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This is to certify that the

dissertation entitled

The English Renaissance Poet in the World:“
Wyatt, Gascoigne, Sidney, Shakespeare, and Jonson

presented by

Carol L. Duane

has been accepted towards fulfillment
of the requirements for

Ph.D . degree in English

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THE ENGLISH RENAISSANCE POET IN THE WORLD:
WYATT, GASCOIGNE, SIDNEY, SHAKESPEARE, AND JONSON

By

Carol L. Duane

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Department of English

 

Copyright by
Carol L. Duane
1984

ii

 

ABSTRACT

THE ENGLISH RENAISSANCE POET IN THE WORLD:
WYATT, GASCOIGNE, SIDNEY, SHAKESPEARE, AND JONSON

By

Carol L. Duane

A significant group of English Renaissance poets —- Wyatt, Gascoigne,
Sidney, Shakespeare, and Jonson —- pays special attention to the
difficulties of taking significant action in a complex, ethically
ambiguous, and problematical world. In different ways, each formulates
this problem in terms of the poet's relation to his society —— how he
functions in it and how he tries to shape its order. Each asks what it
means to be a pggt in the world and what poetry can and should do;
each presents poet-speakers for whom the writing of the poem
constitutes an ethical action, whether that action derives from a
social relationship or from a personal relationship set in a social
context. Wyatt focuses on issues of engagement and detachment,
Gascoigne on assimilating error and failure in the effort to
make"wysedome" from "waste." Sidney's Astrophil is a negative example,
turning away from both social and poetic responsibilities as the
sequence progresses. In the dark lady sonnets, Shakespeare focuses on
the increasingly problematical relationship between knowledge and
action; Jonson, deeply divided, finds the world both hostile and
hospitable. The study as a whole also establishes the presence of a

pattern which is significant in its own right, which has gone

unrecognized, and which illuminates English literary history as well.
Standing apart from the pastoral mode and reflecting the Renaissance
transformation of the idea of wisdom from a contemplative to an active
moral virtue, these poets ask what happens when active humanism is put
into practice. Riveting their attention on the impediments to ethical
action as human beings and as poets within their societies, they
reassess the complex varieties of worldly experience, examine the
inability to act in accordance with reason, explore dilemmas of
detachment and engagement, expose the shortcomings of proverbial
wisdom, and reject the creation of and withdrawal to private worlds.
In their hands, the poem becomes an appropriate vehicle for
discovering and communicating the ethical dynamics of personal and
social relationships. The poem itself serves as a mode of action, and
the poet—speakers reassess and redefine the role and function of the

poet in the world.

 

II

III

IV

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction 1

"I cannot frame my tune to feign": Detachment and
Engagement in Wyatt's Flawed World 7

"Where wysedome makes the ways": The Erring
Poet-Speaker in Gascoigne's Lyrics 63

"Thy lips my history": The Public Context in
Sidney's Astrophil and Stella 82

"At random from the truth": Knowledge and Action
in Shakespeare's Sonnets 112

"This man hath trauail'd well": Jonson's Ambivalence

toward Inclusive Experience 143
Conclusion 180

Notes 206

Bibliography 239

iii

 

 

INTRODUCTION

In an early stanza of "Upon Appleton House," Lord Fairfax,
Marvell's patron and the house's owner, is gently reprimanded for
overextending his retreat to the country and wittily reminded that the
time has come for him to resume his military and political
responsibilities: cut off from his own regiment and the challenges on
which he thrives, he has taken to planting the tulips on his country
estate in regimental formation. Enough is enough, the poem suggests:
it is time to marshall troops, not flowers; Lord Fairfax belongs in
the world of action. His sojourn at Appleton House will have been
successful if it enables him to return to the military and political

chaos he left and to "make [his] destiny [his] choice."1 Here,

H H

clearly, Marvell is admonishing his patron to act in a narrow
political sense —— to use his talents and energies for social ends. In
other poems, though, Marvell's concern with action derives from a much
broader, more inclusive commitment to the world of time and human
history. Harold Toliver and Joseph Summers are only two of many
critics who have observed, for example, that "The Garden" concludes by
endorsing the processes of time and suggests that the contemplative
experience of its middle stanzas does not represent a viable way of
life.2

The poem begins with an unequivocal rejection of the "incessant

1

 

labors" required in the vain, confining enterprise of winning
recognition for various achievements and an equally unequivocal
affirmation of the "garlands of repose," which cannot be found in the
"busy company of men." Pursuing the contemplative life, the speaker
succeeds in "annihilating all that's made / To a green thought in a
green shade"(47—48). But the unflawed perfection of the speaker's
hours in the garden —— the fulfillment of body, mind, and soul —- is,
like the garden of Eden (of which it reminds him), "beyond a mortal's
share." He is in a real garden, not an archetypal one, he suddenly
remembers, as he notices the floral sundial —— a product of the
gardener's industry and skill —— which is designed to compute the
passage of time. "It reminds us," Cleanth Brooks remarks in a recent
essay, "that time has never stopped its motion even during an
experience which has seemed a blessed respite from it."3 The hours
spent in the garden are not necessarily devalued: they remain "sweet
and wholesome," but, like the hours Lord Fairfax spends in hi§_garden,
they are preparatory: the speaker will re—enter a world in which
industry and skill are not simply dismissed as "vain" and
"narrow—verged." "All that's made" has not been "annihilated" after
all. Its readers —— the "we" of line 70 who compute our time while
making or using beautiful and useful objects like poems, gardens, and
sundials —— leave the poem with a new understanding of time, a sense
of multiplied possibilities. Contemplation is viewed not as a
substitute for action but as a preparation for it —- as something

which will bear fruit in action.

In "The Garden" as in "Upon Appleton House," this is a two—stage
process which closely follows the familiar pastoral pattern: caught up
in the problematics of political or social activity, protagonists
withdraw to a world which is figuratively or literally green in order
to gain the kind of perspective on themselves, their opportunities,
and their responsibilities which will allow them to resume their
proper place in human society and attend to what one critic has called
"the real business of life."4 Generally, poems and plays adhering
to this pattern end —— as does "The Garden" —— at that liminal moment
when such a perspective has been achieved. Behind this pattern stands
the familiar Renaissance judgment that the flowers of contemplation
produce the fruits of action —— a judgment which derives, in turn,
from the commitment to the active life that is such a central feature
of Renaissance humanism in England from More to Milton.5 Thus, the
popular notion that Renaissance literature is pervaded by a circular
and tedious debate over the relative merits of action and
contemplation is actually something of a red herring which distorts
the frequently sequential and complementary relationship between the
two modes in Renaissace thought.6 In context, it is more
characteristic and more accurate to speak, as Ronsard does, of the
process by which contemplation is transformed into action.7

Elsewhere, however, Marvell considers the possibility that the
contemplative and active goals can be realized simultaneously, not
sequentially. In the Horatian Ode, for example, he suggests that

Cromwell's "active star" comprises both: "So much can one man do /

 

That does both act and know" (75—76), he says, but his attitude toward
Cromwell's success in this endeavor remains elusive and ambivalent, as
criticism of the poem has amply demonstrated. Marvell wrote at the end
of an era, but his preoccupation with balancing the processes of
acting and knowing (the terms are his) runs throughout the period. It
was, in fact, a concern which preoccupied Wyatt in his early years at
Henry VIII's court. Asked by his friend and patron Catherine of Aragon
to translate Petrarch's lengthy (and, by common agreement, murky) De
remediis utriusgue fortunae, Wyatt begged off after several false
starts and finally offered the queen instead the Quyete of Mynde, his
prose version of Guillaume Bude's Latin translation of Plutarch's
essay, De Tranquillitate et Securitate Animi. In it, analyzing the
conditions conducive to tranquillity or "quyete of mynde," he
vigorously assents to Plutarch's contention that peace of mind —— the
contemplative ideal —- is not necessarily to be achieved in retirement
or inactivity, but in the company of others and in the pursuit of an
active life. There is, he finds, no correlation between a tranquil or
agitated spirit on one hand, and a multitude or scarcity of business
on the other: "quyete of mynde" is fully compatible with the active
life. Those who are temperamentally unsuited to retirement cannot
achieve peace of mind in inactivity, he insists, referring to the
inactive Achilles as a "deed lumpe of erthe."8 Even more

suggestive is the fact that the Quyete of Mynde, like its source, is
cast in an active frame —— a letter from one busy person to another.

The author reveals at the outset that both he and the recipient are

 

   

 

preoccupied with business and pressed for time; he has no more leisure
to compose at length than his friend has to read at length, yet
"quyete of mynde" is within the reach of both.

Wyatt's Quyete of Mynde is important here not because it is the
first prose essay in English, not because it validates the claims of
his friends that he was "depe—witted" as well as diplomatic, and not
because it links him to Catherine's circle of learned humanists (she
was a friend and patron of Vives as well, though there is no evidence
that Vives and Wyatt were acquainted), but because it implies that
writers as well as readers are likely to be men of the world who seek
to apply the fruits of learning to the conduct of life. It dispenses
with the two—stage process characteristic of the pastoral mode and
endorses instead the primacy of lived experience as a potential source
of tranquillity and understanding. This emphasis, so clearly
articulated in Wyatt's youthful prose and so clearly derived from the
civic humanism of antiquity as well as that of his own era, is
underscored and reaffirmed throughout English Renaissance poetry. This
study focuses on that emphasis in the verse of five Renaissance poets
—— Wyatt, Gascoigne, Sidney, Shakespeare, and Jonson. They seek to
equip themselves to respond to an incredibly complex array of
challenges, constraints, and opportunities not by withdrawing to gain
perspective but through the process of living in the world itself.
Their poetry is profoundly and intimately linked not just to central
principles of humanistic moral philosophy but also to changing

conceptions of the nature of wisdom, which it helps to shape.

