melancholy is a physical liquid shared with those things. The particularity of her “particular analogical relation” is this shared substance, which is a point of commonality beyond analogy proper. Thus, she explicates Falstaff’s “gib cat”: “As with the melancholy of Falstaff, a cat’s melancholy is a humour – ­hence a temperature, a temperament, a disposition, and a liquid of specific consistency organizing a cat’s relations with the world.”28 To Paster, whatever else melancholy can be, it is always, simultaneously and primarily, “a liquid of specific consistency.” Applied to Hal and Falstaff’s simile battle, this view requires that comparison have no novelty – ­to compare two things would be merely to note that they already share a defining characteristic. Paster argues that simile is, indeed, a loss of the rhetorical novelty Falstaff had earlier employed in demanding that thieves should be euphemistically called “Diana’s foresters” and the like: Hal and Falstaff have begun their dialogue postulating a periphrastic ability to rename – ­and in so doing, to remake – ­the nature of reality ... Their turn to the proverbs of melancholy, however, offers a limit to the world-making ­capacities of the motivated word, for simile fixes both participants in analogical relationships founded in a theoretically immutable, emblematic order ... For these associations ... are grounded in the premodern doctrine of sympathies and correspondences.29

For Paster, simile is a tropeless trope – i­t abandons periphrasis’s attempt to “rename” and gives way to an “immutable, emblematic order.” Simile’s grounding in specific, culturally ubiquitous analogies defines it as a failure of the rhetorical transformation inherent to figural language. Paster’s argument demonstrates the inescapability of rhetorical considerations in the understanding of melancholy. As she observes, the humours are depicted through specific tropes, which can be explicitly opposed to each other to represent the opposition of competing conceptions of the humours themselves; thus, the way tropes function rhetorically informs the way the humours function intellectually, and vice versa. Renaissance rhetoricians, however, tend to see the distinction Paster discusses the opposite way: periphrasis relies on instantly recognizable connections, while simile is always a provisional, and therefore more malleable, connection, a distinction useful for understanding both why Hal and Falstaff emphasize simile in particular and how melancholy works as

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a comparative element. George Puttenham stresses that periphrasis must be expected in order to function, and gives an example that illustrates its near automation as trope: Whom Princes serve, and Realmes obay, And greatest of Bryton kings begot: She came abroade even yesterday, When such as saw her, knew her not. And the rest that followeth, meaning her Majesties person, which we would seeme to hide leaving her name unspoken, to the intent the reader should gesse at it: neverthelesse upon the matter did so manifestly disclose it, as any simple judgement might easily perceive by whom it was ment.30

Periphrasis is a hiding that can still “manifestly disclose” what is hidden, even to the “simple judgement.” As Puttenham’s example demonstrates, periphrasis does indeed reveal an immutable order, because for it to work there must be no doubt about who it is “Whom Princes serve”  – a­nd ­indeed there cannot be any. Simile is different. Its purpose is to draw attention to a close relation, but not one so exact as to go without saying. Rhetoricians use several terms to define it, but all are identified as translations of the Greek εἰκών – a­ resemblance by means of image. In the pseudo-Ciceronian Rhetorica ad Herennium, it is imago: “Imago est formae cum forma cum quadam similitudine conlatio” – “­ a simile is a comparison of one form [or figure] to another, based on some resemblance.”31 The modifier “quadam” – ­a certain kind of similitude – i­s needed to clarify that a simile does not indicate an identity (in the way that periphrasis does), and this distinction suggests that Falstaff’s naming of simile is an indication of a partial connection, a comparison reaching toward but falling off from a potential identity. Quintilian expands the idea: “Proximas exemplo vires habet similitudo, praecipveque illa quae ducitur citra ullam tralationum mixturam ex rebus paene paribus”  – ­“Simile has a force like that of example, particularly in the case of something derived from nearly equal things, without mixing in metaphor.”32 Simile is carefully positioned between identity – w ­ hich would be paribus rather than paene paribus – ­and metaphor, which is translatio, a transformation (even if merely imagined) of something’s essential being. Puttenham distinguishes between omiosis, resemblance, and icon, which he calls resemblance by imagery, but he maintains the same partial relation as the ad Herennium and Quintilian describe: “this manner of resemblaunce is not onely performed by likening of lively creatures one to another, but also of any other naturall thing, bearing a proportion of similitude, as to liken yealow to gold, white to silver, red to the rose, soft

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to silke, hard to the stone and such like.”33 So simile is a resemblance in one or more aspects with clear limitation in their definition of the whole, and that limitation is what allows it to elide the distinction between like creatures and like things: no one would claim that anything yellow has all the qualities of gold or even its most important quality (which, as Donne reminds us in “Love’s Progress,” is its value), just a superficial one that the similist wishes to highlight. This limitation also separates simile from periphrasis, which is a complete but undefined correspondence, while simile is defined but partial. This tension between commonality and difference is one of the sources of interest for a skilled rhetorician like Hal in the comparison between a melancholy person and a melancholy animal or thing. The final simile in the series is Hal’s “melancholy of a Moor-ditch,” which leads Falstaff to declare that Hal has won the game, as this simile is the most unsavoury and also the “most comparative”: most reliant on the comparative logic of simile. Hal wins by stretching the comparison to the furthest extent, and thus showing Falstaff in the worst possible light by comparing him to a sewer. Paster’s emphasis on trope in this passage is thus apt, but the use and naming of simile demonstrates melancholy as a consciously used element of representation. The “moor-ditch” also plays on a common trope – t­he comparison of the melancholy subject to a surrounding, sympathetically melancholy landscape (in Falstaff’s case, his sympathy with the kinds of neighborhoods that have open sewers). But when Renaissance writers, and perhaps particularly Renaissance dramatists, addressed the association between melancholy feelings and surroundings, they acknowledged the literariness of such analogy – i­ ts oldness, quaintness, and dependence on the particular stylistic mode of a heightened rhetoric. It is a proverbial connection but not an inevitable one. In The Spanish Tragedy, for example, the despairing viceroy appeals to a combination of received wisdom and metaphorical thinking to explain his compulsion toward the barren ground, to which he falls as he speaks: But wherefore sit I in a regal throne? This better fits a wretch’s endless moan. Yet this is higher than my fortunes reach, And therefore better than my state deserves. Ay, ay, this earth, image of melancholy, Seeks him whom gates adjudge to misery: Here let me lie, now am I at the lowest.   Qui iacet in terra, non habet unde cadat.   In me consumpsit vires fortuna nocendo,   Nil superest ut iam possit obesse magis.

112  Solitude and Speechlessness Yes, Fortune may bereave me of my crown: Here, take it now; let Fortune do her worst, She will not rob me of this sable weed: O no, she envies none but pleasant things. (1.3.8–21)34

The Latin lines – ­“Whoever lies on the ground has no further to fall. Fortune has spent her power to harm me, nothing else can happen to me” – ­reinforce the idea of the earth as an “image of melancholy.” Image is, as Richard Sherry notes in his 1550 rhetoric, one of the common English words for simile; Sherry’s definition is under the Greek term: “Icon, called of the latines Imago, and Image in Englyshe, is muche like to a similitude, and if you declare it is a similitude.”35 The viceroy’s use of the term is thus equivalent to Falstaff’s of “simile,” acknowledging his dependence on trope in thinking through his own melancholy. The viceroy’s turn to proverb demonstrates the complex relationship between conventional associations and particular figurations of emotions: his proverb, which is itself a composite, neatly combines a conventional association that might trigger in an audience member a familiar conception of how melancholy works with a distinctive turn that marks the limits of the viceroy’s own understanding of his emotional situation. The literary history of the analogy is thus as telling as its material history. Kyd’s three Latin lines have different sources, and together they point to the problem of describing emotion through proverb (and hence that of understanding the passions through commonplace wisdom). Editors refer to the first line as an echo of Alanus de Insulis’s book of proverbs, though it had an active life as commonplace.36 The second is derived from a line of Cassandra’s in Seneca’s Agamemnon: “Fortuna vires ipsa consumpsit suas” (“Fortune herself has exhausted her powers”).37 The third is original. The basic idea that unites all three is quite common, but its implications vary. Burton connects the proverbial and Senecan ideas together as well, but treats both as describing habitual and inescapable poverty, rather than sudden ill fortune as in Kyd. They illustrate, for Burton, the despair of a poor man with no competency: “what shall we doe that are slaves by nature, impotent and unable to helpe our selves, meere beggars that languish and pine away, that have no meanes at all, no hope of meanes?”38 Such a man cannot accustom himself to his circumstances: Yea but I may not, I cannot, In me consumpsit vires fortuna nocendo, I am in the extremity of humane adversity, and as a shadow leaves the body when the Sunne is gone, I am now left and lost, and quite forsaken of the world. Qui iacet in terrâ non habet unde cadat; Comfort thy selfe with this yet, thou art at the worst, and before it be long it will either overcome thee or thou it.39

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For Kyd, the word terra suggests sympathy between a melancholy person and the ground. For Burton, even though he raises the idea in a book on melancholy, it evidently does not. Adversity can be expressed in the terms of earthliness, melancholy, or darkness, and the same proverb can connect those comparative terms to each other while retaining that flexibility Puttenham associates with simile.40 The distinctive kinds of meaning created by trope limit the direct association between humorally similar entities, perhaps particularly between people and things. Hal intentionally takes the logic of melancholy further than it can go, to mock Falstaff; the viceroy unintentionally does the same, hoping that the associative framework of melancholy can predict the future, which, of course, it cannot. In both cases, the point where melancholy’s comparative function goes from marking similarity to overcoming dissimilarity is where it fails. The kind of rhetorical flexibility these comparisons exhibit is, as Sidney stresses, part of what distinguishes the logic of poetry from that of medicine. Responding to the complaint that poets lie, Sidney argues: “How often, think you, do the physicians lie, when they aver things good for sicknesses, which afterwards send Charon a great number of souls drowned in a potion before they come to his ferry? And no less of the rest, which take upon them to affirm. Now, for the poet, he nothing affirms, and therefore never lieth.”41 Physicians must stake out a position relative to the nature of humanity and the world, and that is their weakness – w ­ hen their logic fails to correspond to natural law, they kill their patients. Poets are free to make use of the same kinds of correspondences, but their tropes are not affirmations of the theory. I make this point not just to reinforce my disagreement with Paster but to demonstrate that melancholy lends itself to a kind of identification that functions more powerfully because more flexibly in a literary context. Sidney is self-conscious about the figurality of his tropes, just as Falstaff and Hal are. This awareness is perhaps related to that pursuit of knowledge Ficino says is natural to melancholics  – t­o be melancholy is in part to reflect on the comparative efficacy of melancholy. Melancholy thus exists in three realms that never quite coincide – f­ elt emotionally, diagnosed physically, but understood rhetorically.

• The traditional association of poets with melancholy appears prominently in dramatic depictions of two conventional types: the poet and the humorous man. The two come together prominently in what Thomas Dekker

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calls the Poetomachia of the turn of the seventeenth century. The central figure in the conflict, Ben Jonson, is depicted both by himself and by his opponents not only as melancholy, but as having a particular kind of melancholy that lends itself to poetic imagination. Jonson’s Poetaster serves a broader function than its early critics seemed to read in it: in addition to mocking some of Jonson’s rivals and casting judgment on who could claim the title of poet, its larger topic is the ethics and politics of a poet as the judge and historian of the state. The play begins with a focus on Ovid, largely a figure of fun who is ultimately displaced by Horace and ­Vergil, who seem to represent what Jonson regards as a more mature poetics. Ovid has much in common, though, with Jonson’s preferred poets. He is a poet by nature rather than by choice, as he demonstrates in claiming to his father, who wants him to take up the law, that he can turn legal speeches into Propertian verse: Ovid ju: Sir, let me crave you will, forgoe these moodes; I will be any thing, or studie any thing: I’le prove the unfashion’d body of the law Pure elegance, and make her ruggedst straines Runne smoothly, as Propertius elegies. Ovid se: Propertius elegies? good! ... Why he cannot speake, he cannot thinke out of poetrie, he is bewitcht with it. (1.2.103–11)

The idea that Ovid’s desire to versify the law represents some bewitching force that has taken over his thought is echoed when Ovid explains his plan to Tibullus, who replies, “The hell thou wilt! What turn law into verse?” and gives Ovid a letter from the emperor’s daughter that will serve as “a supersedeas to your melancholy” (1.3.16–19). A supersedeas is a stay of execution – T ­ ibullus’s joke, though suggesting that Ovid’s poetic melancholy has a specific cause, still works to reinforce the idea that the poetic and legal dispositions are (normally) humorally opposed. For all of the rivalries between the play’s many poets, they are united by their shared humour. Horace describes Propertius as “melancholic” (4.3.4), and is accused of the same by Crispinus (3.1.209). Demetrius, ­responding to Tibullus’s claim that a song purportedly by Crispinus is ­actually plagiarized from Horace, associates the latter’s humoral reputation with his poetic style: “Alas sir, Horace! hee is a meere spunge; nothing but humours, and observation; he goes up and down sucking from every society, and when hee comes home, squeazes himself drie againe” (4.4.104–7). “Spunge” allows for a joking connection between observation, the first stage in the poetic task, and the physical logic of the humors. If Jonson is poking fun at himself here, his doing so suggests an awareness

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that the distinctive poetic abilities of which he was such a stalwart champion cannot securely avoid being reduced to the side effects of a pathology. The melancholy that Jonson attributes to Horace in Poetaster is echoed in the title of Dekker’s response, Satiro-mastix, or The untrussing of the Humorous Poet, published in 1602. Though the play takes place in a contemporaneous setting rather than Poetaster’s Rome, it represents Jonson (based on Dekker’s evident allegorical interpretation of Poetaster) as a poet named Horace, whose melancholy manifests as an effete indifference to politic ways and literary comprehensibility. Horace arrives at the end of the play dressed as a satyr, and called upon to explain why, says: I did it to retyre me from the world; And turne my Muse into a Timonist, Loathing the general Leprozie of Sinne, Which like a plague runs through the soules of men:42

In addition to the misanthropy suggested by the reference to Timon, Dekker also hints at anchorism in identifying Horace/Jonson’s retirement from the world as based on a reaction (clearly in Dekker’s view an extreme one) against worldly sin. Both retirement and misanthropy are connected to melancholy through Timon, who, as Shakespeare would later note in Timon of Athens, is associated with “a poor unmanly melancholy” (4.3.205); in Horace’s case, this humour manifests as a desire to retreat from society, and the question is how much this desire reflects Horace’s identification as a poet. Part of Jonson’s crime, as Dekker sees it, is to allow the dramatic type of the melancholy man to be subsumed into the idea of a poet. This complex set of associations between observation, writing, the solitary disposition, and melancholy are taken up in subtler and more polyvalent ways by Shakespeare. As I have said, critical debates on melancholy have centred around Shakespeare because his treatment is both unusually prominent and interestingly varied. Falstaff is one of a number of melancholic figures Shakespeare includes in his plays, notably Hamlet, Merchant of Venice, and Timon of Athens, but his most unabashedly self-described melancholic is Jaques in As You Like It.43 Jaques is something of a poet and also something of a critic, as revealed in his interactions with the songster Amiens and the amateur poet Orlando. He occupies a central role in a play that, both through Orlando and the more surprising, urgent, and ultimately futile poetic work of Phoebe, gives poetry an important function in interpreting its view of gender. The play depicts gender as determined as much linguistically and performatively as it is physically, a breadth of representation parallel to its depiction of melancholy.

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Jaques is not the only solitary in this play; he joins, at its end, the off-stage character of the hermit who converts Duke Frederick. That conclusion associates him as much with the hermit as with Touchstone, his more frequent analogue as critics imagine him.44 The hermit enables the resolution of the plot, and in both his evident religious rigour and his invisibility on stage provides an effective counterpoint to Duke Senior’s cheerful and ultimately temporary retirement from worldly, courtly life and ambition. Jaques abandons his role in Senior’s court at the moment it is finally worth something, a fitting end for a character whose melancholy is often opposed to social ambition and rank. In this play, the lure of solitude, the melancholy temper, and the critique of social mores are all closely connected, and these connections allow Jaques, even though he represents a familiar dramatic type, to comment on the literary efficacy of the play. I would not associate Jaques with Shakespeare, but I do associate him with a Shakespearean self-consciousness about how literary representation works that is evident throughout this play. Jaques gives Shakespeare an opportunity to comment on the difference between experiencing melancholy and representing it, including the pull melancholy can figure toward an off-stage place of retreat. The ultimate significance of Jaques’s opposition to social status has been downplayed by critics, many of whom regard the withdrawal of Frederick and Jaques to the hermitage as part of what Robert Schwartz calls the play’s “reaffirmation of traditional social order and an even more orthodox sense of moral redefinition.”45 Louis Montrose similarly sees the end of the play and the resolution of the plot as a reversal and containment of its freewheeling social and sexual explorations.46 These readings depend on minimizing Jaques’s role, for Jaques does not rejoin the social order when Duke Senior and Rosalind do. Even those critics who recognize the challenge Jaques presents see it as easily resolved. Heather Dubrow compares him to the antisocial Iachimo, who is exiled at the end of Cymbeline, but the comparison suggests to her an influence kept at bay: “Jaques’s disappearance stages the disappearance of discordant generic potentialities.”47 Unlike Iachimo, however, Jaques is not banished. He leaves voluntarily, and awaits Duke Senior at his cave at the end of the play, a warning that his disruption of its neatly sociable resolution, even if it fades from the stage, lingers in the play’s intellectual world. Jaques’s melancholy is introduced before his first entrance; the joking discussion of him at the beginning of Act 2 emphasizes his social disconnection by showing higher-ranked people laughing at him behind his back. They name him initially through his humour – ­to Duke Senior’s lament at the necessity of hunting deer in their native land, a lord replies,

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“The melancholy Jaques grieves at that” (2.1.26). The duke knows to expect a melancholy disquisition about Jaques’s discovery of a wounded stag: duke senior: But what said Jaques? Did he not moralize this spectacle? first lord: O yes, into a thousand similes. First, for his weeping into the needless stream: “Poor deer,” quoth he, “thou mak’st a testament As worldlings do, giving thy sum of more To that which had too much.” Then being there alone, Left and abandoned of his velvet friends: “’Tis right,” quoth he, “thus misery doth part The flux of company.” Anon a careless herd, Full of the pasture, jumps along by him And never stays to greet him. “Ay,” quoth Jaques, “Sweep on, you fat and greasy citizens; ’Tis just the fashion. Wherefore should you look Upon that poor and broken bankrupt there?” (2.1.43–57)

As in 1 Henry IV, simile is named as such. In this case, the First Lord seems to be attempting to contain Jaques’s similes by defining them, but his observation highlights that this is not just invective against “The body of the country, city, court, / Yea, and of this our life,” as the First Lord says (58–9). Jaques’s similes focus specifically on poverty and solitude, the twin symptoms of social rejection.48 He knows the latter firsthand: duke senior: And did you leave him in this contemplation? second lord: We did, my lord, weeping and commenting Upon the sobbing deer. (63–5)

As Jaques predicted, he has been abandoned to his tears like his deer, and when he is sought out again, it is only because Duke Senior loves “to cope him in these sullen fits, / For then he’s full of matter” (68–9). This matter that Jaques is full of is composed not just of humour, but largely of language and of simile itself: in his “sullen fits” he is filled with the capacity for comparison. The exchange between the Duke and Jaques later in Act 2 shows that this “matter” is related to the theatre – ­or at least, the theatre as figurally conceived – a­ nd that it is important to the play.49 Jaques’s “matter” will

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outlive his dramatic function. The Duke remarks to him, about the unhappy Orlando: Thou see’st we are not all alone unhappy: This wide and universal theatre Presents more woeful pageants than the scene Wherein we play in. (2.7.135–8)

The Duke intends the metaphor as a mark of humility; like an actor who knows only his own scenes, he sees his own experience as unable to represent the world at large, and wishes Jaques to see it the same way.50 The theatre metaphor is akin to the Duke’s thinking of the wind as “counselors / That feelingly persuade me what I am” (2.1.10–11): a reminder of his insignificance in the wide world that places his own troubles into perspective. Jaques takes Duke Senior’s metaphor in an opposite direction: thinking of himself as a character in a play allows him not a lesser but a greater perspective on the world. He posits an access to the “universal theatre” that Senior denies, because in Jaques’s play the same actor occupies every role. The familiar opening clause actually finishes Senior’s pentameter line: All the world’s a stage   And all the men and women merely players: They have their exits and their entrances And one man in his time plays many parts, His acts being seven ages. At first the infant, Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms; Then the whining schoolboy with his satchel And shining morning face, creeping like snail Unwillingly to school; and then the lover, Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad Made to his mistress’ eyebrow; then a soldier, Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard, Jealous in honour, sudden, and quick in quarrel, Seeking the bubble “reputation” Even in the cannon’s mouth; (138–61)

Jaques’s bursting of “the bubble reputation” is not his only criticism of social striving, or social life in general.51 Indeed, the very idea that each of these people are the same amounts to such a criticism, given how entirely different are their basic dispositions – ­one “sudden, and quick in quarrel” and the next “Full of wise saws and modern instances.” Jaques invokes ­animalistic comparisons that imply a natural determination, but undermines the implication by tying them to social role and allowing one to slide

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easily into another; he thinks we perform our selves according to the role the social world gives us, and then describe those selves as essential: we are actors without knowing it. His similes in their variousness question the extent to which such roles can define us: the same man, Jaques says, can be compared first to a cat (surely, though the OED shies away from this possibility), then to a snail, a furnace, and a leopard, his transformation impelled by nothing but time.52 They also suggest a relationship between acting, in both quotidian and professional senses, and the logic of similitude. Animal similes (like Falstaff’s and Hal’s) are common ways of expressing humoral thinking, and Jaques turns them around to make fun of such thinking.53 Melancholy – ­at least, his melancholy – ­is not an example of such a role but an avoidance of role. He says to Ganymede: I have neither the scholar’s melancholy, which is emulation, nor the musician’s, which is fantastical, nor the courtier’s, which is proud, nor the soldier’s, which is ambitious, nor the lawyer’s, which is politic, nor the lady’s, which is nice, nor the lover’s, which is all these; but it is a melancholy of mine own, compounded of many simples, extracted from many objects, and indeed the sundry contemplation of my travels, in which my often rumination wraps me in a most humorous sadness. (4.1.10–19)

However we understand his personality, he insists, we must do so apart from either the kind of social performance he had mocked in his theatre metaphor or a medical condition (he does not separate himself specifically from the poet’s melancholy, which could easily go in his list, but, like Burton, he may be associating it with the scholar’s). He presents himself figuratively not as a melancholic patient, but as the chemist who might treat such a patient, making compounds out of simples. His is an active melancholy – g­ ained, not given.54 What he seeks, it seems, is the transformation of himself in relation to both nature and society through experience, thought, and language. Perhaps particularly language, given Jaques’s critical reading of the play’s spoken texts: he praises the “good terms ... good set terms” of Touchstone’s complaint of fortune (2.7) and mocks Orlando for his “blank verse” (4.1). That transformation is obtained in part through social isolation. Jaques’s connection of melancholy to travel and social separateness shows that the solitude in which the lords describe him at the beginning and to which he retreats at the end is essential to the literary and dramatic function of his temperament. In fact, his separateness and solitariness are emphasized from the very beginning of the play to the very end. A question about his character is already raised in the dramatis personae, if one is present: why does this play have two characters with the same name, Jaques and Jaques de Boys?55 They are connected only by the hermit: they share an association with

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the lure of eremitic solitude. Other than his parentage and birth order, we know only one thing about Jaques de Boys: Orlando says that “report speaks goldenly of his profit” at school (1.1.6). His learning serves him well in his only appearance, at the end of the play: Let me have audience for a word or two. I am the second son of old Sir Rowland, That bring these tidings to this fair assembly. Duke Frederick, hearing how that every day Men of great worth resorted to this forest, Addressed a mighty power, which were on foot In his own conduct, purposely to take His brother here and put him to the sword; And to the skirts of this wild wood he came, Where, meeting with an old religious man, After some question with him, was converted Both from his enterprise and from the world, His crown bequeathing to his banished brother, And all their lands restored to them again That were with him exiled. This to be true I do engage my life. (5.4.150–65)

Jaques de Boys does not say why Frederick has chosen him to report his conversion “from the world,” but it could easily be because he knows that this second son, as a scholar, will understand that conversion, and thus be willing, as he is, to stake his life on the authority of his transmission. Frederick’s conversion requires this commitment not only because of its legal significance – D ­ uke Senior’s title depends on Jaques de Boys’s word – ­but also, surely, because of its strangeness, its incredibility. Without this scholar’s commitment of his life, who would believe that “some question” with a hermit could have such a profound effect? The scholar’s namesake would, it seems. Following this speech is the exchange between the two Jaqueses, who seem to be the only characters interested in Frederick’s conversion as an event in itself, rather than merely as the just restoration of Duke Senior to power. Senior’s Jaques, after requesting confirmation that “The Duke hath put on a religious life” (180), says, “To him will I. Out of these convertites / There is much matter to be heard and learned” (183–4). Jaques’s interest in Frederick is parallel to Duke Senior’s in Jaques, whom Senior regards as “full of matter” (2.1.68), and, particularly in the shift from hearing to learning, suggests, again, a kind of critical reading. That matter is the “question” that was the root of the conversion itself, and the Jaqueses share not in the unspecified religious sensibility behind it but in a sympathetic relation to it: one is curious

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about it, the other willing to vouch for it. Senior’s Jaques leaves the stage for a solitary space already identified as having the capacity to influence the courtly world that space is intended to avoid. His abandonment of his lord is thus reinforcement of the significance of the figural matter his melancholy engenders. Jaques’s interest seems to have been piqued by Jaques du Boys’s reference to “some question”: the hermit’s significance is more rhetorical than religious.

• In Renaissance England, the attractiveness of hermits is tempered by their association with Catholicism, and Jaques’s interest in convertites has been thought to mock Jonson’s conversion to Catholicism in prison.56 Richard II offers to give his “gorgeous palace for a hermitage,” of which Regina Mara Schwartz observes, “Apparently, old metaphors of poor piety had not altogether departed from Tudor England; instead, they lingered to rebuke the claims of divinity made by the powerful wealth of the state.”57 Hermits’ significance must then be essentially negative, which might explain why they are alluded to more often then they appear. I suggest that the interest of a curious observer like Jaques represents an important part of their context, particularly for English Protestant literature  – t­hey are a connection between solitude and thoughtfulness attractive to both the poetically-minded and melancholics. When they do appear in English texts, they are treated with a wary curiosity. In John Lyly’s Euphues and his England, the figure of the hermit is offered as a warning, not as a model. Lyly’s Cassander the Hermit is a prodigal figure: he is one of two identical twins with the same name (an image of similitude, paired like Shakespeare’s Jaqueses) whose father let them choose from either his gold or his writings; the hermit chose the gold, but of course the writings turned out to be more valuable. But ­despite his recognition that his brother made the better choice, Cassander ultimately rejects the whole world and his wiser brother with it: I seeing my money wasted, my apparell worne, my minde infected with as many vices, as my body with diseases, and my bodye with more maladyes, then the Leopard hath markes, having nothing for amends but a few broken languages, which served me in no more steede, then to see one meat served in divers dishes: I thought it best to retourne into my native soyle, where finding my brother as farre now to exceede others in wealth, as hee did me in wit, and that he had gayned more by thrift, then I could spende by pride, I neither envyed his estate, nor pityed mine owne: but opened the whole course of my youth, not thinking there-by to recover that of him by request, which I had

122  Solitude and Speechlessness lost my selfe by riot, for casting in my minde the miserie of the world with the mischiefes of my life, I determined from that unto my lives end, to lead a solitary life in this cave, which I have don the tearm of ful forty winters, from whence, neither the earnest entreatie of my Brother, nor the vaine pleasures of the world could draw me, neyther shall any thing but death.58

Later, he predicts to Callimachus, his nephew: “[T]hou shalt confesse, that it is better to be at home in the cave of an Hermit then abroad in the court of an Emperour, and that a crust with quietnesse, shall be better then Quayles with unrest.”59 However, his experience argues for him not just against courtesy but against travel; unlike Jaques, he derives no interest from it, and even the scraps of languages he has picked up do him no good. His lack of interest in reintegration into society signals that his experience has effected a profound transformation: though his misfortunates account for his retreat into solitude, once that retreat has taken place it becomes essential, and even his admittedly wiser brother cannot coax him out. This determination, significantly, is not described as a passion but as a habit of thought, the result of “casting in my minde the miserie of the world.” But Lyly does not linger on Cassander’s emotional state. The point for Euphues, who tells this story to his travelling companion Philautus, is “not that I think travailing to be ill if it be used wel, but that such advice be taken, yet the horse carry not his own bridle, nor youth rule himself in his own conceits.”60 Cassander’s eremitism is carefully contained, and made incidental to this moral and secondary within the tale: the wisdom imparted to Callimachus is the point rather than Cassander’s fate, and that wisdom is interpretable otherwise than Cassander intended. His solitude is parallel to that of the hermit in As You Like It; in both cases, eremitic status helps to convince someone else to pursue a less disruptive life. Though Lyly’s hermit, unlike Shakespeare’s, is allowed to speak for himself, he is just as much an outsider to the social situation he helps, through his warning, to maintain.61 Eremitic solitude, like melancholy, seems to contain matter that is transferable out of the solitary domain and back into the social world, albeit at the expense of the condition that allowed its creation. There is a mild self-contradiction here: hermits exist for others but their solitude is still essential to them. The juxtaposition makes more sense if eremitism is not understood as a literal circumstance or (as in the anchoritic tradition most English Protestants reject) a religious discipline, but as a personal and emotional orientation that leads to and lends itself to solitude while still benefitting others. The hermit in the sixth book of The Faerie Queene literalizes this possibility by using the instincts that have led him into solitude – ­one of which, Spenser stresses, is linguistic facility – t­ o heal.

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Spenser’s hermit is not explicitly a religious figure, though he embodies a holy role as the counterpart to the Blatant Beast; Arthur asks him to treat Serena and Timias for the wounds the Beast has inflicted. The hermit as narrated is an accomplished warrior who has been led into his solitude by a particular attitude toward the world, and that attitude proves more important in his ability to cure his patients than does his military experience: For whylome he had bene a doughty Knight,   As any one, that lived in his daies,   And proved oft in many perillous fight,   Of which he grace and glory wonne alwaies,   And in all battels bore away the baies.   But being now attacht with timely age,   And weary of this worlds unquiet waies,   He tooke him selfe unto this Hermitage, In which he liv’d alone, like carelesse bird in cage. One day, as he was searching of their wounds,   He found that they had festred privily,   And ranckling inward with unruly stounds,   The inner parts now gan to putrify,   That quite they seem’d past helpe of surgery,   And rather needed to be disciplinde   With holesome reede of sad sobriety,   To rule the stubborne rage of passion blinde: Give salves to every sore, but counsell to the minde. So taking them apart into his cell,   He to that point fit speaches gan to frame,   As he the art of words knew wondrous well,   And eke could doe, as well as say the same.62

Eremitism, here, obtains its value from its particular association with mind and words. This association comes not from discipline or enthusiasm but from weariness. An emotional orientation that seems entirely negative, a tendency to find the world grating, becomes positive within the walls of the hermitage and the parallel recesses of the mind. The conduit that allows for that transformation from a negative response to a positive influence is “the art of words.” The hermit, like Drayton’s narrator in “The Owle,” is a “linguist of the wood.” Given the hermit’s ability to reorient the lives of other characters through language, and his lack of any motivations other than his instinct to retreat from the world, he has nearly as

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clear a connection to the poet (or, at least, a poet) as the speaker of Drayton’s poem. Spenser, like Shakespeare and Lyly, emphasizes the hermit’s effect on others through language, a rather different function than that associated with the anchoritic tradition. Still, this emphasis on others’ benefit rather than the hermit’s own virtue appears in both Protestant and Catholic texts, as does the significance of an emotional need or desire for the eremitic life. The original eremite, according to Saint Jerome’s Vitae Patri, was Paul the Hermit. Jerome’s writings were important to the recusant movement; Henry Hawkins, a recusant Jesuit (author of Parthenia Sacra, a 1633 allegory of the Virgin Mary), is identified by the ESTC as translator of the 1630 English College Press edition. Jerome describes Paul as arriving at eremitism through natural curiosity and love: And proceeding on by little and little, and then pawsing, and often doing the same thing; at last he met with a large rocky hill, neer the bottome whereof there was a large kind of cave shut up by a stone. Upon the removing of which stone he being more earnest in making new discoveries (according to the nature of man which loves the knowledge of hidden things) he perceaved a great entry there within, which being open to the sky above, was overspred by the wide braunches of an ould Palme tree, poynting out a most cleare fountayne, the streame whereof breaking onely out of the ground, the same earth which had brought it forth did instantly sucke it up againe, through a little hole. There were moreover, throughout that worne montayne not a few old roomes, wherein there might be seene certaine anviles, & hammers, which by that tyme were growen rough with rust, and formerly had beene imployed upon stamping coyne. And it is related by the Aegyptians, that this place had been used as a secret mint-house of money, at such tyme as Cleopatra kept that close intelligence with Antonius. But Paul growing now to carry a particular kind of love to this Cave, as if it had beene expressely designed to him by Almighty God, did there imploy his whole life in solitude & prayer.63

Jerome allows us to see that there is something slightly irrational about Paul’s “particular kind of love to this Cave,” a pull toward solitude described in the terms of melancholy; he feels it has been designed for him by God despite its previous, quite worldly use, which Jerome manages to connect to both illicit currency manipulation and extra-marital sex. Paul’s particular love is itself an intensification of the curiosity about “hidden things” that led him there, shared with all men by their nature; his love for his cave is thus not entirely separate from Cleopatra’s use for it, which also depends on its hiddenness. This love is never quite connected to what

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turns out to be the point of Jerome’s story: the series of miracles that attends Saint Anthony’s divinely led meeting with Paul and continues following Paul’s death, ending with a pair of lions who dig Paul’s grave with their paws.64 Jerome’s narrative reveals that the exemplarity of eremitism functions as a result of rather than despite its solitude and idiosyncracy.65 Jerome addresses the paradox through miracle: Paul turns Anthony away at first, seemingly unwilling to explain himself as someone else’s example, but then discovers that he does not need to because Anthony has already been given knowledge of him. Jerome also acknowledges the strange compatibility of joy and sorrow in solitude. Paul’s “particular kind of love” for his messily abandoned cave is the pleasure of lonesomeness, a pleasure which helps to define the melancholy disposition. Asceticism is usually understood, of course, as a renunciation of pleasures, and Jerome is quick to connect Paul’s retiring instinct to more extreme versions, including one martyr he does not name, who was tormented by the Roman persecutors by means of sexual temptation: [A] beautifull Curtisan came to make her approach, and began with her delicate armes, to embrace his necke; and (which cannot be modestly related) did also impurely touch him otherwise, to the end that his body being altered, and inflamed by lust the lascivious conquerors might overspred him. This souldier of the band of Christ, knew not what to do, nor which way to turne himselfe, whome torments had not subdued, delight was beginning to over come, when at length (inspired from heaven) he bit of his owne tongue, & spitting it into the face of her, who kissed him, the sense of lust, was subdued, by the sharpenes of that payne which succeeded.66

Jerome wants this far more profoundly self-denying form of asceticism – ­a speechlessness violently willed – ­to be part of the context in which we understand Paul’s solitude, even though he thinks of Paul as driven to solitude by a kind of desire. The renunciation of pleasure can have its own pleasures, as is acknowledged indirectly in the root of the word ascetic: ἀσκέω refers originally to athletic training, whose pains are offset by a secondary enjoyment. Shakespeare, of course, addresses these complexities of the eremitic draw with silence – w ­ e are never told what the hermit has said to Frederick. Jaques’s interest in eremitism is the cool curiosity of the Protestant observer, not the driven need of St. Anthony, but the “particular kind of love” is one he would recognize. Through the hermit, As You Like It records the Protestant experience of Catholicism, with an appreciation for the lure of solitude. Eremitism, indeed, has at least three functions

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in the play  – ­it is an undifferentiated moralist stance that helps resolve the plot; it is a gentle swipe at Catholic converters; and it bears an attraction in itself which parallels Jaques’s melancholy. The ascetically emergent love for solitude enables the play’s social and legal resolution, and Duke Senior anticipates that resolution by loving that love in Jaques, but the same “matter” the Duke admires will force Jaques’s separation from his court. Hermits, then, are parallel to melancholy poets as Stephens imagines them: when they are in the midst of their solitude, whatever insight they might gain thereby is opaque. Their rhetorical effectiveness, like the figural imagination the Duke admires in Jaques even as he mocks it, does not necessarily alleviate their isolation, but it does allow others to have some benefit from it.