 

   

 

Viewed from the broadest possible perspective, these poets have
in common what Arthur 0. Lovejoy has called "this—worldliness": a
belief in "the sufficient worth of the general conditions of existence
with which common experience has already acquainted us" and a
willingness to identify "the chief value of existence with process and
struggle in time, an antipathy to satisfaction and finality, a sense
of the 'glory of the imperfect.’ "9 Its opposite,
"otherworldliness," is, in Lovejoy's formulation, "the belief that
both the genuinely 'real' and the truly good are radically antithetic
in their essential characteristics to anything to be found in man's
natural life, in the ordinary course of experience, however normal,

"10 The tension between

however intelligent, and however fortunate.
the two, Lovejoy writes, has pervaded Western thought since Plato.
Noting a similar polarity, G.K. Hunter has observed that the humanist
movement in England as well as on the continent was characterized by a
"violent antipathy" to the medieval attitude to contemplation (a
"tendency to spin schemes and dreams" but "founder in the mud" when it
came to practical matters):11 "The age was aware of concentrating

its cleverness on this world, a world of solid and colourful objects,
and of using eloquence to produce a human rather than a theoretical
order."12 Essentially, Hunter's well-known view of Renaissance
humanism —— that it "sought to turn religious ideals and energies
towards the amelioration of life in this world and to achieve an order
in this life corresponding to the religious vision of man's

worth"13 —— is a more historically focused view of Lovejoy's very

 

   

broad perspective.

Standing behind both, however, is the emerging Renaissance
conception, charted by Eugene F. Rice, Jr., in his indispensable
study, The Renaissance Idea of Wisdom, of wisdom as an active moral
virtue rather than a purely intellectual virtue, and the belief that
its measure is the proper conduct of life.14 Just as Cicero
insisted in De Officiis that wisdom concerns the relations between
human beings as well as the relations between human beings and gods,
so too, Rice points out, the civic humanists of the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries increasingly asked not what one needed to know in
order to become wise but what one needed to g9_in order to liyg
wisely.15 Thus, wisdom is not a knowledge of metaphysical truths
but a comprehension of ethical, experiential truths. The emphasis on
turning one's attention to the things of this world is linked,
accordingly, to the growing belief that wisdom involves "the right
conduct of life," as Douglas Bush very simply puts it, rather than the
acquisition of arcane knowledge —— metaphysical on one hand,
scientific on the other.16 In this formulation, the wisdom of the
speaker in Marvell's "The Garden" would be measured by what he
proceeds to do, how he acts, rather than by what he has learned in the
"green shade." Hunter puts it succintly:

The age sees the historical movement as one out of
contemplative idleness (pictured as a monk in
Spenser, and elsewhere) and into practical
utility. Religion, says Sir John Cheke (who taught
King Edward and all Cambridge Greek) has two
parts, 'the one of which is placed in the

searching after knowledge and in the tracing out
of those things which are grateful and

well—pleasing unto God; but the other is employed

in action, which puts forward into life and

performance what she understands to have the

divine approbation. It follows that forceful

action of the right kind could be seen as the

highest human activity by many Elizabethan

theorists, and here they were at one with

continental humanism.
Such an emphasis on action —— on conducting one's life properly —-
places a heavy responsibility on the actor, and Hunter is right to
emphasize that the operative words are "of the right kind." If people
are free to choose, if they must validate their choices in action,
then they are accountable for their choices and responsible for how
they act, how they spend their time. Given this prevailing moral
philosophy, then, it is no wonder that Wyatt, like Plutarch before
him, was concerned with putting "quyete of mynde" within the reach of
intelligent people leading worldly lives.

It has occasionally been argued that the Renaissance elevation of
action over contemplation and the accompanying transformation of the
idea of wisdom from a metaphysical to a moral idea created what can
only be called a double bind for some of those who sought to achieve
wisdom on these terms —— that vulnerable scholars, eager to prove
their adherence to the prevailing code, turned aside from the
sheltered lives for which they were best suited and put themselves at
the mercy of a power structure which was only too willing to exploit
their irresistible blend of personal naivete and verbal skills.18
But as Milton made clear in On Education, and as the foregoing

discussion has emphasized, the aim of English humanism was to produce

citizens, not scholars. Its great poets, for all their learning, were

members of their societies and formed by their communities.1

Their involvement in the complex and imperfect but vital worlds of
court and city was not an endurance test; rather, they focused their
energies on the process of sharing, reflecting, evaluating, and
criticizing their own experience and that of others in their various
circumstances and milieus. Nor are they mouthpieces of stock ideas,
producing metrical illustrations of the reigning moral philosophy.
Instead, they question and help to qualify and redefine the common
(and often proverbial) assumptions of the prevailing humanist
orientation as they discover its gaps and limitations. Consider, as a
case in point, one difference between Wyatt and Vives. The latter's
Introduction to Wisdom is essentially a collection of precepts,
lacking a local habitation if not a name; Wyatt's poems about ways of
reacting to ruthlessness and faithlessness are, in effect, a critique
of such well—intentioned but untested generalities.20 What Wyatt
offers instead is a troubled but intelligently courageous (and very
concrete) response to a world where ruthlessness and faithlessness
exist but do not necessarily dominate.

But what does it really mean to say that these poets wrote about
what it means to live in the world? What actually binds them together?
As a group, they implicitly ask, Given what I know, what should I do?
What kind of action is it possible for me, a poet, to take ——
including the way I write poems? Do my poems cut me off from the world
around me —— or do they bind me closer to it? What are my

responsibilities to that world, and do they conflict or coincide with

 

 

my responsibilities as an artist? Does my involvement in the world
provide me with a reliable guide to action, or does it cut me off from
the sources of understanding? Despite their very real differences, all
.
the poets considered here are preoccupied with the need to act, to
account for their use of time and talents, and to validate their
knowledge by translating it into action (Cheke's formula). All seek
action which is informed by reason —— action which is intelligent and
responsible at the same time that it is timely and effective —— and
all seek to act in ways which confirm and enhance their relationships
to their communities. But Wyatt, Sidney, and Shakespeare pay special
attention to the impediments to such action: for them, a central
problem of living in the world involves an inexplicable tendency to
act irrationally, even self—destructively. In Jonson's case, the
impediments are in society; in Gascoigne's, they are located in the
interplay between self and society. In different ways, all question
the wisdom of getting deeply involved in their worlds: Wyatt, so
concerned with fair play, creates speakers who are temporarily
overwhelmed by their desire to revenge themselves on those who have
wronged them; Jonson, theoretically so committed to an inclusive,
embracing attitude to experience, shrinks from it in a way that has
never been satisfactorily explained; Gascoigne, having learned from
experience the extent of his own shortcomings, comes to accept the
limitations of his society with relative equanimity. Sidney and
Shakespeare, in ways that have not been adequately recognized, reject

the alternative of setting up private worlds, which are shown to be

 

 

ll

deceptive and destructive, not restorative.

Furthermore, these poets not only ask what human beings must do
to live well in the world, but what poets must do: in coming to terms
with the varieties of their own experience, their speakers account for
how they use their time as poets. In some cases they define their
poetic aims and identities in terms of taking action as individuals,
within personal relationships; in other cases, they center such
inquiries in the complexities of social relationships. In some poems,
a personal relationship itself is grounded in a social context, and
the act of writing the poem has an impact on the social order in turn.
In different ways, Wyatt, Gascoigne, Sidney, and Jonson all insist in
their verse that poetry has a legitimate social role and that the poet
holds an important place in his community (Shakespeare does too, of
course, but in the poems considered here he focuses more on the role
of poetry in personal than in social relationships); they also
suggest, directly and indirectly, that writing poems can be a form of
taking action, of having impact on one's community, of asserting one's
membership in it. In contrast, say, to Spenser's Colin Clout, who

V

prefers "pyping lowe in shade of lowly grove,' where he "play[s] to

l,"21 Wyatt, as he confides to a

please my selfe, all be it il
friend, is downright irritated at being cut off from the courtly
audience that perversely prefers the polite compliment of others to
his own plain speaking; an unemployed Gascoigne complains about

corruption in high places to a potential patron whom he proceeds to

try to educate; Sidney is appalled at Astrophil's abdication of his

 

 

responsibilites to both his poetry ang_his society; Jonson finds it
almost more galling to be ignored than to be criticized.

The chapters which follow focus on poets whose work is generated
by or grounded in these issues: it is more to the point to pursue the
vitality of an issue than laboriously and tediously to discuss its
possible relevance to everyone writing at a given period. That period
itself ranges from the reign of Henry VIII through the reign of James
I (though Jonson continued to write well into the reign of Charles I):
to deal with the social and/or public role of the poet in the years
during and immediately preceding the civil war is to encounter very
different questions, as well as a different sensibility —— one
influenced by growing epistemological and scientific debate as well as
by political and social change.

A specific overview of each chapter may be helpful. Rather than
fashioning his life as a work of art or using his rhetorical skill as
an instrument of power in a zero—sum game, Wyatt is defining, through
his poetry, a poet's relation to his society as well as insisting upon
the social function of poetry. In the sonnets and satires, he creates
a social world in which the speaker participates fully, selectively,
or reluctantly while wrestling with the problems of engagement and
detachment. In these poems as well as in the explicitly
self—referential lyrics, Chapter One argues, Wyatt's speakers
demonstrate acute awareness of their participation, its rewards, and
its costs. Wyatt evaluates a broad range of responses: in poems like

H

"Blame not my lute, he presents a speaker who uses poetry to

 

criticize a society from within —— and to redefine the role the poet
plays in it; in the first satire, in contrast, the speaker "cannot."
Nevertheless, because the satire is a verse epistle, a letter to a
trusted friend, it establishes a sense of community, another social
world, to match against the one it rejects. Accordingly, the speaker's
disengagement and isolation are more apparent than real. Moreover, the
poem remains firmly rooted in the temporal world; the speaker ends
with an invitation to Poyntz to judge how he has used his time. At the
same time, however, the poet-speaker in the first satire finds it
impossible, while at court, to write poems that tell the truth but
inconceivable to write poems that lie; the poet—speaker in "Blame not
my lute," in contrast, succeeds in accomodating himself to the
conventions of his society while retaining his artistic independence.
Gascoigne's lyrics are similarly anchored in the world of action,
but he explores the problematics of that world from a slightly
different perspective. Where Wyatt is preoccupied with maintaining his
integrity as a human being and as a poet within his society —- and
with clarifying the relationship between that integrity and engagement
and detachment —— Gascoigne, Chapter Two shows, is preoccupied with
individual error and failure. Focusing on the relationship between the
shortcomings of the individual and the shortcomings of the social
order, he explores the role of poetry in illuminating and redressing
these shortcomings. In "The common speech" and the untitled sequence
of seven sonnets beginning with "In haste post haste," he reflects on

the misuse of time and talents; in "Gascoignes lullabie," he addresses

 

the issue of self-deception: the speaker is "beguiled" by his own
song, which both reconciles him to and protects him from full
awareness of the ravages of time. In "Gascoignes wodmanship," his
imaginative ability not only helps him to understand better his own
circumstances; his rhetorical ability enables him to redefine the
poet—"wodman's" relation to the social order and to create a place in
the world for the values which poetry represents: the poem makes a
unique appeal for patronage at the same time that it seeks to educate
the prospective patron.

In different ways, Wyatt and Gascoigne present speakers who are
profoundly concerned with the relation between knowledge and action
and with the central role of poetry in helping to shape the proper
relation. Chapter Three suggests that Sidney's Astrophil and Stella,
in contrast, presents a negative example -— a poet—speaker who denies
his social role and responsibilities. Rejecting involvement in the
world in which he lives, Astrophil denies an essential part of his own
nature. In his preoccupation with Stella, a woman who is unattainable
but otherwise suitable, he shrinks from knowledge of his OWn
diminished state. Carefully establishing a public context in the
sequence, Sidney invites us to observe how Astrophil's failure to
fulfill expectations associated with his courtly, civic, or diplomatic
roles is linked to his increasingly fatuous conception of himself as
poet —- an identity which he actually chooses to obliterate late in
the sequence. Thus, the public context sonnets do more than illustrate

Astro hil's im ro er balance of reason, will, and appetite or Sidney's
P P P

 

attempts to "place" romantic love in a broad context of human
experience; conflated at crucial points with sonnets about Astrophil's
conception of his goals and status as poet, they reveal important
similarities in the way in which Astrophil narrows the scope of his
ambitions as poet and as courtier.

Like Astrophil, the speaker in Shakespeare's sonnets to the young
man recognizes the existence of a social world. Early in the sequence,
he laments its inaccessibility and the loss of its rewards, seeking
compensation in the private world of the friend's love; later, he
dismisses the world as irrelevant (e.g., "You are my all the world,
and I must strive / To know my shames and praises from your tongue"
[112.5-6]). In the dark lady sonnets, however, the judgments of others
are given legitimacy; dwelling on the opposition between what he feels
for her and what others say of her, the speaker rages at his inability
to stop loving someone who, in contrast to Stella, is attainable but
unsuitable. The validation of an external source of judgment late in
the sequence is used to call attention to the problematical
relationship between action and knowledge. We feel that Astrophil's
failure is an individual failure —— that if only he could see clearly,
he would be able to align his behavior with his knowledge. Here,
however, in what is almost a gloss on the plight of his predecessor,
Shakespeare's speaker seems trapped despite his knowledge. At the same
time, the speaker's attempts to come to terms with his experience ——
with the implications of his own behavior —— do not really leave him

"At random from the truth" even though that truth may be "vainly

 

16

expressed": Chapter Four explores the way in which the speaker is
increasingly perceptive about the complexities of this relationship
even if the insight he acquires does not confer the power to change.

Like his predecessors, Jonson is deeply concerned with the poet's
relation to his society and with the difficulties of taking action.
Unlike them, Chapter Five demonstrates, Jonson exhibits a
fundamentally contradictory attitude toward the complexities of human
experience: endorsing an inclusive attitude in the Discoveries and in
some poems, he advocates retreat in others. On one hand, he praises
people who are fully at home in the world and involved in its
concerns; on the other, he sees figures of virtue as embattled and
beleaguered in a world that is hostile rather than hospitable. These
contradictions run throughout his poems and they cut across genres.
Nor are they ever resolved, because Jonson does not evaluate one
position in terms of the other. In neither group, however, does he
present people whose experience has made them wise; instead, while he
occasionally praises people for demonstrating wisdom in action, he
differs from the other poets considered here in that he does not show
them acquiring wisdom from the realm of action. These observations
apply to his self—referential lyrics as well: in them, Jonson is
deeply sceptical about his own ability to assess and incorporate
inclusive experience —- which can also include the experience of error
—— into his conception of the scope and purpose of his art.

Were Milton not excluded on chronological grounds, as well as on

substantive issues, he would be on generic grounds: epic poetry (and

 

17

the epic poet's conception of his function) presents a special case,
and the epic narrator, a subject unto itself, is not really comparable
to the poet—speaker.22 For similar reasons, I do not discuss

Spenser. First, as the lines from Colin's June eclogue quoted above
indicate, Colin endorses pastoral values. Second, Colin is a poet
figure who reappears throughout Spenser's work, in The Faerie Queene
as well as in "Colin Clout's Come Home Again." And while Spenser
himself asks, "Who knows not Colin Clout?" Colin is hard to know ——
both because of his own complexity and because of Spenser's
complicated attitude toward him. Both Colin's and Spenser's views of
the poet's relation to his society change over time and with genre. In
the eclogues, Colin's notion of poetry is intensely and defensively
private; he has no conception of "playing" to influence others or to
give voice to their aspirations. In The Faerie Queene, however,
Colin's personal and pastoral achievement is something which is
pursued and valued by a representative of a much wider world. As
almost everyone who has ever written on Book VI has pointed out, when
Sir Calidore interrupts Colin on Mt. Acidale, the knight discovers the
true courtesy which should be at court but is not to be found there.
What the poet has to offer, then, is, in Spenser's view, both valuable
and necessary to the larger community. As Richard Helgerson's recent
work on Spenser has demonstrated, these are not just conventional
court—country conflicts: rather, Spenser, like other "self—crowned
laureates" of the English Renaissance, presents himself in terms of

what he thinks a poet should be, and his fluctuating and ambivalent

feelings about Colin's vocation mirror his feelings about his own
role.23 In any case, the length and breadth of Spenser's treatment
of this issue make generalizations based on any one of Colin's
manifestations seem naive and ill-considered, and require separate,
more extensive treatment.

What about other major poets omitted from the present study?
Greville presents a fascinating paradox. Epistemologically and
ontologically, he is the antithesis of those considered here:

Mixe not in functions God, and earth together;

The wisdome of the world, and his, are two,

One latitude can well agree to neither,
he warns.24 In his view, a prudential active life has no
connection with, and is not a means to, a wise life; wisdom ——
knowledge of that which is most valuable —— is dependent upon divine
revelation, not human effort. Profoundly disillusioned with the
political and social order, he held an equally bleak view of the
degeneracy of human nature itself, and his lyric sequence, Caelica
dismisses all worldly accomplishments in a sweeping rejection of life
on earth and a desire for apocalyptic escape from time to eternity.
His view is unrelentingly pessimistic: in the powerful imagery of
Caelica LXXXVI, "The earth with thunder torn, with fire blasted," life
on earth remains a top driven by whipping sorrow; it has no redeeming
features, and its desolation is complete.25 Virtuous activity is
irrelevant if not actually counterproductive, he suggests in CVI and

CVIII: the former argues that "reasons workes" are anathema to "flesh

 

and blood" and that a "sincere Magistrate" is more likely to be hated
than loved, given the depravity of those he governs. Equally
pessimistic, the latter concludes that peace actually brings more
evils than war:
The reason is; Peace is a quiet Nurse
Of Idlenesse, and Idlenesse the field
Where wit and Power change all seedes to the worse.
(7-9)
Nevertheless, Greville pursued power assiduously, chafing when he
was cut off from its hub, and he was an ambitious courtier for most of
his life.26 While his poems utterly reject human experience as a
source of wisdom and dismiss books and humane learning as "False
antidotes" for "vicious ignorance," he actually endowed a chair at
Cambridge to further the application of humanistic studies to
practical affairs.27 But Greville does not conceive of himself as
a pggt in the world. He never writes as a poet—speaker, and the
contradictions which help to make him so interesting —— the
differences between what he says in his poems and what he does in his
life ——are not addressed in the poems themselves.

Ralegh, similarly, pursues power —— pursues it in his
relationship with the queen over many years —— even while he writes of
"giv[ing] the world the lie" and seeking his "Scallop—shell of
quiet."28 In his case as in Greville's, the relevant issue is the
link between his poetry and his life. In Ralegh's case, that link has
been brilliantly and thoroughly explored by Stephen Greenblatt.29

Ralegh seems to have used his poetry in a way that Greville did not:

20

as Greenblatt's analysis suggests, Ralegh's long poem, "Booke of the

Ocean to Scinthia,"

was probably a tool of courtiership if not of
courtship in Ralegh's difficult and volatile relationship with the
queen. But the relation between poetry and biography, admirably
handled by critics like Greenblatt and Helgerson, is not my subject.
In the case of Donne, another notable exception, I would argue
that his commitment to the "here and now" rather than the "there and
then" -— to borrow M.M. Mahood's phrase3O -— is assumed rather
than debated: it is a given, a starting point, not a cause for
analysis or concern. When Donne does focus on the world around him
rather than on a very private world —- the fifth satire, "Thou shalt
not laugh in this leafe, Muse," is a good example —— he simply heaps
up complaints against it rather than examining his own relation with
it. Moreover, in the two anniversaries as in the satires, the fact
that the speaker who dissects the world and charts the progress of the
soul is a poet is of marginal structural or thematic importance.31
Herbert is another story. Although he shunned "the way that takes
the town," he is a superb example of that great amphibium who
flourishes in divided and distinguished worlds.32 A religious
poet, he nevertheless places a value on human experience which would
be unthinkable to Greville and which puts Herbert in the company of
the other poets considered here.33 Like them, he focuses on
virtuous action and the proper use of one's faculties. Where Greville

V

insists that "God comes not till man be overthrown,' and sees little

21

value in human achievement, Herbert's poetry is deeply concerned with
finding connections between the human and the divine. He carefully
assesses the varieties of human experience, especially his own
experience as a poet, as he evaluates the worth of wit, language, and
learning.