• As Lyly’s and Shakespeare’s treatments of eremitism demonstrate, even at the height of Queen Mary’s attempt to undo the English Reformation, English Catholicism still maintained close relation to English Protestant thinking.67 Several of the poets I have discussed seem to have had a particular interest in perhaps the chief poetic spokesman for recusancy, Robert Southwell. Gary Kuchar argues that Southwell and Shakespeare can been seen as mutually influential: Saint Peters Complaint may be intended partly as a rebuke of Venus and Adonis, and Kuchar sees echoes of Southwell’s Complaint, parodically refigured, in The Rape of Lucrece and Richard II, and in several other prominent poets of the right age to be forced to rethink sectarian relations by the violent conclusion of Southwell’s official repression.68 Kuchar has also noted the centrality of melancholy in Southwell’s conception of the recusant’s social isolation.69 In this respect, I believe we can see a connection (previously suggested by Anne Sweeney) to Milton.70 Southwell provides a context for the broader significance of ascetic isolation and an extension of the literary possibilities of a melancholic’s predilections. He defends the importance of solitude even outside of the penitential context of his best-known works, seeing retirement from worldly concerns as necessary for the recognition of the divine origin of natural beauty. His “Looke home” opens: Retyred thoughts enjoy their owne delights, As beawtie doth in selfe beholding eye: Mans mind a myrrour is of heavenly sights, A breefe wherein all marvailes summed lye. (1–4)71

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This advantage of solitude to the intellect matters also to the penitent isolation of Saint Peters Complaint. As much as Peter’s retreat from the world is a kind of self-punishment, Southwell has him acknowledge an advantage, with poetic overtones, of a life apart: Here solitary muses nurse my griefes, In silent lonenesse burying worldly noyse, Attentive to rebukes, deafe to reliefes, Pensive to foster cares, carelesse of joyes: Ruing lifes losse under deathes dreary roofes, Solemnizing my funerall behoofes. (739–44)

There is a figurative disconnect between the beginning and end of this stanza. The muses, nursing Peter’s griefs, occupy an image of maternal ­affection, fecundity, and invention reminiscent of Paul the Hermit’s love for his cave, but all of that is undermined by “deathes dreary roofes.” There are two models of solitary sorrow, here: one that is attentive and productive (parenting cares as the muses do Peter’s griefs), and the other merely a self-oriented ruth inclined toward death. At one point in the Complaint those two models of solitude, one aesthetic and the other mortal, become sufficiently entangled to confuse the scribes and compositors responsible for the poem’s life after its author’s abrupt death. In a stanza devoted to the comfortlessness of penance, both the muses’ solitude and death’s reside unsteadily in a single word: My comfort now is confortlesse to live, In Orphian seate devoted to mishap: Rent from the roote, that sweetest fruit did give, I scorne to graffe in stock of meaner sap. No juice can joy me but of Jesse flower, Whose heavenly roote hath true reviving power. (697–702)

I have quoted the stanza as it appears in the Oxford Poems of Southwell, which follows the first printed edition, but important variations are extant.72 In one manuscript and the second edition, line 698 begins, “In Orphan seate”; in another manuscript and the third edition, it reads, “In Orphan state.”73 In defence of “Orphian seate,” the Oxford editors point to the “relevance of the figure of Orpheus mourning the loss of Euridyce ... The story of Orpheus was represented in the Renaissance as illustrating that perfect love could be achieved only by dying to imperfect things ... Peter’s imperfect love was, like that of Orpheus, realized by a glance.”74 Given Orpheus’s ubiquity in the Renaissance as emblem for poets – ­and

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particularly the ability of poets to move their readers – ­this is a compelling connection, akin to the “solitary muses” image in tying Peter’s isolation, whose product is repentance, to Southwell’s, whose product is poetry.75 “Orphian seate” probably best meets the old (and not very definitive) criterion of lectio difficilior potior: a compositor would seem more likely to miss a surprising classical allusion in favour of a familiar adjective than the reverse. But Southwell compares Peter to an orphan elsewhere  – ­in “S. Peters afflicted minde” he is “Forlorne and left like Orphan child” (15). Indeed, solitude as an “Orphan state” was a powerful idea to R ­ enaissance poets, creating a concrete connection for an internal experience. Sidney writes in Astrophil 88: Tush absence, while thy mistes eclipse that light, My Orphan sence slides to the inward sight (9–10)

The idea of solitude as nourishing love by shifting attention to the inward awareness of the beloved is reminiscent of the similar narrative of retired devotion in Southwell’s “Looke home.” The same inward sight can be a false hope, moving in the direction of Southwell’s deathlier model of solitude, as in Astrophil 106: O Absent presence Stella is not here;   False flattering hope that with so faire a face,   Bare me in hand, that in this Orphane place, Stella, I say my Stella, should appeare, (1–4)

An “Orphane place” is not just solitary but bereft, abandoned. If we admit this possibility into the Complaint, it moves into the realm of love elegy. “Orphian seate” draws attention to the power of Peter’s voice in despair, “Orphan state” to his hopelessness and lament for lost intimacy. The two possible readings enhance the stanza’s and the poem’s composite sense of isolation as both draining and fruitful. As I noted in my introduction, Marvell seems aware of the Orphean resonance of his description of the “Orphan of the Hurricane” in “The Unfortunate Lover” – ­the connection is available as a subtle pun. The ambiguity behind this textual crux is in keeping with the distance and uncertainty of a reader’s relationship to a posthumous text and an Anglican’s to a recusant one. Southwell acknowledges the problem created by the sectarian diversity of his potential audience in the instructions he gives to his reader in his verse preface to the poem. Preparing us for the representation of a sinning saint, he hopes we will “Muse not to see some mud in cleerest brooke” – ­the poem’s purpose includes the juxtaposition

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of contraries and the kind of reading necessary to make sense of them (“The Author to the Reader,” 3). The Orpheus myth expands the range of meaning such contraries can include, and helps strengthen the connection to the kind of melancholic reading inherent in the idea of a reader accepting of “mud.” The possibility of a poetic fruitfulness to Peter’s despair, which can never be fully realized but is always present, has a corollary in the rhetorical function of melancholy apparent in Spenser’s, Lyly’s, and Shakespeare’s hermits. Orpheus is not necessarily described in the terms of melancholy in classical texts, but in his loneliness at the end of his life he certainly has the sympathetic relation to a solemn landscape that Drayton and Mill associate with melancholy: as the trees circle around to hear his lament, Ovid says, “a shadow came apace.”76 Renaissance writers clearly interpret that shadow as melancholy. Bacon says that Orpheus after the death of Eurydice “falling into a deepe melancholy became a contemner of women kind, and bequeathed himselfe to a solitary life in the deserts.”77 Peter Heylen, in his description of the Rhodope mountains of Thrace, refers to “the fate and fable of Orpheus, who in a melancholy humour (having lost his wife) betooke himselfe unto these mountaines.”78 The possibility is brought to its fullest extent in Milton’s “Il Penseroso,” which relies on a similar comparative ability to Southwell’s to bridge Christian and pagan contexts in relying on the literary preoccupation with the often provisional relationship between melancholy and the muses. Milton connects the flexibility of Orphean significance that allows for its putative appearance in Southwell, with a seeming mix of confidence and anxiety, to both eremitic solitude and melancholy.79 His reference to Orpheus in “Il Penseroso” is largely an exploration of its capacity for reinvention, starting with the possibilities raised by the poem’s adaptation of the parallel images in “L’Allegro”: the same myth signifies the sympathies of opposite temperaments. In both poems it is used in simile, in keeping with what seems to be a melancholic predilection for comparison. “L’Allegro” seeks a music such That Orpheus self may heave his head From golden slumber on a bed Of heapt Elysian flowres, and hear Such streins as would have won the ear Of Pluto, to have quite set free His half regain’d Eurydice. (145–50)

Orpheus will hear strains comparable to those that would have succeeded where he fails, a hyperbolic conceit that incorporates the myth only to note its limitations. The reference in “Il Penseroso,” addressed

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throughout to “Divenest Melancholy,” is quite similar: the speaker asks Melancholy to   bid the soul of Orpheus sing Such notes as warbled to the string, Drew Iron tears down Pluto’s cheek, And made Hell grant what Love did seek. (105–8)

The grammar of the two references is almost parallel, with the same “such ... as” construction, but the contrary-to-fact subjunctive in ­“L’Allegro” is replaced by a historical indicative. In this case, the music invoked is Orpheus’s actual song rather than the seemingly superior one of “L’Allegro.” The music in “Il Penseroso” is then transformed into the “Anthems cleer” of the church (163), but after the “extasies” such music raises (165), Milton’s speaker turns toward silence and solitude. That solitude takes the form of a Protestant version of eremitism not that different from ­Spenser’s, and carefully defined – ­against Catholic models like Jerome’s – ­as studious rather than enthusiastic: And may at last my weary age Find out the peacefull hermitage, The Hairy Gown and Mossy Cell, Where I may sit and rightly spell Of every Star that Heav’n doth shew, And every Herb that sips the dew; Till old experience do attain To something like Prophetic strain. (167–74)

This astronomical quasi-monasticism leads to “something like,” but also separate from, prophecy: a simile in which one side of the comparison is blank. The line leaves unanswered the important question of what influence the solitary penseroso can have on the world. Is there any conduit from his “high lonely tower” to a receptive audience for his not-quite-­ prophecies? Of course, the question is modified when the poem appears in print, surrounded by other works that help interpret it.80 Those directive contexts include “L’Allegro,” which stresses the importance of contraries to the melancholy thought of “Il Penseroso,” as well as “Lycidas,” which presents its own image of an influential solitude at its end. But “something like Prophetic strain” seems to acknowledge the gap that needs to be crossed in a way the poem leaves obscure. Melancholy provides matter for this “something,” and then that matter is conveyed through unstated means. Perhaps they are finally stated when Milton more fully embraces

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the prophetic role in Paradise Lost, but that poem retains the emphasis on the prophet’s hiddenness, as in Milton’s comparison of himself to a songbird in “shadiest Covert hid,” and to the “darkness” and “solitude” in which he is inspired.81 As in “Il Penseroso,” the prophet in Paradise Lost is informed by his dreams and performs much of his work at night. The “something” that Milton’s pensive man hopes to glean from the hermitage and transform into a “strain” accessible to others seems comparable to the “matter” that Jaques seeks from his own trip to a hermitage. That matter is not itself melancholy: melancholy is the draw toward solitude that leads these inquisitors to the matter that they will find, illustrated by Paul the Hermit’s love for his cave or Drayton’s mystical connection to the habitation of his owl. But melancholy merely helps the thoughtful mind document that content – ­its impetus toward retreat leaves the possibility that, without a Saint Anthony to spread a hermit’s message to the world, the secrets of the hermitage will remain there. The literary bent of melancholics is essential to whatever influence they might have, then. It is not, perhaps, that melancholy makes people poets, but that poetry records the experience of melancholy and allows it both accessibility and permanence.

Chapter Five

The Naked Sense of Retirement: Cowley, Marvell, Traherne

There is a potential dissonance between the act of writing and the publicization of writing, even when the writing is itself motivated by public concerns. The intent to benefit the public does not cancel out the essential privacy of the study and thought necessary to significant literary endeavour. Milton demonstrates this difficulty in Book 2 of The Reason of Church Government, written early in 1642, in which he worries about how his intentions in writing the treatise might be perceived: So lest it should be still imputed to me, as I have found it hath bin, that some self-pleasing humor of vain-glory hath incited me to contest with men of high estimation, now while green yeers are upon my head, from this needlesse surmisall I shall hope to disswade the intelligent and equal auditor, if I can but say succesfully that which in this exigent behoovs me, although I would be heard only, if it might be, by the elegant & learned reader, to whom principally for a while I shal beg leav I may addresse my selfe. To him it will be no new thing though I tell him that if I hunted after praise by the ostentation of wit and learning, I should not write thus out of mine own season, when I have neither yet compleated to my minde the full circle of my private studies, although I complain not of any insufficiency to the matter in hand, or were I ready to my wishes, it were a folly to commit any thing elaborately compos’d to the carelesse and interrupted listening of these tumultuous times.1

Milton addresses himself only to “the elegant & learned reader” because such a reader will recognize that no vainglorious goal would have led him to write this document while, at age 33, still engaged in his “private studies”; on the other hand, even if those studies were complete, it would still be “a folly” to address more broadly “the carelesse and interrupted listening” of the wider world. The relationship between public and private here is complex: while private study is supposed to prepare Milton for

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public life, the completion of that study is to be judged according only to the standard of his own mind, not the public at large nor even the learned subset of it (and he need not mention the university he had left a decade earlier). Even “the matter in hand,” to which, he stresses, his learning is sufficient, does not provide a standard. So, while the world’s careless listening is identified as a problem, both the cause and the justification for his withholding himself from a broad audience are private. Milton’s evident reluctance to address an audience appears in works from throughout his literary career and has been the subject of critical debate. Daniel Shore argues that moments in which “Milton professes to speak to no one” should be read as themselves directed toward readers and rhetorically strategic. Criticizing the “excessive, even hyperbolic credulity” with which he sees Stanley Fish reading such passages, Shore argues that “these moments are used to establish authority, project an ethos, allay doubts and objections ... in short, they are used to persuade.”2 For Shore, expressing a desire for intellectual privacy is itself a public act, and his argument points toward a larger question about writing in general and its relationships to the inwardly experienced self and the desire to turn away from the world. In Church Government Milton suggests that readers (good ones, at least) help him navigate the relationship between private study and public utterance, even though he is also writing in the context of public indifference. Does it follow, then, as Shore would argue, that he is exaggerating his solitude, that his relation to readers is essentially just a different kind of sociability? This question has broad significance for the seventeenth century, since Milton is hardly alone either in the value he places on private reflection over public engagement or in the writing of literary works that, despite being available for a wide audience, express an explicit reluctance to address one. In the early years of the Restoration, a brief pamphlet war between George Mackenzie and John Evelyn over the virtues of solitude and its attendant stoical ideals (Mackenzie, a Scottish lawyer, had previously written in praise of stoicism) touched on a similar question.3 Evelyn points out how strange it is for Mackenzie, in print, to call for the celebration of solitude and of solitary men. To Evelyn, Mackenzie’s argument is countered by its own medium: But to pursue the method of our ingenious Author, whilest he is thus eloquently declaiming against Publick Employment, Fame, Command, Riches, Pleasure, Conversation and all the topicks of his Frontispiece, and would perswade us wholly to retire from the active World; why is he at all concern’d with the empty breath of Fame, and so very fond of it, that without remembering the known saying, Nemo eodem tempore assequi potest magnam famam, & magnam quietem, would have men celebrated for doing nothing?4

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The reference to Mackenzie’s frontispiece is effective: it calls attention not only to the pamphlet’s being printed, but to those parts of the printed edition that exist for the purpose of marketing. The point of a frontispiece is to engage the public. But Mackenzie anticipated Evelyn’s point: he had already alluded to a closely related problem in the opening of his own pamphlet. Addressing his dedicatee, John Lindsay, Earl of Crawford, Mackenzie notes the strangeness of praising solitude to someone already attached to it: But I praise it to you, as we use to praise a Mistris to her enamoured Gallant, whose intimacy with her, though it far exceeds the acquaintance of the praiser, yet it breeds not in her enamorato, an unwillingness to hear what he already knows; complacency being oftner the product of our knowledge, then the occasion of enquiry.5

Mackenzie acknowledges two slightly different things here: that the praise and love of solitude are not fully compatible, and that solitude, not lending itself to inquiry, is not something that can be studied and understood. Evelyn has it partly right, then: the public celebration of solitude is beside the point, like the general admiration of a man’s mistress, which is superfluous to the man’s love for her but is not unwelcome as a public endorsement of a private experience. But the polemics of much of Mackenzie’s arguments, warning of “volatile heads, whose mercurial Complexion hath inclined them rather to a restlessness, then virtuous activity, and who like the wind, are nothing at all when they are not moving,” acknowledges that – ­necessarily, since he printed the pamphlet – his primary audience is not his solitary patron but the sociable members of the reading public.6 If solitude cannot be “the occasion of enquiry,” because it is only understood when the process of enquiry is over, then to praise it is not to advocate its importance but to record an influence already extant. The relationship between retirement – the embrace of solitude – and literary audience matters to any kind of writing that comes out of private experience but is intended for public reading, and to poetry in particular. Evelyn is right that readership is an intrusion upon solitude; as Milton concedes, public scrutiny both interrupts and insufficiently appreciates private self-development. But readership is also the audience for which the solitary experience is recorded or praised and thus the thing that makes solitude matter, if it will matter to strangers. In the Interregnum and early ­Restoration, these issues seemed particularly urgent and were actively debated. This chapter will focus on three poets – Abraham Cowley, Andrew Marvell, and Thomas Traherne – who contribute especially valuably to an understanding of retirement in this period. All of them published their poetry with avowed

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reluctance or not at all and wrote passionately about the desire to retreat from the world, but these two circumstances do not mean that readership, in both immediate and imagined forms, does not influence their work. On the contrary, reading and retreat as these poets treat them converge toward an aesthetics of provisional withholding, in which the inevitable collapse of the peaceable retirement is necessary to fully imagine it. Their own r­ eading – showing the influence of Donne and Herbert in particular – reflects their awareness of isolation as a concern within a continuing lyric tradition. Retirement was associated with two distinct intellectual backgrounds: asceticism and stoicism. Rhetorically, the two tend to be treated as allied by those skeptical of both. Retirement’s relationship to anchorism caused it to be an object of suspicion in Protestant rhetoric. Joseph Hall insists that the proper emulation of Christ includes sociability: The Parents of Christ knew him well, to be of a disposition, not strange, nor sullen and stoycall, but sweet and sociable ... Neither as God, nor man doth he take pleasure in a stern froward austerity, and wilde retirednesse, but in a mild affablenesse, and amiable conversation.7

Secular objections appear in similar terms. Henry Peacham regards retirement as politically dangerous, warning that a gentleman should not aspire to it: For since all Vertue consisteth in Action, and no man is borne for himselfe, we adde, beneficiall and usefull to his Country; for hardly they are to be admitted for Noble, who (though of never so excellent parts) consume their light, as in a dark Lanthorne in contemplation, and a Stoicall retirednesse.8

Despite the admiration in the period for Seneca and Marcus Aurelius, “Stoicall” seems to be an effective shorthand for an unjustified refusal to engage with the world.9 The classical roots of retirement are similarly apparent in poetry. In his “Church Militant,” Herbert narrates in allegorical terms the transformation of sin into a Roman Catholic priest, and describes sin as learning “Anchorisme and retirednesse” in Egypt (the location, as I noted in the previous chapter, of the meeting between Saint Anthony and Saint Paul the Hermit). The passage takes the form of a travelogue of sin’s education: From Egypt he took pettie deities, From Greece oracular infallibilities, And from old Rome the libertie of pleasure By free dispensings of the Churches treasure.

136  Solitude and Speechlessness Then in memoriall of his ancient throne He did surname his palace, Babylon. Yet that he might the better gain all nations, And make that name good by their transmigrations, From all these places, but at divers times, He took fine vizards to conceal his crimes: From Egypt Anchorisme and retirednesse, Learning from Greece, from old Rome stateliness: And blending these he carri’d all mens eyes, While Truth sat by, counting his victories: (177–90)

This part of Herbert’s poem had staying power: Henry Vaughan alludes to the image of truth counting victories in “The World.”10 It proved especially useful for anti-Catholic purposes, in which context Richard Baxter quotes these same lines in his 1680 ecclesiastical history.11 These quotations are reminders that, despite his famous quietness, Herbert was not regarded as an ascetic, and he provides a crucial model for an engagement with the reading public that still maintains a sense of pious reserve. To Vaughan, Herbert’s piety counters the taint of association with the press, which “prints lewdness and impieties” whose remedy is ultimately private rather than public: The suppresion of this pleasing and prevailing evil, lies not altogether in the power of the Magistrate; for it will flie abroad in Manuscripts, when it fails of entertainment at the press. The true remedy lies wholly in their bosoms, who are the gifted persons ... The first, that with any effectual success ­attempted a diversion of this foul and overflowing stream, was the blessed man, Mr. George Herbert, whose holy life and verse gained many pious ­Converts, (of whom I am the least) and gave the first check to a most flourishing and admired wit of his time.12

Herbert’s poetry is the conduit between the bosom of a gifted man and those capable of benefitting from it. But the public reception of the poetry is still secondary. “The true remedy” is private and internal. Herbert is both a voice against ascetic retirement and a model for public poetry, but he is simultaneously a model for the public benefit of private experience. Herbert does not say that retirement is inherently sinful: in his history it was already extant, in the same gentile category as Greek learning and Roman stateliness, before sin arrived in Egypt to appropriate it. This history is typical of suspicion of retirement, which is often imagined becoming dangerous through its association with something else. As for the charge of idleness, it has dogged the idea of retirement and been challenged by

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retirement’s adherents since Seneca. Following his seventh epistle, which makes the case for solitary life, Seneca’s eighth anticipates and defends against the claim that solitude is idle. As Thomas Lodge translates in his 1613 edition: To this end have I withdrawne my selfe, to this intent have I shut up my doores, that I might profit many men. I spend not a day in idlenesse; yea, and for the most part of the nights, I spend them in studie, maintayning and forcing mine eyes against sleepe. I retired my selfe not from me onely, but from affaires, and principally from mine owne particular: I wholly traffique for posteritie, by writing that which may be profitable unto them.13

For Seneca, sharing solitude with readers justifies rather than invalidates it, and Lodge translates this idea as to “traffique for posteritie,” reframing the vocabulary of commerce for a pursuit without personal profit (Lodge is rendering Seneca’s “posterorum negotium ago”: literally, “I conduct my business for the future”).14 Lodge’s economically tinged “traffique” hints that Seneca’s solution to the question of public benefit is an uncomfortable one, and Evelyn’s point remains valid: stoic retirement has an unsociable streak, which is difficult to reconcile with seventeenth-century Protestant ideals. Non-stoic proponents of solitude had to carefully stick to a middle path, denouncing the eremitic preference for solitude I described in my last chapter but still welcoming its advantages, and particularly its capacity for an intermediate state between living in the world and the freedom of death. Baxter, who quoted Herbert’s disparagement of anchorism, published a treatise on “The Improvement of Solitude” which responds to a patron’s unexpected loss of several immediate family members, in which he stresses that, while solitude can be a boon to those like his patron who undergo it by happenstance, it should not be sought out by others. As Seneca anticipated, Baxter compares the desire for solitude with idleness: You must not causelessly withdraw from humane society into Solitude. A  wearines of converse with men, is oft conjunct with a weariness of our duty: And a retiring voluntarily into solitude, when God doth not call or drive us thither, is oft but a retiring from the place and work which God hath ­appointed us: And consequently a retiring rather from God, than to God. Like some idle servants, that think they should not work so hard, because it is but Worldly business, and think their Masters deal not Religiously by them, unless they let them neglect their labour, that they may spend more time in serving God: as if it were no serving God to be faithful in their Masters service.15

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Baxter gives several circumstances that might make solitude necessary, including “In case a man by age or sickness find himself so near to death, as that he hath now a more special call to look after his present actual preparation, than to endeavour any more the good of others.”16 “But,” he continues: when there is no such necessity of call, it usually proceedeth from one of these vicious distempers: ... Cowardize and fear of suffering ... laziness of minde and weariness of duty ... impatience ... humour and mutability of mind, and discontent with ones condition ... Melancholy, meerly to please a sick imagination, which is vexed in company, and a little easeth it self in living as the possessed man among the Tombs ... self-ignorance, and an unhumbled state of a soul.17

On the other hand, “If God call us into Solitude, or men forsake us, we may rejoyce in this, that we are not alone, but the Father is with us. Fear not such Solitude, but be ready to improve it, if you be cast upon it.”18 Indeed, Baxter gives a remarkable testament, not to the pleasures of solitude, but to its status as “half delivered from VANITY and VEXATION of the world” – “half delivered” because the full deliverance comes only with death.19 Even those who are essentially on Evelyn’s side of the debate, then, are still capable of celebrating the freedom and virtue of solitary life; what is suspicious is the desire for that life. Retirement, referring specifically to willful solitude, assumes such a desire. A recently discovered text demonstrates that the Evelyn-Mackenzie exchange and the broader debate of which it is a part have particular resonance and difficulties for a poet. In 1997, Jeremy Maule identified a manuscript housed at Lambeth Palace Library, MS 1360, as consisting of several theological treatises, some incomplete, written by Thomas Traherne.20 One of them is evidently Traherne’s response to the debate over solitude; Maule gave it the title Inducements to Retirednes, from the summation in the manuscript. It is of particular interest given Traherne’s commitment to simplicity and his exceedingly low profile as a poet, and, though it does not resolve the mystery of Traherne’s intentions for his written work, it does at least give us more of a context for the tension his poetry reflects between unworldly self-consciousness and readership, to which I will return at greater length in the last section of this chapter. The first editor to bring the treatise to print, Jan Ross, cautiously suggests that Traherne might have intended to publish it himself.21 Inducements to Retirednes is largely concerned with the same problem as Seneca’s eighth epistle: how the retired can benefit the world. Seneca put the emphasis on study and writing; Traherne shifts it to thought:

The Naked Sense of Retirement  139 In Societie a Man may Discours of Excellent Things; if the Company  be ­Excellent: but by Retirement, we are fitted for that Societie. And by Recollection of Mind, which is a Retirement of Soul, or Thought into it self, we find what to Discours upon, and feel what we find fit to be Discoursed. For to be present in Spirit with any Object, is to be retired in our Thoughts from all outward Things that are before our Eys to that object. And if the Thing be present before our Eys, with which our Souls are likewise present; yet when we meditat upon it, we are fain to receiv it into our Thoughts as we do Things that are absent from our Bodies. or els our Souls are Absent from them. Now Nothing that is Distant from the Soul affecteth the same. It feeleth nothing without, but as it entereth in, and is Considered there.22

The analogy is between meditation, which allows for a connection ­between absent and present things, and retirement, which improves social discourse by means of its opposite. Just as the “Retirement of Soul” allows the distinction between absence and presence to become immaterial, so, perhaps, does such retirement allow for discourse with sufficiently excellent company to be allowable within a retired life. But Traherne places such severe limitations on discourse as to suggest uncertainty, at the very least, at the social implications of his idea. The biggest problem is marriage. In keeping with his interest in retaining discourse, Traherne defends friendship (if conducted in ideal terms), but draws a distinction between friendship and marital love: Second to friendship, and very like it is the Allurement of Marriage which withdraweth from Retirement. I call Marriage Second to friendship, becaus therin tho a Man does communicat fortunes and Estates, yet He is not bound to communicat His Thoughts, a Reservation of which is the Destruction of Friendship. A man may marry a Wife for other Ends, then that of Her being his Counsellor. Nor does he need to approve Him self in all His Actions to Her Imagination. Tis otherwise in Exact and perfect Friendship. Wisdom and my Friend must be united, or I at Variance with one of the Twain ... As therfore such a Friendship is not convenient here upon Earth, becaus this World is not Capable of it. So likewise the Ties of Marriage are inconvenient, in their Degree, so far as it approacheth near it. I would be Disentangled from all the World, but God alone.23

Marriage is a symptom of a life bound up in the world, accepted as such but no more. Traherne concedes that “those who are necessarily Entangled with Earthly Cares may without any Treason to themselves or their Happiness, marry if they pleas.” So marriage is not worse than any other entanglement, and may be a necessary step for those whose cares cannot

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be ignored, but it does not apply to Traherne: “God having so C ­ onstituted my Life that to alter it any way, would be a Disadvantage.” He will not miss romantic love itself: “As for the Immediat feeling of those Sweet ­Affections, with which we are Delighted, in a Closer Approximation to a certain Person: I shall refer to the Suavities of such Charming Allurements to the other World.”24 The intense commitment to solitude in Traherne’s vision of retirement is not diminished by its lingering associations with friendly conversation. Traherne’s idea of solitude as preparation for discourse does not in itself establish the role of writing, because writing as he is understanding it is an intermediary between solitude and social exchange that must therefore be uncommitted to either. Part of the experience of solitude is the potential readership for the written works that may be solitude’s fruit. Readership still leaves writing solitary because it is conditioned by intervening circumstances, including both unpredictable repackaging of the work and death: as Cowley makes explicit and Marvell mulls implicitly, poetic retreat can be imagined in terms of the deaths of the poet and the poem’s subject. The potential for future readership does not convert solitary writing into social discourse, nor does it provide company in retirement. Readership is akin to the personal effects of a life in the world that are buried with the dead, possessing symbolic meaning without intruding upon a state that holds the world at bay.

• Retirement’s association with self-improvement (whether or not it is imagined in stoic terms) allows it to cross between sacred and secular contexts. Abraham Cowley, royalist, well-travelled courtier, and at one time quite ambitious for worldly fame, could hardly have had a more different trajectory from Traherne’s, but Cowley was a lifelong defender of the pleasures of solitude and the ethics of retirement, and, like Traherne, he thought of retirement not necessarily as a virtue in itself, since it is experienced differently by different people. In his essay “Of Solitude,” Cowley declares that “Solitude can be well fitted and set right, but upon a very few persons.”25 Still, this discrimination does not prevent a universalizing praise; in the poem that concludes this essay he pays tribute to “Solitude, first state of Human-kind!”26 That poem also posits an analogy between human and divine solitude, but, despite the parallel, Cowley treats solitude in distinctly secular, personal terms, best when one is “throughly engaged in the Love of Letters.”27 He does so partly to keep at bay the suspicion we might have that he was driven to retirement only once his worldly ambitions proved futile (a circumstance the essays address frankly), insisting, rather, that it is a way of being that

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is natural to him and that distinguishes him from others. He says in “Of Myself,” the final essay in the collection published as Severall discourses by way of Essayes within Thomas Sprat’s 1668 edition of Cowley’s collected poems: As far as my Memory can return back into my past Life, before I knew, or was capable of guessing what the world, or the glories, or business of it were, the natural affections of my soul gave me a secret bent of aversion from them, as some Plants are said to turn away from others, by an Antipathy imperceptible to themselves, and inscrutable to mans understanding.28

There is an emphasis on perception in this passage, pointing curiously in contrary directions. The access of memory powerful enough to manifest a time before knowledge of the world contrasts with the “secret bent of aversion” that is compared to a vegetable instinct he declares “imperceptible” and “inscrutable.” The solitary impulse works as much by ignorance of the world as by knowledge, and needs to be communicated with the world even as it is inherently unable to be understood.29 As it does for Traherne, this impulse emanates from childhood. The instinct for solitude interacts polyvalently with Cowley’s poetic aims. In the preface to the 1656 folio edition of his poems (which Sprat reprinted verbatim), Cowley explains that he has been compelled to print them for two reasons: his need to clarify his literary corpus in response to the proliferation of pirated printings of his work (as well as the publication under his name of poor work by someone else) and his desire to retire from poetry altogether. His edition, he explains, should be considered that of a dead poet (and thus a more typical collected edition, like those of Donne and Herbert): I have been perswaded to overcome all the just repugnances of my own modesty, and to produce these Poems to the light and view of the World; not as a thing that I approved of in it self, but as a lesser evil, which I chose rather then to stay till it were done for me by some body else, either surreptitiously before, or avowedly after my death; and this will be the more excusable, when the Reader shall know in what respects he may look upon me as Dead, or at least a Dying Person, and upon my Muse in this action, as appearing, like the Emperor Charls the Fifth, and assisting at her own Funeral. For to make my self absolutely dead in a Poetical capacity, my resolution at present, is never to exercise any more that faculty.30

Literally dead poets have their work compiled by others, who may not do it very well; this observation lends itself to an argument for collected editions by the living, but Cowley does not make that argument, because

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the association with death is valuable to him in itself. A dead poet has an authority a living one does not, precisely, it seems, because he has been silenced, his muse having died with him. Not writing poetry is the important part of being dead; actually dying is optional. Cowley insists that such silencing must be parallel to a physical retirement and an abandonment of his (now politically unfriendly) country: And this resolution of mine does the more befit me, because my desire has been for some years past (though the execution has been accidentally diverted) and does still vehemently continue, to retire my self to some of our American Plantations, not to seek for Gold, or inrich my self with the traffique of those parts (which is the end of most men that travel thither; so that of these Indies it is truer then it was of the former, Improbus extremos currit Mercator ad Indos Pauperiem fugiens—) But to forsake this world for ever, with all the vanities and Vexations of it, and to bury my self in some obscure retreat there (but not without the consolation of Letters and Philosophy) Oblitúsque meorum, obliviscenus & illis. As my former Author speaks too, who has inticed me here, I know not how, into the Pedantry of this heap of Latin Sentences. And I think Doctor Donnes Sun Dyal in a grave is not more useless and ridiculous then Poetry would be in that retirement. As this therefore is in a true sense a kind of Death to the Muses, and a real literal quitting of this World: So, methinks, I may make a just claim to the undoubted privilege of Deceased Poets, which is to be read with more favor, then the Living; Tanti est ut placeam tibi, Perire.31

Cowley never made it to America, though he did spend his final years in  bookish solitude in Chertsey.32 He is not, he stresses, a would-be colonizer – his repudiation of “traffique” serves the same function as Lodge’s redefinition of the same word in his translation of Seneca, reorienting retirement in relation to its contrary, the financial sphere. Cowley refers to the last stanza of Donne’s “The Will,” and offers poetry in retirement as equivalent to the sundial in the grave. He seems to be responding to Donne’s references in that poem to a kind of death in life, suggestive of the death of the muses Cowley hopes for. Donne addresses broader issues in that stanza about how purpose is conceived posthumously: Therefore I’ll give no more; But I’ll undoe The world by dying, because love dies too. Then all your beauties will bee no more worth

The Naked Sense of Retirement  143 Then gold in Mines, where none doth draw it forth; And all your graces no more use shall have Than a Sun dyall in a grave. Thou, Love, taughtst me, by making mee Love her, who doth neglect both mee and thee, To’invent, and practise this one way, to’annihilate all three. (“The Will,” 46–54)

Cowley’s analogy requires poetry to be equivalent to love, which, in turn, raises a key question about Donne’s word “use” – to question the use of love can, in parallel, question what poetry is for. In Donne’s poem the word is understood in terms of value. If dying (in the sense in which it appears in this poem, which seems to mean, at least provisionally, giving up on love) can undo the world, then it seems worthwhile to ask, about Donne’s first comparison in particular, what value gold still has. Like Cowley, Donne acknowledges that his retreat from the world is in tension with commerce (just as he sees love as opposed to commerce in “The Canonization” and other poems). Gold stuck in mines, not to be drawn forth, is worth exactly as much as beauty is to a dead lover – nothing – and that negation of value is extended to the world through the death of love. Since gold only has value in the marketplace, the image is indeed parallel to the sundial in a grave, which is useless in two ways at once: it is built to measure time, which has no meaning in the grave, and it measures it by means of the absent sun. The sundial in the grave is a memento of the world rendered meaningless by the world’s absence, which Donne compares to the “graces” of the addressee, but which he might as well compare to love itself, and indeed to love poetry. By comparing the sundial in the grave to poetry in retirement, Cowley offers an effective reading of “The Will,” and places his metaphor of the muse’s death within a tradition of a poetry that seeks to cancel itself out by cancelling out the world. Poetry in retirement is quite like the sundial in the grave: it may be present, but it will not have meaning to the outside world, except by its absence. Cowley and Donne both seem to think that there is no discourse between the dead and the living: the poem does not speak for the dead poet, in which case Cowley’s premature posthumousness must have a different function. Poetry’s uses for the poet are entirely removed from its uses for readers, and in this sense the retired poet and the dead poet are indeed interchangeable; in both cases readers are dependent solely on the poetry for their understanding of the poet, and it mediates for him opaquely. But poetry can still serve a function in this state: perhaps the limited one allowed by Donne’s sundial, which has symbolic meaning even without functional purpose. Cowley intended to keep his retirement from becoming solipsistic by working on translations; speaking through a dead

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person’s voice, perhaps, is compatible with being a living dead poet.33 Much earlier, though, Cowley had hinted at the possibility of an effective poetry within retirement in a poem from The Mistress. “The Wish” (from which he quotes in “Of Myself” as evidence for the lifelong consistency of his solitary instinct) anticipates a slightly different version of the retirement Cowley hopes for in his preface: 1.   Well then; I now do plainly see, This busie world and I shall ne’r agree; The very Honey of all earthly joy   Does of all meats the soonest cloy,   And they (methinks) deserve my pity, Who for it can endure the stings, The Crowd, and Buz, and Murmurings   Of this great Hive, the City. 2.   Ah, yet, ere I descend to th’grave May I a small House, and large Garden have! And a few Friends, and many Books, both true,   Both wise, and both delightful too!   And since Love ne’r will from mee flee, A Mistress moderately fair, And good as Guardian Angels are,   Onely belov’d, and loving mee! 3.  Oh, Fountains, when in you shall I My self, eas’d of unpeaceful thoughts, espy? Oh Fields! Oh Woods! when, when shall I be made   The happy Tenant of your shade?   Here’s the Spring-head of Pleasures flood; Where all the Riches lie, that she   Has coyn’d and stampt for good. 4.   Pride and Ambition here, Onely in far fetcht Metaphors appear; Here nought but winds can hurtful Murmurs scatter,   And nought but Eccho flatter.  The Gods, when they descended, hither From heav’en did always choose their way; And therefore we may boldly say,   That ’tis the way too thither.