In different ways, the "Jordan" poems, "The Pearl," and "The
Forerunners" place limits on the power and relevance of art and
intellect and emphasize the need to master the temptation of
"beautiful words."34 But just as many poems about "versing" pull
the other way, and insist not simply on the value of the product but
on the value of the process -- the experiece of writing -— as
well.35 In argument as well as imagery, "The Flower" establishes
the poet-speaker's link to the natural world and suggests that to
"relish versing" is to "bud again," to "live and write"; here,
creative renewal is linked to the ability to respond to the renewal of
the earth. In "The Quidditie," on the other hand, making poems is the
means by which the speaker transcends the limitations of the world:
"But it is that which while I use / I am with thee, / And most take
2.1.1"(11-12)-36

If "The Quidditie" suggests that the full use of his gifts
enhances rather than impedes the speaker's spiritual well being, poems
such as "Dulnesse" and "Deniall" equate diminished creative activity
with spiritual deprivation. The former distinguishes "wit" and "mind"
and "lines" from "sugred lyes," and implies that the lack of poetic

inspiration is as unfortunate as its misuse; the latter argues that

 

 

22

the speaker's inability to write well is directly related to his
separation from God. In these poems, the speaker's desire to write
well is not the result of muddled thinking or misplaced priorities ——
a weakness for the "sugar—cane" of poetic diction —— nor does it stem
from an exaggerated sense of his own importance. Other poems --
"Employment (1)" is one example —— focus even more explicitly on the
speaker's proper use of his time and talents; in this case, his
"employment" is to write the best possible poems and thereby fulfill
his responsibility as a "link" in the great chain. These observations
about Herbert, based on well established critical views, illustrate
the vitality and flexibility of an attitude toward human experience
thst adapts itself even to religious poetry. They are of illustrative
rather than intrinsic importance, however, and therefore do not stand
on their own.

In focus and approach as well as in content, this study sets
definite limits. First, I deal with only one primary genre, the lyric
poem, though I do deal with different lyric forms: sonnets, odes,
epigrams, songs, and epistles. This is inevitable, given my priority
of picking the most relevant and illuminating examples of the issues
at stake, since the poets in question simply did not confine
themselves to one lyric form. Second, depending on the author, I deal
sometimes with individual poems, sometimes with groups of poems which
are treated as part of a sequence or collection (e.g., Sidney's

Astrophil and Stella or Shakespeare's sonnets), and sometimes with

 

poems which may appear in a collection but which I treat autonomously

23

(e.g., poems from Jonson's Epigrammes or The Forrest), The
increasingly popular notion that both collections can and should be
read sequentially is not relevant to my argument, and therefore I do
not pursue it. (When I do make inferences implicitly based on
sequentiality, as with Sidney and Shakespeare, I base my arguments on
long—established critical precedent.) Third, this is not the study of
a style: I make no systematic attempt to establish links between these
poets' strategies for dealing with the complexiies of their artistic
and social worlds and their stylistic practices. Nor is it the history
of an idea: my concluding chapter does tentatively suggest some ways
in which certain assumptions of intellectual history should be
qualified, but that has not been my major aim.

At the same time, my focus in the final chapter on such issues as
changing conceptions of wisdom, and my interest in the differences
between the poets' and the philosophers' treament of this topic help
to differentiate this study from those focusing on sociopolitical
tensions —— an increasingly popular critical approach. In an important
book, Daniel Javitch has demonstrated meticulously and persuasively
how the qualities needed to be a successful courtier in the middle
years of Elizabeth's reign were also the qualities needed to be a
successful poet.37 Following Javitch's lead, others have pursued
different analyses of the complex relations betwen courtiership and
eloquence, often finding "sociopolitical encoding" and cryptic
complaints to disaffected associates embedded in every sonnet. Where

relevant, I have drawn on them. But I am, as it should now be clear,

24

dealing with broader issues than the constraints imposed or favors
conferred by the poets' associations with the prevailing power
structure.38

Do the arguments advanced by today's revisionist critics (e.g.,
Greenblatt and Marotti) make the questions informing an inquiry like
this seem naive and out of date? Possibly, but not necessarily. To
ignore the contributions of the new historicism and to proceed as if
the poets' relations to the social order were irrelevant -— as if they
endorsed the received wisdom in a vacuum —— would be silly. But the
two approaches can and should be complementary. The more we learn from
analyses of the literary and patronage systems about the actual
circumstances in which Renaissance poets wrote (and the sooner we put
to rest any lingering echoes of the ahistorical and inaccurate "nest
of singing birds" cliches), the more we understand how the pressing
ethical deliberations and dilemmas on which this inquiry focuses were
grounded in actual experience. The poets who encountered problematical
relationships with the social order were the ones who put their
principles into practice as poets. One thing that recent studies in
the politics of poetry contribute is a concrete sense of how difficult
it was to find (to return to Lovejoy's terms) the "chief value of
existence" in "process and struggle in time," in "the ordinary course
of human experience."

This study has inherent limitations. Given its very nature, it
seeks to shed light on one recurrent concern. If it does not seek to

"prove" anything, neither does it attempt to disprove what others have

25

observed. What is odd is that it has not been done before. We all
understand the impact of active humanism on the major poets of the end
of the Renaissance, Marvell and Milton. We understand, too, how the
prevailing moral philosophy shaped and energized the drama: Hamlet
finds it intolerable that "capability and godlike reason" should "fust
in us unused."39 Yet no one has really paid attention to the way
the lyric poetry of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries is
informed by the same ideas. I say informed by rather than influenced
by, because this is not a systematic study of the application of those
ideas: were it a "sources and influences" project, it would take a
very different shape. An inductive inquiry grounded in the poetry
itself, it proceeds on the assumption that what the poets have to say
is more interesting and relevant than who it is derived from. To
assume derivation, in fact, is to divide poetry from serious thought
and to imply that the former merely reflects the latter. But to make
such a division is to misunderstand a fundamental impulse of the
Renaissance: as Petrarch wrote to Francesco Bruni, "You make an orator
of me, a historian, philosopher, and poet, and finally even a
theologian."40
My primary aim, then, has been to establish how the poet—speakers
presented by these five poets seek a reliable guide to action and how
they link the problematics of acting in a given world to their
concerns as poets. These five poets pay special attention to the
difficulties of taking significant action in a complex, ethically

ambiguous, and problematical world. In different ways, each formulates

 

26

this problem in terms of the poet's relation to his society —- how he
functions in it and how he tries to shape its order. Each asks what it
means to be a pggg in the world and what poetry can and should do;
each presents poet—speakers for whom the writing of the poem
constitutes an ethical action, whether that action derives from a
social relationship or from a personal relationship set in a social
context. These concerns are grounded in the poems themselves, not
imposed from a critical distance; accordingly, each of the five
chapters stands on its own in contributing to our understanding of the
poets in question. But the study as a whole also establishes the
presence of a pattern which is significant in its own right, which has
gone unrecognized, and which illuminates English literary history as
well. Standing apart from the pastoral mode and reflecting the
Renaissance transformation of the idea of wisdom from a contemplative
to an active moral virtue, these poets ask what happens when active
humanism is put into practice. Riveting their attention on the
impediments to ethical action as human beings and as poets within
their societies, they reassess the complex varieties of worldly
experience, examine the inability to act in accordance with reason,
explore dilemmas of detachment and engagement, expose the shortcomings
of proverbial wisdom, and reject the creation of and withdrawal to
private worlds. In their hands, the poem becomes an appropriate
vehicle for discovering and communicating the ethical dynamics of
personal and social relationships. The poem itself serves as a mode of
action, and the poet—speakers reassess and redefine the role and

function of the poet in the world.

 

 

 

"I cannot frame my tune to feign":
Detachment and Engagement in Wyatt's Flawed World

How to apply ethical standards to a world in which they often
seem irrelevant at best is one of Wyatt's central concerns. Contrary
to Stephen Greenblatt's recent assertion that Wyatt uses poetry as a
weapon, an instrument of power, in a dangerous contest,1 Wyatt is
passionately committed to fair play in a world in which others play
only to win. He not only uses poetry -— its figurative, formal, and
generic resources —- as a medium for exploring ways of responding to
the various power struggles and treacheries which comprise his world
and shape his personal and social relationships; he also suggests that
the writing of poems is a means of taking significant action in that
world. Rather than using his rhetorical skill to wield power over
others or exact submission, as Greenblatt argues,2 Wyatt uses it
to discover what happens when an imperfect but thoughtful and
conscientious person who is also a poet tries to live fully in,
position himself in relation to, and write about a world which is even
less perfect and often corrupt.

In some cases, he decides that the appropriate response is
detachment or even withdrawal. Protesting the "bitter taste" of life
at court, for example, his epigram "In court to serue" concludes that
"who so ioyes such kinda of life to holde, / In prison ioyes, fettred
with cheines of gold."3 That distaste is echoed in a handful of
poems. The epigram "Stond who so list" paints a similarly bleak
picture of the "brackish ioyes" awaiting those who seek fortune "vpon

the Slipper toppe / Of courtes estates,' in contrast to the

27

 

28
self—knowledge which the speaker prefers to attain "In hidden place"
(CCXL). A similar view, one in which the Senecan influence is
explicit, informs "Who lyst his welthe and eas Retayne" (CLXXVI),
while the sonnet "Ffarewell, Love" endeavors to rank the "perfaict
welth" of philosophy above the questionable rewards of love (XIII).
Courtly manners and mores are viewed with fastidious contempt in the
first satire and with sardonic bitterness in the third.

Such responses, however, are only a small part of the picture. In
addition to considering detachment as one possible response to
troublesome circumstances and relationships, Wyatt devotes far more
energy to exploring the problematics of engagement. Grounding his
poems in the world of action, he presents speakers who participate
reluctantly, selectively, or fully in their worlds and who often
demonstrate acute awareness of their participation, its rewards, its
costs, and its implications. At times, of course, he depicts a speaker
who is tempted by the prospect of a simpler life, a safe haven; in
others, the protagonist is overwhelmed by circumstance, cast adrift or
blown to a lee shore. Occasionally, foreshadowing the plight of the
protagonists in revenge tragedy, Wyatt's speakers are unable to take
significant action or maintain their ethical equilibrium without
becoming caught up in the very wrongs they are trying to set right.
Others, like the speakers in "Y5 yt possyble" (CLXXXIV) and "What
vaileth trouth?" (II), ask difficult questions rather than rushing to
judgment: in the latter, as Charles Hannen has observed, "the speaker
really wants to know the worth of honesty in an environment dominated

by treachery."4 Nevertheless, Wyatt is sometimes able to celebrate

 

 

 

 

29

the quiet achievement of speakers who manage to strike a difficult
balance, taking their own measure at the same time that they take the
measure of the world in which they live.

This range of responses cuts across Wyatt's work in various
genres —- songs, sonnets, satires, and psalms. It occurs in poems
about personal and social relationships: in both groups, as we will
see, Wyatt considers in depth the difficulty of deciding upon —— and
following through on -— significant action. After establishing the
variety and complexity of Wyatt's exploration of the ethical bases of
action in three of the love sonnets, this chapter looks at the satires
from a similar perspective and finds them less straightforward, more
tentative and troubled, than is generally recognized. But if Wyatt
asks, "Given what I know, what should I do?" he also asks, "Given what
I know, what sort of poems should I write? What is their function in
such a world?" In love lyrics, satires, and penitential psalms,
Wyatt's speakers not only use verbal and formal resources to
investigate and evaluate the possibility of establishing and
sustaining personal and social relationships in a world which is
frequently brutal; they also consider and affirm the social and moral
function of poetry. The last section of this essay, focusing on
Wyatt's self—referentiality, examines his conception of what it means
to be a pggt in the world.

The sonnets "Ffarewell, Love," "Som fowles there be" (XXIV), and
"Eche man me telleth" (X) run the gamut of possible responses to
unsatisfactory personal relationships.5 In the first, the speaker

extricates himself from a situation which threatens to consume his

 

 

   

30

best energies; in the second, a more troubled poem, he is plagued by
his inability to do so. In the third, far more subtle in argument and
design, the speaker's behavior seems at the outset to be determined by
the fickle standards of his society; as the poem progresses, however,
he proposes an experimental stability within an unstable community.

The argument of "Ffarewell, Love" is straightforward and
explicit. The speaker, recognizing his "blynde errour," resolves to
change his course of action, takes steps to do so, and reaffirms the
validity of his reasoning:

Ffarewell, Love, and all thy lawes for ever;
Thy bayted hookes shall tangill me no more;
Senec and Plato call me from thy lore,

To perfaict welth my wit for to endever.

In blynde errour when I did perseuer,

Thy sherpe repulce that pricketh ay so sore
Hath taught me to sett in tryfels no store
And scape fourth syns libertie is lever.

Therefore, farewell: goo trouble yonger hertes

And in me clayme no more authoritie;
With idill yeuth goo vse thy propertie

And thereon spend thy many britill dertes;

For hetherto though I have lost all my tyme,
Me lusteth no lenger rotten boughes to clyme.

Breaking with convention, the speaker identifies love with the
"authoritie" of law, and wants to escape from love's constraints to
the "libertie" of philosophy. The poem is a rejection, not a
renunciation: despite his rather bitter tone, the speaker is
untroubled by misgivings about the wisdom of his proposed course of
action.6 If he has erred, he has done so in the past; addressing
an abstraction, not a person, he says that he has learned from his

mistakes. Relegating "tryfels" to "idill yeuth," he now refuses to

continue to engage in self—destructive activities like climbing

 

31

"rotten boughs." There is no suggestion that he is turning his back on
the proper sphere of human activity, no sense that to continue in the
kind of entanglement he is rejecting would constitute the best use of
his energies, no intimation of loss. The cost exacted by the
relationship or relationships standing behind the poem is far greater
than any rewards: the love he rejects is made to seem trivial and
distracting at best, deceptive and potentially destructive at worst.
Turning his back on it in the contemptus mundi tradition, the speaker
thinks in terms of dichotomies: love and philosophy, youth and age,
authority and liberty, trifles and perfect wealth, time wasted and
time well spent.

If, as the poem ends, there is no indication that he will act
contrary to the dictates of reason, that is not the case in "Som
fowles there be," in which the speaker's clarity of perception has no
impact upon his actions:

Som fowles there be that have so perfaict sight,
Agayn the Sonne their Iyes for to defend,
And som, bicause the light doeth theim offend,
Do never pere but in the darke or nyght.
Others reioyse that se the fyer bright
And wene to play in it as they do pretend,
And fynd the contrary of it that they intend.
Alas, of that sort I may be by right,
For to withstond her loke I ame not able;
And yet can I not hide me in no darke place,
Remembraunce so foloweth me of that face,
So that with tery yen swolne and vnstable,
My destyne to behold her doeth me lede:
Yet do I know I runne into the glede.

In the octave, the speaker's powers of observation,

classification, and analysis are unimpaired: the eyesight of some

 

 

32

small animals is so perfect, he observes, that they can look straight
at the sun without harm; others, sensitive to light, are sensibly
nocturnal; but members of a third group, in which he includes himself,
are consumed by the very brightness which attracts them. In the
sestet, he is partially able to explain why he acts as he does by
developing the analogy further: if he is like a moth, the woman whose
love is so dangerous to him is like the flame.7 Unable to

"withstonde her loke" or to shield himself from it, he sees unhappily
that he is inviting self—destruction but is unable to do anything to
prevent it. Unlike the "fowles," however, he possesses a rational
faculty and can see what he is doing to himself.

Where "Farewell, Love" assumes that what is debilitating in human
experience can be gotten away from easily by the proper use of reason
and will, "Som fowles there be" suggests, in contrast, that the source
of potential danger is both pervasive and deceptive —- the sun whose
warmth gives light also burns -— and that knowledge of its harmful
properties cannot always be translated into action. Unlike some of the
defenseless and insignificant animals to whom he compares himself, the
speaker in the latter poem is unable to seek safety by retreating to
the shelter of a "dark place." In contrast to them, the source of his
danger lies within as well as without —— in his own mind, his

' which accompanies him. Memory, one aspect of his

"remembraunce,'
rational faculty, works against him, invading his hiding place and --
in the syntax of the poem -— making his vision "vnstable." Tormented

by memory and knowledge, he has nowhere to go. In the closing couplet,

 

33

the speaker feels utterly helpless, attributing his inability to stop
loving her to "destyne" and knowing that he, like the moth drawn to
the flame, faces certain destruction if he continues to "run into the
glede." His analysis of the impasse at which he finds himself is a
rational and lucid description of irrational behavior.

In these two poems, Wyatt links the relationship of knowledge and
action to the issue of detachment and engagement, and presents
radically different responses to similar circumstances. In the first
poem, the speaker acts decisively to remove himself from the fray and
is preoccupied with the need to account for himself and his use of
time. In the second, the speaker is so caught up in his experience
that he cannot extricate himself, and shifts from accounting for
himself to blaming fate. But in the former poem, the destructive
experience is easily defined, understood, and dealt with; in the
latter, the ability to define and to understand does not confer the
power to act in accordance with that understanding.

In contrast to both of these sonnets, however, "Eche man me
telleth" suggests a very different possibility. Confronted with an
unstable world, its speaker is neither overwhelmed nor forced to
retreat; instead, he discovers new ways of taking action in, and
reaching an accomodation with, such a world:

Eche man me telleth I chaunge moost my devise.
And on my faith me thinck it goode reason
To chaunge propose like after the season,
Ffor in every cas to kepe still oon gyse

Is mytt for theim that would be taken wyse,

And I ame not of suche maner condition,
But treted after a dyvers fasshion,

 

   

34

And therupon my dyvernes doeth rise.
But you that blame thys dyvernes moost,
Chaunge you no more, but still after oon rate
Trete ye me well, and kepe ye in the same state:
And while with me doeth dwell this weried goost,
My word nor I shall not be variable,
But alwaies oon, your owne both ferme and stable.

The octave deals with his attempt to adjust to the world of
change in which he lives. Attributing his own "dyverness" to the way
he is treated —— "after a dyvers fasshion" —— he insists that it is
only sensible, under the circumstances; proposing to be constant in
inconstancy, he seeks to make change predictable. The tone, at once
flippant and slightly defensive, is no more cynical than the questions
in "What vaileth trouth?" are rhetorical: everyone tells him that he
is changeable, he admits, but he is, after all, subject to the
unpredictable behavior of others.

But unlike the sonnet "Dyvers dothe vse" (CCXVII), in which the
speaker simply decides to "let it passe and think it is of kinde /
That often chaunge doth plese a womans minde" (13-14), "Each man me
telleth" goes beyond the recognition and acceptance of disloyalty. In
the sestet, the speaker's flexibility and adaptability take another
form. Instead of criticizing me for changing, stop changing yourself,
he says in a direct challege; when you do, so will I. His aim is not
just cleverly to rebut a complaint against "dyvernes" but to respond
fully and directly to all of its implications. Dependent upon the
response of another, he nevertheless declares his willingness to break

with the norm —— the way of the world around them —— if she will do

the same.

 

 

35

The speaker, then, is not overwhelmed by the fact that the world
is governed by change. Neither cynical nor naive, he will not be
destroyed by the fickleless of others, nor will he be a victim of his
own disillusion. The acceptance of inconstancy in the octave does not
render constancy impossible in the sestet. "Eche man me telleth"
declares that it is possible to be "boeth ferme and stable" in a world
governed by change; the speaker's pledge of fidelity is not dependent
upon a change of setting. Moreover, the world of the poem, however
flawed, is able to accomodate stability, to make room for a new kind
of diversity within its bounds, just as the sonnet's sestet (which can
be read either as two tercets or as a quatrain plus a couplet) creates
new units within an established formal order.

Approached somewhat differently, however, this carefully
constructed poem also contains a subtle analysis of the speaker's
character. He is, in fact, not simply complaining about inconstancy in
others, but is increasingly aware of its effects upon his own state of
mind. To ask, "Against deceipte and dowblenes / What vaileth trouth?",
as the speaker in that lyric does (8-9), is to raise a moral issue and
link it to action; but the more introspective "Eche man me telleth"
introduces a psychological dimension which complicates the speaker's
response. Echoing the refrain of still another lyric, "For dred to
fall I stand not fast,"8 this speaker is also concerned about the
shakiness of his own nature.