The Naked Sense of Retirement  145 5.   How happy here should I, And one dear Shee live, and embracing dy? She who is all the world, and can exclude  In desarts Solitude.   I should have then this onely feare, Lest men, when they my pleasures see, Should hither throng to live like Mee,   And so make a City here.34

Cowley has sometimes been accused of insincerity in his love poems, and the mistress here certainly seems like an afterthought.35 But she, being “all the world,” is also one of those “far fetcht Metaphors” Cowley admits to preferring, in this case a metaphor that functions through synecdoche and simultaneously through allusion, since this is surely an echo of Donne’s several comparisons of a mistress to the world. If we take this poem literally, it seems like a half-considered retirement compared to the more complete (and loveless) one in his America fantasy: after all, he neglects to explain what incentive this desert has for the moderately fair mistress he hopes to woo there. As Traherne imagines the retiring instinct to be at the very least in tension with romantic love, Cowley’s version seems somewhat incongruously forced into a sequence of love lyrics. Katherine Philips, for whose printed poetry collection Cowley wrote a commendatory poem, responds to Cowley’s praise of retirement by redirecting it more firmly toward self-discovery. In her “ode upon retirement, made upon occasion of Mr. Cowley’s on that subject,” she praises “mighty Cowley” as “triumphantly retir’d” through “a Parthian conquest.”36 But for her, solitude is a chase that only leads back to the self, winning no glory: In my remote and humble seate   Now I’m again possest Of that late fugitive, my breast (18–20)

As if to demonstrate the contradictions of The Mistress, however, Philips clarifies this sense of self-containment, and the division between romantic love and friendship that seems to follow from it, in another poem arguing “Against Love”: Him whose heart is all his own, Peace and liberty does crown, He apprehends no killing frown. (poem 96, 11–14)

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For Philips, as for Traherne, love interferes with the mechanism by which retirement might have some benefit for the world. In this sense, Philips is remaking Cowley’s model of retirement to bring it into line with her own celebration of the emotional stability of friendship as opposed to romantic love. Cowley, however, keeps the conflict between love and retirement unresolved. The fourth stanza of “The Wish,” by turning his poem into a meditation on love lyrics rather than love itself, makes poetic language the site of that conflict. As I have discussed throughout this book, pride and ambition can indeed be found within poetic language apart from its reception, and, even if Cowley makes that point lightly here, it can be made more boldly about his entire career. He hints at such a possibility in the essays. In “Of Solitude” he compares those who cannot appreciate retirement’s pleasures to the speaker of Catullus’s “Odi et amo”: And yet our Dear Self is so wearisome to us, that we can scarcely support its conversation for an hour together. This is such an odd temper of mind as Catullus expresses towards one of his Mistresses, whom we may suppose to have been of a very unsociable humour. Odi, et amo: quanam id faciam ratione requiris. Nescio; sed fieri sentio, et excrucior. I Hate, and yet I Love thee too; How can that be? I know not how; Only that so it is I know, And feel with Torment that ’tis so. It is a deplorable condition, this, and drives a man sometimes to pittiful shifts in seeking how to avoid Himself.37

This recasting of Catullus’s famous poem of tormented love into a conception of self-love is remarkable, implying a division of self in which the “unsociable humour” of Catullus’s mistress becomes the hostility of the perceived self toward the perceiving self. The revisionist reading speaks to Cowley’s conception of retirement as an inward accounting, and allows him to claim that solitaries are actually more sociable than gregarious people, who are unsociable toward themselves. For Cowley, to be in retirement is not ultimately a flight from the world but a reconfiguration of self. The turn to Catullus is apt, and characteristic for all of the essays: this reconfiguration is one that Cowley can most easily express not only in poetry but through poetry, and through a conversation between multiple poets. He acknowledges this poetic orientation of even his essayistic mode at the end of “Of Myself,” the last essay in the book: “because I have concluded all the other Chapters with a Copy of Verses, I will maintain the

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Humour to the last.”38 The “Humour” is not merely an organizational whim: the essays chart Cowley’s poetic humour, and thus justify and define his identification as a poet. Poetry, as Cowley admits in the preface to the 1656 collection, is the sundial in the grave: it is a relic of his attempt to communicate his private self to the world whose function persists within solitude as a reminder of the fundamentally transformed, public form that self will take when perceived by readers. Like the sundial, poetry’s value refers to a public engagement that is practically irrelevant to the retired poet but remains imaginatively important as a figural presence that helps define and shape the poet’s solitude.

• Cowley’s consideration of the relationship between retirement and love in The Mistress is glancing, but even a more thorough one can remain ambivalent. In the poetry of Andrew Marvell, love seems often to be deferred toward a future that may never come, allowing for a compatibility both with Cowley’s cheerful pessimism and with Marvell’s great poem of retreat, “The Garden.” Marvell is also emblematic of the elusive relation to readers effected by the poetry of retirement. A clear account of his goals for his own poetry has never been made and often seems to require a circularity of reference; as Rosemary Colie memorably puts it, “Marvell’s chief reason for writing lyric poetry was an overriding interest in the problems of lyric poetry.”39 Colie also describes Marvell’s poetry as “both public and private,” and that sense of privacy – both his poetry’s removal from his social and political environment and its interpretive elusiveness – is an obstacle to understanding his verse but also one of its major topics.40 Despite considerable effort, the interpretive problem created by this elusiveness of Marvell’s goals has not been resolved by a greater awareness of his poems’ immediate context. Paul Alpers’s reading of the “Horatian Ode” demonstrates the problem: Alpers criticizes the critics he lumps together as “modernist” for seeing the poem’s representations of its opposed subjects, Oliver Cromwell and Charles I, as removed from history, but his own reading focusses on the inconsistency of the poem’s speaking voice, and Alpers finally asks with striking tentativeness, “Have I shown that the poem succeeds by failing?”41 Such a question renders consideration of the purpose of writing a poem essentially beside the point, and some critics have ceased trying to understand that purpose. Derek Hirst and Steven Zwicker share in Alpers’s charge that critics have underestimated the importance of circumstance to the reading of Marvell, but take that importance considerably further, to the point that it is all. They embrace

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a satirist’s claim that Marvell had a hermaphroditic body in order to ­argue that no attempt to assess the corpus of Marvell’s poetry that is not ­focussed on the body of the man can succeed: Modern scholars have attempted to argue the imaginative coherence of Marvell’s work through such constructions as the poet’s intellection and circumspection; we shall insist that such coherence is always and can only be rooted in the lived circumstance. For it was a structure of feeling formed and driven by the position of his body within the constraints of patriarchal politics and culture that constituted Marvell’s deepest and most abiding argument.42

In another essay, Hirst and Zwicker argue that “The Unfortunate Lover” is “the supreme text of Marvell’s imagined life ... the key to the whole.”43 They concede in both essays that their interest in declaring a single point of consistency in Marvell’s career is owing in large part to the failure of criticism to do so.44 To imagine Marvell as singular, then, is to thematize the critical disunity over his most basic ideas and aspirations. Hirst and Zwicker turn this around to find an alternative unity, but they are unable to answer Colie’s question – why did Marvell write poetry? – any better than she can. The circumstances Hirst and Zwicker focus on – Marvell’s being called a “gelding” and the possible internalized versions of that a­ ccusation – probably do bear on that question, though I do not think giving lived experience an inherent priority over literary reflection is the way to answer it.45 But even if those circumstances make themselves apparent in his poetry, they cannot in themselves explain why poetry has, for him, the world-cancelling function it seems to. Along similar lines, one of the themes of Nigel Smith’s recent biography is that Marvell’s poetry is an “escape,” and a hidden, introverted, puzzlingly half-political lifelong personal project.46 On the other hand, when Smith comments directly on the goals that might have propelled this hidden project, he tends to point to social advancement, as if Marvell had one reason for writing at all and another for writing the particular things he wrote. Thus, Smith sums up the personal effect of “To His Coy Mistress”: “Perhaps such a richly allusive achievement gave him confidence when he finally met Milton for the first time in early 1653”; and Smith sees the point of that meeting – despite Marvell’s admiration for Milton as a poet and his hope to be admired in kind – primarily as a quest for an appointment.47 The political poetry is obviously thus most relevant: Smith says that “The Character of Holland” is “a demonstration that Marvell was fit in ability and in sympathy ‘for the state to make use of.’”48 And yet he acknowledges that “Holland,” if its purpose was

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indeed to help Marvell get a job, is a failure, and the diction of hiddenness keeps returning in Smith’s readings of the poems: “the process of the poem’s creation,” he says of “The Nymph Complaining for the Death of her Fawn,” “seems to involve a hiding of the views of the all too evident regicidal context that surrounds the poem” – a hiding for its own sake, not for actual political protection, that seeks to withhold what is nevertheless “all too evident.”49 Smith seems to question his own instinct to identify Marvell’s goals and ambitions within the context of introverted hiddenness, but, as I have suggested in earlier chapters, obscure ambition need not be an oxymoron. Both Marvell’s literary ambitions and his interest in retreat are conditioned by his dedication to and admiration of a kind of negating power. If Cowley longs for a retirement that is probably impossible, in the company of friends, books, and a loving mistress but with the rest of the world somehow held at bay, Marvell’s version of retirement dwells on its impossibility as the point.50 The curious reference to annihilation in “The Garden” is a realization of the retreating instinct to which the whole poem is devoted, an instinct I believe we can see in the concern with negated, withheld, or obscured capacities in many of Marvell’s lyrics. It is not so much that retirement is represented through metaphor as that a metaphor can enact retirement. I have observed that some poets wish to establish relationships with future readers distinct from those created by fame. Marvell has his own version of an anonymous, aesthetic communication with posterity in the weeping statue that half preserves and half replaces the speaker of “The Nymph Complaining.”51 That statue is the crux of the poem’s only explicit reference to an audience; the speaker at first apostrophically addresses the fawn itself, and then slides into a shifting relationship to her listener: the “you” who would presume the Nymph’s garden “To be a little Wilderness” at lines 73–4 is not the person who helplessly hears her cry over the fawn’s death at line 93. Instead, a different kind of audience is identified: the engraver who will continue the work of the poem itself, or try to, until he is displaced by the speaker:   First my unhappy Statue shall Be cut in Marble; and withal, Let it be weeping too: but there Th’ Engraver sure his Art may spare; For I so truly thee bemoane, That I shall weep though I be Stone: Until my Tears, still dropping, wear My breast, themselves engraving there. (111–18)

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Engravers are associated by a false but tantalizing etymology to writers, and this one seems to be trying to extend the poem itself.52 But his efforts are overwhelmed by his model. The artist is prevented from his representation by the represented subject’s achieving her own memorialization first. The art, then, connects with its viewer without the artist’s intervention; if the analogy is between engraver and poet, then the poem would reach its reader regardless of its author, who seems to erase himself. This self-erasure is consonant with Marvell’s lack of effort toward circulating his poems. Still, not all of his poems are as pessimistic as “The Nymph Complaining.” “On a Drop of Dew” imagines a fuller form of representation, albeit a more fragile one. The “Drop of Dew” “in its little Globes Extent, / Frames as it can its native Element” (7–8). The drop of dew makes its mark by shutting out the world and yet showing it through transparency: In how coy a Figure wound, Every way it turns away: So the World excluding round, Yet receiving in the Day. (27–30)

The drop is celebrated for this ability to capture and exclude the world at once, even though the poem describes no viewer of it. In death, the drop of dew is forgotten, and yet its figure still carries power, because it “does, dissolving, run / Into the Glories of th’Almighty Sun,” and by a kind of transferred epithet carries those future glories within its minuscule reflective globe (39–40). “On a Drop of Dew” hints at an ambition to represent influentially even if the representer is forgotten, and even if the means of representation is invisible. Marvell blames no outside influence for the possibility of the drop’s dissolution. The “Figure” itself, in which the drop is “wound,” is “coy.” The figure’s winding seems to be the revolution of the drop, or perhaps of the world around it, or even of the eye of the nevermentioned viewer, as if one must look at the drop from every angle to see it exclude the whole world. But the word “coy” – an important word for Marvell – gives the drop itself some responsibility for its exclusion. The drop is filled with light, and yet its interior is somehow invisible, a paradox that defines coyness in this context. The praise for the coy dew is part of Marvell’s abiding admiration for the unseen, which he figures sometimes in aesthetic terms and sometimes in erotic ones. In his notorious poems about little girls, the beauty of the subjects often seems to be concentrated in the invisibility of their future adult selves (and the possibility that those selves will never come to be).53

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In “Young Love,” the fantasy is of stopping time by means of an intervention in maturation, necessary because of the risk of death: Now then love me: time may take   Thee before thy time away: Of this Need wee’l Virtue make,   And learn Love before we may. (17–20)

The girl’s possible future death means that a space for love existing in potential must be created. That space turns out to be better than all others, like “Kingdomes” that crown infant kings “So all Forraign Claims to drown” (25, 28): So, to make all Rivals vain,   Now I crown thee with my Love: Crown me with thy Love again,   And we both shall Monarchs prove. (29–32)

The kingdom over which the two jointly rein is a strange one: they are king and queen of a potential future necessitated by the alternate potential future in which the girl dies before reaching maturity. Unlike Cowley, Marvell is willing to admit that the love he seeks can exist only in fantasy. The diction in “Young Love” resembles that of “The Picture of Little T.C. in a Prospect of Flowers,” in which again Marvell suggests that love is better in anticipation than in actuality: O then let me in time compound, And parly with those conquering Eyes; Ere they have try’d their force to wound, Ere, with their glancing wheels, they drive In Triumph over Hearts that strive, And them that yield but more despise. Let me be laid, Where I may see thy Glories from some shade. (17–24)

When T.C. is an adult, her conquests will despise her for her power over them; it is only by freezing time in her childhood that the speaker can avoid this fate. But his admiration for her is not despite the injury he is forestalling, but because of its potential. The “shade” cast by her youth enables his appreciation of a future power he will be unable to withstand. What he most admires about her is something removed from him doubly:

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by its status as mere potential and by the possibility that death will “Nip in the blossome all our hopes and Thee” (line 40). The preoccupation with delaying potential futures in the poems about little girls allows for an unexpected reading of “To his Coy Mistress”: one in which Marvell prefers the fantasy of infinite time and space at the beginning to the climax at the end. Slowing time, as “Young Love” tells us, is a good thing, and in “Coy Mistress” the lady’s coyness can accomplish it – albeit only within the poem’s conceit, formed as a contrary-to-fact conditional: Thou by the Indian Ganges side Should’st Rubies find: I by the Tide Of Humber would complain. I would Love you ten years before the Flood: And you should if you please refuse Till the Conversion of the Jews. My vegetable Love should grow Vaster then Empires, and more slow. (5–12)

So the untimely love is the one that, like the infant love, is superior to kingdoms. The image at the end is the opposite, an abrupt consumption of time: And now, like am’rous birds of prey, Rather at once our Time devour, Than languish in his slow-chapt pow’r. (37–9)

The power of time is contained in its slowness, as is the power gained by time’s conqueror. In this sense, time’s power is the same whether the “iron grates” are broken through or not: the lady’s coyness reveals the power of time, and her requested willingness will reveal the power of time in exactly the same way. Readings of the poem as hostile to its subject are simplistic – there is admiration for her as well, and a sympathy derived from mutual appreciation of delay.54 Sex and death are both inferior possibilities to the “vegetable love” that can exist only in potential, a potential the coy mistress keeps active by wavering between acceptance and rejection of the speaker, freezing the seduction at the point of its greatest number of possible futures. The coyness of the drop of dew is parallel: not a retreat from time in its case, but a retreat from the three-dimensional space reflected on the drop’s surface. Coyness is a representational process like that of the tears on the Nymph’s statue: it fixes a moment in time and space without revealing the mechanism that allows it to do so.

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Both of these kinds of coyness accentuate poetry’s ability to hold its readers at a remove. But they also keep their own capacities to themselves, and Marvell seems fairly consistently to value power reserved and unexercised, sometimes connected explicitly to retirement, as the chief virtue of the people he most admires. In the “Horatian Ode,” this preference for withheld capacity applies to both Cromwell and Charles. The poem’s praise for Cromwell is doubtlessly highest when he is still in his peaceful state:   And, if we would speak true,   Much to the Man is due. Who, from his private gardens, where He liv’d reserved and austere,   As if his highest lot   To plant the Bergamot, Could by industrious Valour climbe To ruine the great Work of Time,   And cast the Kingdome old   Into another Mold. (27–36)

“Could,” in line 33, is past tense; Cromwell’s capacity “To ruine the great Work of Time” applies while he is still in his garden. His retirement contains within it his ability to have an impact in the world, but in a hidden (coy) state. It is not because he is without ambition besides bergamot cultivation that he has such ability, but his lack of ambition does allow his abilities to be defined in a way that the actual exercise of that power would complicate. This praise of Cromwell is parallel to Marvell’s striking use of the same capacity, to ruin, in his commendatory poem for the second edition of Paradise Lost: When I beheld the Poet blind, yet bold, In slender Book his vast Design unfold, Messiah Crown’d, Gods Reconcil’d Decree, Rebelling Angels, the Forbidden Tree, Heav’n, Hell, Earth, Chaos, All; the Argument Held me a while misdoubting his Intent, That he would ruine (for I saw him strong) The sacred Truths to Fable and Old Song, (So Sampson groap’d the Temples Posts in spight) The World o’re whelming to revenge his Sight.

154  Solitude and Speechlessness   Yet as I read, soon growing less severe, I lik’d his Project, the success did fear; (1–12)

The rhetorical mode here is deferral – the delay of the object of “ruine” over the parenthesis immediately following it is a miniature version of the longer, more disturbing delay until line 11, when Marvell finally, almost reluctantly, admits his initial apprehension was wrong, and Milton will let the sacred truths live. But he continues to defend his “causeless, yet not impious, surmise” that Milton would ruin them, even though it was wrong, because he admires Milton’s ability to be far more radical than he is being. This latent power resides in the text of Paradise Lost, blameslessly perhaps, but hardly irrelevantly. Ruin and destruction measure greatness, but only when kept in reserve, just as the beauty of T.C. is at its height when her cruelty to her conquests still lies in the future. Shakespeare says in Sonnet 94 that “They that have power to hurt and will do none ... are the lords and owners of their faces”; Marvell suggests that Milton, by not exercising the strength to ruin the sacred truths that he possesses, most clearly establishes the accomplishment of his poem. Cromwell does the same by, essentially, delaying his destruction of the old order. Marvell praises the king in more subdued but similar terms.55 The king is born to be a “Royal Actor” but does not act; like Cromwell in the garden he remains “reserved and austere.” Cromwell here is the one who has acted, such that:   the Royal Actor born The Tragick Scaffold might adorn:   While round the armed Bands   Did clap their bloody hands. He nothing common did or mean Upon that memorable Scene:   But with his keener Eye   The Axes edge did try: Nor call’d the Gods with vulgar spight To vindicate his helpless Right,   But Bow’d his comely Head,   Down as upon a Bed. (53–64)

The whole passage is about power unclaimed. Charles could call on the gods to vindicate him, as Shakespeare’s Richard II does. His eye is sharper than the axe, as if, again like Richard, it could “kill with looks” (Richard II, 3.2.165), but this day it will not. Cromwell’s retired state and Charles’s

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condemned state are parallel, and in both cases are preferred to the ethical messiness of actual political power. The poem does not remove Cromwell and Charles from history (as some critics have claimed) so much as it laments the loss of an alternative history of restrained inaction, seeming as the love poems are to be interested in a false temporality for its own sake.56 On the model of “Drop of Dew,” this reserve is a kind of coyness. It is also a kind of retirement, or to use Marvell’s preferred term, retreat. But Marvell solves the chief problem of retirement Seneca had been forced to respond to – the accusation of idleness – by reinterpreting it as a potential energy, an activity deferred. “The Garden” focusses these themes into a philosophically wide-ranging but tightly organized argument for a physical and intellectual retirement. The fourth stanza of “The Garden” returns to the theme of “Coy Mistress” and “Young Love,” associating retreat with a love withheld and removed from time: When we have run our Passions heat, Love hither makes his best retreat. The Gods, that mortal Beauty chase, Still in a Tree did end their race. Apollo hunted Daphne so, Only that She might Laurel grow. And Pan did after Syrinx speed, Not as a Nymph, but for a Reed. (“The Garden,” 25–32)

The notion that Pan preferred Syrinx in her reed form – the inactive conclusion of her metamorphosis – is almost a gloss on the “vegetable love” of “Coy Mistress,” and is parallel to Marvell’s interest in eternal childhood. The retreat of love into the garden, then, is neither a denial of love nor a consummation – the garden life is both loving and solitary.57 Paul Hammond rightly calls attention to “the disappearance of women” in this stanza as in others of Marvell’s lyrics, but given Marvell’s admiration for invisibility, disappearance is not necessarily neglect.58 That is not to say that many readers will find much to sympathize with in this nihilistic account of love, in which the condition that makes consummation impossible is also love’s motive. But the stanza rewrites Ovid in a way that is consistent with the aesthetic of the statue in “The Nymph Complaining,” recasting Ovid’s metamorphosis by making the transformed state the intended end of divine love. The nexus of three concepts apparent in many of Marvell’s poems – solitude, an inactive and perpetually dilatory love, and a power that manifests

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in potential rather than action – conditions the final stanzas of “The Garden,” starting with the sixth’s claim that mental reality exceeds physical reality: Mean while the Mind, from pleasure less, Withdraws into its happiness: The Mind, that Ocean where each kind Does streight its own resemblance find; Yet it creates, transcending these, Far other Worlds, and other Seas; Annihilating all that’s made To a green Thought in a green Shade. (41–8)

The “ocean” of the mind is somewhat like the drop of dew – a self-contained watery sphere that by the sheer scope of its capacity to reflect and refract displaces the world itself. In “The Mower’s Song,” “the greenness of the Grass” in which the mind “Did see its Hopes as in a Glass” is the reverse effect, but maintains the same reflective relationship between thought and world (lines 3–4). The question is how much of a relationship that is: what conduits there might be between the inside and outside. The much-­ discussed ambiguity of “Annihilating” – as William Empson says, it can mean two things that are opposites, “contemplating everything or shutting everything out” – affects the meaning of “Withdraws” in the stanza’s second line.59 The mind withdraws from one kind of pleasure to another; it does not explicitly withdraw from the world itself. Whatever kind of life surrounds this aesthetically productive daydreaming is quite limited, though. The suspended love from his earlier poems is replaced here not only by the gods’ love for their transformed plants, but by Adam walking in Eden “without a mate” in stanza VIII: Such was that happy Garden-state, While Man there walk’d without a Mate: After a Place so pure, and sweet, What other Help could yet be meet! But ’twas beyond a Mortal’s share To wander solitary there: Two Paradises ’twere in one To live in Paradise alone. (57–64)

The patriarchal assumption that women are a threat to male contentment is clear enough here. Still, like the earlier stanza fantasizing plants as the apotheosis of feminine desirability, this one incorporates misogyny but

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goes beyond it: the claim is not that Eden can remain a paradise without Eve, because that would only explain one paradise, and Adam is in two. The second one is solitude as distinct from Eden itself, which is to say, within the logic of “The Garden,” that it is love, but a vegetable love that is not tied to a realized and flawed partner. The paradox of this stanza is similar to that of Marvell’s praise of Cromwell and Milton: Cromwell is most praiseworthy when he has the potential to ruin the old order but has not acted upon it yet, Milton when he is able to be misconstrued as blaspheming. Adam is at his best in anticipation of his fall. In this way, the retirement of “The Garden” always anticipates its dissolution; even the flowery zodiac of the last stanza is powered by “the milder sun” (67), acknowledging that an inevitably more severe sun will both kill the plants and cast sharper lines on regular sundials. Marvell’s retirement is always more of a retreat from (or, as in “Dew,” a turning away “Every way”) than a retreat to, and as such can never be final. Of course, that retreat achieves at least fixity, if not finality, in print, but Marvell’s reluctance for that possibility comes through in the 1681 posthumous edition of his poems. Given his interest in a love that functions best in fantasized potential, the possibly fictitious person of Mary Marvell is an almost too perfect conduit for Marvell’s lyrics to the reading public. Mary appears in her married form in the note “To the Reader” behind the title page of the 1681 Miscellaneous Poems. That note reads: These are to Certifie every Ingenious Reader, that all these Poems, as also the other things in this Book contained, are Printed according to the exact Copies of my late dear Husband, under his own Hand-Writing, being found since his Death among his other Papers, Witness my Hand this 15th day of October, 1680. Mary Marvell.

Mary Marvell assumed the administration of Marvell’s will in 1679, seven months after Marvell’s death; as Smith documents, this delay is only a small part of a series of financial and legal complexities in which Mary played a prominent role. She insisted she was Marvell’s wife; one of his creditors, John Farrington, said otherwise, and that she was a servant in Marvell’s household named Mary Palmer with illicit designs on his assets (which turned out to be scarce anyway).60 If they were married, theirs was, as Smith stresses, an “unorthodox” relationship appropriate to “a man who had no interest in marriage for propagation, romance, or companionship.”61 Whether Mary is a fictitious spouse or an unconventional one, she is a remarkably appropriate compiler for the Miscellaneous Poems. The poems are revealed from death’s concealment and “among his other

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Papers” by a love that comes into being in retrospect and posthumously, the mirror image of Marvell’s love for the imagined figures created by the possible future deaths of little girls. Who else should profit from these poems if not such a privatively understood wife? It is not a coincidence that critics struggle to reconcile the contents of Marvell’s poems to his biography. Marvell’s instinct for retreat makes most sense in poems that speak for their author only provisionally and that are left, largely uncirculated, to an uncertain future. In this sense, ­poetry ­necessarily represents a part of his mind, and of his life, that cannot be ­reconciled to the whole. It is surprising when “the skilful Gardner” ­appears – ­albeit in past tense, his presence marked in the form of the g­ arden but not otherwise apparent – in the last stanza of “The Garden” (65), but this ­gardener has neither created nor intrudes upon the poet’s retreat. He is like the sculptor in “The Nymph Complaining”: a half-acknowledged presence necessary to make the retreating assemblage work, but not its point. B ­ ecause they are creators, these artists might sound like analogues for the poet, but that would negate the strong sympathy between the poet and the retreating figure, whether the speaker of “The Garden” or the nymph herself. The sculptor and gardener function better as stand-ins for the circulator (whether scribe, printer, or self-appointed literary executor), whose work is necessary for our interpretation of the poem but separate from its ­acknowledged purpose.

• The equivalent of Mary Marvell for Thomas Traherne’s poems is a combination of two people with unchallenged identities: Traherne’s brother Philip and the late-Victorian rare book dealer Bertram Dobell. Their roles have emerged in reverse chronological order: Dobell did not know about Philip Traherne when he announced the discovery of several manuscripts in Thomas’s hand, the poems from which he published as The Poetical Works of Thomas Traherne in 1903. The story Dobell tells in the introduction to this edition is engrossing: he begins by ruling out, on stylistic grounds, the poems’ attribution to Vaughan by Alexander Grosart, the previous owner of the manuscript that contained them. Several clues lead him by degrees first to a Private Chaplain to Sir Orlando Bridgeman, and then to that chaplain’s name, Thomas Traherne.62 The discovery is then confirmed by the appearance of a poem from one of Dobell’s manuscripts in Traherne’s Christian Ethicks, which was printed posthumously in 1675 under Traherne’s name. Dobell characterizes his discovery the same way Mary Marvell does: he stresses the poems’ authentic representation of Traherne’s personality

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and himself as the best person to reveal it. His understanding of poets’ personalities is what first led him to doubt the attribution to Vaughan: “With Traherne all nature is bathed in warmth and light: with Vaughan we feel sensible of a certain coolness of temperament, and are conscious that he rejoices rather in the twilight than in the radiance of noonday.”63 But Dobell’s claim to understand this characteristic way of thinking must be explained within the extent and limitations of his sympathy for the poet: “Much as I dissent from his opinions, and much as my point of view as regards the meaning and the purpose of life differs from his, I have yet found it easy to appreciate the fineness of his character, and the charm of his writings.”64 Dobell and his profession are everywhere in the story: Christian Ethicks, the crucial piece of evidence in his case, “is so rare a book that I have only just obtained a copy of it, after searching for it for nearly two years. Few books surely have had so unfortunate a fate.”65 That last statement is not really true – the English Short-Title Catalogue lists 35 copies in its database of major depositories, not an unusual number for a seventeenth-century book by a (then) little-known author – but it is a signal that Dobell continues to pursue this work from a bookseller’s perspective. Dobell’s earlier counterpart, Philip Traherne, emerged in Gladys Wade’s edition of Traherne’s poems in 1932: Wade was able to recognize Philip’s handwriting in corrections and emendations to the poems in the Dobell folio manuscript, and to match the hand to another manuscript, Poems of Felicity. The latter manuscript is well organized and carefully prepared, apparently intended for publication: it opens with a title page listing Thomas Traherne as author and Philip as stationer. Poems of Felicity contains twenty-two of the thirty-six poems in the Dobell folio, as well as thirty-eight poems that appear only in it (one of which contains two stanzas that appear under their own title in Dobell). Philip edited the former group, as indicated by the marks in his hand in the Dobell folio, which (as all editors assume) implies that he also edited the ones appearing only in his manuscript. Poems of Felicity also contains subsequent emendations to the original transcription, which are also in Philip’s hand. This circumstance has led to some questions about how to present the poems in print. Wade published the latest available version of each poem, even if it meant preferring Philip’s version of a poem that survives in Thomas’s hand; she defends this practice on grounds of consistency and because Philip “had a far more critical ear than his brother for metrical defects,” even if he might “substitute at times a duller orthodoxy for his brother’s radiant spirituality.”66 The next editor to prepare a major edition, H.M. Margoliouth, criticized her for this decision, and took the opposite approach so far as to attempt to reconstruct bits and pieces of Thomas’s originals out of Philip’s

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revising process (Margoliouth presents poems in both brothers’ hands on facing pages).67 Philip Traherne’s revisions have continued to present challenges to editors. Jan Ross, the most recent editor of the poems, presents transcripts of the Dobell folio and the final version (with changes noted in the commentary) of Poems of Felicity in full, and separately. A new, large-scale Oxford edition of Traherne’s complete works is currently in preparation, and will apparently take a similar tack.68 But the editing question also frames one of interpretation: how do we read Philip Traherne, and how does that decision affect how we read Thomas Traherne? To some critics, the situation suggests that we should regard Poems of Felicity as a distinctive, collaborative eighteenth-century work rather than a source of information about some extant and some lost seventeenth-century poems.69 But this approach does not explain either why Philip set his title page up the way he did, nor why the printed edition he planned never came about. It seems just as likely that Philip’s work came from a desire to fulfil an intent of Thomas’s rather than his own (and it seems plausible that he abandoned that edition because he found updating the poems to eighteenth-century standards too difficult). Thomas Traherne is only known to us now, we should remember, because he was a published writer. Traherne’s authorship of the anonymous Roman Forgeries was retroactively announced in advertisements for the posthumously published Christian Ethicks and was the primary accomplishment that gained his posthumous entry to Anthony Wood’s Athenæ Oxonienses, which was the chief source of information that enabled Dobell to establish Traherne’s authorship of the poems and Centuries.70 Nor was Traherne entirely unfamiliar to the reading public: the Newberry Library copy of Forgeries contains Traherne’s name on its dedication page in a seventeenth- or early eighteenth-century hand, suggesting a reader who took note either of the advertisement for Ethicks or Wood’s note. Poems of Felicity tells us very little about eighteenth-century devotional poetry, since it is an unusual and not fully realized example, but, encouraged by Philip Traherne’s title page, it does fit into an extant corpus of Thomas Traherne’s writing. I make this point not to revive the debates of the twentieth century over the nature of authorship or the goals of editing; on the contrary, I acknowledge that we cannot adequately read Thomas Traherne’s poems without keeping always in mind how little information we have about them or about him. But understanding Philip’s manuscript as a collaborative work does not give us a way around the fundamental inaccessibility of Thomas Traherne’s poetry, which we must accept as the prior condition of any attempt at interpretation. Indeed, some of Philip’s revisions show that readership itself is a challenge to Thomas Traherne’s style and themes, one

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that Philip cannot always overcome. Philip Traherne and Bertram Dobell are thus engaged in the parallel task of trying to create a public poet out of a private one, and encounter similar difficulties in doing so: Dobell struggles to know Traherne, Philip to present him to a reader who did not know him. The relationship between the two manuscripts reveals the paradox of Thomas Traherne’s evident purpose as his brother (and Dobell) attempted to represent it: to create a poetic mode that exemplifies for his readers the virtues of refusing to engage with a world that includes those readers. Philip Traherne’s Poems of Felicity opens with a poem titled “The Author to the Critical Peruser,” signed “T.T.,” but its title presumably provided by Philip. No version in Thomas’s hand survives. The poem does not, in fact, address readers (or critics) as such directly; its claim that Traherne’s poems are written “to th’end thy Soul might see / With open Eys thy great Felicity” (7–8) sounds like it is addressed to one of those near-perfect friends he describes in Inducements to Retirednes, not a “critical peruser.”71 Philip’s use of that term indicates his redirection of these poems’ relation to readership with public scrutiny in mind. The poem is actually about writing, however, not reading. Echoing Herbert’s regret at “Curling with metaphors a plain intention” (“Jordan” [2], line 5), “The Author to the Critical Peruser” announces that Traherne’s poetic goals are opposed to “Poetick Strains and Shadows” (36), substituting something less representational but more “real”: No curling Metaphors that gild the Sence, Nor Pictures here, nor painted Eloquence; No florid Streams of Superficial Gems, But real Crowns and Thrones and Diadems! That Gold on Gold should hiding shining ly May well be recon’d baser Heraldry. (11–16)

The images of jewellery establish a parallel between austerity of style and of living – sense without “curling Metaphors” is analogous to living without gems and gold, because extravagant poetic style is akin to regilding what is already gold (of a different and better kind) to begin with. The pleasure of the kind of metaphors Traherne rejects is like the “far fetcht” ones Cowley planned to carry with him into his retirement: a pleasure for the writer in coming up with them, not a benefit for the reader. The goal Traherne sets for his poetic project is an august one, and also one that is explicitly opposed to literary goals; it is: to make Us Kings: To make us Kings indeed! Not verbal Ones,

162  Solitude and Speechlessness But reall Kings, exalted unto Thrones; And more than Golden Thrones! ’Tis this I do, Letting Poëtick Strains and Shadows go. (32–6)

These lines undoubtedly contain a criticism of the kind of lyric ambition in which the power of a conceit can be its own accomplishment, and they are also an acknowledgment of the extent to which power in the world is, in fact, “verbal.” But Traherne’s “us,” its antecedent never quite made clear, leaves ambiguous the relationship between verbal and “reall Kings.” Are they opposed, or can poetry serve as a conduit to a more legitimate kingship than it can represent? Poetry’s fragility and potential for failure are part of the point for Traherne, and they reveal the extent to which ­audience is a challenge to his sense of retirement. Just as, in Inducements to Retirednes, he defends his own decision not to marry but declines to ­recommend it to others, Traherne makes his reader no promises for ­felicity – the benefits it allows are strictly potential, and Traherne does not give instructions on how to bring them about. Philip’s revisions show an intention to provide those instructions – to resolve Traherne’s avoidance of readership into a message for the public. The first poem in both the Dobell folio and Poems of Felicity (after the prefatory poems) is “The Salutation.” The differences between the two highlight the strangeness of Thomas’s sense of temporality, narrative, and representation. The version in Thomas’s hand begins: These little Limmes, These Eys and Hands which here I find, These rosie Cheeks wherwith my Life begins, Where have ye been,? Behind What Curtain were ye from me hid so long! Where was? in what Abyss, my Speaking Tongue? (1–6)

Philip’s version alters the third and sixth lines: These little Limbs, These Eys and Hands which here I find, This panting Heart wherwith my Life begins; Where have ye been? Behind What Curtain were ye from me hid so long! Where was, in what Abyss, my new-made Tongue?

The stanza introduces one of Traherne’s abiding themes: that a more immediate understanding of the presence of God in the world is available

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in infancy, and the goal of retirement is to rediscover it within the adult self.72 How infancy is imagined, then, is crucial to understanding how the return is to be effected. Philip’s change in line three is relatively subtle – a shift from an external view of the infant to an internal one – but intensifies the sense of return. Thomas’s version pictures infancy, because his intent is descriptive; Philip’s re-experiences infancy as a form of prescription. Thomas’s “Speaking Tongue” in the last line is more surprising, seeming to contradict the fundamental idea of infancy (etymologically the word means not speaking). Philip’s shift not only resolves this dissonance, it brings the poem closer to the relationship between retirement and infancy as more broadly imagined. Philip’s version is reminiscent of the similar idea proposed by Vaughan, who thinks of retirement as a return to an infancy without speech, as he makes explicit in “The Retreate”: Before I taught my tongue to wound My Conscience with a sinfull sound, Or had the black art to dispence A sev’rall sinne to ev’ry sence, But felt through all this fleshly dresse Bright shootes of everlastingnesse. O how I long to travell back And tread again that ancient track! (15–22)

Vaughan imagines his life as a road, with infancy a specific piece of it he could recreate if only it were possible to travel backward within his own experience. Thomas Traherne, in contrast, imagines infancy as a state of being contained within his adult self. Philip Traherne attempts to clarify this undefined chronology by hewing to an idea closer to Vaughan’s, and restoring a literal and sensible conception by suggesting that the memory of actual, lived infancy – rather than an idealized version that somehow floats within adult experience – is the essence of felicity. This literal sense of things is in keeping with Philip’s seeming interest in maintaining felicity as something achievable, an aim to which P ­ oems of Felicity guides its critical perusers. Even when the speaker of the ­poems addresses himself, Philip appears to have that didactic purpose in mind, as in the final stanza of “The Preparative.” The Dobell manuscript renders it: A Disentangledand a Naked Sence A Mind thats unpossest, A Disengaged Brest,

164  Solitude and Speechlessness An Empty and a Quick Intelligence Acquainted with the Golden Mean, An Even Spirit Pure and Serene, Is that where Beauty, Excellence, And Pleasure keep their Court of Residence. My Soul retire, Get free, and so thou shalt even all Admire. (61–70)

Philip’s Poems of Felicity reworks the final lines: A disentangled and a naked Sense, A Mind that’s unpossest, A disengaged Breast, A quickunprejudic’d Intelligence Acquainted with the Golden Mean, An eeven Spirit, quiet, and serene, Is that where Wisdom’s Excellence And Pleasure keep their Court of Residence. My Soul get free, And then thou may’st possess Felicity. (61–70)

Philip’s elision of Thomas’s direct reference to retirement is combined – through the final rhyme pair – with his turn toward a clearer self-improvement. For Thomas, retirement moves the soul toward an action: admiring. For Philip, the emphasis is on freedom, which in Thomas’s version is secondary to retirement, and freedom works not toward action but toward the possession of felicity as a concrete benefit. To some extent this shift may be the result of Philip’s repackaging of the poems for an eighteenth-century context: the Restoration debates over retirement are no longer as familiar. Still, it is notable that Philip moves the poems toward claiming a greater benefit for their readers; the extent to which felicity is ultimately something the poems document rather than guide makes them too inward-directed for his purposes.73 The interpretive problem raised by Philip’s orientation toward readers’ interests is that in Thomas’s poems in his own hand, and in the Centuries, the actual trajectory from retirement to felicity is deeply mysterious. In the poems there is something curiously negative about the benefit of separation from society. At times it seems to be a recovery of infancy, except that ­Traherne imbues his descriptions of infancy with knowledge of the society the infant is uniquely able to ignore, as in Thomas’s version of “Dumnesse”: Then did I dwell within a World of Light, Distinct and Seperat from all Mens Sight,

The Naked Sense of Retirement  165 Where I did feel strange Thoughts, and such Things see That were, or seemd, only reveald to Me, There I saw all the World Enjoyd by one; There I was in the World my Self alone; No Business Serious seemd but one; No Work But one was found; and that did in me lurk. (32–9)

The perspective is double – the infant’s consciousness of a world of light is coupled with an aversion to the scrutiny and serious business the infant does not yet know of but the speaker does. In Philip’s Poems of Felicity, “Distinct” in line 33 is changed to “Retir’d,” and the purpose of such retirement made clearer; lines 37 to 39 (which are 34 to 36 in Felicity) read: There All Things seem’d to end in Me alone: No Business serious deem’d, but that which is Design’d to perfect my Eternal Bliss.

So a passage that in Thomas’s manuscript moves toward the inmost location and task, an unnamed work lurking within the self, shifts in Philip’s toward a specific design that will lead to felicity. That change makes the poem easier to read, since it makes the connection much clearer between retirement and infancy: retirement, to achieve its goal of felicity, requires a partial recovery of infancy’s singular focus on the divine task embedded within the self. Thomas never quite endorses that connection explicitly in the poems in his own hand. In the Centuries, Thomas is more direct about what solitude accomplishes, though it is still often negative – solitude provides a way of understanding the social world it excludes, and that understanding helps achieve a happier relationship with God. This gives it a somewhat opaque relation to the central theme of the Centuries, which is instruction to a friend on the achieving of that divinely inspired happiness to which Traherne is committed. Indeed, solitude does not figure prominently in the Centuries until the third, in which Traherne turns to autobiography. Despite its striking images of isolation, the Third Century is often devoted to understanding the relationship between the self and society. That relationship is necessary even though Traherne defines it unilaterally from the self’s perspective, and seeks the social element of an emotional state he perceives as non-social. The first time he saw “a Magnificent or Noble Dining Room,” he enjoyed the “Carved Imagery” but was disappointed to find that: all was Dead, and there was no Motion. But afterwards, when I saw it full of Lords and Ladies and Musick and Dancing, the Place which once seemd not to differ from a Solitary Den, had now Entertainment and nothing of

166  Solitude and Speechlessness Tediousness but pleasure in it. By which I perceived (upon a Reflexion made long after) That Men and Women are when well understood a Principal Part of our True felicity. (3.22)

The insertion of the phrase “when well understood” is important, because, as Inducements to Retirednes makes explicit, friendship matters to felicity but its significance is more clearly expressed in solitude. The empty room is necessary to understand the full one. This insight leads into a further one that comes out of the intense experience of loneliness: Another time, in a Lowering and sad Evening, being alone in the field, when all things were dead and quiet, a certain Want and Horror fell upon me, beyond imagination. The unprofitableness and Silence of the Place dissatisfied me, its Wideness terrified me, from the utmost Ends of the Earth fears surrounded me. How did I know but Dangers might suddainly arise from the East, and invade me from the unknown Regions beyond the Seas? I was a Weak and little child, and had forgotten there was a man alive in the Earth. Yet som thing also of Hope and Expectation comforted me from every Border. This taught me that I was concernd in all the World: and that in the remotest Borders the Causes of Peace delight me, and the Beauties of the Earth when seen were made to entertain me: that I was made to hold a Communion with the Secrets of Divine Providence in all the World: and that these things being Absent to my Ey, were my Joys and consolations: as present to my Understanding as the Wideness and Emptiness of the Universe which I saw before me. (3.23)

Traherne’s pedagogy of contraries is essential here: the lesson of delight and entertainment comes out of the experience of want, horror, and fear. In keeping with his suspicion of trope and image as unnecessary gilding, he wants his friend to value what is absent to the eye more than what is present. That absence makes itself felt not only in the sense of want Traherne describes as falling upon him, but in the lack of any narrative mechanism that bridges the gap between fear and comfort. Comfort is so invisible in the world that it challenges narration: “Content,” as Katherine Philips says, is “abstruse and hid in night.”74 I do not believe that the difficulties in placing Thomas Traherne within a larger literary history are merely the result of methodological limitations. Both his autobiographical writing and the peculiar circumstances of his surviving works insist on his singularity, isolating him from literary and social worlds alike. The ability of the poems and the Centuries to help a friend achieve felicity is a power existing in potential, not incomparable

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to that Marvell imagines in dead kings and mortal girls. But this power depends on the text: the differing senses of infancy in the various versions condition Thomas’s and Philip’s depictions of retirement itself, and Philip’s version pulls this idea of a power in reserve in the direction of something active and public. Whether because of his own preference or his perception of the needs of the book market, Philip downplays his brother’s emphasis on a potential never quite fulfilled, but Philip cannot eliminate it altogether, and his own ambitions for Thomas’s work were themselves unfulfilled. What Traherne’s poems have to offer a reader is, by their own admission and as confirmed by their history, elusive. Cowley’s assertion that dead poets have it better is made in broad terms, and indeed the challenge to audience of self-consciously introspective poetry is a general one, of which these three poets are representative in distinctive ways. Marvell identifies Milton, with reason, as emblematic of potency in the midst of retreat. Paradise Lost’s references to narration are about the power of solitude, the “thoughts,” uninformed by anything external, that voluntarie move Harmonious numbers; as the wakeful Bird Sings darkling, and in shadiest Covert hid Tunes her nocturnal Note. (PL 3.37–40)

Marvell points out that what Milton withholds is as crucial for the force of his poem as what he offers. He is right, and his insight models a kind of reading attuned to potential power and the withheld idea that applies effectively to Paradise Lost. Milton compares the “evil dayes ... and evil tongues” that find him “In darkness, and with dangers compast round / And solitude” (7.26–8) to: the barbarous dissonance Of Bacchus and his Revellers, the Race Of that wilde Rout that tore the Thracian Bard (32–4)

The complaint contains a hint of a threat, since Orpheus’s challenge to the social order is genuine. But despite his “fit audience ... though few” (7.31), Milton still embraces the work of the world, and an argument that is “sufficient of itself to raise” the name of epic above its usual topics (9.43). Paradise Lost is a public poem that broadcasts the privacy of its poetic means, as if still referring a reader to that inaccessible realm of private study M ­ ilton held apart from his audience in The Reason of Church Government.

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Traherne’s retreat is more complete than Milton’s, but leaves the power of a text over its reader’s lives uncertain, despite Traherne’s sincere interest in helping his friend achieve felicity. The task Philip gave himself – to bring that sincere helpfulness to the fore and rescue it from Thomas’s instinct to shrink from readable narration – was never completed, perhaps because it is impossible. As Cowley understood, to achieve a true retreat within fully legible poetry would necessarily mean maintaining authorial control after death: he wanted to be both Andrew and Mary Marvell, both Thomas and Philip Traherne. But Cowley also knew that that dream was merely one of his “far fetcht Metaphors,” which he could realize no more easily than one can tell time by a sundial in the grave.

Chapter Six

Literary History in Isolation: Bacon, Hofmannsthal, and Historical Memory

I have argued throughout this book that literary activity is shaped not just by interaction with an initial audience but by the possibility of long-term reading far in the future; as Samuel Daniel says, “I know I shalbe read.” In this chapter I turn from the anticipation of such future reading to its actuality, and to readers who encounter a text well after the death of its author. I do so with three concerns in mind: the potential experience by readers of the isolation of texts, including the possibility of parallels with other kinds of isolation to which the reader may be subject; the limitations of originary context in determining later readers’ engagement with old literary works; and the bearing of textual isolation on the relationship between reading and interpretation. I will examine these concerns through two episodes in the long and complicated posthumous literary life of Francis Bacon. The two do not perfectly coincide – they do not reveal quite the same things about isolation, reading, and interpretation – but both of them demonstrate the distance between reader and writer and acknowledge the instinct of readers to bridge that gap as well as the obstacles to doing so. Both examples show Bacon received in ways that accord neither with his own conception of his literary career nor with the ways he has commonly been thought of; indeed, in both cases I suggest that critics have avoided or struggled with the interpretive questions that come out of these unusual readerly engagements. My first example is a poem, beginning “The world’s a bubble,” that seems alternately to be regarded as Bacon’s only successful poem or, by a narrower definition, his only poem. For a text that is very seldom subject to critical interpretation, this poem has had a surprisingly long and varied history, appearing consistently in print from the mid-seventeenth century to the present and remarkably frequently in manuscript during the early part of that span. In ways that I suggest are representative of an often implicit insight about it, the poem has been treated as unusual through

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its history: its relation to its source is uncertain, and Bacon’s name separates it from the similar adaptations and epigrams with which it was often included in its early appearances. Its opening image, the bubble, implies an unstable relationship between content and form that parallels the relationship between literary history and an individual poem Bacon’s epigram instantiates. My second story is about an unexpected invocation of Bacon’s name. In October of 1902, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, a young poet who later became better known as a playwright and librettist, published a prose work titled simply Ein Brief, written in the form of a letter from a fictitious Jacobean aristocrat (but with the surname of a real English family). Despite its brevity and unusual frame, the work was considered significant by some prominent twentieth-century critics. Theodor Adorno remarks early in his Aesthetic Theory that Ein Brief is “the first striking evidence” that the materials of poetic language “have lost their a priori self-evidence.”1 This is an intriguing claim to make about a work that, set in seventeenth-century England, does not necessarily announce its modernity and is written by a writer with a traditionalist streak. A headnote to the piece reads “This is the letter Philip, Lord Chandos, younger son of the Earl of Bath, wrote to Francis Bacon, later Baron Verulam, Viscount St. Albans, apologizing for his complete abandonment of literary activity.”2 The letter itself describes a series of experiences that have shaken Chandos’s faith in language, not so much the poetic language in regard to which Adorno understands it but the ordinary language of conversation and moral judgment: one of its climactic moments is Chandos’s inability to scold a disobedient child. I came upon this work some years ago by chance, and was surprised by the apparent lack of interest among its critics in explaining the reference to Bacon. Though the work alludes to Bacon’s educated, upper-class background  – Chandos remarks more than once that his addressee will be familiar with the aristocratic life he finds increasingly alienating and the texts that constitute his education – nowhere does it mention any of ­Bacon’s writings, philosophical ideas, or specific experiences in government, law, and scientific inquiry. Many critics have ignored the fictional frame of the letter or treated it as a mere pretext, while others have thought of Bacon as a stand-in for philosophers or intellectuals in general, despite the plethora of available German and Austrian examples.3 A number of the interpretive questions that occupy the present book grew out of my initial question about Hofmannsthal’s reference to Bacon. The fundamental elusiveness and yet urgency of that reference  – a late reader demonstrating an unspoken debt to an earlier author not by writing about him but by writing to him, as if reaching across the centuries – spoke to the parallel I have been contemplating between the condition of

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Renaissance writers addressing unknown and unpredictable readers, and that of modern readers confronting their necessarily partial knowledge of old texts. The natural response to such a predicament is to lapse into speechlessness, as Chandos does. But the strange reading I have been a­ dvocating, an interpretation that acknowledges my own ignorance and the way the texts under discussion withdraw from being read, is a s­ econdary approach made necessary because silence seems insufficient. Even C ­ handos, after all, is rather eloquent for one who has sworn off language. To consider literary history, which links together disparate works in different languages or of different times, can be alienating and isolating, leaving us with knowledge we can neither comfortably say we share with readers of the past nor effectively convey to our own contemporaries. This dissonance is very apparent in teaching: when students are anxious about approaching old texts, their concerns are not merely obstacles for teachers to overcome but revelations of a real and persistent gulf between writer and reader. As much as readership and our modernity separate us from such texts, however, they also allow for a different kind of connection, since texts moving through time are themselves, as I have argued, solitary wanderers disconnected from their origins. The isolation of the text and the reader (and hence the teacher or critic) are parallel and induced by the same difficulty in confronting an ongoing and extended literary history. In some sense, the task of bridging the gap between reader and text is the domain of philology, but (as, again, students can attest) commentary and other apparatus can only supplement the experience of a text, not transform it. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, in his The Powers of Philology: Dynamics of Textual Scholarship, addresses a related issue, though focussing on the philologist’s point of view rather than that of the beneficiary of philological labour. Gumbrecht sees the quest for a fuller understanding of partially preserved old texts as a natural human response, their oldness and incompleteness coinciding in a sense of urgency in the reader’s imagination. Though my sense of what the imaginative response to reading can signify is quite different from his, I am interested in a parallel topic here – how we make sense of texts’ relations to time and to each other. I see those relations, however, as constituting a literary history that emerges out of discomfort, disconnection, and uncertainty. Gumbrecht’s focus is on the “desires for a physical and space-mediated relationship to the things of the world (including texts)” that impel the philological study of literary fragments.4 This desire, despite its academic context, stands in for the broader relationships possible with texts of the past. For Gumbrecht, the doubt of the philologist is emblematic of the appreciation of such texts: “these ambiguities  – the tension, the interference, and the oscillation that the philological practices are capable of

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setting free between mind effects and presence effects  – come close, in both their structure and their impact, to contemporary definitions of aesthetic experience.”5 Gumbrecht’s reference to “presence effects” alludes to his own book Production of Presence, which treads a very careful line between a hermeneutic tradition suspicious of presence and what might be shared between the idea of presence as an “extreme temporality” in Jean-Luc Nancy’s work and the explicitly theological accounting of presence in that of George Steiner.6 This in-between position leads Gumbrecht into an extended interaction with the thinking of Martin Heidegger. Like Heidegger, he allows literature, and specifically poetry, a distinctive role within the kind of aesthetic experience that interests him: Poetry is perhaps the most powerful example of the simultaneity of presence effects and meaning effects  – for even the most overpowering institutional dominance of the hermeneutic dimension could never fully repress the presence effects of rhyme and alliteration, of verse and stanza.7

Gumbrecht’s word “repress” sneaks a criticism of interpretation into this statement of its alternatives and demonstrates why his celebration of philology depends on considering it a quest for a personal relation to a thing rather than an investigation of meaning. In my view, the formal elements Gumbrecht mentions coincide with the work of interpretation not to ­repress a sense of presence, but to reveal an essential distance. Against Gumbrecht’s understanding of philology as a subset of the desire for a physical relationship with things, I believe that texts, because they can involve and include each other in ways that other things cannot, contain and implement a distinctive history of the world, differing from that of material objects, which emerges out of literature in unexpected ways and sometimes without the voluntary agency of either writer or reader. Bacon plays an underappreciated role in this history and its theorization, despite his reputation as a committed materialist. He was a stalwart champion of reading with purpose, which means understanding both the ongoing relationships texts have with each other and the isolation that comes from a reader’s difficulty in perceiving those relationships. In The Advancement of Learning, he finds missing from prior scholarship a way to study broadly the associations of disparate texts from different eras, which he defines as literary history – a term he may have introduced into the English language.8 For all the period’s interest in classical writing, no one, he says, had ever successfully assembled a history of literature: History is Naturall, Civile, Ecclesiasticall & Literary, whereof the three first I allow as extant, the fourth I note as deficient. For no man hath propounded to himselfe the generall state of learning to bee described and represented

Literary History in Isolation  173 from age to age, as many have done the works of Nature, & the State civile and Ecclesiastical; without which the History of the world seemeth to me, to be as the State of Polyphemus with his eye out, that part being wanting, which doth most shew the spirit, and life of the person.9

Bacon’s definition of literary history here is quite broad, but still useful: Bacon understands literature as that which can be placed within a long-term history of learning. History without literary history resembles the blind cyclops because it leaves no temporal structure of learning in which narrower histories can be contextualized. Bacon allows that there have been attempts at histories of literature of particular times, places, or topics, but the history of the whole would provide a different kind of knowledge: a just story of learning, containing the Antiquities & Originalls of diverse Administrations, and Managings; their Flourishings, their Oppositions, ­Decayes, Depressions, Oblivions, Removes; with the causes, and occasions of them, and all other events concerning learning, throughout the ages of the world; I may truly affirme to be wanting. The use and end of which worke, I doe not so much designe for curiositie, or satisfaction of those that are the lovers of learning; but chiefly for a more serious, & grave purpose, which is this in fewe wordes, that it will make learned men wise, in the use and administration of learning.10

For Bacon, learning is not sufficient unless the learned administer it wisely, and the knowledge of that administration lies outside of any individual work. It is assembled out of the relationship between “events concerning learning” over all of “the ages of the world,” with the goal of understanding those events’ “Antiquities and Originalls”: the prior learning underlying each individual articulation of new or newly synthesized knowledge. Understanding the relationship between modes of literature or learning of different eras has value beyond such understanding within a particular era, because when the history is applied over a large span of time, the preoccupations of one generation or another give way to the consistent structures of knowledge. That large span suggests that to think about literary history is necessarily to think about the various purposes to which learning has been put, including unpredictable kinds of reading that emerge gradually. As I have argued throughout this book, readers removed in time from the “Originalls” of their own thinking matter as much as the audience for which texts are intended. Since Bacon made this point there have been many ambitious natural, civil, and ecclesiastical histories, but even now no history of learning on the scale he has in mind has been attempted. Literature has since come to

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be defined more narrowly than Bacon does, and literary history in our time tends to focus on specific periods. As Wai Chee Dimock has argued, however, such narrow historical foci are matters of academic convenience; understanding a text in its proper context still includes a sense of history broader than the precise time and place of its composition, a sense she refers to as “deep time.”11 That approach does not lend itself to a comprehensive literary history, but neither does Bacon’s – he provides no details about how to accomplish such a massive feat, which would seem to require documenting not only all current knowledge, but everything that has ever been known, so that the “Originalls” of what is known might emerge. If such an undertaking is, as it sounds, impossible, then the cyclops must always be blind, and what ambitious literary history does is to demonstrate what is lacking. That negative insight is a large-scale reflection of the particular kinds of ignorance that might attend any individual act of reading. Literary history arises out of the relation to texts that Bacon characterizes as blindness: the contextual lacunae that hamper all reading.

• Poetry plays a central role in the literary history that both contextualizes and isolates the act of reading. In Bacon’s own definition of poetry, its function is limited but clearly related to the larger history that interests him: “Poesie is a part of Learning in measure of words for the most part restrained: but in all other points extreamely licensed.”12 It is a small corner of learning marked by controlled use of language and freedom of thought; this freedom allows for the advantages of an alternative history: “The use of this Fained Historie, hath beene to give some shadowe of satisfaction to the minde of Man in those points, wherein the Nature of things doth denie it, the world being in proportion inferiour to the soule.”13 Poetry, in other words, has a significant function but essentially a negative one, recognizing what is denied by nature. Bacon directly opposes Sidney’s view that poetry’s freedom makes it the pinnacle of learning; theology and philosophy must, he says, be given “more reverence and attention.”14 As ­Jonathan Dollimore observes, “Bacon gives poetry an idealist function only to undercut idealism itself.”15 Poetry, then, pursues the wistful activity of marking the distinction between human awareness and natural realization of proportion. It is concerned with what is absent, a concern that provides its reason for being but limits its scope. This limitation, in contrast to Sidney, perhaps marks the difference between a poet and a philosopher only provisionally concerned with poetry.16 Its constraints also make Bacon’s theory of poetry

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difficult to apply, including to the generic categorization and interpretation of his own limited work in verse. Nevertheless, Bacon’s poetry does demonstrate some of the effects of the blindness he associates with literary history, particularly when understood, as he would prefer, in a broad historical context. Reading Bacon as a poet can evoke an uncanny feeling of seeing something that is not altogether there. Bacon’s few surviving, securely attributed poems are all translations or adaptations.17 Among these, the freeest is a loose translation and expansion of an epigram, “Ποίην τις βιότοιο τάμοι τρίβον,” commonly attributed to Posidippus.18 It was a familiar epigram. W.R. Paton translates it: What path of life should one pursue? In the market-place are broils and business difficulties, and at home are anxieties; in the country there is too much labour, and at sea there is fear. In a foreign land there is apprehension if you possess anything, and if you are ill off, life is a burden. You are married? You won’t be without cares. You are unmarried? You live a still more lonely life. Children are a trouble, and a childless life is a crippled one. Youth is foolish, and old age again is feeble. There is then, it seems, a choice between two things, either not to be born or to die at once on being born.19

In the Greek Anthology it is balanced by another poem making the opposite claim. Bacon’s version is not merely an adaptation, because the same epigram had been translated several times already, most prominently in a version by Nicholas Grimald included in Tottel’s Songs and Sonettes in 1557, so that Bacon’s responds not just to the original Greek text but to these later translations. This poem’s history, including its reflections on itself, shows how a poem can pull interpretation away from the immediate time and circumstances of its composition and simultaneously away from the time of its reception. “The world” is much closer to the wandering orphan Spenser declares The Shepheardes Calender to be than the Calender itself, not because it is unattributed, but because no context ever emerges to define what it is and how to understand it. Bacon’s adaptation circulated by itself, unlike Grimald’s, which included the traditional response.20 Bacon also adds significant new material: The world’s a bubble, and the life of man lesse then a span, In his conception wretched, from the wombe,       so to the tombe: Curst from the cradle,and brought up to yeares, with cares and feares. Who then to fraile mortality shall trust,

176  Solitude and Speechlessness But limmes the water, or but writes in dust. Yet since with sorrowhere we live opprest:      what life is best? Courts are but only superficiall scholes to dandle fooles. The rurall parts are turn’d into a den      of savage men. And wher’s a city from all vice so free, But may be term’d the worst of all the three? Domesticke cares afflict the husbands bed,      or paines his head. Those that live single take it for a curse, or doe things worse. Some would have children, those that have them, mone,      or wish them gone. What is it then to have or have no wife, But single thraldome, or a double strife? Our owne affections still at home to please,     is a disease, To crosse the sea to any foreine soyle, perills and toyle. Warres with their noyse affright us: when they cease,       W’are worse in peace. What then remaines? but that we still should cry, Not to be borne, or being borne to dye.21

The original epigram is about choices, but Bacon broadens it into a statement about the nature of the world and the futility of trusting one’s aspirations and ideals to an unfeeling universe. The individual choices are themselves contextualized: Bacon’s phrase “or doe things worse” (whatever sexual substitutes it might refer to) moralizes the choice available; the accusation that courts are “scholes / to dandle fooles” is a broader social critique than Grimald’s “The courts plea, by braul, and bate, drive gentle peace away.”22 His final stanza turns the epigram’s sense of discontent into a warning about hedonism, and its anxiety about travel is reinforced by a striking characterization of war. But the first stanza is the biggest change, since it takes a dichotomy and makes it singular, and introduces, not a consistent conceit, but a consistent category of conceit  – bubble, w ­ ater, and dust are distinctly material and quotidian kinds of ephemerality. They

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belong to the category of matter that passes through the air without disturbing it. The stanza is also puzzlingly vague: what exactly is being compared to limning in water or writing in dust? Ambition? Hope of any kind? Or, perhaps, the particular kind of trusting to mortality engaged in by writers and limners? The stanza’s general pessimism is concentrated by its most concrete metaphor on the futility of poetry. The most detailed study of this poem is H.J.C. Grierson’s of over a century ago.23 Responding to an earlier claim that the poem should be attributed to Henry Wotton, Grierson vigorously defends the attribution to Bacon and places the poem into two contexts: the various translations in the period of the Posidippus epigram, of which Bacon’s is the most formally and figurally distinctive; and the surviving poems that seem to have come out of a friendly competition between several young poets who were followers of the Earl of Essex, including Bacon, Wotton, Donne, and Thomas Bastard. To Grierson, the pessimism in Bacon’s poem illustrates this group’s general feeling: “Bacon, Donne, and Wotton were all in 1597 in the unhappy position of suitors, kicking their heels, or toiling at ungrateful tasks, in the hope that Essex’ influence might find them profitable employment.”24 Despite this congruence of biography and literary meaning, however, Grierson ultimately abandons any interpretive conclusion: “The chief interest of the few facts I have brought together is that they throw a small pencil of light upon the lives of Bacon, Wotton, and Donne at a time when they must been in close intercourse with one another.”25 Compositional context here helps settle authorship, but does not explain how this odd poem fits into the non-poetic career of its author or whether, or in what way, Bacon thinks the world is a bubble. The context of its preservation and dissemination does not help much, in part because it is unable to escape the continuing association with a non-poet as author. The poem’s reception history reflects its position at the nexus of contradicting identifications: translation, epigram, anonymous manuscript poem, poem by a famous person. It was first printed anonymously, among various “other witty conceits” appended to an edition of Thomas Overbury’s The Wife; in that appendix it is paired with Wotton’s contrasting “How happie is he borne or taught” as the only verses in a section of prose character sketches.26 I have quoted it from its second publication and first attributed one, in Thomas Farnaby’s 1629 collection of translations of Greek epigrams, Florilegium Epigrammatum Græcorum.27 It sits rather uncomfortably in that book, however; it is not only the freest adaptation but the only one in English (the others are all in Latin), and the book marks its difference by setting it in italic type; the others are in ­Roman. One of several poems indexed in the table of contents as “Ανδρώπινον βίον. In Vitam humanam” (“on human life,” twice) it

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is headed with an attribution: “Huc elegantem V. CL. Domini Verulamii παρῳδίαν adiicere adlubuit” (“Lord Verulam was pleased to contribute this elegant parody”; the abbreviation is for viri clarissimi, the most brilliant man).28 The word parodia is a stretch for this poem, and Farnaby leaves it in Greek, surely to indicate that he does not mean the modern genre but one of the original uses of the word, which can indicate a free imitation.29 Even though he is printing it in an anthology of translations, and even though relatively literal translations of this epigram already existed in English, Farnaby includes a poem that is sufficiently different that he feels obliged to acknowledge that it is not a translation in the sense his others are. “The world” next appears the following year, appended to Josuah Sylvester’s Panthea, whose title page notes: “Whereunto is added an appendix, containing an excellent elegy, written by the L. Viscount St. Albans, late Lord High Chancelour of England,”30 another of many appearances that play up its connection to Bacon’s lofty status. The appendix has its own title page, followed by an “epistle dedicatory,” in which the printer notes that he is “moved to adjoyne to the precedent Canzonets, th’ensuing Nectarines of the late Excellent Viscount St. Albans.”31 I have found no other instances of the word “nectarine” that refer to a poem – is the inventive metaphor again stemming from a difficulty in categorization? Contrary to what the dedication implies, the two epigrams following “The world’s a bubble” are not attributed to Bacon in the edition or elsewhere, so there is only one nectarine of the late viscount. The most widely available seventeenth-century publication of the poem is in Reliquiæ Wottonianæ, a posthumous edition of Wotton’s works whose dedication is signed by Izaak Walton. Bacon’s poem’s treatment in this edition is the opposite of what it receives in Panthea: it is included in a section titled “Poems Found among the Papers of S. H. Wotton”; in the first and second editions, Bacon’s is headed “The World” and signed “ignoto.”32 In the expanded third edition of 1672, the attribution “Fra. Lord Bacon” is provided; the anonymity of the other poems in the section is unchanged (though the replacement affects the whole section by showing that ignoto is always subject to displacement by future knowledge).33 The text of the poem in both of these editions has several small differences from the versions in the Farnaby and Sylvester books, most notably the fifth line, which reads “Nurst from his cradle” instead of “Curst from the cradle” (a variant that had earlier appeared in the Overbury book, and, as Grierson documents, several early manuscripts).34 The effect is quite different: “Curst” refers to “the cradle” merely as a metonymy for birth, while “Nurst” joins it in order to create a conceit of dismal childrearing. The two metaphors take opposite positions in the nature-versus-nurture

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debate: to be “Curst” from birth is to be hopeless by nature; “Nurst” implies a potentially avoidable failure in nurture. The book also contains a poem attributed to Wotton that is similar in metre and has a strikingly similar metaphor, which begins: O Faithless World, and thy more faithless Part,   a womans heart! The true shop of variety, where sits   nothing but fits And feavers of desire, and pangs of love,   which toyes remove. Why was she born to please, or I to trust   words writ in dust?35

This poem is in iambic couplets of pentameter and dimeter; Bacon’s is in quatrains of pentameter and dimeter each followed by a pentameter couplet. It is headed “A Poem written by Sir Henry Wotton, in his youth” (Wotton was born in 1568). Wotton’s poem, like Bacon’s, takes an essentially proverbial narrow point about courtly life and broadens it: its opening phrase, “O Faithless World,” connects to its last, “words writ in dust,” to suggest that love is merely a “faithless Part” of a universe structured to prevent permanence and meaning. The coincidence might partly – but only partly – explain Bacon’s expansion of the original epigram, since his poem’s more spacious form allows him room for a set of formal and figural interests he shared with a friend. The two comparisons to writing in dust – Bacon’s of ambition and Wotton’s of courtship – both speak to the futility of poetry as a means of improving one’s lot. This print history proceeds in close interaction with other forms of the poem’s transmission. Peter Beal, in his Catalogue of Literary Manuscripts 1450–1700, lists about 70 manuscript copies of part or all of this poem; it was obviously popular.36 The poem appears to have some circulation history dating before its first publication, though much more after. Most copies are unattributed or attributed to Bacon, but Beal lists two copies attributed to Henry Harrington (including one in which Bacon’s name was written and crossed out in favour of Harrington), one to Francis Quarles, and one to Donne, crossed out in favour of Bacon. A collation of all of them must wait for the upcoming relevant volume of the Oxford Bacon.37 However, in an attempt to better understand how this poem was being read and rewritten in the period, I have examined the two copies held by the Newberry Library, quite different from each other in presentation and yet textually essentially the same in comparison to the range of extant versions. Both have known provenance. One comes from an elaborately

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prepared calligraphic manuscript in black and red ink that belonged to and may have been created by Henry Feilde, who was responsible for other similarly fastidious manuscripts of verse and prose on various topics.38 In many cases the calligraphic design is quite complex, most notably an acrostic poem by William Browne (but unattributed in the manuscript), “Beholde O God in rivers of my Teares,” written with the acrostics revealed using both colour and geometric form.39 “The Worlde,” so titled and unattributed, is the last poem in the manuscript, and on one of only two monochrome pages (see figure 1).40 Line 5 in this copy reads “Nurst from the cradle, and brought up to yeares,” which could have been taken from an earlier manuscript or the 1626 printing (assuming this manuscript predates the Wotton book). The Newberry’s other manuscript version is quite different – a badly damaged collection of vellum pages, written in several hands in faded ink, mostly in two not very straight columns, that derives from the family of Peter Chamberlen in the late seventeenth century. The manuscript includes family records; some lively verse acrostics on various family names as well as a few other names written vertically in capitals with blank lines following, as if acrostics were intended to be filled in; and a number of poems, mostly unattributed (though damage to the manuscript makes it hard to be certain) and unfamiliar. Bacon’s poem appears toward the back of the manuscript, among a small group of leaves reversed in orientation from the rest, headed “Lord Verulam of the World” (see figure 2).41 It has the “nurst” rather than “curst” variation in line 5, again echoing the version in the Overbury and Wotton books (but not necessarily derived from them). At the end of the poem, following the last line, “not to be borne or being borne to die,” is what appears to be an alternative ending: “for being borne & being borne to die.”42 The scribe might be surprised by the use of “cry” with its desideratum as a direct object (a usage the OED marks as obsolete, its last cited instance by Pepys in 1668), and has reworked it into the more familiar formulation of “cry for,” though doing so softens the meaning, with death now being lamented rather than sought.43 Two more lines below are not legible, a frequent problem in assembling a manuscript history. While it is the differences between these two manuscripts that are most striking – one seemingly prepared for presentation or other semi-public use, the other a gap-filled family scrapbook; one nearly perfectly preserved, the other only partly legible; one presenting Bacon’s poem anonymously, the other highlighting his name and rank – they are united by the text itself, which is nearly identical in each. Gumbrecht says that fragmentary material objects lead us to imagine the wholeness they once had; I am not sure that is true. Both the damaged and whole manuscript defer toward a textual path that connects them but in hidden ways. Material

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Figure 1. “The world’s a bubble,” from a manuscript owned and possibly created by Henry Feilde. Courtesy of the Newberry Library.