From its opening statement, we learn that no matter how rampant

"dyverness" may be in the speaker's society at large, his own behavior

36

is more noticeably erratic than others'. Having decided at the outset
that there is no point to constancy in an inconstant world, he
overreacts by becoming more changeable than anyone else. What he
changes is his "devyse" -- a word whose multiple meanings qualify one
another as the poem proceeds. At once a clever plan or invention, a
disposition or wish, discourse or communication, or an emblematic
figure accompanied by a motto,9 the word calls attention both to

the speaker's tactics and to the feelings which motivate them.

Quite literally, his "devyse" is an ingenious stratagem: he
assumes a role, a "gyse," in order to acquire a reputation for wisdom.
At the same time, his "devyse" is his conversation with friends, his
Characteristic way of communicating. On a deeper level, though, his
"devyse" is also what he thinks and feels: to be changeable in one's
devyse in the sixteenth century is not just to be changeable in one's
outward actions, but in one's intentions as well. Finally, to change
one's emblem is to change something which is intended to reveal what
one stands for. Frequently or casually to change one's devyse, then,
is not simply to be a little fickle in taste, but to hedge on bigger
commitments. Like the person who "stands[s] not fast" because he
"dred[s] to fall," the speaker's distaste for change commits him to
change.

The second half of the sestet underscores this emphasis.
Revealing that the "wyse" behavior referred to in line 5 is only an
outward show, the speaker acknowledges in line 12 that his spirit is

"weried," not imbued with wisdom. And the rhyming words of the closing

 

*‘

 

37

couplet, "variable" and "stable," remind us of the speaker's warring
feelings about flux and permanency: in Wyatt's day, "stable" not only
meant "constant in affection" or "dependable," but also "settled in
character" or "settled in purpose and resolution"10 ——
connotations which reinforce important undercurrents throughout the
poem, and link its end to its beginning. He declares, in effect, that
what he says and how he behaves will no longer be at odds with his

' an outward seeming which belies

values; instead of devising a "gyse,'
his inner revulsion against the predictability of change, he now
pledges that he and his word will be "alwaies oon" —— that there will
be no gap between what he believes and how he represents himself, as
there was in lines 2 and 3. Moreover, he does not need to cut himself
off from others —— to seek a contemplative tranquillity removed from
his changeable surroundings —- to ensure that his words and beliefs
are congruent: as line 13 continues, they are not just "alwaies oon";
they are also "your own." His commitment to the other person (who
criticizes his erratic behavior but who is also changeable) is an
essential part of the equation.

Furthermore, "Eche man me telleth" dramatizes the process of
thinking through a problem and proposing a solution -— just the
opposite of "Ffarewell, Love," in which the process of thinking seems
to have been completed outside of the poem. There, the speaker is not
attempting to clarify his own thoughts. Rather, in what sounds more
like public oration than private introspection, he announces and then

defends a course of action upon which he has already decided.

 

38

Remarkably unified in tone,11 the sonnet reinforces the speaker's
convictions but does not struggle wih them or against them, and there

is no tension between its parts. "Som fowles there be,"

in contrast,
is all introspection and no action —— an introspective look at the
limits of introspection. But "Eche man me telleth," at once
introspective and dramatic, fixes the speaker's attempt to come to
terms with the gap between the real and the ideal -— and to master his
own reaction to it —— in one side of an important conversation between
two people during which something important occurs.

On balance, both "Ffarewell, Love" and "Som fowles there be"
share a similar perspective and differ fundamentally from "Eche man."
The relationships which stand behind the first two poems are both
potentially destructive: the difference lies in the speaker's varying
ability to act rationally and extricate himself. The speaker in the
latter poem would respond like the speaker in the former does were he
not immobilized. The view of human life and human love underlying his
predicament is echoed in the last lines of another of Wyatt's fine
sonnets, "My galley charged" (XXVIII):

The starres be hid that led me to this pain;
Drowned is reason that should me confort,
And I remain dispering of the port.
That view is only slightly less bleak than Fulke Greville's chilling
formulation some seventy to eighty years later: "A bggg, to which the

world it selfe is Sea, / Wherein the minds sayles on her fatall way"

(Caelica 96.55-56).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

39

But the spirit of "Eche man me telleth" is closer to Morus' gentle
rejoinder to Hythlodaeus in Book One of Utopia: "You must not abandon
the ship in a storm because you cannot control the wind."12
Like the sonnets just considered, Wyatt's three satires, "Myne
owne John Poyntz," "My mothers maydes," and "A spending hand," also
focus on the issue of engagement and detachment in a flawed world.
More tentative than the sonnets, each satire backs away from closure,
raising as many questions as it seems to answer. If the sonnets focus
on problematical personal relationships, the satires focus on
sustained social relationships in a problematical social system. Since
Thomas Warton, the first critic to appreciate their intrinsic value,
praised them for their treatment of the "felicities of retirement,"
critics have stressed their affinities with the Horatian
tradition.13 In important ways, however, that emphasis distorts
their content. While "Myne owne John Poyntz" does criticize the court,
the speaker is more bitter than tranquil, nor does he come to terms
with the involuntary nature of his departure from it.14 "My
mothers maydes" calls attention to the inherent dissatisfactions of
all ways of life (including the misery of the rural poor), while "A
spending hand" describes country life as swinish and loutish.

On the surface, "Myne owne John Poyntz," the best known of the
three, has closer links to the literature of retirement than to the
literature of humanism. Exploring the relationship between success and
knowledge, advancement and virtue, it centers on the corruption of the

court —— a society in which the price of advancement is not worth the

 

40

cost -— and sees withdrawal from that corrupt courtly society to the
simpler life of the country as a prerequisite to a virtuous and
honorable life. In this poem the speaker is as superior to -— and
ultimately remote from —— the courtiers he despises as he is from the
"common sort" foolish enough to "estime" them. Taking his own measure,
he is reluctant neither to judge himself nor to be judged by others.
The tentative resolution that he offers depends upon the rejection of
courtly manners and morals: although he "grawnt[s] sumtime that of
glorye the fyar / Doth touche [his] hart" (14—15), he is unwilling to
pay the price of that glory. The long list of activities that he
"cannot" engage in includes hypocrisy, flattery, misuse of poetic
gifts, misrepresentation of truth, worship of false gods, and
self—glorification of others. He sets up, in contrast, the Horatian
picture of the self—sufficient life of the country gentleman, whose
freedom from ambition frees him from guile.

The speaker's central concern is in seeking "what dothe inwarde
resort" so that he can practice his craft. Although acknowledging that
"a clogg doeth hang yet at [his] hele," his essential freedom of
action —— as he defines it here -- remains unimpaired; not only is he
able to "lepe both hedge and dyke full well," he is also able to "read

' and the freedom to think and write is the yardstick by

and ryme,'
which he measures what he has left behind. The satire seems to
establish a clear hierarchy of values: there is no middle ground, no

exploration of the moral ambiguity of the courtier's role, no sense of

partial gains measured against partial losses, no awareness of the

 

 

 

41

possible pitfalls of rural retreat. "In Kent and Christendome," the
poet is at once in rural England with book and bow, and in a Christian
empire governed by a clear hierarchy of immutable values.

But the speaker is less isolated that he seems. ostensibly a
satire, the poem is actually a verse epistle, a letter to a trusted
friend. As such, it seeks to establish a sense of community, and the
friend's implied presence does much to determine the poem's
conversational tone. In contrast to the duplicity demanded of him at
court, the speaker's relationship with his friend permits him to
disclose his convictions about what is wrong with courtly life, and
the human transaction suggests an act of reaching out rather than
pulling back. The opening lines indicate that Poyntz really wants to
know the reasons behind the speaker's departure, and subsequent lines
imply that his shared values will allow him to understand them.
Moreover, the fact that the speaker writes as he does to a fellow
courtier who presumably shares at least some of his concerns —— and
not, say, to a rural neighbor —— suggests the possibility of a
community, however small, which transcends the simple opposition of
court and country that the poem seems to set up. His invitation to
Poyntz to join him underscores that possibility. At the same time, his
disclosures to Poyntz reveal his recognition that he needs to account
for himself and justify the use of his time; despite their common
ground, Poyntz does not seem to have applauded as a matter of course

I!

his friend's removal from "the presse of courtes, but seems instead

to expect an explanation.

42

The account of himself that the speaker gives establishes an
implicit but important link between his preoccupations in court and
country. The common thread is poetry. Wyatt's speaker is extremely
conscious of himself as a poet, and his rejection of the court is
linked to his conception of poetry's proper demands. Underlying his
defense of his own actions —- and his clear need to align them with
his values —— is a concern with the right use of words: saying,
speaking, naming, calling. A refusal to use language to distort the
truth —— what Ronald Rebholz calls "the context's emphasis of specious

rhetoric"15

—— dominates his self—justification. First, he applies
a high standard to his own poetry, refusing to frame his tune "to
fayne / To cloke the trothe" (19—20),16 nor will he misrepresent
his own felings -— "with [his] wordes complayne and mone / And suffer
nought; nor smart wythout complaynt" (28—29). Furthermore, just as he
refuses to equate the mercenary exploits of a self-serving adventurer
with the achievements of an Alexander, he also refuses to praise
worthless art; he will not adopt the stratagems of the eloquent style
to persuade others that the crow's song rivals that of the swan, or
confuse the crude music of Pan with that of Apollo. Those
poet—courtiers who "Praysse Syr Thopas for a noble tale, / And skorne
the story that the knyght tolld" (50—51) earn his contempt.

If there is no sense of responsibility abdicated or opportunity
wasted in this poem, there is a very real sense of constraint. The
speaker says that he leaves the court because it blocks his pursuit of

a given activity; positive actions, like speaking the truth, are ruled

   

 

43

out. Unlike Spenser's Colin, who is content in the June eclogue to
play only to please himself, Wyatt's speaker is extremely conscious of
whom his songs praise and blame, and how they are received. Although
he adopts the role of the country gentleman whose tastes run to
hunting and hawking, he seems less at home with his bow and book than
he would be with a lute and an audience. Devoting more attention to
the difficulties of writing at court than to the rewards of writing in
the country, he certainly never suggests that the proper audience for
his poetry is a rural one.