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Figure 2. “The world’s a bubble,” from a manuscript owned by the family of Peter Chamberlen. Courtesy of the Newberry Library.

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continuity and imagined wholeness are both countered by the mobility of the poem – it is always recognizably the same poem; its singularity stands out to its reusers and is able to be reinforced by its author’s name, even in manuscript  – but it still never coheres into anything with a sense of stability, because it cannot render its singularity onto the material surface that records it. Indeed, the relationship between this poem and its various contexts suggests a defence of interpretation not alien to Bacon’s own arguments. The metaphor of the world as a bubble, both as image and as assertion, pushes the poem’s meaning past that defined by its origin and its literary, material, social, and bibliographic contexts. As Bacon says, the purpose of poetry is to allow for the contemplation of what does not exist in the world. In this case, the ephemerality of bubble and dust suggests the ways that their tenuous material existence, and the poem’s, is displaced by their figural existence. The world’s a bubble: the material is always on the verge of collapse. In this sense we might think of one of Spenser’s bubbles, from “The Ruines of Time”: Why then dooth flesh, a bubble glas of breath, Hunt after honour and advauncement vaine, And reare a trophee for devouring death, With so great labour and long lasting paine, As if his daies for ever should remaine? Sith all that in this world is great or gaie, Doth as a vapour vanish, and decaie. (“The Ruines of Time,” 45–56)

In the ambition-distrusting mode of Jaques’s disdain for “the bubble reputation” in As You Like It, the “honours and advauncement” scorned here might include that sought by poets, including the ambitious Spenser. The only “trophee” is, as Spenser insists in “Epithalamion,” the “eternall moniment” constituted by the text itself (“Epithalamion,” line 433). The text of “The world’s a bubble” is unfixed in its precise manifestation but bears a recognizable singularity carrying through its many instantiations, and manifests a latent instinct to retreat to the security of Bacon’s lordly name, a bulwark against the inevitability of its repurposing for later ages. Despite its potential connection to a Greek epigram or a similar poem by Wotton, it travels alone. Like many Renaissance poems, Bacon’s dropped out of circulation until the nineteenth century’s revival of interest in Renaissance literature beyond Shakespeare and Milton. Because the rationale for inclusion in these later editions is Bacon’s authorship, editors are forced to account for its seemingly unique role within Bacon’s oeuvre, which they struggle to do.

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In James Spedding’s monumental edition of Bacon’s complete works, “The World” stands out from the others of Bacon’s poems included, most of which Spedding does not think much of. He musters only a partial defence of Bacon’s psalm translations, conceding that they have been thought of “not only as a failure, but as a ridiculous failure,” but seeking out the “best parts” within uneven composition.44 In contrast, Spedding regards “The World” as “a more remarkable performance,” and Bacon’s lines in relation to the original epigram “are not meant for a translation, and can hardly be called a paraphrase. They are rather another poem on the same subject and with the same sentiment; and though the topics are mostly the same, the treatment of them is very different.”45 So Spedding sees “The World” as unique: Bacon’s most “remarkable” effort in verse, his only surviving poem that is not a translation per se, and an adaptation whose relation to its source Spedding cannot name. It is treated similarly in Alexander Grosart’s 1870 edition of Bacon’s poems, which draws heavily on Spedding.46 As the culmination of its singularity, it is the only poem of Bacon’s included in Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, where it is printed with the title “Life,” and, contrary to Spedding’s approach, with no indication of its history as an adaptation.47 A note is appended: “A fine example of a peculiar class of Poetry; – that written by thoughtful men who practised this Art but little.”48 Palgrave names as contributors to this class Wotton, Jeremy Taylor, George Berkeley, Samuel Johnson, and Thomas Macaulay: it hardly seems a definitive characterization (and Bacon has fewer surviving poems than any of these). This history provides essentially four ways to perceive the context of this poem. We could think of it as a translation, as Farnaby does. Following Grierson, we could see it as emerging out of a small literary coterie in the court of the Earl of Essex. Encouraged by its early print history and Beal’s catalogue of its appearances in manuscript, we could see it as part of a much larger circulation of often anonymous miscellaneous poems. Or we could follow Palgrave and think of it in relation to the corpus of writing attached to its author’s name, which in this case means giving it a provisional (“peculiar”) status in which its role cannot be defined except in opposition. The four effectively cancel each other out, however: the first stanza and tricky “Yet” in the first line of the second, along with Bacon’s more conservative approach to translation in his other surviving examples, keep it from being associated very firmly with the original epigram; the recurrence of Bacon’s name in manuscripts and early editions keep it from fading into the larger body of poems it travels with (even when it starts out marked “ignoto,” as in the Wotton book, it quickly reverts to its attributed status). But unlike most poems by familiar authors, the attribution cannot provide a definitive context, since virtually everyone seems to agree that

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it has little or nothing in common with the rest of Bacon’s oeuvre. What we end up with, in reading this poem now, is a sense of its isolation, and in this regard I consider it an extreme example that is still representative of the extent to which poems in general, as Spenser once imagined them, are wandering orphans. Bacon himself provides an alternative metaphor: the poem is a bubble, akin to words writ in dust.

• The problem with writing in dust, and even more so with limning the water, is not so much that one’s efforts will not last as that they may be invisible from the start. A text receding from view only redoubles the blindness Bacon says afflicts us when we contemplate history without a sense of literary history. I have suggested that nineteenth-century readers such as Spedding and Palgrave are struggling with this lack of context, but Bacon’s metaphor of the blind cyclops becomes even more apt as a figure for literary experience in the twentieth century. My example is ­Hofmannsthal, but the reception of Hofmannsthal’s own response to Bacon shows that his skepticism of reading aligns well with Bacon’s own conception, and to the metaphorical logic behind it. In the Odyssey, Polyphemus is trebly disoriented: first by wine, then blindness, and finally by the ignorance of ­Odysseus’s name that causes him to be abandoned by his fellows. For modern readers contemplating literary history, the isolation the text ­already had from their own perspective is redoubled by the experience of modernity itself. Paul de Man uses the same metaphor Bacon does in his Blindness and Insight in characterizing the ways critical methods of the first two-thirds of the twentieth century “could grope toward a certain degree of insight only because their method remained oblivious to the perception of this insight.”49 To de Man, critics are blinded as much by what they know as what they do not, and this makes them much like Polyphemus, who would be better off even in his blindness had he never inquired of Odysseus’s name. Like the unfortunate cyclops, whose partial knowledge leads to the scorn of his peers when he seeks their help, modern readers are often disappointed when they turn to colleagues for assistance; partial knowledge serves more as a reason to ignore a reader’s experience than an opportunity for collaborative learning. Hofmannsthal is a good emblem for readers’ ignorance, because his knowledge of Bacon was undoubtedly slight. In a letter to Rudolf Pannwitz, he admits that he was familiar only with Bacon’s Essays; however, after reading Pannwitz’s discussion of Bacon in Die Krisis der europäischen

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Kultur in 1917, he asserts that, despite his limited reading, he felt an instinctive connection to Bacon he finds reconfirmed by Pannwitz’s account, wondering: how it can be, that I have associated with this being – hardly knowing anything of him except the essays and a few fragments, not suspecting and yet having a premonition of what he was about – a quite subjective work that was really a confession (the fictitious Letter of Lord Chandos that you might or might not know).50

Hofmannsthal’s tone suggests surprise at his own response to Bacon – a peculiar form of reading in which ignorance supersedes knowledge. This kind of reading, though, is supported by a certain perspective on literary history that Hofmannsthal’s Chandos does share with Bacon (as the letter to Pannwitz makes clear, Chandos and Bacon are not meant to be understood in opposition). But the choice of Bacon is apt also because it suits the sense of literary alienation – of skepticism about the value of reading and of learning – that suffuses Ein Brief. Bacon once described the England of his time as “seated between the Old World and the New”: geographical position becomes a way to express a temporal transition, and that sense of change has been important to the way Bacon is contextualized.51 The date Hofmannsthal’s Ein Brief assigns itself – 22 August 1603 – places it within the most uncertain moment of this transition, shortly after the death of Elizabeth I. In general, though, it has not been understood that way: its immediate biographical context has played a dominant role in its interpretation. Around the time of Ein Brief’s publication in 1902, in the midst of a successful career as a lyric poet, Hofmannsthal abruptly and permanently abandoned poetry and turned toward essays, plays, and eventually the operatic libretti for which he is now best known. Given the enthusiastic reception of his early poetry, this was a surprising choice.52 Critics have generally read Ein Brief as explanation for Hofmannsthal’s genre shift, notwithstanding the difference between ceasing to write poetry in particular and Philip Chandos’s “complete abandonment of literary activity.”53 In the letter, Chandos writes of his frustration with words as possible representations of the world, which has sounded to readers like the lament of a poet who finds that lyric’s goal of precise representation of subjective experience can never be fully achieved. This interpretation has required discounting the importance of the fictional context for the letter.54 But doing so also risks missing the piece’s concern with the alienation of reading and of contemplating literary history.

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Ein Brief describes a seemingly complete crisis of representation and of the role of representation in identity. Chandos’s former life was devoted to a mystical and egalitarian version of natural philosophy: In those days I, in a state of continuous intoxication, conceived the whole of existence as one great unit: the spiritual and physical worlds seemed to form no contrast, as little as did courtly and bestial conduct, art and barbarism, solitude and society; in everything I felt the presence of Nature, in the aberrations of insanity as much as in the utmost refinement of the Spanish ceremonial; in the boorishness of young peasants no less than in the most delicate of allegories; and in all expressions of Nature I felt myself.55

After the break he finds himself unable to conceive of such a grand theory or even to participate in daily life. What bothers him the most is small talk, whose constant little judgments of people and things Chandos cannot endorse or accept, and he explains this impossibility of judgment as an inability to view anything broadly: My mind compelled me to view all things occurring in such conversations from an uncanny closeness. As once, through a magnifying glass, I had seen a piece of skin on my little finger look like a field full of holes and furrows, so I now perceived human beings and their actions. I no longer succeeded in comprehending them with the simplifying eye of habit. For me everything disintegrated into parts, those parts again into parts; no longer would anything let itself be encompassed by one idea. Single words floated round me; they congealed into eyes which stared at me and into which I was forced to stare back – whirlpools which gave me vertigo and, reeling incessantly, led into the void.56

It is difficult to place this set of metaphors and ideas into a single context. The magnifying glass suggests precision, vertigo distraction. But then, this figural inconsistency seems appropriate to the disintegration of the world into parts of which Chandos complains. What he has lost is the ability to contextualize: everything that enters his ken does so discretely. The result of this loss is a deep suspicion of social consensus, whether specifically ethical or not, that furthers his dislike of rhetoric, which he considers “overrated by our time.”57 “Human beings and their actions” no longer reflect a unified logic. Chandos’s failure at context is echoed in the categorical confusion apparent in scholarship on Ein Brief. Robert Vilain questions whether the piece is indeed about a literary crisis rather than a social one, concerning

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the kind of relationship between self-and other-conception necessary for moral judgment: “The crisis of expression is linked to a crisis of identity, in turn associated with the lack of confidence that a moral system needs.”58 More strictly philosophical readings tend to define this crisis by conflating Hofmannsthal and Chandos, as Adrian del Caro does in arguing that what separates Chandos from philosophers is his loss of confidence in rhetoric: “Essentially, Hofmannsthal-Chandos is not concerned with winning others over to his position; he has more than enough on his plate with the language that throws him before the unspeakable presence and present that life is.”59 The critical habit del Caro exemplifies here causes Thomas A. Kovach, with some exasperation, to try to clear up such a “misunderstanding”: “though it may seem obvious, the letter is a work of fiction.”60 I think Kovach means only to separate the speaker from the author, but the word fiction looks toward a genre, and that remains an intractable problem; J.D. McClatchy, in his edition of Hofmannsthal’s selected works in translation, places Ein Brief with Hofmannsthal’s essays, not his short stories (which were written later).61 This problem of assigning the work to a genre is clearly related to the anachronism of the piece itself – its themes make it sound like an essay about the turn of the twentieth century, but we have no word but fiction for the decision to place those themes within the context of the seventeenth. Some of this reluctance to take Ein Brief at its word is a reflection of Hofmannsthal’s personal resistance to reading. His politics are notoriously uncategorizable (at various times in his life he was associated with, and also critical of, both the left and right wings in Austria), a quality that serves alternately as an emblem or an explanation for his literary interest in inarticulateness. Hermann Broch reduces Hofmannsthal’s fervent defence of Austrian nationalism to a naive agenda whose real purpose was aesthetic: The people, as Hofmannsthal saw them, formed a collective fairy-tale image. It is almost as if he fabricated from this image a legitimizing foil for the (likewise fairy-tale-like) image of the “poet,” in order to permit the exaggerated tribute due the latter, because of its correlation with the former ... It is a fantasy of ethics – too apolitical for an ethical utopia, served by the ethic-ritual of Hofmannsthal’s poetics through symbols disguised as dreams, allegories disguised as dreams.62

Hofmannsthal’s fiercest critics regard his ethics as never fully realized ­anyway. Adorno, despite his interest in Ein Brief, regarded ­Hofmannsthal’s general political attitude as neither a complex nor forgivable identification with the aristocracy: compared to the “bearing” that reaches for respectability emphasized by his mentor Stefan George, Adorno says,

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Hofmannsthal offers “the laxity of one who does not need bearing since he ‘belongs’ anyway.”63 Adorno’s essay on Hofmannsthal and George provoked an unusually critical response from Walter Benjamin. In a letter to Adorno, Benjamin defends Hofmannsthal, one of his early mentors, not just in the social terms of Adorno’s critique but in a theoretical sense suggested to him by Ein Brief itself.64 Chandos’s resistance to language, Benjamin argues, carries an element of self-awareness: His “speechlessness” was a kind of punishment. The language that Hofmannsthal avoided may be precisely the language that was given to Kafka at about the same time. For Kafka took on the task at which Hofmannsthal failed morally, and therefore also poetically ... I believe that throughout his life Hofmannsthal took the same stance toward his talent as Christ would have taken toward his reign if he had to attribute it to a deal with Satan. It seems to me that Hofmannsthal’s uncommon versatility goes hand in hand with his awareness of having betrayed the best within himself.65

Adorno included this letter in his edition of Benjamin’s correspondence, but did not add a response to this remarkable claim. Since the mode of Hofmannsthal’s thought to which Benjamin refers reveals itself in paucity rather than abundance of language, it is indeed difficult to respond to. Speechlessness becomes the site of meaning: an account of Hofmannsthal’s politics must depend on what he does not say, and Benjamin understands such silence as a self-accusation into which Hofmannsthal’s talent, and thus whatever admiration we might have for him, collapses. Such evocative silence helps contextualize the invocation of Bacon, which is at once concrete  – precise date, future aristocratic title  – and yet oddly empty. Benjamin’s sense of Hofmannsthal as speechless in the face of his literary talent is reminiscent of Bacon’s image of the blind Polyphemus as a representation of a reader working without the literary history that has never been written. It is also a rejection of the world as trivial and ephemeral compared to something within the self: the world’s a bubble. Chandos highlights to Bacon one particular incident to describe the impossibility of his reconciling his own understanding to the experience of a larger world. The example forces him into a relation to prior learning he recognizes as inadequate, an attempt to ground literary truth in historical memory and sympathy that seems to fail: Recently, for instance, I had given the order for a copious supply of rat-poison to be scattered in the milk-cellars of one of my dairy-farms. Towards evening I had gone off for a ride and, as you can imagine, thought no more about it.

190  Solitude and Speechlessness As I was trotting along over the freshly-ploughed land, nothing more alarming in sight than a scared covey of quail and, in the distance, the great sun sinking over the undulating fields, there suddenly loomed up before me the vision of that cellar, resounding with the death-struggle of a mob of rats. I felt everything within me: the cool, musty air of the cellar filled with the sweet and pungent reek of poison, and the yelling of the death-cries breaking against the mouldering walls; the vain convulsions of those convoluted bodies as they tear about in confusion and despair; their frenzied search for escape, and the grimace of icy rage when a couple collide with one another at a blocked-up crevice. But why seek again for words which I have foresworn! You remember, my friend, the wonderful description in Livy of the hours preceding the destruction of Alba Longa: when the crowds stray aimlessly through the streets which they are to see no more ... when they bid farewell to the stones beneath their feet. I assure you, my friend, I carried this vision within me, and the vision of burning Carthage, too; but there was more, something more divine, more bestial; and it was the Present, the fullest most exalted Present. There was a mother, surrounded by her young in their agony of death; but her gaze was cast neither toward the dying nor upon the merciless walls of stone, but into the void, or through the void into Infinity, accompanying this gaze with a gnashing of teeth! – A slave struck with helpless terror standing near the petrifying Niobe must have experienced what I experienced when, within me, the soul of this animal bared its teeth to its monstrous fate.66

Chandos seems to understand this vision as a rebuke of his own indifference  – an indifference he thinks Bacon would share (“as you might imagine”). His prior reading, which he stresses that Bacon would know, attempts to contextualize his experience but also stands in opposition to the extreme violence of the description. He reaches toward reading as consolation in his loneliness and alienation from the social world, but seemingly unsuccessfully, since it still leaves him confronting a “helpless terror” (itself contextualized through prior texts) which is “something more” than what he finds in literary memory. After his lament for the limitations of language, he makes clear, in his invocations of Alba Longa and Carthage, why he thinks of it that way – because it is a realization of a kind of experience that Chandos and Bacon alike associate with history, not with “the fullest and most exalted Present.” Chandos’s reading seems to him a potential rescue from his predicament because it enables him to imagine the rats’ present through analogy; at the same time, it buries him further into both language and history, two of the dependencies from which he seeks to free himself. Language threatens to categorize and simplify the ethics of killing rats, which is language’s

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moral flaw, but it is also the only way to work through that ethics at all. At the same time, in a letter that seems often to reject reading and writing in favour of experience, Chandos finds himself, at the moment of a particularly profound experience, drawn to make sense of it through his reading and in a piece of writing – and not incidentally in a letter intended for someone who would have read the same things Chandos has and have them in memory (“You remember,” he says to Bacon about Livy). This emphasis on shared reading implies that the episode comments on the experience of history in a way that Bacon might recognize. The turn to history, then, is an instructive failure: it conditions an attempt to contextualize traumatic experience and marks that attempt’s limits. The first historical episode Chandos recalls, Rome’s destruction of Alba Longa in the seventh century BC, occupies a large portion of the first book of Livy’s Ab Urbe Condita. Livy considers it a formative event in early Roman history, although partly because he thinks it is anomalous. Tullus, the king of Rome, had negotiated a treaty with the dictator of the Albans, Mettius Fufetius, which hinged on a fight between two sets of siblings representing each side; after the Albans lost, Mettius broke the treaty. As punishment, Tullus had Mettius tied, alive, to two chariots and torn apart, which Livy calls “the first and last time that the Romans applied the kind of punishment that ignores the laws of humanity.” Then Tullus ordered the city evacuated and destroyed: While this was happening, horsemen had been sent to Alba to bring the inhabitants to Rome. Then the legions were brought to demolish the city. When they entered the gates, there was not the uproar and panic that usually attends the capture of a city when gates are broken down, walls laid low by the battering ram, and the citadel captured by force; when shouts of the enemy and the rush of armed men throughout the city create havoc with fire and sword. Grim silence and speechless grief so overwhelmed the minds of all that, in their fear, they could not decide what they should leave behind and what they should take with them. In their indecision they kept asking each other’s advice, standing now on their doorsteps, now wandering randomly through the houses they were seeing for the last time. When the call of the cavalry ordering them to depart became insistent, already they could hear the crash of the buildings that were being destroyed in the outskirts of the city. When the dust rising from distant places had filled everywhere like a gathering cloud, hastily they took whatever each could and departed, abandoning the lar and penates, and the homes in which each had been born and raised. A continuous line of emigrants filled the streets. As they caught sight of each other, their tears flowed anew in their mutual anguish. Plaintive cries began to be heard, especially from the women as they went by the venerable

192  Solitude and Speechlessness temples that were now occupied by armed men, leaving their gods, so it seemed, as captives. When they had departed from the city, the Romans indiscriminately leveled to the ground all the buildings, both public and private, utterly destroying in a single hour the work of the 400 years in which Alba had stood. But the temples of the gods were spared, for thus it had been decreed by the king.67

Livy places the episode carefully in a much longer history. Mettius’s punishment is established as unique and compared explicitly to Republican and Imperial Rome, and that history (which serves to establish that this episode is anomalous) is Livy’s justification for his sympathy for the Albans. Alba’s previous history is present as well, reaching back before the founding of Rome. Livy’s detailed description of the more typical “uproar and panic” is important to establishing the Albans’ speechless calm in contrast, but equally importantly it establishes Livy’s own history as greater than its explicit subject – reflecting on the present, invested with knowledge of the distant past. Livy’s sense of time is already sympathetically extended when Chandos takes it up in order to understand the experience of the rats through that of the Albans. Hofmannsthal imagines Chandos carrying that description with him alongside (or as part of) his vision of the dying rats. He seems to recognize in himself Livy’s sympathy with the enemy, although that sympathy has clear limits: Livy condemns the torture of Mettius, not the destruction of the city. Chandos similarly carries his memory of the burning of Carthage, another attack by the Romans on a great city with a long history. Livy’s account of this event has been lost since the early Middle Ages; Chandos must be remembering Appian’s or a derivative of it. (Though this event has been treated a number of times in literature, the reference to Livy suggests that the disciplinary context here is historical.) Relying on Polybius, who was present at the event itself but whose account is also lost, Appian describes the event as if at close range, including the uproar missing at Alba: Then came new scenes of horror. The fire spread and carried everything down, and the soldiers did not wait to destroy the buildings little by little, but pulled them all down together. So the crashing grew louder, and many fell with the stones into the midst dead. Others were seen still living, especially old men, women, and young children who had hidden in the inmost nooks of the houses, some of them wounded, some more or less burned, and uttering horrible cries. Still others, thrust out and falling from such a height with the stones, timbers, and fire, were torn asunder into all kinds of horrible shapes, crushed and mangled.68

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This image of chaos and Livy’s of confused passivity serve as contrasts, acknowledging that Chandos does not really know, despite his vision, whether the rats went calmly or not. Appian’s Carthage is like Livy’s Alba, however, in raising curious problems of historical sympathy. The Roman general Scipio Aemilianus, on beholding the burning city in his moment of triumph, “shed tears and publicly lamented the fortune of the enemy,” Appian says, and contemplating “the inevitable fall of cities, nations, and empires, as well as individuals,” quoted from Homer: The day shall come in which our sacred Troy And Priam, and the people over whom Spear-bearing Priam rules, shall perish all.69

Appian doubts whether Scipio meant to say this out loud: “εἴτε ἑκὼν εἴτε προφυγόντος αὐτὸν τοῦδε τοῦἔπους”: he spoke “either willingly or the poem escaping from him.”70 Literary memory, it seems, has the capacity to make involuntary associations between one event and another, and the emphasis on Scipio’s self-talk signals that literary experience is private and solitary even when overheard. Appian’s account contrasts interestingly with Cicero’s in the Dream of Scipio  – Cicero also has Scipio seeking a broader perspective of this same event, but that perspective is temporal, astronomical and metaphysical, not literary.71 In Appian, Scipio’s possibly involuntary turn to literature defines him, humanizes him, but also isolates him from his soldiers and from his country and time by immersing his perspective in a literary context deriving from an era, nation, and language different from his own. This instinct to contextualize an event through literary history is one Appian suspects Scipio would be reluctant to reveal. Regarding Alba, Livy sees understanding the other side as something the savage Tullus would be incapable of, but at Carthage Scipio shares with the historian a flattening of perspective. Chandos remembers the Albans’ resignation to their fate in conjunction with the burning of Carthage because both are opportunities to reflect on the ethics of assembling events in time into historical language. On the one hand, learning a more ethical use of history by perceiving connections between these two historians writing over one hundred years apart and in different languages is precisely the kind of thing Bacon seeks from the universal history of literature and learning he laments has not been written. On the other hand, the two reveal the obstacles to drawing broad conclusions from such connections, since Livy insists on the unexplained anomalousness of the events he describes and Appian seems

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to defer to poetry, acknowledging that, despite Polybius’s presence, it is Scipio’s quotation of Homer that contextualizes the historical moment rather than the historian’s authority. Chandos’s jumble of visions of present and past suggest a historiography that reaches and notes the limits of historical practice, in its response to the challenge of the sympathetic enemy. What bothers Chandos – that he cannot simultaneously represent his own perspective as a vermin-exterminating landlord and the rats’ perspective facing death – is a problem that historians face. They deal with it at times by attempting to represent two perspectives anyway, at times by turning, somewhat grudgingly, to poetry, and at times through silence – the silence Appian thinks Scipio might have wished he had maintained. Chandos finds these approaches inadequate, and turns away from history to a “Present” even less able to be represented. Chandos’s sense of these historical parallels as inadequate may be one that Hofmannsthal and readers would share: the relationship between literary history and speechlessness that seems essential to Chandos’s predicament does not render his description of the rats’ deaths any less disturbing, nor does it prevent us from thinking of them in the context of the human catastrophes closer to Hofmannsthal’s time. Ultimately, I am convinced by Benjamin’s belief that Ein Brief should be understood as ethically self-questioning (though the tougher approaches of Adorno and Broch might still be right as well, since it is not clear that this early self-doubt continues into Hofmannsthal’s later career). Hofmannsthal marks both the necessity and the difficulties of the history of learning that Bacon wishes for. Like Appian’s Scipio, who understands the larger and more foreboding significance of his conquest of Carthage by reference to other times, to Troy’s past and the future of Rome’s potential fall, Hofmannsthal’s Chandos responds to immediate experience, willingly or not, by turning to the span of time as it is abstracted and compacted in his reading, which is to say, by turning to literary history. His prior reading provides the context and significance of his loneliness, and seems parallel to Hofmannsthal’s setting of his “confession” in a historical moment he associates with Bacon. Bacon may be right that to be wise in the “use and administration of learning” requires assembling literature into a cogent history, but doing so might lead to a sense of dislocation from the perspective of the reader’s time, place, and social category. The prior relations between the texts one reads can be overwhelming, but they are still essential to placing not only reading itself but also experience of all kinds into a sympathetic context. I would compare Hofmannsthal’s difficulty in naming the relationship between Chandos’s reading and his experience not only to Appian’s similar difficulty with Scipio, but also to Spedding’s inability to identify the

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genre of Bacon’s adaptation of Posidippus. “The World” turns to literary history in turning away from the world, but in a manner that fails to establish a relationship between reading and experience. These invocations are not exactly responses. In attempting to assemble a history out of them we are like Polyphemus reaching for the backs of his sheep, unaware “that any of them bore / Upon his belly any man before.”72 Hans Robert Jauss was surely right to think of literary history as a challenge to criticism whether it is acknowledged or not, but Jauss set too high a bar for the consistency and readability of that history. Jauss says: “The historicity of literature as well as its communicative character presupposes a dialogical and at once processlike relationship between work, audience, and new work that can be conceived in the relations between message receiver as well as between question and answer, problem and solution.”73 Hofmannsthal demonstrates that the relationship Jauss describes is incomplete, because the glancing nature of his reaction leaves the dialogue unspoken, the process concealed (and perhaps, as he says to Pannwitz, mysterious even to him). For both Chandos contemplating his vision of the dying rats and for Scipio at the fall of Carthage, the connections between personal experience and old texts are at once consoling and alienating. This problem prevents the task of the philologist from being merely to make earlier works available for the experience of modern readers. Scipio’s turn to Homer is involuntary and perhaps embarrassing; Chandos’s turn to Livy and Appian is insufficient and thus merely serves to bring into clearer definition the violence of his vision. Is not this also true of Hofmannsthal’s turn to Bacon? He reaches not toward a particular text or set of texts but a name that – as demonstrated by the history of “The world’s a bubble” – stands in uncertain relation to a body of texts. Appian must admit that he does not know how deliberate Scipio’s invocation of Homer was; a modern reader must say the same about Hofmannsthal’s invocation of Bacon. The allusion allows for a putative connection between two writers and two texts that still leaves all four isolated within a larger literary history that can never be fully mapped.

Conclusion

Reading in Solitude

When Joseph Scaliger took up his appointment at the University of ­Leyden in 1593, he was provided with lodging befitting his status as one of the great scholars of his era. The arrangement did not last, however, and he soon found himself looking for a rental.1 In a letter of 11 February 1597, Scaliger complains to his friend Isaac Casaubon, then working at the ­University of Montpellier, about the frustrations of his peripatetic life: I wish I could do as I pleased: I would become your neighbor at Montpellier. But I have long perceived that I was not born for myself, nor my possessions for me. What ought you to think of a man who has his lands in Agénois, his books in Touraine, his home in Holland? He who suffers so multifold a division can be nowhere a whole man. I have a house, I hire lodgings. I have a library, I use the books of others. I am of noble family, it is doubted and contradicted. I have devoted myself to letters, I am an utter ignoramus. Seek no other witnesses: it is the universal testimony of those who desire the excellencies which they deny to us.2

Anthony Grafton points out that Scaliger was a chronic pessimist about the reception of his own work, feeling that professional scholars “had a vested interest in responding with calumny and abuse,” even though “Scaliger’s resentment against the reading public was largely unjustified” by his actual, mostly positive reception.3 But Scaliger’s own self-assessment suggests that his discomfort comes not so much from scholarly debate as from the scholar’s uncertain relation to the larger world, and particularly from the necessity that a scholar is something of a free agent, with stronger ties to ancient works in dead languages than to any country, home, or even, as Scaliger complains, class. The emphasis on scholarly ties over social ones can have unsettling effects, as it did for another of Casaubon’s friends, his Greek teacher Franciscus Portus, who grew up in Crete but spent so much

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of his life studying and teaching abroad that he forgot modern Greek, corresponding almost exclusively in classical Greek.4 This rootlessness could be truly dangerous. Because scholarship frequently crossed the boundaries between Catholic and Reformed Europe, as Scaliger and Casaubon experienced, scholars could find themselves objects of suspicion in both worlds. Gabriel Boule attempted for years to translate Jacques-Auguste de Thou’s History, finding his work held up by de Thou’s family and friends because Boule was Protestant; after he converted to Catholicism, his work continued to be delayed by friction with Protestant colleagues, and he eventually gave up.5 Scholarly work could be a detriment to the most basic social, political, and religious identifications, and, in turn, such identifications could be a significant obstacle to the pursuit of learning. Modern scholars sometimes experience a similar sense of isolation. The academic job market tends to create its own geography: like Casaubon, who travelled from Switzerland to France and eventually to England as his talents were sought by different patrons and for different purposes, modern professors go where their particular specialties and skills are most needed, not often where they have prior ties.6 But the work of scholarly research and writing – particularly the interpretation of literature of the distant past – is isolating in itself. Like Scaliger, we often have the experience of leaving our own books behind to use those belonging to someone else; like Boule, we go to great lengths in pursuit of projects the point of which might not be apparent to our friends and colleagues or to the copyright-holders or archivists who control the materials we need for our work. The bonhomie of academic conferences is offset by the distinctive scholarly goals of the various participants, whose professional success will be measured mostly by the unique contribution of their work, not the collective enterprise of a conference. Scholarly work, as invaluable as it is for informing our teaching, also separates us from our students, not only because it may be too advanced for them but because many of us feel obliged to teach a broader sense of the field than we adopt in print. Immersion in the past separates us from the culture of our time, including the intellectual culture, even while we spend our lives reading texts that come from a time that is alien to us. The pleasures of reading, which may include an imaginary quasi-social connection to a poetic persona or a fictional character, give way to the abstraction of interpretation and contextualization. I may feel a sense of intimacy with some of the writers I think about most frequently: when I read a letter by, for example, Donne, I might think to myself, yes, that is like him, as I would of a friend. But this is a distortion – my acquaintance is only with his writings, as conditioned by the particular circumstances of their transmission. I do not, in any real sense, know the man. The work of literary scholarship is a work of solitude, profoundly

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isolated in temporal, social, and intellectual senses from a scholar’s circumstances and those of the people under study. My intention in this book has been to demonstrate that Renaissance poets and other writers shared this sense of isolation governing reading, writing, interpreting, and the relationships those activities allow to the past and future. There is a consolation to this mutual literary isolation for a solitary critic: the solitude of the work is shared by its subjects. But I would suggest that this conjunction of isolations also aptly addresses the relationship between reading, scholarship, and texts: it suggests that interpretation, attribution, editing, and similar endeavours do not necessarily lead to the profound transformations scholars sometimes imagine them to effect. Jeffrey Masten argues: “To attach a name to a book that did not bear one, to modernize, standardize, repunctuate, and emend in our own image the texts of another period, to elide or rewrite, often silently, the apparatus in which a text originally circulated – all of these acts relinquish and/or ignore important evidence of the culture we read.”7 But the texts I have been discussing here, as I have argued, were always wanderers, their relation to their origins uncertain and obscured from very early in their existence and in ways that were predictably unpredictable to their authors. This inevitability of a text’s recategorization and rethinking does not mean that Masten is wrong, but it changes the implications of his observation. Literary history does not carry a text to the present in some unadulterated state, but its isolating effects are not separable from those always present in the relationship between writer and reader. My final chapter in particular is intended to serve as a reminder that the divorce from context involved in imagining an interaction with an earlier writer is inevitable and also largely apparent to the imaginer. When Hofmannsthal confidently addresses Bacon as a friend, he acknowledges the mutual isolation of the two writers more than he undoes it. Similarly, interpreters should work to understand the history by which a text has reached us, but not with the intent of undoing that history’s role in interpretation. The word ­unediting has sometimes been used to describe the process of revealing the history of a work’s isolated sojourn through time by examining the layers that have accrued to it.8 I find this work valuable, but I am as skeptical of considering the material history of a text as an object of interpretation as I am of heavy editing for the sake of a supposed clarity that elides our e­ strangement from old texts. When editing or interpreting separates a work from the circumstances of its original composition and circulation, it can further a process of personal, temporal, and cultural isolation already underway within the text. Literary history’s effects are always dual: the same processes that allow for contextualization also reinforce the isolation of a text as it moves through time. The poets are not our friends, but that does not mean that

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the intimacy of reading is an illusion or a fabrication, only that it is provisional and distinctive. Reading is a momentary glimpse of the long life of a text far too complex to be fully taken in, but able to be represented in the brief encounter between similarly isolated perspectives. My approach in this book has been designed to account for one particular part of that essential literary experience. I have focussed primarily on English Renaissance lyric poetry because of the interpretive problem created by its social uses, and also because a sense of isolation is perceptible within the inward turn of lyric. I have touched on drama, epic, and prose genres more briefly, but there is more to be said about their treatments of literary isolation. The twin audiences of drama in the theatre and print create the possibility that the potential perspective of each of those two audiences undermines the interpretive confidence of the other: widely read playwrights such as Shakespeare and (particularly) Jonson have proper homes in neither sphere. There is a comparable tension in The Faerie Queene and Paradise Lost between the singularity of literary ambition and the intertextual polysemy of genre. Nor are these issues limited to England: Joachim du Bellay (whose interest in the desolations of history influenced Spenser’s) and Luis de Góngora (who appears here in Thomas Stanley’s translation) represent notable voices within a continental tradition of attention to solitude and skepticism of social thinking extending at least from Cervantes to La Rochefoucauld and forming a prefiguration of the modernist concerns with alienation and broken communication represented in this book by Hofmannsthal. Still, there seems to have been a sense, in England in particular, beginning around the 1580s, that there was something insufficient about the social promise behind the literary network of patronage and praise. The frequently acknowledged difficulty of obtaining preferment through writing poetry leads to more of it rather than less, as if futility were its own reward. Reading such texts now is a fulfillment of an orientation toward strangers already detectable within them. There is, furthermore, a particular mode of reading that follows from this orientation, a reading that acknowledges both the text’s isolation and its singular ability as text to overcome that isolation; the term I have used in this book is strange reading. I do not suggest, however, that this reading is the special domain of scholars. On the contrary, scholarship can sometimes give us too much confidence in our ability to understand; we succumb to the temptation to believe that a sufficient quantity of contextual information can make up for the uncertainty of interpretation. The reader who begins with incomprehension may have an advantage, as long as that reader avoids the shortcut I sometimes see students take, of assuming that there is something special about the first idea that comes to mind. I have sometimes reflected, while writing this

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book, on the life and work of Paul Celan, literature’s greatest proponent of an association between emotional isolation and textual obscurity. “The poem,” Celan says in The Meridian, “is lonely. It is lonely and en route. Its author remains added to it.”9 Celan’s difficulty has a way of equalizing scholarly and lay readers (particularly since he would have placed himself in the latter category). Hans-Georg Gadamer describes this tendency in his extended essay on Celan: [E]very poem in this sequence [Breath-turn] is a configuration of unambiguous precision; and while they are not transparent, nor articulated with direct clarity, neither are they veiled, or capable of being interpreted arbitrarily. This is the experience of reading which awaits the patient reader. The reader who is interested in understanding and decoding hermetic lyrics must clearly not be hurried. Such a reader need not be scholarly, or especially learned. He or she must simply try to keep listening.10

It may be surprising that Gadamer places the adjectives “hermetic” and “scholarly” effectively in opposition, if we think of scholarship as precisely the kind of closed-off world of special knowledge associated with hermeticism in its figurative, post-Renaissance sense. But Gadamer’s point is that the key that enables access to poetic hermeticism is reading, not learning. He is not disparaging learning: indeed, his essay contains many references to the literary and philosophical tradition he and Celan shared. Learning is (merely) the explicatory mechanism by which the insights of reading are shaped and conveyed. Reading, however, can also reveal and document learning’s failure to explain. Celan knew that interpretation can console; as he says in The ­Meridian of the heady discussion of aesthetics that occurs late in ­Büchner’s Danton’s Death, “It feels good to talk about art.”11 But he ­immediately ­reminds his audience that “when the talk concerns art, there’s always someone who is present and ... not really listening,” someone who “doesn’t know what the talk was about.”12 That someone (Lucile, in ­Danton’s Death) leads him to ask whether Büchner might be interested, as Celan is, in “a radical calling-into-question of art.”13 Thinking about the person who won’t understand a discussion of aesthetics helps Celan think about his relation to art. I have suggested, about Chapman and Donne in particular, that obscurity entails and derives from thinking about the reader who is not an understander, which I have related to the notion that ­literary ambition entails thinking about the reader who is not an acquaintance (and, as I observed in chapter 3, Chapman connects these two notions directly). The shared isolation of reader and writer frames and delineates, sometimes vertiginously, the epistemology of incomprehension that is ­inscribed in the heart of literary history.

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But incomprehension is not the inevitable result of literary isolation; it is merely a marker of the text’s separation. The same uncertainty that weakens the triangular relationship between writer, text, and reader also allows for possible modes of reading that are more attuned to genre and to a work’s place in a long-term literary history than immediate reading within a social context can be, and this is why I have associated literary isolation with both retreat and ambition, both obscurity and broad influence. Isolation is an orientation toward history that allows for a reading far removed from the social circumstances of the author but strangely able to make sense of the distinctive but provisional readability of a wandering text. It is the status of a literary work at the point of its transition from the interest of friends and writing colleagues to the scrutiny of strangers.

Notes

Introduction: Writing in Solitude 1 Harvey, letter to John Young, Master of Pembroke Hall, 21 March 1573. ­Letter-Book of Gabriel Harvey, ed. Edward John Long Scott, 4. 2 American Association of University Professors, “On Collegiality as a Criterion for Faculty Evaluation.” 3 Bérubé, Blum, Castiglia, and Spicher Kasdorf, “Community Reading and ­Social Imagination,” 421. 4 Lupton, Thinking with Shakespeare: Essays on Politics and Life, 9. 5 Stillinger, Multiple Authorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius; Marotti, Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric; Masten, Textual Intercourse. 6 May, Virgil’s Georgicks Englished, 135, sig. I4r. I have modernized the typography of quotations from early editions but preserved spelling and punctuation. 7 Stanley, Poems, 208, sig. O6v. 8 Line 32; lines 35–6. The Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell, ed. Margoliouth. 9 “To the reader,” Ovids Tristia, trans. S[altonstall], sig. A3v. 10 Quotations of Shakespeare are drawn from The Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. Bevington. 11 Quotations from Sidney’s poems are drawn from The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Ringler. 12 David Scott Wilson-Okamura observes that the word “curious” (line 1) often “refers to the care (Latin cura) that the artist lavishes on painting or poem,” but also to the same care applied to reading; he cites Shakespeare’s hope that his “slight Muse do please these curious days” in Sonnet 38 (Wilson-­Okamura, Spenser’s International Style, 161). Shakespeare and Sidney are both worried that the “curious frame” through which their readers view their texts might frame what is not actually there.

204  Notes to pages 9–15 13 As Kenneth Borris argues, allegory for Sidney is a poetics that can encompass modes of writing and reading extending beyond allegory as genre. Borris, ­Allegory and Epic in English Renaissance Literature, 110–14. 14 Few recent critics have made Lady Rich the pre-eminent focus of the ­sequence’s interpretation, but there has been a broad range of opinion, ­including Nona Fienberg’s view that, though it should not be primary, “one of the legitimate pleasures and interests of the sequence remains in the identification” of Stella with Devereux; Marotti’s insistence that “Lady Rich was a symbolic figure for Sidney”; and Margreta de Grazia’s claim that “­biographical considerations have obfuscated” the interpretation of the ­sequence. ­Fienberg, “The Emergence of Stella in Astrophil and Stella,” 11; Marotti, “‘Love is Not Love,’” 400; de Grazia, “Lost Potential in Grammar and Nature: ­Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella,” 30. 15 Quotations of Milton’s poetry are drawn from The Works of John Milton, ed. Patterson, vols. 1–4. 16 Divisions among interpretations of this passage are stark. Neil Forsyth ­observes that Milton’s question – “What boots it?” – is not answered (­Forsyth, “‘Lycidas’: A Wolf in Saint’s Clothing,” 694), while David ­Sansone believes to the contrary that “Milton’s question answers itself when one recognizes that his question echoes lines in which Spenser places the poet Orpheus happily in Elysium” in The Ruines of Time (Sansone, “How ­Milton Reads,” 349). Spenser’s use of similar language, however, is in a tribute to ­Sidney offered with more humility than Milton’s elegy is; Paul Alpers is surely right that in Lycidas, “The emergence of Phoebus’s voice, far from ­putting the speaker in his place, is one more stage in the poem’s enabling of him” (Alpers, “Lycidas and Modern Criticism,” 478). 17 Forsyth, in “Saint’s Clothing,” presents a particularly interesting reading of the poem’s denunciation of corrupt clergy in the voice of Saint Peter. 18 The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser, ed. Oram et al., 212 and 213, line 4. See the editors’ headnote to December (202) for ­speculation about the missing emblem. 19 Thus, Franco Moretti criticizes close reading for “emphasizing the ­uniqueness of exactly this word here and this sentence here” and insists ­instead on a model of literature as “a collective system, that should be grasped as such, as a whole” (Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees, 3–4). 20 Dobranski, Readers and Authorship in Early Modern England, 6. 21 Levine, “Citizens’ Games,” 33. 22 Nicholson, Uncommon Tongues, 1. 23 Gil, Before Intimacy, xii–xiii. 24 Sussman, Idylls of the Wanderer, 2. 25 Ibid., 5.

Notes to pages 15–22  205 26 Philostratus, The Life of Apollonius of Tyana, trans. Jones, 1.14, vol. 1, 63. 27 Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, trans. Hicks, 6.57, vol. 2, 59. 28 Defences of solitude seem always to open with the notion that it needs defending, that, as Diana Senechal says, “individuals, schools, and culture are pushing solitude aside” (Senechal, Republic of Noise, 4). Senechal puts some of the blame on the internet and some on contemporary teaching methods; Anthony Stoll had earlier suspected psychoanalysis (Stoll, Solitude, ix). But the debate between solitude and sociability is an ancient one, greatly predating any of these things. 29 Cobb, Single: Arguments for the Uncoupled, 15. Cobb’s book is strongest in its critique of postwar and contemporary literature and popular culture, as well as its substantial treatment of Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener” (139–56); about earlier literature Cobb has less to say, comparing the role of marriage in a political autobiography to “a Shakespearean comedy” in which “a marriage ends our tragic twists and turns, nullifying all the bad feelings of misunderstanding and misconnection that preceded it” (13). As my ­reading of As You Like It in chapter 4 should demonstrate, I do not believe that ­marriage in Shakespeare’s comedies does those things. 30 Francis Petrarch, The Life of Solitude, trans. Zeitlin, 2.3.12, 220. 31 Ibid., 1.4.3, 135. 32 Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations, 1. 33 Smith, Contingencies of Value, 47. 1 Lyric Futures: Hidden Ambitions in the Sidney-Pembroke Circle 1 The OED notes the political context. 2 Horae Subsecivae. Observations and Discourses (London: Edward Blount, 1620), 11–12, sigs. B5r–B6v. For a convincing account of the authorship of this essay collection, see Andrew Huxley, “The Aphorismi and a Discourse of Laws: Bacon, Cavendish, and Hobbes 1615–1620,” The Historical Journal 47 (2004), 399–412. 3 Horae, 25. 4 Ibid., 16. 5 Shorter Poems, 13; Paradise Lost, line 16. 6 Wall, The Imprint of Gender, 34–5. 7 Ibid., 55; 93. 8 “Of Ambition,” Bacon, The Essayes or Counsels, Civill and Morall, ed. ­Michael Kiernan, 115. 9 Meric Casaubon, A Treatise Concerning Enthusiasme, 271. Casaubon ­wonders whether poetic inspiration is truly a mystical process, and considers the role of wine. 10 The Shepheardes Calender, “January,” 63 and 65.

206  Notes to pages 22–6 11 “A Dialogue betweene two shepheards, Thenot, and Piers, in praise of ­Astrea,” 58–60. The Collected Works of Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of ­Pembroke, ed. Hannay, Kinnamon, and Brennan. 12 Herbert, “Elegy for Doctor Dunn,” lines 2–3. The Poems English and Latin of Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, ed. Moore Smith. 13 Dryden, “The Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy,” from his preface to Troilus and Cressida, The Works of John Dryden, vol. 13, ed. Maximilian E. Novak and George R. Guffey (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 241. 14 This claim – that interpretation was then and should now be tied to the means of transmission – was made most strongly by critics in the 1990s, for example by Harold Love, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England, particularly pp. 141–76; it continues to be influential in arguments such as Thomas Healy’s for “a critical practice that acknowledges textual variability within manuscript culture” (Healy, “‘Trewly wrote’: Manuscript, Print, and the Lyric,” in The Lyric Poem: Formations and Transformations, ed. Marion Thain, 59). 15 Syr P. S. His Astrophel and Stella, sig. A.ii v. 16 Sidney, Astrophel, sig. A. ii r. 17 The Works of George Herbert, ed. F.E. Hutchinson, 3. Though this preface is headed “The Printers to the Reader,” Hutchinson notes Ferrar’s authorship confidently (476). 18 We should bear in mind, though, Michael Mascuch’s warning that social ­ambition is not as inherent to middle-class life as is often thought; Mascuch argues that self-representations in middle-class people’s life-writing reveal them to be motivated as much by fear of sliding backward as by desire to ­advance. Mascuch, “Social Mobility and Middling Self-Identity,” 45–61. 19 Huntington, Ambition, Rank, and Poetry in 1590s England, 4. 20 On His Own Ignorance, in Francesco Petrarca, Invectives, trans. Marsh, chapter 2, 119–220. 21 Ibid., 121–2. 22 As Stephen Guy-Bray shows, Daniel alludes frequently to the futility of love poetry to change the beloved’s mind and so raises broader questions about what the function of a poem really is. Guy-Bray, “Rosamond’s Complaint: Daniel, Ovid, and the Purpose of Poetry,” 338–50. 23 Delia Sonnet 12, Daniel, Poems and A Defence of Ryme. 24 Daniel, indeed, is a key figure in the use of print to further a poet’s reputation, as Steven K. Galbraith notes in an interesting comparison of Daniel’s 1599 collected works in quarto and his 1601 folio, which announces “his status as the preeminent poet of his generation.” Galbraith, “English Literary Folios 1593–1623,” 55. 25 Daniel, Poems, ed. Sprague, 9.

Notes to pages 27–37  207 26 Daniel, The Collection of the History of England, sigs. A4r and Br. 27 Included with Spenser’s Astrophel, with which it was originally published, in The Complete Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, 708–10. 28 Defence of Poetry, in Sidney, Miscellaneous Prose, 73; 111. 29 This is not to say that Sidney did not write about such things in letters, only that those letters no longer exist. Roger Kuin notes that “no letters survive between Sidney and those closest to him,” including his f­ ellow ­poets Greville, Spenser, and his sister Mary. The Correspondence of Sir Philip Sidney, xxxi. 30 Greville, A Dedication to Sir Philip Sidney, in Complete Prose Works, 8. 31 Ibid., 11. 32 Gouws comments on the problems of Greville’s claim at Complete Prose Works, 186n. For Sidney’s will, see Miscellaneous Prose, 147–52. 33 G.A. Wilkes, “The Literary Relationship of Sidney and Fulke Greville,” 295. 34 Ibid., 301. 35 Greville, Complete Prose, 11–12. 36 Ibid., 3. 37 Alexander, Writing After Sidney, 238. 38 Jonathan Dollimore has argued that Greville’s various statements, in both prose and verse, on the nature of poetry suggest an unresolvable internal conflict over poetry’s function; Greville “expresses a strong preference for a form of realist mimesis, both in the Life [of Sidney] and the early sections of Human Learning. Yet, when giving a specific account of poetry later on in Human Learning he suddenly switches tack, investing the art with an idealist function ... he cannot press the theory to its conclusion.” Dollimore, Radical Tragedy, 79; 82. 39 Poems and Dramas of Fulke Greville, 2 vols., ed. Geoffrey Bullough. 40 As Joel Davis documents, Greville’s interest in stoicism was a source of ­conflict over the management of Sidney’s reputation. Davis, “Multiple ‘­Arcadias’ and the Literary Quarrel between Fulke Greville and the Countess of ­Pembroke,” 401–30, esp. 406–9. 41 Peacham, The Compleat Gentleman (London: Francis Constable, 1622), 99, sig. O4. 42 Peacham, Graphice, or The Most Auncient And Excellent Art of Drawing and Limming. 43 The Courtyer of Count Baldessar Castilio, sig. Piii v–Piiii r. 44 Daniel, A Defense of Ryme, in Poems and A Defence, 131. 45 Puttenham, Arte, 1.3, 6. 46 Puttenham, The Art of English Poesy, ed. Whigham and Rebhorn, 96. 47 Ibid., 1.5, p. 10. 48 Greenblatt, Learning to Curse, 28.

208  Notes to pages 38–46 49 Ibid., 1.8, 16. Like Puttenham, Sidney regrets that “England, the mother of excellent minds, should be grown so hard a stepmother to poets” (Miscellaneous Prose, 110). 50 Whigham, Ambition and Privilege, 126. 51 Huntington characterizes Lanyer as an extremely ambitious poet who “puts herself in a position of creating the social space which has not previously ­existed in which her accomplishment will be valued” (Huntington, Ambition, Rank, 151). He concedes, though, that the book’s attention to rank makes it “socially confusing” (147). 52 Susanne Woods, Lanyer: A Renaissance Woman Poet, 103. 53 I agree with Ann Baynes Coiro that “Lanyer and Jonson have more in common with each other than does Lanyer with other important women writers of her generation” (Coiro, “Writing in Service,” 359). Coiro documents carefully the relationship between the two poets’ treatment of gender and class in their respective country-house poems; that relationship hints at a shared sense not only of how this particular genre works but of how genre works in general, and thus might extend to the newly emerging genre of the printed single-author poetry collection. 54 Gallagher notes that the insistence of women writers that what they are ­doing is normal often disappoints critics looking for evidence of subversion. ­Gallagher, “A History of the Precedent,” 309–10. 55 Alexander, Writing After Sidney, 285. 56 Masten, “‘Shall I turne blabb?’” 69. 57 Mueller, “The Feminist Poetics of ‘Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum,” 104; 123. 58 Ng, “Aemilia Lanyer and the Politics of Praise,” 434. 59 Goldberg, Desiring Women Writing, 21. 60 Ng, “Aemilia Lanyer,” 440. 61 “To the Ladie Susan, Countesse Dowager of Kent,” lines 43 and 47; Ng, “­Aemilia Lanyer,” 434. 62 In “To the Vertuous Reader,” the preface to the book’s title poem, Lanyer ­explains why she has “written this small volume, or little booke,” but not why she has printed it (Lanyer, Salve Deus, 48). 63 Mueller, “Feminist Poetics,” 101. 64 Ibid., 123. 2 Nameless Orphans: Ambitious Poetry in an Age of Modesty 1 Sidney’s name as dedicatee is on the title page, which lacks any other name except that of the printer, Hugh Singleton. The verso of the title page contains the envoy, and the facing recto is the first page of E.K.’s preface, headed with E.K.’s initials, and containing the names of the other poets within its first few sentences. The Shepheardes Calender.

Notes to pages 46–50  209 2 E.K.’s name has attracted nearly as much attention as the things he writes. Louis Waldman, for example, places E.K. in relation to naming practices of the period (Waldman, “Spenser’s Pseudonym ‘E.K.’ and Humanist Self-­ Naming,” Spenser Studies 9 [1988], 21–31). D. Allen Carroll, responding to the general trend (which includes Waldman) toward thinking of E.K. as a version of Spenser rather than a distinct, potentially identifiable personage, rethinks his name as a single word (Carroll, “The Meaning of ‘E.K,’” Spenser Studies 20 [2005], 169–81). Since the practice of trying to identify E.K. as an actual person has been largely abandoned, many critics now seem to imagine his annotations as part of the Calender itself. 3 Catherine Nicholson connects this withholding usefully to the Calender’s genre and relation to its classical antecedents as well as to its language and r­ elation to readers, all of which can be characterized through E.K.’s description of the work’s author as “furre estraunged.” Nicholson, Uncommon Tongues, 104. 4 The Complaints bear a dedication to the Countess of Pembroke, alluding ­implicitly to the previous dedication of the Calender to her brother, and Colin Clouts Come Home Againe refers in its opening to the events of the Calender and shares several of its characters. The two later works are attributed on their title pages to “Ed. Sp.” and “Ed. Spencer,” respectively, firmly associating them with The Faerie Queene, published with Spenser’s name in 1590. Complaints; Colin Clouts Come Home Againe. 5 There has been a long running debate over the sincerity and significance of the embarrassment Renaissance gentlemen sometimes express about print publication; Joshua Phillips summarizes it in the context of a discussion of the meaning of the word shame in his English Fictions of Communal Identity, 160–70. 6 Introductory epistle lines 7–11, Yale Shorter Poems, 13. 7 Tristia 1.1.53–68. Ovid, Tristium Libri Quinqueetc., ed. S.G. Owen. 8 The three first bookes of Ovid de Tristibus translated into English, trans. Thomas Churchyard f. 2r, sig. A2r. This is a corrected reprinting of the first edition of 1572. 9 Saltonstall, Ovids Tristia, sig. B2r. 10 Ovid, De Tristibus Libri Quinque, f. 3r, sig. Aiiir. 11 Ovid, De tristibus: or Mournefull elegies in five bookes, sig. B2r. 12 “Color” is a Latin word introduced into English without change; Saltonstall’s “hew” is the Anglo-Saxon equivalent. “Sable,” however, is the colour of melancholy or lament: Saltonstall believes that Tristia will be recognized for its elegiac tone. Peter Green’s recent translation, by contrast, renders “colore” as “style.” Ovid, The Poems of Exile, 1.1.61. 13 The term derives from Foucault’s essay “What is an Author?” (trans. Josué V. Harari, in Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism, ed. Harari, 141–60), though it has been used more broadly by subsequent critics.

210  Notes to pages 50–3 14 15 16 17 18 19

20

21

22 23 24

25

North, The Anonymous Renaissance, 39. Ibid., 43–4. Ibid., 68. Robson, “The Ethics of Anonymity,” 350–63. Ibid., 363. The primary examples are the deception of Malvolio in Twelfth Night (ibid., 350–2) and several quotations from Erasmus (352–4). I should be clear that I am not disagreeing with the basic premise that editors do their readers a disservice when they hide a text’s prior anonymity – editorial interpolations, whether textual or paratextual, should be announced as such. But, unlike Robson, I do not regard attribution as a fundamental change to a work; ­indeed, it is a wholly predictable fate for a once-anonymous text. Colins Clouts Come Home Againe, lines 380 and 382, and respective notes. The Yale editors conclude that “the court audience for which Spenser was writing would have perceived the poets” pseudonymized in the poem, but that assumption hardly applies to the revised version printed in 1595 – as I ­argued in my previous chapter, we should not be so quick to define the ­poem’s audience as its initial audience. Zarnowiecki observes the distinction between the “semi-anonymous insiders’ names” and those of Alabaster and Daniel, who “receive no pastoral nominative shadowing” (Fair Copies, 98). But he says of Spenser’s Astrophel that “the community of poets, praised in detail by Colin in Colin Clouts, acts in concert, and ensures its own reproduction and continuance” (99). “In concert” surely implies a consistency of genre, however, which seems to be undermined by the inconsistent use of pastoral monikers. North, Anonymous Renaissance, 69. Ibid., 74. The only indication that Moeoniæ follows the Complaint is the title page itself. See the ESTC, which lists a total of nine editions of these four books between 1587 and 1595, for the details of publication; the first three editions of the Complaint were printed (by different printers) for John Wolfe and Gabriel Cawood (who was also the bookseller for the Funerall Teares) and the first two of Moeoniæ for John Busbie. I will discuss these editions further in chapter 4. In the Huntington Library copy of the Complaint, Busbie’s note replaces “The Author to his loving Cosin” found in other copies (sig. A2r–v). W. Craig Ferguson speculates that possibly the printer, Valentine Simmes, “­actually printed a third edition of Moeoniæ which has not survived, and that, by chance, a copy of its preface has found its way into a copy of St. Peter’s Complaint” (Ferguson, Valentine Simmes, 90). Ferguson gives an example of another book, by an “R.T.,” in which Simmes says in his preface that he will hide the identity of the author despite the author’s initials appearing on the title page, “either by accident or design” (92). Simmes evidently appreciated

Notes to pages 53–60  211

26 27 28

29 30 31 32 33

34

35 36 37 38

39 40 41 42 43

the value of anonymity but did not regard it as a right, or its denial as particularly consequential. Gascoigne, Prefatory Letters to Additions from The Posies, 360. Gascoigne, Certayne Notes of Instruction, in Pigman’s Flowres, 459. Gascoigne frequently took on an exaggerated humility, whose sincerity has been questioned. Contrary to a common understanding of Gascoigne as ­modelling himself on the prodigal son and humbly accepting his various ­public failures, Felicity A. Hughes argues that his response to the censorship of his first book “represents an attempt to brazen it out with the censors rather than to placate them” (Hughes, “Gascoigne’s Poses,” 1). Defence, Sidney, Miscellaneous Prose, 73. Puttenham, Arte of English Poesie, 3. Italicized in original; ibid., 2. Wither, Britain’s Remembrancer, f. 129r–v, sig. L10r–v. Brendan O Hehir, who quotes this passage, notes that Aubrey is the only contemporaneous source for this tale, and finds no indication that Wither was ever captured at all, much less spared by Denham. O Hehir, Harmony From Discords, 64–5; the bracketed emendation is my own. The Newberry Library’s copy of Britain’s Remembrancer contains an ­inscription addressed to Edmund Prideaux and dated 16 June 1656; Norman E. Carlson transcribes it: “Sr, since it pleases you to think these Remembrances worth the inquiring after, the Author conceives them not to be unreasonably presented unto you though it be the thireth year after they were first prepared for this generation” (Carlson, “A George Wither Presentation Copy,” 536). Whether this note indicates that Aubrey was wrong about Wither’s reputation or merely speaks to Wither’s persistence is a matter of conjecture. Wither, Abuses Stript, and Whipt, Lib. 2, Satyr 3, “Of Weakness,” sig. R2v. Ibid., sig. A4v. The commendatory poems are italicized. All the Workes of John Taylor the Water-Poet, sig. A4v; A5r. Ibid., 153, sig. Oor. As Bernard Capp notes, Taylor’s feud with Fennor began when the latter did not show up for what was supposed to be a joint performance; an abusive exchange of verses followed in individual printings, which Taylor collected together in his folio. Capp, The World of John Taylor the Water-Poet, 14–15. Taylor, Workes, p. 161, sig. Oo5r. Ibid., 247, sig. Bbb6r. Lanyer, Salve Deus Rex Judæorum. The title page is reproduced in Woods’s edition. Poole, The English Parnassus, sig. a2. The style of quotation, however, does not necessarily dictate its purpose. As Fred Schurink argues, the association of commonplacing strictly with either

212  Notes to pages 60–4

44 45 46

47 48 49

50

51 52 53 54 55 56 57

pragmatic or recreational reading is reductive; Schurink identifies literary works in particular as being able to provide commonplaces to be used for multiple purposes (Schurink, “Manuscript Commonplace Books, Literature, and Reading in Early Modern England,” 453–69). Poole’s book is assembled with a singular purpose in mind – producing new poetry – but since that ­poetry itself may have varied goals, Poole’s quotations depend on a rather broad sense of literary value. Poole, Parnassus, 235, sig. Q6r. Ibid., 280, sig. T4v. Poole abstracts the phrases from their more fluent ­context; see Earle, Micro-cosmographie, sigs. Br–B2v. For example: “Critick. Snarling, supercilious, biting, lashing, captious, ­censorious, carping, exceptious, invective, wise, capricious, curious, exact, accurate, judging, rigorous, sharp, sharp tooth’d, severe, pettish, pievish, sponge-­using, flouting, gibing, quipping, jeering, girding, rigid, snappish, grinning” (­Parnassus, 77, sig. F7r). Italicized in original. Ibid., sig. A6r. Ibid., sig. A8v. Ferrar’s preface begins, “The dedication of this work having been made by the Authour to the Divine Majestie onely, how should we now presume to interest any mortall man in the patronage of it” (“The Printers to the Reader,” Works of George Herbert, Hutchinson, 3). Ferrar refers to Herbert’s “The Dedication,” which immediately follows Ferrar’s preface (Hutchinson, Works, 5). On Ferrar’s authorship of the preface, see Hutchinson, Works, 476. Izaak Walton is responsible for the idea that Herbert was born in ­Montgomery Castle, the home of his ancestors, while modern biographers shift the event to Black Hall nearby; Walton also stresses Herbert’s need to repair B ­ emerton Rectory while he lived in it, although here too he has been accused of ­exaggeration (Charles, A Life of George Herbert, 26–7 and 154ff). Cristina ­Malcolmson summarizes the debate over Herbert’s downward trajectory and relates it to his possible appeal to his aristocratic family connections when ­securing his appointment at Bemerton (Malcolmson, George Herbert, 101). Marotti, Manuscript, Print, 256–7. Hutchinson, Works, 3. Schoenfeldt, Prayer and Power, 4. Ibid., 73. Ibid., 78. Ibid., 70. Many people do understand books through their uses, of course, and not only in relatively recent criticism. Carla Mazzio and Bradin Cormack cite Geffrey Whitney’s 1586 motto about “Usus libri” to defend their assertion that “The concept of book use is integral to the history of reading in early modern Europe.” Cormack and Mazzio, Book Use, Book Theory, 1.

Notes to pages 66–9  213 58 Schoenfeldt reads the poem as quite bitter; its conceit “bemoans the great costs of entertaining a monarch whose omnipresence necessarily occupies every chamber of the self” and the “usurpation of his individual rights” and the surprising rhyme of “dittie” and “wittie” is “intentionally dreadful” and “jangling” rather than comical (Prayer and Power, 100; 102). I suggest instead that the poem’s allusions to the sacred use of a language shared with secular poetry allows for less of a discontinuity between the bitter and grateful parts of the poem and hints at the possibility of a continuing history beyond the poem’s end and the poet’s death it anticipates. 59 The complexity of the quotation’s inclusion has been previously noted, even by critics who believe the quotation does solve something the poem is o ­ ffering as a problem. Nicholas R. Jones reads the phrase as a hint of “the language of the next stage,” displacing what “The Forerunners” rejects (Jones, “Texts and Contexts, 170); and Christopher A. Hill says that as a q ­ uotation from scripture, it “seems to be a credible response to the problem of the decorum of praise: God’s words are naturally most fitting” (Hill, “George Herbert’s Sweet Devotion,” 254). Both critics note, though, that there is something provisional about the way the phrase is given; to Jones it is “­suggestive, not definitive” (171), and to Hill its assurance “does not last” (254). 60 Richard Strier believes that “The poem comes to a positive conclusion when it shifts to conceiving of the heart rather than the brain as what is ‘within’” (Strier, Love Known, 216.) I do not see that shift – the “bleak paleness” ­remains the same mark the forerunners made in the first stanza; the tone has changed here, but the conceit is still the same: the chalk mark on the door compared to white hair. 3 The Peril of Understanding: Forms of Obscurity 1 Chapman, trans., Achilles Shield, sig. Bv. 2 Notes of Conversations with Ben Jonson made by William Drummond of Hawthornden, ed. G.B. Harrison, 9. Harrison’s edition largely preserves Drummond’s light punctuation, appropriate to what are no more than ­mnemonic jottings. Ian Donaldson’s introduction and notes to his more ­extensively edited text provide useful context (Cambridge Jonson, vol. 5, 353–91). Donaldson rightly warns against the critical habit of treating ­Jonson’s opinions in the form in which Drummond conveys them as “fixed and final positions” rather than one participant’s report on a wide-ranging and jokey discussion (355). 3 Arthur Marotti explicates that Jonson “objects to the poems of the mature Donne because they force the reader to follow closely the idiosyncratic ­mental processes of the author,” (Marotti, “All About Jonson’s Poetry,” 220). Richard B. Wollman, who agrees with Jonson, still does not give him much

214  Notes to pages 69–74

4 5

6

7 8 9

10

11 12 13 14

15 16

credit: “Jonson, anxious to print his own works, perhaps did not understand how true his statement was. For Donne, meaning exists in the exchange, and contrary to modern print assumptions, not solely on the page” (Wollman, “Donne’s Obscurity,” 91). Conversations, 7. Jonson was also quite capable of being obscure himself. As William W.E. Slights argues, a central theme in Jonson’s literary output is the “tension between concealment and revelation,” a tension that depends more on uncertainty than authorial control given “the large part played by inadvertence” in the mechanisms of secrecy. Slights, Ben Jonson and the Art of Secrecy, 3; 172. Rowe, “Ben Jonson’s Quarrel with Audience and Its Renaissance Context,” 439. Paul D. Canaan points out that Jonson’s disdain of audiences is one of the principal concerns of his prefaces (Canaan, “Ben Jonson, Authorship, and the Rhetoric of English Dramatic Prefatory Criticism,” 189–90) and Brian Patrick Chalk, discussing Sejanus, says that such contempt was fed by documented bad experiences with theatergoers (Chalk, “Jonson’s Textual ­Monument,” 388). Quoted from Donne, The Epithalamions, Anniversaries, and Epicedes, ed. W. Milgate. Monsieur Bossu’s Treatise of the Epick Poem, trans. W.J., 53, sig. E3r. “Latebrasque Lycophronis atri,” Statius, Silvae, ed. and trans. D.R. S­ hackleton Bailey and Christopher A. Parrott, 5.3.137, 344–5. Edward Phillips cites ­Lycophron’s “obscure poem” in his Theatrum Poetarum, and modern classicists continue to consider Alexandra “the most obscure and e­ nigmatic literary work of the Hellenistic period and indeed, it could be a­ rgued, of the entire antiquity.” Phillips, Theatrum Poetarum (London: Printed for Charles Smith, 1675), 51 sig. D2r; Elisabeth Kosmetatou, “Lycophron’s ‘Alexandra’ Reconsidered: The Attalid Connection,” Hermes 128 (2000), 32. The point of this story is that scripture itself is often obscure. Quoted from the anonymous A New Systeme of the Apocalypse, sig. *5v; compare also The Works of the Reverend and Learned John Lightfoot, 1245, sig. 7R3r. Chartier, “Texts, Printing, Readings,” 157. Ibid., 171; 172. Ibid., 173–4. For the original speculation, see Bradbrook, The School of Night, and Yates, A Study of Love’s Labour’s Lost. For counterclaims, see for example Jackson, “Francis Meres and the Cultural Contexts of Shakespeare’s Rival Poet Sonnets,” 232–3 and Shirley, Thomas Harriot: A Biography, 359–60. Hutchinson, review of Holmes, Review of English Studies 10 (1934), 232. For example, William Jaggard informs the reader of his 1599 edition of ­Albertus’s Book of Secrets that “it is manifestly known, that this book of

Notes to pages 74–6  215

17

18 19

20

21

22

23 24

Albertus Magnus is in the Italian, Spanish, French, and Dutch tongues”: the necessity of his translation derives from secrecy’s being “manifestly known” over much of Europe. The Book of Secrets of Albertus Magnus, 2. OED, “Hermetic,” sense 2a. H.D.’s Hermetic Definition might have influenced the association of the term with difficult modern poetry, though in fact she seemed to intend a reference to the Hermetic tradition, as Jason M. Coats argues in his “H.D. and the Hermetic Impulse,” 79–98. Stevenson, Occasions Off-spring. or Poems upon Severall Occasions, 21, sig. B11r. Stevenson was part of a group of Cavalier wits with an interest in difficulty for its own sake; the Dictionary of National Biography cites Anthony Wood’s report that Stevenson’s friend Henry Bold liked to translate the most ­obscure English verses he could find into Latin (“Stevenson, Matthew”; “Bold, Henry,” DNB). As Anthony Grafton has noted, the receding of the authority of the Hermetic writings as such is a gradual process over this period, but its turning point is Isaac Casaubon’s philological analysis of 1614, which concluded that the Hermetica must be far later than previously thought. Grafton, “Protestant versus Prophet,” 78–93. This tension between secrecy as occultist practice and as rhetorically performed pose is one of the primary subjects of Katherine Eggert’s Dis­ knowledge: Literature, Alchemy, and the End of Humanism in Renaissance England. Eggert argues that “despite the utility of the posture of withholding secrets, such a pose of ‘not telling’ blatantly challenges the ideal of the textual transmission of knowledge that was fundamental to humanism in its early phase” (25), but she acknowledges that the ubiquity of the pose allows esotericism a figurative mobility well beyond its role in intellectual history. Gerald Snare traces the long history of Chapman’s reputation for obscurity with the conclusion that it is undeserved: “Chapman’s preference for the ­obscurity and darkness that comes from a unique and coherent invention – that special delight Renaissance poets took in making unlikely similes and ­digressions fit the poem they would appear to fragment – has been interpreted as the intentional obscurity that comes from arcane reference to philosophical systems and mythologies” (Snare, The Mystification of George Chapman, 4). Even if Snare is right that critics’ desire to see the arcane in Chapman is ultimately a misreading, however, that error still has its basis in Chapman’s preferred figurative modes and should not prevent us from recognizing that Chapman was obscure and knew he was obscure. The Poems of George Chapman, ed. Phyllis Brooks Bartlett, 49. All quotations from Chapman’s poetry are drawn from this edition unless otherwise noted. Wilson-Okamura, Spenser’s International Style, 160.