Like "Myne owne John Poyntz," "My mothers maydes" focuses as much
on the use of time as on the choice of life. At the outset, it seems
to be a simple tale about the relative merits of innocence and
sophistication, country and city life, but it turns out, upon closer
inspection, to be a subtle frame tale about violence and revenge. Most
criticism has concentrated upon Wyatt's treatment of the tale itself,
and on on his assimilation of and departure from his major sources,
Horace, Chaucer, and Henryson. Recently, however, Rebholz and Donald
Friedman have pressed the poem further, linking Wyatt's treatment of
the familiar tale of the city mouse and country mouse to his
preoccupation with inner tranquillity or "quyete of mynde." As Rebholz
puts it,17

Wyatt's known predecessors emphatically relate
attitudes of mind to external conditions of life.
One might generalize their morals as a preference
for the simple, frugal, quiet and hence mentally
and emotionally secure life of country or moderate

poverty over the complicated, hedonistic,
materialistic, busy and hence anxious life of town

 

 

44

or wealth. On the other hand, Wyatt, using the
categories of Christian stoicism, defines earthly
happiness as a purely interior state —— quietness
of mind —— achieved by the exercise of virtue, and
defines concerns about or desires for any external
conditions of life as mistaken means to the end of
happiness . . . . Of course, Wyatt's choice of the
fable does imply that it is probably easier to
achieve spiritual peace in the country than in the
city or the court . . . . But, since in this
poem's more radical analysis each "kind of life"
has its "disease" (I. 80), if the mind's attitude
is wrong, the mind remains the only place
essential to the achievement of health.

What has gone unnoticed, however, is the relationship among the
poem's parts. The actual tale of the mice ends with line 69; lines
70—74 are an aside to Poyntz; lines 75-92 an address to a wider
audience, to whom the speaker directs the moral derived from the tale,
and lines 103—12 an application of the tale to his own circumstances.
As with most frame tales, there is a close connection between the
speaker's situation and the story which he tells. In lines 75—83,
reflecting upon the story he has just narrated, he recognizes, as
Rebholz says, that life is full of care almost by definition and
reminds his audience, whose minds he calls "wretched," that no way of
life offers protection from unhappiness. Ascetic withdrawal is not the
answer, however; he reminds his listeners that peace of mind comes not
merely with stoical acceptance of one's condition but also (and in the
spirit of Plutarch's essay) with the proper use of one's time and
talents: it is not enough to be "content with that is the assigned";

it is also necessary to "vse it well that is to the allotted" (95—96).

But the memory of a simple chanson de toile from his rural past

45

has unsettling implications for his present life in a very different
setting:
Hens fourth, my Poynz, this shalbe all and some:
These wretched fooles shall have nought els of me
But to the great god and to his high dome
None othre pain pray I for theim to be
But when the rage doeth led them from the right
That lowking backward vertue they may se
Evyn as she is so goodly fayre and bright;
And whilst they claspe their lustes in armes a—crosse,
Graunt them, goode lorde, as thou maist of thy myght,
To frete inward for losing such a losse.
(103—12)

Not surprisingly, the final section of the poem places the
speaker in a problematical situation in which his own "quyete of
mynde" depends upon how h§_acts. He struggles with his own clearly
divided feelings toward those "wretched fooles" who have, in some
unspecified way, exploited or harmed him. But are the "wretched
fooles" of line 104 the same as those "wretched myndes" of line 75? If
not, who are they? If so, then why the change in attitude from
sympathetic pity to disgust? And why does he seem disgusted with
himself as well? Is he, like the naive mouse tricked by a
sophisticated world, partially responsible for having gotten
entrapped? Is he also at the mercy of a "Catt?" More important, does
the speaker himself confuse peace of mind with the desire to avenge
himself on his enemies by invoking divine retribution?

The answer depends on one's view of the severity of the
!H

punishment he selects for them —- to be deprived of "quyete of mynde

Does he follow his own advice, seeking tranquillity by giving up

 

46

thoughts of retribution, by realizing that his enemies' wretchedness
is their own worst punishment? Or does he miss the point of his own
tale, upon which he has just moralized, when he wishes the worst thing
he can think of —— to see and know the good, and understand the full
value of what they have lost —— on those who have exploited him? It is
impossible to say which is correct; all that is certain is that the
fate of the speaker, like that of the country mouse, remains a
mystery. The poem leaves both ensnared —— one in physical danger, the
other in moral danger. The mouse is caught up in terror and violence;
the speaker, in violent feelings. When he asks, in effect, "how shall
I behave toward those who have gulled me?" he is worlds away from his
literary as well as his familial heritage —— as far from the composure
of Horace and Chaucer as he is from the household of his childhood.
This poem moves from the remote to the immediate, from detachment to
engagement, from memory of the past to resolve for the future, from a
pleasant old tale to an unpleasant self-discovery.

The third satire, "A spending hand," is immersed in the troubles
which are kept at a distance in the first satire but which encroach
upon the second. The least accessible of the three poems despite its
immediacy, it lacks the civilized charm of "Myne owne John Poyntz" and
the domestic familiarity of "My mothers maydes." Focusing less on the
problem of detachment and engagement than on the problem of corruption
in public life, it questions the relevance of received wisdom --
platitudinous proverbs and old tales —— to the complexities of

contemporary life. At the outset, the primary speaker mocks the power

 

 

47

of proverbial sayings to "counsell man the right"; in actual fact, he
proceeds to stand conventional wisdom on its head by using proverbs to
convince Sir Francis Brian that prosperity and honesty are mutually
exclusive.

If, he tells Brian, you are committed to exhaust yourself by
"runnyng day and nyght / Ffrom Reaulme to Reaulme" (12-13) as a
diplomat, a public servant, rather than enjoying a self—indulgent life
in the country (which Brian likens to the life of a pig in a
barnyard), then you're going to need plenty of money. He then
describes in detail a world in which dishonesty, flattery, and
treachery are the routine means of advancement —— describes, in fact,
scenarios of expediency and corruption that anticipate incidents in
Jonson's Volpone. Like Jonson's Corbaccio, Brian is advised to seek
wealth by gaining through flattery the inheritance of a sick old man
(51—59); like Corvino, he is urged to pimp for his wife or daughter
(67—71).

Measured against the world of "A spending hand," Hythlodaeus'
description in Book One of Utopia of the pitfalls of a life of public
service seems mild. Dismissing as irrelevant the issue of personal
advancement, More's character argues that honest counselors can have
no real impact in a society of parasites and flatterers; worse yet,
the rulers they would advise are interested only in war and
territorial acquisition, not in governing well. Grounded in the
Renaissance conviction that a courtier should use his talents to exert

a positive influence on public policy, the conversation in Utopia

48

examines the very real obstacles to such an effort. When Morus says,
"What you cannot turn to good you must make as little bad as you can,"
. l8

Hythlodaeus disagrees:

There is no chance for you to do any good because

you are brought among colleagues who would easily

corrupt even the best of men before being reformed

themselves. By their evil companionship, either

you will be seduced yourself, or, keeping your own

integrity asnd innocence, you will be made a

screen for the wickedness and folly of others.

Thus you are far from being able to make anything

better by that indirect approach of yours.
But the issues debated in the enclosed garden in Antwerp are not those
discussed in "A spending hand." Neither speaker in the poem is
troubled by the subtleties which pain Hythlodaeus; neither seems
bothered by his inability to have any positive impact. The poem is
generally read ironically, its central irony located in role reversal:
If the primary speaker, who advocates cynicism, is assumed to be
Wyatt, known as a man of "depe—witted" probity, in contrast to the

notorious Brian, known as Henry VIII's "Vicar of Hell,"

the poem
becomes an elaborate joke at Brian's expense. While nothing in the
third satire disproves such a reading, the fact that both speakers in
this dialogue are blind to the larger implications of their words
makes it hard to View this poem as a simple "praise of poliical
responsibilty and personal moral integrity."19 Brian's

"integrity,"

such as it is, is untried: without money, he will have no
power; without power, he will have no influence; without influnce, his

"honest name" cannot be used to advance the public good by serving his

 

49

prince. Closing doors on the possibility of a decent life at court or
in the country, the satire's picture of unimaginative expediency
makes Hythlodaeus' misgivings seem almost naive.

On balance, it is impossible to say whether the deeper ironies
in the satires are there by accident or design —— whether we are
intended to see that Brian's complacent assumptions about serving the
king while remaining honest are facile and misguided, that the
speaker in "My mothers maydes" is blind to his own vengefulness, or
that the speaker in the first satire has conveniently forgotten that
his departure from court was involuntary and that his real work must
be done there. To some extent, the problem is one of audience:
certainly Poins, the addressee of the first two satires, would have
known the circumstances surrounding their composition, as would the
coterie audience among whom they were circulated and by whom they
were preserved in manuscript. What does stand out, regardless of
audience, is the preoccupation of all three with the uses of writing.
Ironically or not, the speaker in "A spending hand" talks about
writing to instruct others in the art of living properly; in "My
mothers maydes," a story recalled from the speaker's privileged past
sheds light on the present; and in "Myne owne John Poyntz," the
speaker conveys his disgust with the way in which poetry is
misunderstood and undervalued at court. In other poems as well, Wyatt
engages in pointed discussions about the proper use of poetry, though
the importance he attaches to this subject has received only marginal

notice. More than thirty—five years ago, Hallett Smith called

 

50

attention to "two interesting lyrics in which Wyatt may be said in
some sense to comment on his own songs": "Me list no more to sing"
(CCX) and the final stanza of "Lament my losse, my labor, and my
payne" (CCXIV) in which the speaker addresses the reader of his book,
and which Smith describes as "a kind of retraction" in the Chaucerian
mode.20 But there are many such poems: Wyatt's self—referentiality

is extensive and intensive. While its importance is secondary in
lyrics like "Me list no more to sing" and peripheral in others like
"At moost myschief" (LI) or "Marvaill no more" (LII),21 it is a

major concern in the prologues to the penitential psalms, in "My lute,
awake!" (LXVI), and in "Blame not my lute" (CCV).