216  Notes to pages 76–83 25 As Philippa Berry reads the poem, its interest in the obstacles to knowledge are linked to its challenge to the way the queen is imagined; as the poem moves through its stages of perplexity, “what seems ‘blindnesse’ will paradoxically lead to clearer vision. But when, at the end of this first part of his poem, Chapman introduces his female saviour, he does so in terms which Elizabeth’s cult had always studiously avoided. For she is no longer seen as a passive emblem of spiritual power, but as its active manipulator,” her role “accompanied or preceded by the enactment of an apocalyptic vengeance.” Berry, Of Chastity and Power, 142–3. 26 Poems of Chapman, 19. 27 Webbe, A Discourse of English Poetrie, sig. K3v. 28 The Revenger’s Tragedy was first attributed to Tourneur by Edward Archer 49 years after its anonymous publication; that attribution was questioned by W.W. Greg in the 1930s and debated throughout the twentieth century. MacDonald P. Jackson prepared an edition of the play that attributed it to Middleton in 1983, and more recent scholars have endorsed his conclusion. Jackson summarizes this history and the relevant evidence in his note on the play in “Canon and Chronology,” Thomas Middleton and Early Modern Textual Culture, 360–3. 29 Ferguson, Valentine Simmes, 15. 30 Ibid., 21. 31 Lesser, Hamlet After Q1. 32 Quoted by A.C. Hamilton, who explains his interest in the poem on the basis of is debt to Spenser (Hamilton, “Spenser and Tourneur’s Transformed Metamorphosis,” 127). Swinburne’s judgment has largely held sway; the most spirited defence of the poem might be Kenneth N. Cameron’s in “Cyril Tourneur and The Transformed Metamorphosis,” 18–24. What interest there was in the poem was largely owing to Tourneur’s supposed authorship of The Revenger’s Tragedy, and hence has faded further along with that attribution. 33 Quotations from this poem are drawn from The Works of Cyril Tourneur, ed. Allardyce Nicoll, collated with the EEBO images of the 1600 edition; Nicoll follows that edition closely, but I have restored some additional punctuation. See also the first modern edition in The Plays and Poems of Cyril Tourneur, ed. Collins, vol. 2, which provides details of the poem’s rediscovery in its ­introduction. In line 7 above, “it sinne” is surely a misprint for “its sinne” (that is, crime’s). 34 The Ghost of Lucrece, Prologue, stanzas 1 and 2, sig. A3r. The Ghost of Lucrece, ed. Joseph Quincy Adams, provides both a facsimile of the 1600 Simmes edition and a modernized, edited text; I quote from the former. 35 Stanza 9 of the main part of the poem, sig. A6r. 36 Stanzas 49–52, sigs. B8r–v.

Notes to pages 84–8  217 37 The marginalia appear on sigs. B2r (where the text is upside-down) and B3v. As transcribed by Adams (who speculates that Richard Fallowes is the young scribe of these lines and George his father), the lines read: George ffallowes is the trwe oner of this booke and he that stealeth this booke he shall be hanged on a houcke and If the hocke do faille he shale be hanged on anile and If the naile do cracke he shall be ha: George ffalowes is the trewe oner of this boke and he that stealeth this booke he shall be

38 39

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44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53

Richard fallowes is my nam and If with my pen I rot the same and If my pen hit had ben Better I woould amend everi letter (Lucrece, xiii) “Phlegethon, ontis, a ryver of hell, which allwaye burneth.” The Dictionary of syr Thomas Eliot knyght, sig. R5r. Seneca His Tenne Tragedies, dedication signed by Thomas Newton, f. 22v, sig. D6v and f. 37v, sig. F5v. Heywood is identified in this edition as translator of three of the plays: Hercules Furens, Thyestes, and Troas (sig. A4v). Ibid., f. 102v, sig. O7v. Waddington, The Mind’s Empire, 3. Ibid., 4. This poem was read as an attack on the Earl of Oxford, but is misty enough for Harvey to plausibly deny the charge. Penny McCarthy discusses its implications for Harvey’s approach to his many literary skirmishes in her “‘Milksop Muses’ or Why not Mary?” 23–5. Martin, “The Erotology of Donne’s ‘Extasie,’” 122. Wollman, “Donne’s Obscurity,” 117. Young, “‘O My America, My New-Found-Land,’” 36; 39. The Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne, ed. Stringer et al., vol. 3, 480. Birch, The Life of the Most Reverend John Tillotson. Mueller, “Donne’s Epic Venture in the ‘Metempsychosis,’” 109. Lyon, “Jonson and Carew on Donne: Censure into Praise,” 114. Emphasis in original. Eggert, Disknowledge, 72–3. Ibid., 77. Mattison, The Unimagined in the English Renaissance, 90–4 and 100–2.

218  Notes to pages 88–94 54 Gardner quotes Izaak Walton’s claim that Donne “in his declining age” wrote “many divine Sonnets,” but concludes that manuscript evidence points to most (but not all) of the sonnets having been written in 1609, thus well before Donne’s ordination. Donne, The Divine Poems, xxxvii–xlix. 55 Anne Donne died on 15 August 1617. The composition of “Since she whome I lovd” has been thought to have taken place any time from immediately after this date to about two years later. Donne Variorum, vol. 7, part 1, 432–3. 56 Guibbory, “John Donne,” in The Cambridge Companion to English Poetry, 124. 57 Donne Variorum, vol. 7, c–ci. 58 Oliver, Donne’s Religious Writing, 211. 59 Ibid., 213. 60 Quoted from Divine Poems, ed. Gardner. 61 Donne says of his early prose work Biathanatos, “it is a book written by Jack Donne, and not by Dr Donne.” Letter to Ker of April 1619, Selected Letters, 88–9. 62 “Ague” is originally a technical term for the tremors of a high fever, and is not often applied to love, but it can be so usefully in contrast to ordinary fever as in Robert Herrick’s “Not to Love,” which complains of “Freezing cold, and firie heats, / Fainting swoones, and deadly sweats; / Now an Ague, then a Fever, / Both tormenting Lovers ever” (lines 7–10). Herrick, Poems. 63 Gardner considers the poem “too uncharacteristic of Donne in theme, treatment, and style” in part because of its preoccupation with “the love-sickness of Lesbian Sappho” (Elegies and Songs and Sonnets, xlvi). See also Marotti, John Donne, 18. 64 Harvey, Ventriloquized Voices, 118. 65 Lewalski, Donne’s Anniversaries and the Poetry of Praise, 219. 66 Letter to Garrard of 14 April 1612, in Donne, Selected Letters, 62. 67 Letter to Goodyer of 14 April 1612; ibid., 63. See also the Donne Variorum, vol. 6, 239–41, for the context of these letters and other early comment on the poems. 68 For this reason, there is an understandable logic to the critical position that the Anniversaries make their claims about history, knowledge, and truth through Elizabeth Drury even while not being primarily about her. Anita Gilman Sherman exemplifies this approach in arguing that the poems are “a site of problematic remembering, pulling in opposite directions – both ­consigning knowledge to oblivion and keeping Elizabeth Drury alive in memory.” Sherman, Skepticism and Memory in Shakespeare and Donne, 49. 69 Carey, John Donne: Life, Mind, and Art, 88. 70 Ibid., 89. 71 Marotti, John Donne, 245. 72 Martin, “The Advancement of Learning and the Decay of the World: A New Reading of Donne’s First Anniversary.”

Notes to pages 94–104  219 73 Ibid., 164. 74 Mayne, “On Dr Donnes Death,” lines 1–6. Included in Anniversaries, ed. Milgate, 93–5. 75 Most early uses refer to Italian texts; the OED cites a translation of Luigi Pasqualigo’s Il Fedele, attributed by the ESTC to Anthony Munday, in Fedele and Fortunio. 76 To Sidney Logan Sondergard, it is one example of many illustrating that “­humanist veneration of classical linguistics and literatures was scorned as irrelevant, as affectation and ornamentation” (Sondergard, “‘To Scape the Rod,’” 274). 77 Sidney, Miscellaneous Prose, 73. 78 Quoted in Gardner’s edition of Elegies, 201. 79 Conversations, 10. Donaldson amends “pure” to “poor” in the Cambridge Jonson; Harrison’s transcription makes a richer sense, however. 80 Ibid., 4. 4 The Lure of Solitude: Melancholy and Eremitism as Literary Dispositions 1 John Stephens the yonger, Essayes and Characters, sig. K6v; page misnumbered as 134. 2 Stephens’s defence of printing, though sardonic in tone, is probably sincere. Ben Jonson, champion of print, regarded Stephens as an ally. He suggests in a commendatory poem for Stephens’s Cinthias Revenge that the book, published under Stephens’s name, provides an argument against anonymous publication: “Who takes thy volume to his vertuous hand ... May aske, what Author would conceale his name?” B.J., “To his much admired and worthily esteemed friend the Author,” in Stephens, Cinthias Revenge, sig. A4r. 3 Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Kiessling, Faulkner, and Blair, 1.2.3.15, vol. 1, 303. 4 Ibid., 1.2.3.15, vol. 1, 309. 5 Ibid., 1.2.3.15, vol. 1, 310–11. The quotation is from the first elegy of George Buchanan. 6 Ibid., 1.2.3.15, vol. 1, 311. 7 The Civile Conversation of M. Steeven Guazzo, trans. Pettie and Young, ed. Sullivan, book 1, vol. 1, 19–20. 8 Mackenzie, A Moral Essay, Preferring Solitude to Publick Employment, 7, sig. B4r. 9 Ficino, Three Books on Life, 113. 10 Ibid., 115. 11 Ibid., 113. 12 Trevor, The Poetics of Melancholy in Early Modern England, 38. 13 Anatomy, 2.3.8.1, vol. 2, 206.

220  Notes to pages 104–8 14 Ibid., 207. 15 As Drew Daniel argues, Burton’s tendency to seem “worryingly agnostic about the prospects of improving our minds” has led, by way of Stanley Fish’s reading of the Anatomy, to a polarized debate over simplistic ­questions about Burton’s intentions (Daniel, The Melancholy Assemblage, 164). ­Daniel prefers an approach that treats Burton’s lack of a linear argument as a ­rhetorical and formal feature; he compares the Anatomy to Walter Benjamin’s Arcades. 16 Though the literal humoralism I will discuss below still influences a great deal of work on Renaissance representations of emotion, I am not alone in ­arguing a contrary view; Michael Slater, for example, argues that, “As pervasive as it may have been, humoralism by no means exhausted the possibilities for explaining the passions in early modern England” (Slater, “The Ghost in the Machine,” 606). 17 Davies, Wittes Pilgrimage, Sonnet 94, lines 1–4, sig. H1v. 18 Poems of Michael Drayton, ed. Buxton. 19 This joint semantic and experiential quality may simply be, as Seth Lobis argues, the nature of sympathy, which is both “a crucial conceptual nexus between natural philosophy and natural magic” and “a charged and ­volatile signifier” that is “addressed and attacked as a linguistic matter.” Lobis, The Virtue of Sympathy, 10; 5–6. 20 Mill, Poems Occasioned by a Melancholy Vision, sig. Bv. 21 Ibid., sig. ar–v. 22 Mill, A Nights Search, Discovering the Nature and condition of all sorts of Night-walkers, 282, sig. V5v. 23 The term was new and might have been unfamiliar, as it seems to have been to the compositor of the 1604 quarto, who set the phrase in this line as “black verse,” as if taking the Lady’s speech and giving it to the Humorous Man. 24 Emphasis on a material and specifically corporeal understanding of emotion and identity in the Renaissance is associated most prominently with the work of Michael Schoenfeldt and Gail Kern Paster, although, as Cora Fox observes, continuing critical disagreements over the nature of the Renaissance body “­reveal instability, rather than certainty, in cultural understandings of this ­element of the self.” This uncertainty explains the instinct of critics to define, as Lesel Dawson does, an “intellectual melancholy” specifically opposed to the physical one. Fox, Ovid and the Politics of Emotion in Elizabethan England, 7; Dawson, Lovesickness and Gender in Early Modern English Literature, 93. 25 Paster, Humoring the Body, 140–5; Trevor discusses Paster’s relationship to recent scholarship on Renaissance emotion (Poetics of Melancholy, 4–5). 26 For this reason, Drew Daniel accuses her of indifference to the way that “melancholy constituted an intellectual battleground between genial and pathological understandings” (Daniel, Assemblage, 24). This Renaissance

Notes to pages 108–16  221

27 28 29 30 31

32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40

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44

battleground, along with its analogues in modern thought and culture, is the basis of Daniel’s argument that we should “think of the wildly divergent and multiple phenomena of early modern melancholy as” what Gilles Deleuze calls “an assemblage” (ibid., 11). Paster, Humoring, 140. Ibid., 142–3. Ibid., 144–5. Puttenham, Arte, 193. Rhetorica ad Herennium, ed. Harry Caplan, 384; I have rewritten Caplan’s translation. On the close relation between the Latin words forma and figura, see Erich Auerbach, “Figura,” trans. Manheimin Auerbach, Scenes from the Drama of European Literature, 11–78, particularly 11–28. Quintilian, Institutionis Oratorie, 5.11.22; my translation. Arte of Poesie, 244. Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy. Sherry, A Treatise of Schemes and Tropes, sig. Fvir–v. See the note on 1.3.15–17 in Mulryne’s edition, and The Spanish Tragedy, 17–18. Agamemnon, line 698, Seneca’s Tragedies, vol. 2, ed. and trans. Frank Justus Miller (London: Heinemann, 1917). Anatomy, 2.3.3.1; vol. 2, 162. Ibid., 2.3.3.1; vol. 2, 164. Donne, similarly, recasts the idea of sympathy with the ground in “Qui iacet in terra” in a sermon to refer to sin rather than melancholy. The Sermons of John Donne, ed. Potter and Simpson, vol. 5, sermon 9, 186. Sidney, Miscellaneous Prose, 102. Satiromastix 5.2.194–8. The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker, ed. Fredson Bowers, vol. 1. Every critic who writes on the subject, it seems, must choose a ­prototypical Shakespearean melancholic. Trevor focuses particularly on Antonio in ­Merchant as endowed with a sadness whose “specific cause ... has been ­mystified” and which “has not thus far been entertained in Shakespearean dramaturgy” (Trevor, Poetics, 70); Erin Sullivan likewise (but with quite different conclusions) treats the “cultural indeterminacy” of Antonio’s sadness as an emblem for her attempt “to distinguish between sadness and melancholy” and reconfigure the relationship between literary and historical evidence of ­Renaissance emotion (Sullivan, Beyond Melancholy, 3). Daniel ­argues that Hamlet’s “‘that within which passes show’ is melancholy” (Daniel, Assemblage, 123). Marjorie Garber, for example, sees a sort of triangle in which Touchstone and Jaques, the “melancholy fool in the forest,” are opposed to the more sincere Rosalind, “the central player” in the play’s “series of productive and provocative hypotheses” (Garber, Shakespeare After All, 454); this view is

222  Notes to pages 116–19

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largely in keeping with the longstanding idea of Jaques as a “gross fool” parallel to Touchstone (Hassel, Faith and Folly in Shakespeare’s Romantic Comedies, 115). Schwartz, “Rosalynde among the Familists,” 75. Montrose makes this case most pointedly about Rosalind, arguing that, “If As You Like It is a vehicle for Rosalind’s exuberance, it is also a structure for her containment,” and accuses “several generations of critics” – earlier “­infatuated” male readers and recent feminist readers – of overstating her independence (Montrose, “‘The Place of a Brother’ in As You Like It,” 52 and n. 48). Dubrow, Shakespeare and Domestic Loss, 141. The bracketed emendation is mine. Dubrow associates Jaques’s allegory of the deer with Shakespeare’s allusions to the problem of homelessness by theft or fire, for example in King Lear (ibid., 90). Tiffany Stern argues that critical attempts to make the theatrum mundi Shakespeare’s “master-metaphor” have eclipsed the complications the actual stage brings to that commonplace notion (Stern, “‘This Wide and Universal Theatre,’” 16). Perhaps it would be best to think of it not as a single metaphor at all, but as a point of comparison on which many metaphors are possible. In this scene, Jaques recasts Senior’s theatre metaphor in ways incompatible with the original. Senior’s and Jaques’s differing understandings of an actor’s responsibility for a whole play anticipates a twentieth-century scholarly controversy. The now familiar idea that actors had only their own lines memorized, and that this accounts for some of the peculiarities of the early quarto editions of ­Shakespeare, was largely developed by W.W. Greg; see particularly the ­introduction to his edition of the 1602 quarto of Merry Wives of Windsor. Greg’s theory is strongly questioned by Paul Werstine, “Narratives About Printed Shakespeare Texts,” 65–86. I am interrupting Jaques in the middle of his speech. Bruce R. Smith stresses, in the context of commonplace treatments of a man’s life, the circularity of Jaques’s account, ending in second infancy (Smith, Shakespeare and ­Masculinity, 67–80). But figurally the speech is not so much a circle as two distinct rhetorical trajectories, the first (culminating with the soldier) relying on simile, which is then abandoned as the speech declines toward oblivion. The OED cites this passage in the sense of mewl, v., as to cry, “Esp. of an ­infant,” but the only citation earlier than this one is in Scots dialect, and the rest are both quite a bit later and are in the same mode as Jaques’s speech; a search in Early English Books Online returns no other uses of the word. The OED has a separate definition of mewl as “Of a cat,” with a citation from a 1611 French dictionary which translates miauler as “to mewle, or mew, like a cat” (mew, of course, was well established with that meaning). Mewl

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and mew seem to be forms of the same word, and Shakespeare is using it as metaphor; subsequent references to mewling infants might be imitating him. It is worth noting also that the OED’s first sense for puke, v., concerns the regurgitation of hawks, and the dictionary cites Shakespeare’s line, perhaps similarly anachronistically, under a separate sense specific to babies. Adam H. Kitzes points out that Jaques’s identification with animals is shared with the melancholic Puntarvolo of Jonson’s Every Man Out of His Humour, and, as significantly, that it is virtually the only thing the two characters share. Kitzes, The Politics of Melancholy from Spenser to Milton, 75–6. Trevor does not believe him, arguing that “Jaques is not as immune to the melancholy of scholars as he would like us to think,” because, like melancholy scholars, he feels “controlled by a certain habit of thought” (Trevor, Poetics, 71). However, what interests Jaques in this passage is not the origin or even the experience of his melancholy but its indefinability. Creating taxonomies of melancholy, as Burton would attest, is itself a symptom of the melancholy condition. The 1623 folio has no dramatis personae; the relationship first becomes ­immediately obvious to a reader in Nicholas Rowe’s edition of 1709, which presents a list of characters in which the two names are spelt the same and are only four lines apart (The Works of Mr. William Shakespear, vol. 2, sig. K2v). In the 1623 folio, Jaques de Boys’s name is given only at the beginning of the play, and the stage direction at the end calls him “Second Brother,” perhaps to avoid confusion at the dual use of the name. See the Arden As You Like It, ed. Dusinberre 5.4.182 n. and appendix 3 on Jonson and Shakespeare, 368–73. Schwartz, Sacramental Poetics at the Dawn of Secularism, 23. The Complete Works of John Lyly, 3 vols., ed. Bondvol. 2, 24–5. Ibid., 28–9. Ibid., 30. Richard Helgerson compares Cassander to the traditional prodigal figure, and observes that Cassander is even more of an outsider because his warning ­reflects “an uncharacteristic reluctance to believe that admonition can have any effect.” Helgerson, The Elizabethan Prodigals, 72. The Faerie Queene 6.6.4–6. Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. Hamilton, Yamashita, and Suzuki. The life of S. Paul the Hermite, published with separate title page and pagination in Certaine Selected Epistles of S. Hierome [trans. Henry Hawkins], 4–5, sig. A2v–A3r. Ibid., 11, sig. B2 r. In the life of Saint Anthony, this exemplarity at a remove becomes essential; Richard Finn summarizes: “Antony guarded his solitude and issued guidance to other would-be hermits. His growing authority as an interpreter

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69 70 71 72

73 74 75

76 77 78

of the ascetic life is attested by letters of instruction which he sent to other ­solitaries, by Athansius’ Life, and by Antony’s appearance as a source of authoritative advice in the Apophthegmata Patrum, the Sayings of the Desert Fathers ­collected and then redacted in a long process from the early fifth century” (Finn, Asceticism in the Greco-Roman World, 113). Geoffrey Galt Harpham argues that this exemplarity through other people’s writing is the central principle of asceticism itself: “ascetic discipline is a science of imitation made possible by the mimetic imitations of texts such as The Life of ­Anthony” (Harpham, The Ascetic Imperative in Culture and Criticism, 13). Life of S. Paul, sig. A2r. Lucy E.D. Wooding advocates this position at length, observing that rather than “saints, images, pilgrimages, monasteries, and the powers of the priesthood and the papacy, all characteristics held to be defining features of ­Catholic thought and devotion,” the writers of Mary Tudor’s church ­emphasize “Scripture, godly living, a true and lively faith and proper ­understanding of the sacraments: the Marian Church was using its reformist inheritance as the basis of its work of regeneration” (Wooding, Rethinking Catholicism in Reformation England, 116). Kuchar, The Poetry of Religious Sorrow in Early Modern England, 49–61. There is considerable interest in Southwell’s influence on Protestant poetry; in addition to Kuchar, see Wilson, “A Bloody Question,” 296–316 (cited by Kuchar); Rust, “Malengin and Mercilla, Southwell and Spenser,” 185–209; and Anne Sweeney, Robert Southwell: Snow in Arcadia, particularly 279–86. Kuchar, “Gender and Recusant Melancholia in Robert Southwell’s Mary Magdalene’s Funeral Tears,” 135–57. Sweeney, Southwell, 12. The Poems of Robert Southwell, S.J., ed. McDonald and Brown. There were three separate editions of the Complaint in 1595, the year of Southwell’s execution. McDonald and Brown use the earliest, by John ­Windet for John Wolfe, as a copy-text. Windet reset an expanded text for Wolfe’s second edition in the same year (the STC assigns both the same ­number, 22957). The third was printed by James Roberts for Gabriel Cawood and has the STC number 22956. See Poems of Southwell, ci–cii. Poems of Southwell, 169. Ibid. The idea of Orpheus as an emblem for poets has been much discussed, ­perhaps most fruitfully regarding Spenser; see, for example, Jane Tylus, ­Writing and Vulnerability, 113–43. Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Golding, ed. Nims, book 10, line 96. Bacon, The Wisedome of the Ancients, trans. Arthur Gorges, p. 55, sig. C4r. Heylen, Cosmographie, 249, sig. xx5r.

Notes to pages 129–35  225 79 Milton appears prominently in recent scholarship on melancholy but in ­remarkably different roles. Douglas Trevor summarizes that in Paradise Lost, “a key element of original sin, we might say, is the very ­humourousness of the human body” (Trevor, Poetics, 153). Drew Daniel, focussing on S­ amson Agonistes while acknowledging its hero as “an unlikely candidate for ­melancholy,” sees the tragedy’s “curiously extended series of references to melancholy” as casting “a corrosively reductive physiological meaning onto the very ‘inward motions’ upon which Samson’s heroic final transcendence from abjection to martyrdom depends” (Daniel, Assemblage, 200; 201). 80 The extent to which “Il Penseroso” is separate from the other poems of Milton’s 1645 Poems, including “L’Allegro,” has been debated, but the poem almost invariably seems to be imagined in a multi-poem context, whether a pair of companion poems or a longer intellectual autobiography; as Joanna Picciotto describes it, “The poem is a statement of intent” toward “a sacred labor” it “does not enact” itself. Picciotto, Labors of Innocence in Early ­Modern England, 412. 81 Paradise Lost 3.39; 7.27–30. I have argued previously that Milton describes the task of writing Paradise Lost as a work of night and a recording of what cannot be transmitted (Unimagined, 147–9). 5 The Naked Sense of Retirement: Cowley, Marvell, Traherne 1 Milton, Complete Prose Works, vol. 1, 806–7. 2 Shore, Milton and the Art of Rhetoric, 6. 3 Mackenzie’s work on stoicism includes his Religio Stoici. For the context of the debate, see Public and Private Life in the Seventeenth Century, ed. ­Vickers, including Vickers’s introduction. 4 J.E., Esq; S.R.S., Publick Employment and an Active Life, with its Appanages, 5, sig. B3r. The quotation – “no one can simultaneously achieve great fame and great peace” – is from Tacitus’s Dialogus de oratoribus. 5 Mackenzie, A Moral Essay, Preferring Solitude, 2, sig. Bv. 6 Ibid., 7–8, sigs. B4r–v. 7 Hall, Contemplations, vol. 5, 339–40, sig. Y7r–v. 8 Peacham, Compleat Gentleman, 2, sig. B3v. 9 This negative association with stoicism is parallel to an attempt to ­resocialize the stoic tradition itself. Meric Casaubon, in the commentary of his ­magisterial translation of Marcus Aurelius, goes out of his way to commend Marcus’s association of sociability with charitability and adds, “here I cannot but say somewhat of the marveilous consent of this Heathen mans ­philosophy, with the holy Scriptures.” Marcus Aurelius Antoninus The ­Roman Emperour, trans. Casaubon, sig. Ll3 verso.

226  Notes to pages 136–42 10 “The weaker sort slight, triviall wares Inslave Who think them brave. And poor despised truth sate Counting by Their victory.” (“The World,” lines 42–6, The Works of Henry Vaughan, ed. Martin.) 11 Baxter, Church-History of the Government of Bishops and their Councils, 459–60, sig. Nnn2r–v. 12 From the preface to Silex Scintillans, Works of Henry Vaughan, 391. 13 The Workes of Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Both Morall and Naturall, trans. Lodge, 172, sig. Q2v. The Epistles have a separate title page, dated 1613. 14 Seneca, Ad Lucilium Epistulae Morales, ed. Gummere, vol. 1, 36. 15 Baxter, The Christians Converse with God in Baxter, The Divine Life, 342, sig. xx3v. 16 Ibid., 343, sig. xx4r. 17 Ibid., 343–4, sigs. xx4r–v. Baxter elaborates each of these examples at length. 18 Ibid., 347, sig. Yy2r. 19 Ibid., 349, sig. YY3r. 20 Inge and Macfarlane, “Seeds of Eternity,” 14. 21 The Works of Thomas Traherne, vol. 1, ed. Ross, xxii. 22 Works of Traherne, vol. 1, 7. 23 Ibid., 15. 24 Ibid., 16. 25 Cowley, The Essays and Other Prose Writings, ed. Gough, 131. 26 Ibid., 135. 27 Ibid., 132. 28 Ibid., 216. 29 This paradox is central to Cowley’s sense of society and solitude’s role within it. Alan de Gooyer points out that Cowley “pretends to be expressing an unmediated recognition of a self that is unconstituted by social and political pressures, but it is at the same time a self that needs to be rescued from the inevitably corrupting power of a society he has known all too intimately” (de Gooyer, “Sensibility and Solitude in Cowley’s Familiar Essay,” 14). The criticism is justified, but this rhetorical self-contradiction speaks to Cowley’s sense that the social dissonances that make retreat necessary intrude also upon the language with which retreat is explained. 30 Preface to Cowley, Poems, sig. (a) 2r. 31 Ibid., (a)3r–v. The first quotation (“the wicked merchant runs to the ­Indies, fleeing poverty”) is an altered echo of Horace’s Epistles 1.1; the second (“if I forget my friends, they should forget me”) is from Epistles 1.11. The third (“pleasing you is worth perishing”) is paraphrased from Martial 8.69.

Notes to pages 142–9  227 32 He could not enjoy his retirement, however, as he complained to his friend Thomas Sprat in a letter of May 1665, because of sickness, an injury from a fall, and uncooperative tenants. The letter is quoted by Samuel Johnson in Life of Cowley, in Lives of the English Poets, ed. Waugh, 12. 33 As Paul Davis says, Cowley was concerned both about the ethical status of his retirement and how it would appear to others, and “one of the ways Cowley tried to exonerate his retirement was by translating,” and thus claiming the company, through posthumous collaboration, of the authors he translated. Davis considers that effort mostly unsuccessful; ultimately, “it is Cowley’s conduct as a translator that most brings to light solipsistic tendencies in his privateness.” Davis, Translation and the Poet’s Life, 95; 103. 34 Poems, 22–3, sigs. Cc3v–4r. 35 This opinion is usually attributed to Samuel Johnson, although, as Charles H. Hinnant argues, Johnson’s criticism of Cowley is somewhat more ­nuanced. Hinnant, Steel for the Mind, 156. 36 Poem 77, lines 75–7, in Philips, The Collected Works of Katherine Philips, ed. Thomas et al., vol. 1. 37 Essays, 131. Cowley misquotes the Catullus poem. 38 Ibid., 221. 39 Colie, “My Ecchoing Song,” 13. 40 Ibid., vii. 41 Alpers, “Renaissance Lyrics and Their Situations,” 321; 328. 42 Hirst and Zwicker, “Andrew Marvell and the Toils of Patriarchy,” 631. 43 Hirst and Zwicker, “Eros and Abuse,” 372. 44 Hirst and Zwicker expand on these points in their book Andrew Marvell, Orphan of the Hurricane. 45 Hirst and Zwicker, “Toils of Patriarchy,” 630–1. 46 “He deliberately hides himself in his verse, and clearly it was a form of ­escape, just as he apparently liked to retreat into gardens or secluded studies.” Smith, Andrew Marvell: The Chameleon, 3. 47 Ibid., 106. 48 Ibid., 109. 49 Ibid., 79. 50 Paul Hammond argues that Marvell agreed with some aspects of Cowley’s arguments for retirement and disagreed with others, though Hammond has Marvell separating his commentary into two different poems with ­different personae as speakers (Hammond, “The Date of Marvell’s ‘The Mower Against Gardens,’” 178–81). 51 As Lara Bovilsky puts it (comparing Marvell’s nymph to ­Shakespearean characters with stony hearts), “the statue will conjure and preserve her exquisite grief for her pet, her death from this grief, and her grief’s power to survive in

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the absence of the relationship that engendered it and the fleshly body that experienced it.” Bovilsky, “Shakespeare’s Mineral ­Emotions,” 253. The root means “dig”; a possible connection to Greek γράφειν, to write, was once explored but is no longer accepted. “Grave,” v.1, OED. Victoria Silver’s valuable reading of this group of poems begins with the idea “that the love of little girls or sexual neuters in Marvell is prophylactic, since in every instance they are represented as a kind of magical bulwark against the depredations of time and sex upon the speaker, who anticipates suffering at the hands of both: they must fend off time because in the pastorals it presages the elegiac sensations of disappointment and loss, and sex because women’s erotic complexity or ‘coyness’ – their sexual reluctance in the face of men’s sexual urgency – hastens just those eventualities.” Silver, “The Obscure Script of Regicide,” 35. Hirst and Zwicker describe “Coy Mistress” as a poem of “misogyny and aversion” and one in which “what seems shocking is that a memento mori, with its worms and decay, should serve as the prompt to desire” (“Eros and Abuse,” 386). It seems less shocking to me in light of a poem like “Little T.C.,” in which the possibility of death makes delay a good thing, indeed makes it everything. This is not exactly a defence: Marvell’s fixation on the deaths of women is hardly a healthy attitude. But I do not read “Coy ­Mistress” as a seduction poem strictly speaking. The critical history regarding this poem is a curious one: critics continued to feel the need to warn each other not to overreact to Marvell’s sympathetic portrayal of Charles long after the poem was regularly read as royalist (for example Wallace, “Marvell’s Horatian Ode,” 33–45, and Worden, “The ­Politics of Marvell’s Horatian Ode,” 525–47). Recent studies have understood it to be a self-conscious critique and renovation of political poetry, but have placed that critique in both Cromwellian and Cavalier contexts; see respectively Knoppers, Constructing Cromwell, 53–6; and Cousins, Andrew ­Marvell, 146–85. Alpers attributes the idea that the poem removes both of its subjects from history to Barbara Everett, but regards it as typical of what he calls “the ­modernist bias.” Alpers, “Renaissance Lyrics,” 321. I do not read this solitary redefinition of love in biographical terms, but I also cannot dismiss the possibility of doing so. Cowley and Traherne never ­married; whether this is also true of Marvell is less clear, as I will discuss below. What is unquestioned is that, as Smith puts it, “We always encounter ­Marvell as a single visitor, either to friends or acquaintances” (Chameleon, 198). ­Marvell did not live publicly as a married man, and thus fits the (social, not legal) definition of singleness in Michael Cobb’s Single. Hammond, The Making of Restoration Poetry, 84. Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral, 119.

Notes to pages 157–64  229 60 Smith, Chameleon, 336–7. 61 Ibid., 338. Smith notes that many commentators remain unconvinced that this marriage ever happened. The historical record on this point seems definitively inconclusive. 62 Dobell’s introduction is reprinted in The Poetical Works of Thomas Traherne, ed. Wade, xxi–xciii; the discovery of Traherne’s name is described on xci. 63 Ibid., lxxxix. 64 Ibid., lxxxv. 65 Ibid., lvii. 66 Ibid., x; xi. 67 Margoliouth explains his handling of poems in Philip’s hand with later changes also in Philip’s hand: “There is a strong presumption that what [Philip] first wrote down is generally a transcription of Thomas: sometimes, of course, it may be a version of his own on which he later thought he could improve. But I have felt justified in printing the first F version where it can be done without ruining metre or rhyme. Where we could restore a first line of Thomas’s but, for what should be the rhyming line, have only a line of Philip’s which does not rhyme with it, there is nothing to do but print Philip’s two rhyming lines and record in the notes what is recoverable of the original.” Traherne, Centuries, Poems, and Thanksgivings, ed. Margoliouth, vol. 1, xvi. 68 See oxfordtraherne.org, the website for the edition-in-progress. 69 Brown and Koshi, “Editing the Remains of Thomas Traherne,” 766–82. Brown and Koshi observe that “Philip seems to have been planning a ­sizeable printed edition of his brother’s literary remains” (770), but must also ­acknowledge that there is no evidence either of why that effort began only decades after Thomas’s death nor why it was abandoned. 70 See Pritchard, “According to Wood,” 276. 71 Quotations from Traherne’s poetry and the Centuries are drawn from ­Margoliouth’s edition, though I have adopted some punctuation from the transcriptions in The Works of Thomas Traherne, ed. Ross, vol. 6. 72 Traherne uses images of childhood to serve multiple philosophical and ­theological concepts, and what Elizabeth Dodd calls “the strikingly ­paradoxical poetic function of the child” in his work is never resolved, ­perhaps by ­design. As Dodd says, “Traherne’s ‘Babe’ is an object of both contemplation and participation and is to be both admired and imitated,” but these various aspects do not necessarily coincide. Dodd, Boundless Innocence in Thomas Traherne’s Poetic Theology, 172–3. 73 Indeed, one suspects that Thomas Traherne is not that certain that following his self-discovering precepts will lead to felicity. Gary Kuchar argues that Traherne’s work both celebrates and warns of the potential failure of self-­ consciousness: “Traherne’s puppet-persons, dumb shows, dead statues, and

230  Notes to pages 164–74 dead apostates concretize the constant risk of slipping from full to ventriloquized speech, from animate being to de-animate spectrality that haunts the human person” (Kuchar defines “human person” as “a properly self-­ conscious being”). Kuchar, “Traherne’s Specters: Self-Consciousness and Its Others,” in Re-Reading Thomas Traherne, ed. Blevins, 198; 184. 74 Philips, “Content,” line 3. 6 Literary History in Isolation: Bacon, Hofmannsthal, and Historical Memory 1 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Hullot-Kentor, 16. 2 Von Hofmannsthal, Selected Prose, trans. Hottinger and Tania and James Stern, 129. 3 Benjamin Bennett, for example, considers the reference to Bacon an ­opposition between Chandos’s silence and Bacon’s “intellectual a­ rticulateness.” Bennett, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, 111. 4 Gumbrecht, The Powers of Philology, 6. 5 Ibid., 7. 6 Gumbrecht, Production of Presence, 58. 7 Ibid., 18. 8 A proximity search of Early English Books Online confirms that the ­combination does not otherwise occur in the database, and Bacon’s phrase is the OED’s earliest citation for the word “literary.” James Mackintosh, in his promotion of literary history as a distinct discipline, credited Bacon with ­inventing it; see Phillips, Society and Sentiment, 208–9. 9 Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, ed. Michael Kiernan, 62. 10 Ibid. 11 Dimock says, “Literature is the home of nonstandard space and time. Against the official borders of the nation and against the fixed intervals of the clock, what flourishes here is irregular duration and extension, some extending for thousands of years or thousands of miles, each occasioned by a different tie and varying with that tie, and each loosening up the chronology and geography of the nation” (Dimock, Through Other Continents, 4). 12 Advancement, 73. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid., 76. Sidney declares that one should set “the laurel crown upon the ­poets as victorious, not only of the historian, but over the philosopher” as well (Defence, Miscellaneous Prose, 90–1). 15 Dollimore, Radical Tragedy, 77. 16 The notion of Bacon’s opposition to poetry is widespread but not universally ­accepted; Stephen Gaukroger challenges it, arguing that it is the “juxtaposition of the contrasts between the contemplative life and the active or practical life, and

Notes to pages 174–8  231

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philosophy and poetry, that shapes the conceptual space in which Bacon is able to think through the question of the practice of natural philosophy.” Gaukroger, Francis Bacon and the Transformation of Early-Modern Philosophy, 48–9. Brian Vickers summarizes the attribution issues regarding Bacon’s poetry in his Oxford Authors edition, Francis Bacon, 705–9. Anthologia Palatina 9.359. The Cambridge edition of the Greek ­Anthology notes that the poem was popular and frequently imitated and its theme seen commonly elsewhere, and that its “authorship is highly obscure; this ­Posidippus, Plato Comicus, Crates, Heraclitus (given in one florilegium), all seem unlikely” (“this Posidippus” meaning Posidippus of Pella, as opposed to some otherwise unknown poet with the same name). The Greek ­Anthology, ed. Gow and Page, vol. 2, 501–2. For the text, see vol. 1, p. 173, epigram XXII in the Posidippus section. The Greek Anthology, trans. Paton, vol. 3, Book IX, Epigram 359, 193. Grimald, “What path list you to tred?” and “What race of life ronne you?” Tottel’s Miscellany, ed. Rollins. Quoted as it appears in Florilegium Epigrammatum Græcorum, Eorumque Latino Verse à variis redditorum, 8 and 10; sigs. A4v and A5v (both the front matter and the first signature in the body are given sig. A). Bacon’s accusation works whether he is thinking of aristocratic courts or, like Grimald, law courts. The Greek is “ἀγορῇ,” which can refer to either, or, as most modern translators assume, to the marketplace. Grierson, “Bacon’s Poem, ‘The World,’” 145–56. Ibid., 153. Ibid., 156. Sir Thomas Overbury His Wife, With Additions of New Characters, and many other witty conceits never before Printed, sig. N5v–N6r. Farnaby is not credited on the title page, but the dedication is signed “Tho. Farnabius” (Florilegium, sig. A3v). Florilegium, 8, sig. A4v. Anthony Martin notes the indeterminacy of parody as a seventeenth-century genre in his “George Herbert and Sacred ‘Parodie,’” 443–70; Martin discusses Farnaby’s use of the term on p. 452. Sylvester, Panthea: or, Divine wishes and meditations. Ibid., sig. C4v. Wotton, Reliquiæ Wottonianæ. The section begins on p. 531, sig. Z2r; Bacon’s poem is on pp. 538–9, sigs. Z5v–Z6r. Bacon’s poem is followed in both editions by a poem on similar themes, “De Morte,” which begins: “Mans life’s a Tragedy: his mothers womb / (From which he enters) is the tyring room; / This spacious earth the Theater.” This poem is ascribed to “Ignoto” in all editions. Reliquiæ Wottonianæ, 3rd ed., “with large Additions.”

232  Notes to pages 178–86 34 Grierson, “Bacon’s Poem,” 148. 35 Reliquiæ, 1651 ed., sig. Y6v. “O Faithless World” also appears with a­ ttribution to Wotton in Francis Davison, Davisons Poems, 202–3, sigs. O5v–O6r, and is attributed to Benjamin Ruddier in Poems Written by the Right Honorable William Earl of Pembroke, 34–5, sigs. Dv–D2r. The latter book contains a number of poems attributed to Ruddier as responses to Pembroke’s. 36 See Beal’s Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts. 37 Alan Stewart, editor of the second volume of the Oxford edition, intends such a collation (Stewart, personal correspondence), which should be ­particularly valuable given this poem’s popularity and its later shift toward the ­margins of the literary canon, a trajectory worth documenting in full. 38 Beal notes about Bodleian MS Eng. th. c. 71 that the “calligraphic script, elaborate layout, and occasional bindings stamped ‘H.F.’ can be identified in many other MSS”; about Senate House Library (University of London) MS 312, Beal observes an “H” and “F” on each cover, and that many of the pages bear the “semi-calligraphic secretary hand, formal title-pages and ­headings with heavily inked borders and decoration, associated with one Henry Feilde.” For more on the Senate House manuscript and another similar one of Feilde’s, see Joshua Eckhardt, Manuscript Verse Collectors and the Politics of Anti-Courtly Love Poetry, 68–9. 39 Newberry Vault Wing MS folio ZW 5451, f. 3r. 40 Ibid., f. 14v. 41 Newberry Vault Case MS folio Y 1845.7, f. 14r. 42 The ascender on the ‘b’ in the first “borne” is missing or faded and the word looks like “corne,” but that reading seems highly unlikely. 43 OED, “cry,” v., sense 1a. 44 The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. Spedding, Ellis, and Heath, 267. 45 Ibid., 269–70. 46 Grosart criticizes Spedding for modernizing the spelling, and follows the Farnaby text precisely, except that he changes “mone” in the third stanza to “none,” as it appears in Panthea. The Poems of Francis Bacon, ed. Grosart (1870), included with separate pagination as the first part of Miscellanies of The Fuller Worthies’ Library, vol. 1, ed. Grosart, 50–1; “The World” is discussed in the introduction, 16–20. In addition to this poem, the psalm ­translations, and some verse letters, Grosart includes “The man of life ­upright,” which is more frequently attributed to Thomas Campion. 47 The Golden Treasury of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English ­Language, ed. Palgrave, poem LVII, 37–8. 48 Ibid., 311. 49 De Man, Blindness and Insight, 106. 50 Hofmannsthal ponders: “wie es kommt, dass ich gerade an dieses Wesen— kaum etwas von ihm kennend als die Essays und ein paar Bruchstücke, nicht

Notes to pages 186–90  233

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55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64

65 66

ahnend und doch ahnend was es mit ihm auf sich haben möchte—eine höchst subiective Arbeit eigentlich eine Confession (jenen imaginären Brief des Lord Chandos den Sie kennen oder vielleicht auch nicht kennen) angeknüpft habe.” Hofmannsthal and Pannwitz, Briefwechsel 1907–1926, ed. Schuster, 18–19. From a “Device” for private performance Bacon wrote on behalf of the Earl of Essex, dedicated to the queen. James Spedding, The Letters and the Life of Francis Bacon, vol. 1, 388 (this volume also forms vol. 8 of The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. Spedding et al). Stefan Zweig, who was only seven years younger than Hofmannsthal and met him as a teenager, when Hofmannsthal was already well known, says: “The emergence of the young Hofmannsthal is and remains remarkable as one of the great wonders of early perfection.” Zweig, The World of Yesterday, trans. Cedar and Eden Paul, 46. Robert Vilain makes this observation, arguing, contrary to earlier consensus, that Hofmannsthal’s turn away from poetry was actually gradual and incomplete. Vilain, The Poetry of Hugo von Hofmannsthal and French Symbolism, 279. Hermann Broch notes that Hofmannsthal himself let that context be p ­ artial: “Hofmannsthal wisely did not put the Lord Chancellor in the p ­ redicament of having to answer the letter” (Broch, Hugo von Hofmannsthal and His Time, trans. Steinberg, 121). Broch is imprecise about dates (Bacon was not a­ ppointed Lord Chancellor until 1618, fifteen years after the date H ­ ofmannsthal ­assigns Ein Brief), and that indifference to the context of Ein Brief’s fictional frame is typical of critical responses, but perhaps this i­mprecision is driven by ­Hofmannsthal’s own unwillingness to make clear why the frame is what it is. Hofmannsthal, Selected Prose, 132. Ibid., 134–5. Ibid., 130. Vilain, Poetry of Hofmannsthal, 301. Adrian Del Caro, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, 141–2. Kovach, “Hofmannsthal’s ‘Ein Brief’: Chandos and His Crisis,” in A ­Companion to the Works of Hugo von Hofmannsthal, ed. Kovach, 85. The Whole Difference, ed. McClatchy. Broch, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, 106–7. Adorno, Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber, 195. Hofmannsthal published excerpts from Benjamin’s The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Massimo Cacciari argues compellingly for a close relationship between Benjamin’s and Hofmannsthal’s thinking on dramatic genre. ­Cacciari, The Unpolitical, trans. Verdicchio, 67–72. Letter to Adorno, 7 May 1940, The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 1910–1940, ed. Scholem and Adorno, trans. Jacobson and Jacobson, 631. Hofmannsthal, Selected Prose, 136–7; ellipsis in original.

234  Notes to pages 192–200 67 Livy, The History of Rome [Ab Urbe Condita], Books 1–5, trans. Warrior, 1.28, 43–4. 68 Appian’s Roman History, vol. 1, trans. White, 631. 69 Ibid., 637. White adapts William Cullen Bryant’s translation of The Iliad. 70 Ibid., 636; my translation. White translates “either voluntarily or otherwise the words of the poet escaped his lips” (637), but the sense of escape applies only if the recitation is not voluntary. Appian is tentative about reading ­Scipio’s mind, but must account for the strangeness of this moment. 71 Cicero, Tusculan Disputations I and Dream of Cicero, ed. Rockwood. 72 Homer, Odyssey, trans. Chapman, ed. Nicoll, book 9, lines 599–600. 73 Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. Bahti, 19. Conclusion: Reading in Solitude 1 2 3 4 5 6

7 8 9 10

11

12 13

Autobiography of Joseph Scaliger, ed. and trans. Robinson, 38–9 and notes. Ibid., 39–40. Grafton, Joseph Scaliger, vol. 1, 223–4. Pattison, Isaac Casaubon, 1559–1614, 8. Sam Kinser, The Works of Jacques-Auguste de Thou, 259–60. Pattison describes Casaubon’s call to England as a “solitary instance of ­disinterested patronage of learning” by the church and government (­Casaubon, 323), but later questions his own assertion, perhaps inevitably: patrons of scholars must always have some impetus for their patronage, and that impetus is often not shared with the scholar, whose success is thus a r­ einforcement of friendlessness. Masten, Textual Intercourse, 11. See the work of Randall McLeod and Random Cloud, particularly McLeod, “UnEditing Shakespeare,” 26–55. Celan, The Meridian: Final Version – Drafts – Materials, trans. Joris, 9. Gadamer, Gadamer on Celan: “Who Am I and Who Are You?” and Other Essays, trans. Heinemann and Krajewski, 67. The bracketed emendation is mine. I quote here from Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan, trans. Felstiner, 401. The German is “Von der Kunst ist gut reden”; Joris seems to find Celan less sympathetic to Büchner’s characters than Felstiner does, and translates “It is easy to talk about art” (The Meridian, 2). Ellipsis in original. Selected Poems and Prose, 402. Ibid., 405.

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Index

Adorno, Theodor, 170, 188–9, 194 Alanus de Insulis (Alain de Lille), 112 Alba Longa, 190–3 Albertus Magnus, 214–15n16 Alexander, Gavin, 30, 40 allegory, 9 Alpers, Paul, 147 ambition, 8, 20; literary, 5, 10–11, 17, 20–32, 35–6, 39–44, 50, 53–4, 57, 61–2, 65, 70, 93, 149, 162, 199, 200– 1; social, 23, 38, 39, 63, 93, 116, 140, 144–6, 177, 179, 183, 206n18 American Association of University Professors, 4 Anaximenes of Lampascus, 15 anonymity, 45–7, 50–5, 58, 60, 160, 177–8, 184, 210n19 Anthony of Egypt, 125, 131, 135, 223–4n65 antinomasia, 85 Apollonius of Tyana, 15 Appian of Alexandria, 193–4 asceticism, 15, 125–6, 135–6, 223–4n65 astronomy, 31–2, 103, 130, 193 attribution (of literary works), 45–6, 50–5, 57–60, 78, 158–9, 177–9, 184, 198, 210n19 Aubrey, John, 56 authorship, 4–5, 12–14, 43, 50–1, 53, 160

Bacon, Francis, 11, 15, 18–19, 94, 129, 169–72, 185–6, 190–1; The Advancement of Learning, 18, 172–5, 185, 189, 193–4; Essays, 22; “The world’s a bubble,” 169, 175–85, 195 Barthes, Roland, 5 Bastard, Thomas, 177 beauty: of language, 64–6; of nature, 126; of a person, 27, 75, 143, 150, 154; of truth, 34 Benjamin, Walter, 189, 194 Berkeley, George, 184 Birch, Thomas, 86–7 Bold, Henry, 215n19 Boule, Gabriel, 197 Broch, Hermann, 188, 233n54 Browne, William, 180 Bryskett, Lodowick, 27–8 Büchner, Georg: Danton’s Death, 200 Burghley, William Cecil, Baron, 55 Burton, Robert: The Anatomy of Melancholy, 101–2, 103–4, 112–13, 119 canon (literary), 6, 12, 13, 19 Carey, John, 93 Carthage, destruction of, 190, 192–5 Casaubon, Isaac, 196–7, 215n20 Casaubon, Meric, 22

254 Index Castiglione, Baldassare, 33 Catlin, Zachary, 49 Catullus, 146 Cavendish, William, 20–1 Celan, Paul, 199–200 Cervantes, Miguel de, 199 Chamberlen, Peter, family of, 180, 182 Chapman, George, 17, 24, 69, 70, 72, 74–7, 85–6, 96, 200, 215n22; The Shadow of Night, 76–7, 78, 80, 82, 92, 98, 216n25 Charles I of England, 56; Marvell’s depiction of, 147, 153–5 Charles, Ron, 4 Chartier, Roger, 73–4 chess, 33 Churchyard, Thomas, 48–9 Cicero, Dream of Scipio, 193 class (social), 3, 23, 24, 40, 49–50, 57, 170, 196 close reading, 12, 18, 204n19 Cobb, Michael, 15 Coiro, Ann Baynes, 208n53 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 31 Colie, Rosalie, 147, 148 collaboration, 4–5, 13, 19, 160 collegiality, 4 community, 4–5, 15, 39, 56 comprehension, 12, 17, 69, 73, 115 concealment, 76, 124; of authorship, 49; of context, 149; of happiness, 166; of intertextual relationships, 180, 195; of meaning, 81–6; of moral import, 72; of poetic aims, 148–9; of prophetic voice, 131 courtesy culture, 8, 34, 38, 63, 66, 96–7, 102, 122, 179 Cowley, Abraham, 18, 134–5, 149, 151, 167–8; Essays, 141–3, 146–7; The Mistress, 144–6, 161 coyness, 150, 152–5 criticism (literary), 5, 11, 19, 54, 171, 185, 195, 198

Cromwell, Oliver, Marvell’s depiction of, 147, 153–5, 157 Daniel, Samuel, 14, 28, 41, 43–4, 52, 78, 82, 169; Defence of Ryme, 36; Delia, 25–6; History of England, 27 Davies, John, of Hereford, 105 death: advantages of, 137–8; anticipated 10, 27, 150–2, 158; as dissolution, 150; in Donne’s Anniversaries, 95, 98–9; impending, 66; as context for solitude, 127–8; of a poet (figurative), 141–3, 168; of poetry, 71 Dekker, Thomas, 113–14; Satiromastix, 115; Shoemakers’ Holiday, 78 Del Caro, Adrian, 188 de Man, Paul, 185 Denham, John, 56 de Thou, Jacques-Auguste, 197 Devereux, Penelope (Lady Rich), 9 Dimock, Wai Chee, 174 Diogenes of Sinope, 15 Dobell, Bertram, 158–61 Dobranski, Stephen, 12 Dollimore, Jonathan, 174, 207n38 Donne, Anne, 88 Donne, John, 17, 62, 141, 145, 177, 179, 197; “Air and Angels,” 87; early reputation, 69–70, 95–6; Elegies, 86; “The Extasie,” 87–8, 92; First Anniversary, 94–5; influence on later poets, 135; “Loves Progress,” 111; Metempsychosis, 87; “A Nocturnall,” 87, 92; obscurity of, 77–8, 85–8, 200; “Oh, to vex me,” 88–91; reception of Anniversaries, 91–3; resistance to reading, 69–72, 93; “Sapho to Philaenis,” 90–1; Satires, 60; Second Anniversary, 96–9; “The Sun Rising,” 97; “The Will,” 142–3

Index 255 Drayton, Michael, 101; “The Owle,” 105–6, 123–4, 129, 131 Drummond, William, of Hawthornden, conversations with Jonson, 69–70, 86, 97, 98, 99, 213n2 Drury, Elizabeth, 92–3, 95, 98–9 Dryden, John, 22–3 du Bellay, Joachim, 199 Earle, John, 60 ecosystem (as analogy for literary history), 19 Eden, 156–7 editing: principles of, 159–60, 198 Eggert, Katherine, 87–8, 215n21 E.K. (annotator of The Shepheardes Calender), 11, 21, 46–7, 52, 209n2 Elizabeth I of England, 22, 55, 76, 110, 186 Elyot, Thomas, 84 epic, 14, 72, 168, 199 eremitism, 7, 15, 18, 101, 116, 119–26, 129, 130–1, 135, 137 Essex, Robert Devereux, Second Earl of, 177, 184 evaluation (of literary works), 10, 12, 19, 23–4, 30, 45, 47, 54, 72 Evelyn, John, 133–4, 137, 138 fame, 10, 24–5, 27–30, 34–5, 41, 43–4, 55–6, 58–60, 61, 149. See also posterity Farnaby, Thomas, 177–8, 184 Farrington, John, 157 Feilde, Henry, 179–81 Fennor, William, 57–8, 64 Ferguson, W. Craig, 78, 210n25 Ferrar, Nicholas, 24, 62–3 Ficino, Marsilio, 103, 113 Field, Richard, 55, 57 Fish, Stanley, 133 Florio, John, 78 Foucault, Michel, 5, 50

friendship, 17, 76, 139, 145–6, 166 Galen, 103 Gallagher, Catherine, 40 Gardner, Helen, 88, 90, 97 Garrard, George, 92–3 Gascoigne, George, 52, 54–5, 61 gender: in As You Like It, 115; and authorship, 23, 39–41, 44; in Lanyer’s Salve Deus, 42–3; and Marvell, 148 genre, 14, 40, 106, 199, 201 George, Stefan, 188 georgic, 11 Gil, Daniel Juan, 14 Goldberg, Jonathan, 40 Góngora, Luis de, 6, 199 Goodyer, Henry, 92–3 Gosse, Edmund, 88 Grafton, Anthony, 196, 215n20 Greek Anthology, 175 Greenblatt, Stephen, 16–17, 37 Greville, Fulke, 43; Caelica, 30–2, 36, 38; A Dedication to Sir Philip Sidney, 28–30, 35–6; Inquisition Upon Fame and Honour, 34–5; Treatie of Humane Learning, 32–4 Grierson, H.J.C., 177, 178, 184 Grimald, Nicholas, 175, 176 Grosart, Alexander, 158, 184 Guazzo, Stefano, 102–3 Guibbory, Achsah, 88 Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich, 18, 171–2, 180 Harriot, Thomas, 74 Harvey, Elizabeth, 90 Harvey, Gabriel, 3–4, 8, 18, 46, 86 H.D., 75 Herbert, Edward, 22 Herbert, George, 17; “Affliction” (1), 63–4, 66; “The Altar,” 64; “The Church Militant,” 135–7;

256 Index “The Church-Porch,” 64; “The Collar,” 67; “The Forerunners,” 65– 8; influence on later poets, 61, 135– 6; “Jordan” (1), 64, 67; “Jordan” (2), 64, 161; life and ambitions, 61–2; The Temple, 24, 62–3, 141 hermits. See eremitism Heylen, Peter, 129 Heywood, Jasper, 84–5 Hirst, Derek, 147–8 historiography, 4, 194 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, 11, 18, 170, 185–95, 198, 199 Homer, 35, 45; Iliad, 69, 193–5; Odyssey, 173–4, 185, 189, 195 Horace, 32, 45, 226n31; as character in Poetaster and Satiro-mastix, 114–15 Horae Subsecivae, 20–1 Huntington, John W., 24, 39 hyperbole, 30–2 idealism, 174 imagination, 16, 90–1, 171 incomprehension, 7, 69–70, 199, 200–1 invisibility, 150, 155 isolation, 5–6, 12, 15–16, 197–200; of characters, 117, 126; of mind, 68; of readers, 16, 171–2, 174; of scholarship, 197–8; of texts, 7–8, 12, 19–21, 28, 36, 44–7, 54, 88, 169, 185, 195; of writers, 6–7, 16, 21–4, 45, 54, 56, 62, 91, 100–1, 135, 167, 195 Jaggard, William, 214–15n16 James I of England, 57 Jauss, Hans Robert, 195 Jerome, 124–5, 130 Jonson, Ben, 13–14, 17, 24, 39, 101, 199; comments on Donne, 69–72, 77–8, 85–7, 91, 95, 98–9; comments on John Owen, 97–8; Poetaster, 114–15; resistance to audience,

70–1; satirized by Dekker, 115; satirized by Shakespeare, 121 Ker, Robert, 89 Kovach, Thomas A., 188 Kuchar, Gary, 126, 229–30n73 Kyd, Thomas, 18; Spanish Tragedy, 111–13 language: ethical limitations of, 189–91; evolution of, 44; of hermits, 124; nonsocial potential of, 16; poetic, 45, 55, 61–2, 64–8, 146, 170, 174; relation to melancholy, 104, 106, 108–9, 117, 119 Lanyer, Aemilia, 24, 39; Salve Deus Rex Iudaeorum, 40–4, 58–60, 79 La Rochefoucauld, François de, 199 Le Bossu, René, 72 Lesser, Zachary, 78–9 Levine, Nina, 13 Lewalski, Barbara, 92 literary history, 11–12, 18–19, 26, 44, 45, 68, 198–200; Bacon’s definition of, 170–5, 185–6, 189, 193–5 Livy, 190–3, 195 loneliness, 6, 13, 20, 39, 55–6, 58, 61, 129, 166, 190, 194, 200 Lupton, Julia Reinhard, 5 Lycophron, 72 Lydgate, John, 46, 47 Lyon, John, 87 lyric poetry, 14, 101, 135, 186, 199; and ambition, 21, 24, 162; Marvell’s interest in, 147–8; and poetic persona, 54, 90, 91 Macaulay, Thomas, 184 Mackenzie, George, 103, 133–4, 138 manuscript circulation, 12, 21, 23, 39, 44, 70, 92, 179–80 Marcus Aurelius, 135, 225n9

Index 257 Margoliouth, H.M., 159–60 Marlowe, Christopher, 74, 97 Marotti, Arthur, 5, 62, 86, 90, 93 Marprelate, Martin, 78 marriage, relation to retirement, 139–40, 157 Martial, 226n31 Martin, Catherine Gimelli, 86, 94 Marvell, Andrew, 18, 134, 140, 168; “The Character of Holland,” 148; “The Garden,” 147, 155–7; “A Horatian Ode,” 153–5; motivations for writing poetry, 147–9; “On Mr. Milton’s Paradise Lost,” 153–4, 167; “The Nymph Complaining,” 149–50; “On a Drop of Dew,” 150; “The Picture of Little T.C.,” 151–2; Miscellaneous Poems, 157–8; “To His Coy Mistress,” 152; “The Unfortunate Lover,” 6, 128, 148; “Young Love,” 151 Marvell, Mary, 157–9 Mary I of England, 126 Mary (mother of Jesus), 98 Masten, Jeffrey, 5, 198 materialism: and critical approaches, 12, 107–8; and Bacon, 172 Maule, Jeremy, 138 Mayne, Jasper, 95–6 McClatchy, J.D., 188 melancholy, 7, 15, 17–18, 76, 100; association with poets, 100–2, 113–15; inspiring poetry, 106–7; and landscape, 105–6; and Orpheus, 129–30; and prophecy, 130–1; and reading, 129; relation to role, 117–19; and Renaissance medicine, 103–4; recent approaches to, 108–9; rhetorically understood, 104, 109– 13; and solitude, 102–3, 119–22, 124–6, 131

metaphor, 22, 65–8, 99, 110, 144–5, 149, 161 Mettius Fufetius, 191–2 Middleton, Thomas, 15, 77–9; The Ghost of Lucrece, 78, 81–4, 85, 88 Mill, Humphry, 106–7, 129 Milton, John, 12, 18, 126, 133, 148; “L’Allegro,” 129–30; Lycidas, 10–11; Marvell’s interpretation of, 153–4, 157, 167; Paradise Lost, 21, 167–8; “Il Penseroso,” 101, 129, 130–1; Poems (1645), 23; The Reason of Church Government, 132–3, 134, 167 mimesis, 31 Montaigne, Michel de, 78 Montrose, Louis, 116 Mueller, Janel, 40, 43, 87 music, 32–4 Native Americans, 37 Newman, Thomas, 23–4 Ng, Su Fang, 40 Nicholson, Catherine, 14 North, Marcy, 50–1 obscurity, 5, 17, 200–1; and blasphemy, 99; as challenge to education, 96; defended, 75–7; and hermeticism, 74–5; as natural to poetry, 72–3; and poetic persona, 90–1; as resistance to reading, 70–4, 86–8, 91–3, 99; as simultaneous concealment and revelation, 79–81; as threat to literary longevity, 69, 72, 77–8, 85 Oliver, P.M., 89 orphanhood: as metaphor for condition of poetry, 7, 47, 51, 53, 60, 74, 175, 185; as metaphor for personal isolation, 127–8 Orpheus, 6–7, 127–30, 167

258 Index Ovid, 7, 58, 97; as character in Poetaster, 114; Metamorphoses, 75, 129, 155; Tristia, 47–50, 53 Owen, John, 97–8

Psalms, 67–8, 184 Puttenham, George, The Arte of English Poesie, 36–8, 55, 110, 113 Quintilian, 110

Palgrave, Francis Turner, 184, 185 Pannwitz, Rudolf, 185–6 pastoral, 7, 11, 28, 47, 52 Paton, W.R., 175 patronage, 17, 22, 36, 39–41, 55, 58, 199 Paul the Hermit, 124–5, 127, 131, 135 Peacham, Henry, 33, 135 pedagogy, 32, 71, 92, 94–7, 99 pedantry, 96–8 Pembroke, Mary Herbert, Countess of. See Sidney, Mary periphrasis, 47, 85, 109–11 Persius, 73 Petrarch, Francis, 16, 24–5, 45 Pettie, George, 102–3 Philips, Katherine, 145–6, 166 philology, 18, 102, 171–2, 195 Philostratus, 15 Phlegethon, 79–85 Plato, 35, 84, 87 poetry: definition, 5; goals, 10–11, 21–4, 43, 199; history, 44, 45; purpose, 7, 31–2, 36–8, 61, 65–8, 96, 115, 138, 143–4, 147, 162, 168, 172, 174–5, 183; risks, 33–4, 58, 99; value, 14, 30, 71–2 Polybius, 192, 194 Poole, Josua, 60–1, 62, 68 Portus, Franciscus, 196–7 Posidippus of Pella, 175, 177, 195 posterity, as audience for poetry, 24–5, 28, 30, 39, 44, 77, 87, 149 print publication, 11, 14, 36, 43–4, 47, 69, 78, 93, 157; and attribution, 52–3; and gender, 39–41, 43; and literary reputation, 55, 57–8, 100; relation to manuscript circulation, 21, 23–4; and retirement, 133–4, 141

Ralegh, Walter, 74 reading, 7, 17–18, 23–6, 128–9, 133–5, 140, 143, 160–2, 167–8; and ignorance, 174; isolation of, 15–16, 39, 101, 197–200; long-term, 11–12, 19, 40, 44, 62, 68, 169–73, 185–6, 194–5; obstacles to, 8–9, 57, 69–74, 77–8, 85, 91–5, 99; politics of, 4; relation to authorship, 12–13; and secrecy, 75–7 Rebhorn, Wayne, 37 recusancy, 52, 124, 126, 128 representation, 16, 77, 88, 107, 116, 150, 186–7, 194. See also mimesis Rhetorica ad Herennium, 110–11 Robson, Mark, 51 Ross, Jan, 138, 160 Saltonstall, Wye, 7, 48–9 Scaliger, Joseph, 196–7 Schoenfeldt, Michael C., 63–4, 213n58, 220n24 Schwartz, Regina Mara, 121 Schwartz, Robert, 116 Scipio Aemilianus, 193–5 Seneca, 135; Agamemnon, 112; Epistles, 137, 138, 142, 155; Thyestes, 84–5; Troas, 84 sexuality, 14 Shakespeare, William, 5, 14, 18, 101, 107–8, 129, 199; As You Like It, 6, 23, 107, 115–21, 122, 124, 125–6, 183; Coriolanus, 23; Cymbeline, 116; Hamlet, 78–9, 107; Henry IV, Part 1, 108–9, 117; Henry IV, Part 2, 78; Love’s Labour’s Lost, 74;

Index 259 Merchant of Venice, 115; Much Ado About Nothing, 78; The Rape of Lucrece, 82, 126; Richard II, 68, 121, 126, 154; Sonnet 94, 154; Timon of Athens, 115; Venus and Adonis, 126 Sherry, Richard, 112 Shore, Daniel, 133 Sidney, Mary, 17, 26, 43–4; Astrea, 22 Sidney, Philip, 14, 31, 32, 34, 35, 41, 43–4, 46–7, 58; Astrophil and Stella, 7–10, 22, 23, 26–8, 128; Defence of Poesie, 28, 54, 96–7, 113, 174; literary ambitions, 28–30 Silver, Victoria, 228n53 simile, 108–12, 113, 117, 119, 129, 130 Simmes, Valentine, 78–9, 210–11n25 singleness, 15, 228n57 Smith, Barbara Herrnstein, 19 Smith, Nigel, 148–9, 157 Snare, Gerald, 215n22 sociability, 3–4; as virtue, 5, 135; relation to solitude, 146 solitude, 5–7, 15–18, 68, 127–8, 155, 167, 197–9; commended, 126, 134, 137, 140–1, 146, 165; complemented by speechlessness, 8, 17; desired, 100–1, 105, 116, 121–6, 129–31, 145; held in suspicion, 4, 13, 133, 137–8; related to melancholy, 102–4. See also isolation Southwell, Robert, 18, 52–3, 101; “Looke home,” 126–7; Saint Peters Complaint, 127–9 Spedding, James, 184, 185, 194 speechlessness, 8–9, 11, 15, 17, 22, 95, 99, 100, 102, 106, 125, 171, 189, 192, 194 Spenser, Edmund, 14, 17, 24, 53, 58, 62, 101, 199; Colin Clouts Come Home Againe, 51–2; Complaints, 106, 183; “Epithalamion,” 183; The Faerie Queene, 122–4, 129, 130; The

Shepeardes Calender, 11, 21, 22, 46–7, 50, 51, 60, 62, 74, 175, 185 Sprat, Thomas, 141, 227n32 Stanley, Thomas, 6, 199 Statius, 72 Stephens, John, 100–1, 102, 106, 126 Stevenson, Matthew, 75 Stillinger, Jack, 5 stoicism, 7, 32, 133, 135, 137, 140 strange reading, 12, 77, 85, 108, 171, 199 style, 17, 45, 49, 76, 100, 161 Sussman, Henry, 14 Sylvester, Josuah, 178 Taylor, Jeremy, 184 Taylor, John (the Water-Poet), 57–8, 61, 64 Thoreau, Henry David, Walden, 15 Tottel, Richard, Songs and Sonettes, 175 Tourneur, Cyril, 15; The Revenger’s Tragedy, 78; The Transformed Metamorphosis, 77, 78–81, 82, 84–5, 88 Traherne, Philip, 158–68 Traherne, Thomas, 18, 141, 158–60; “The Author to the Critical Peruser,” 161–2; Centuries, 165–6; “Dumnesse,” 164; Inducements to Retirednes, 138–40, 145–6; “The Preparative,” 163–4; “The Salutation,” 162–3 Trevor, Douglas, 103 Tullus Hostilius, 191, 193 Vilain, Robert, 187–8 Wade, Gladys, 159 Waddington, Raymond B., 85–6 Wall, Wendy, 21 Walton, Izaak, 178, 212n50 Webbe, William, 77

260 Index Westmoreland Manuscript, 88–9 Whigham, Frank, 37, 38 Wither, George, 55–7, 58, 61 Wollman, Richard B., 86 Wood, Anthony, 160, 215n19 Woods, Susanne, 39 Wotton, Henry, 177–9, 180, 183, 184 writing: as collaborative, 13; ethics of, 83, 85; frustrations of, 22, 39,

177, 179, 185, 199; as solitary, 5, 7, 10–11, 15, 100–1, 104, 132–3, 140, 198. See also authorship Wroth, Mary, 40 Young, R.V., 86 Zweig, Stefan, 233n52 Zwicker, Steven, 147–8