Like the satires, the prologues to the penitential psalms are
also concerned with the uses of writing. But where the speaker in the
satires is a victim of the treachery of others, the speaker in the
psalms both victimizes those around him and is a victim of his own
treachery. As a result, he uses his poetic ability to try to come to
terms with his own anguish and remorse. A murderer and adulterer,
David has gotten rid of Bathsheba's husband Uriah by sending him off
to be killed in battle, and the first penitential psalm
opens as he begins to repent. As John Stevens has observed, "Many
learned poets worked the psalms because they were 'a divine poem'
justifying, against all attack, the use of metre and figurative
speech";22 but Wyatt's treatment goes far beyond the kind of
implicit defense of poetry which Stevens describes. While Wyatt goes

to the scholar Johannes Campensis as a source for the psalms

 

51

themselves, he goes to the poet Pietro Aretino for the narrative
prologues which introduce and link them.23 Greenblatt has argued

that this narrative framework appeals to Wyatt because it embeds the
poems firmly in the world of royal power which Wyatt understood so
well,24 but whatever Wyatt's intention, one result of his decision

to incorporate a terza rima version of Aretino's prose prologues into
his handling of the psalms is to focus explicit attention on David's
status as a poet. In David's hands, the prologues make clear, poetry
becomes a means for discovering and accepting unpleasant truths about
his own behavior, for dealing with a crisis, and for praying.

The prologues refer to David's harp not merely as the "Faythfull
record of all his sorOWS sharp" (CVIII, 192), but also as "his guyde,
/ Wherewith he offerth his plaintes his sowle to save" (58—59). Thus,
his songs are at once a record of the most basic human problems and an
attempt to transcend them. Hidden in a cave, David is completely
caught up in his plight, and makes his poems out of his own strongest
feelings:

His voyce he strains, and from his hert owt brynges
This song that I not wyther he crys or singes.
(425—26)
Their intensity and undeniable referentiality, however, do not
compromise their artistry:
in his hert he tornith and paysith
Ech word that erst his lypps myght forth aford.

He poyntes, he pawsith, he wonders, he praysyth.
(518-20)

52

Moreover, in addition to being carefully framed, his songs are
powerful enough to surprise even their author, who is taken aback at
his ability to sing of "diepe secretes" (509):
The grettnes dyd so astonne hymselff a space,
As who myght say: who hath exprest this thing?
(512-13)
Although he will despair once again in Psalm 130, David rejoices
temporarily in his own poetic powers in the prologue introducing it:
By cause he knew he hath alone exprest
Thes grete thinges that greter spryte compilde,
As shalme or pype letes owt the sownd inprest
My musikes art forgid tofore and fyld.
(634—37)
In this prologue, David's status as a divine poet in confirmed.

In Wyatt's version of the penitential psalms and prologues,
David's poems are truly recreative: his artistic power is responsible
in part for his new—found ability to pass beyond a rhetoric of guilt
and self-disgust, to suspend his disbelief in forgiveness, and hence
to seek it genuinely in the poems which conclude the sequence.25
But the discussion of poetry in the two lute poems, while far more
mundane, is just as important. Far from providing "a little music
after supper," as C.S. Lewis disparagingly refers to Wyatt's work in

26 "My lute, awake!" transforms the

the native song tradition,
familiar love complaint into a vehicle capable of absorbing and

commenting upon the turbulence of the speaker's feelings, while "Blame

not my lute" suggests ways in which poetry can shape a given social

 

53

order.

In "My lute, awake!" the speaker laments the inadequacy of his
song, which is no more able to reach the woman to whom it is sung than
lead is able to "grave in marbill stone"; rejected, he commands his
lute to cease its fruitless endeavors and to "be still" or be silent.
Despite its conventional beginning, however, this lyric proceeds
systematically to reject the values and preconceptions traditionally
associated with such love complaints.27 It emphatically disavows

the traditional, long—suffering stance of the unrequited lover who
persists in unyielding but unreciprocated devotion.

In addition to its carefully varied and modulated refrain, the
poem also contains a song—within—a—song: while the first, second,
third, and eighth stanzas are addressed to the lute itself, stanzas
four through seven are addressed to a woman (the "her" and "she" of
lines 8 and 13). In them, rejecting submissiveness and abject
flattery, he tells her bluntly that she is cruel, collecting lovers'
hearts like trophies. He warns her that he will be revenged: "withered
and old," herself the victim of an unrequited love, she will regret
her cruelty to him when it is too late. His characterization of her
here eschews all courtly compliment: Unlike the hind in "Who so list
to hounte" (VII), she is predator, not prey. His aim is not to gain
her pity by calling attention to his own misery, but to vent his own
feelings and tell her off, and when he has done so he has no more to
say. In these stanzas, his tone is bitter, resentful, and vindictive.

Preoccupied with revenge, he hardly achieves equanimity. Despite his

 

 

54

agitation, however, he is able to break with polite convention by
speaking the truth as he sees it; to a certain extent, he retains
honesty if not tranquillity, and uses the convention of the musical
love complaint to sever himself from its constraints. Unlike the
speaker in the first satire, the pressures of his environment do not
force him to choose between fawning or fleeing.

But if the ways in which this song—within—a—song breaks with
courtly tradition are important, the ways in which the framing stanzas
comment upon the speaker's attitude to his song are even more
significant. Look at the opening lines:

My lute, awake! perfourme the last

Labour that thou and I shall wast

And end that I have now begon;

For when this song is sung and past,

My lute be still, for I have done.
Is the lute commanded to wake to its lggg song or its last useless
song? The two possibilities are contradictory, not complementary, and
the difference is crucial. If "perfourme the last / Labour that thou
and I shall wast" means "this is the last wasteful song I will play

' then it suggests the possibility of other less wasteful

and sing,'
songs. (It also suggests that the speaker can distinguish what is
wasteful from what is not.) This reading is suggested in part by the
stress on "wast" as a rhyming word as early as line 2, but there is no
demonstrable support for it in the rest of the poem —— no explicit

suggestion that more fruitful songs will follow.

Instead, the manipulation of the refrain and the recurring

 

 

55

finality of "I have done" emphasize the alternative reading. Stanzas 2
and 3 stress the futility of the kind of song the speaker has been
singing:

As to be herd where ere is none,

As lede to grave in marbill stone,

My song may perse her hert as some;

Should we then sigh, or syng, or mone?

No, no, my lute, for I have done.

The Rokkes do not so cruelly

Repulse the waves continuelly

As she my suyte and affection,

So that I ame past remedy,

Whereby my lute and I have done.
The final stanza recycles the opening lines; the only changes indicate
that the song has been completed, not that the speaker's perspective
has changed:

Now cesse, my lute; this is the last

Labour that thou and I shall wast,

And ended is that we begon;

Now is this song boeth sung and past;

My lute, be still, for I have done.

The upshot is that the speaker is silenced, brought to a
standstill. If he does conceive of a larger, continuing purpose for
his song, or of other manner or matter, he does not identify them. If
the common theme in the variation on the refrain in the framed song is
that he has finished with the woman in question, the common theme in
the less varied refrain in the framing song is that he has finished

with this kind of singing —— with making poems thatfit this

conventional model. Moreover, if the framed stanzas seem to reject the

 
 

56

limitation of courtly song to Petrarchan compliment, the framing song
demonstrates the extent to which the speaker is dominated -—
overwhelmed and utterly silenced —— by the very convention he seems to
reject. Defeated as a poet because he is defeated as a lover, the
poet—speaker does not claim for poetry a function which transcends his
immediate need to avenge himself. Instead of writing a poem in which
the speaker realizes that his pursuit of the woman in question is
futile, or that his preoccupation with revenge is self—destructive and
wasteful, Wyatt has chosen to write a poem in which the speaker's
attempt to vent his feelings demonstrates the extent to which he is
consumed by them. If the poem seems to cast off courtly convention on
one hand, it ironically demonstrates the force of that convention on
the other. And if the speaker avoids the dissembling flattery which is
protested in "Myne owne John Poyntz," he shares with the speaker in
"My mothers maydes" a certain obtuseness about the relation of his
words to his own feelings.

"Blame not my lute," however, offers a very different
perspective. In this extraordinary lyric, the poet—speaker achieves a
rich understanding of the relationship between his various
responsibilities —— artistic and ethical, personal and social.
Operating within the conventions of the society in which he lives, he
uses the plain style of the native tradition to evoke a world in which
feigning and inconstancy are as common as art is ornamental and
superficial; to expose the infidelity and vanity of the person to whom

the poem is addressed; and to reaffirm his own commitment to playing a

 

57

role in that society by making the kind of poems which tell the truth
without feigning. He does so in a tone which is balanced, thoughtful,
and forthright, and in a style which is direct and unadorned.

The poem's dramatic and social context is inseparable from its
structure. In a courtly setting —— with others in the background, but
close enough, apparently, to overhear —— the speaker is ready to sing
a song to (and about) a former lover; since she has been unfaithful,
he cannot praise her according to polite custom, but must describe her
behavior for what it is. She protests, attempting to break his
lute—strings in order to silence him; he objects, telling her
pointedly not to blame him or his lute for exposing her, but to blame
herself —— to be accountable for her own actions. When she does reach
out a second time and breaks the strings (as we learn in the final
stanza), he does not retaliate in kind but resolves to continue
singing "for [her] sake" —— less to threaten than to illuminate.

. . . 28

The poem needs to be read in its entirety:

Blame not my lute, for he must sownd

Of thes or that as liketh me;

For lake of wytt the lutte is bownd

To gyve suche tunes as plesithe me;

Th0 my songes be sume what strange

And spekes such wordes as toche they change,
Blame not my lutte.

My lutte, alas, doth not offend

Tho that perfors he must agre

To sownd such teunes as I entend

To sing to them that hereth me;

Then tho my songes be some what plain,

And tocheth some that vse to fayn,
Blame not my lutte.

58

My lute and strynges may not deny

But as I strike they must obay;

Brake not them than soo wrongfully,

But wryeke thy selffe some wyser way;

And tho the songes whiche I endight

Do qutt thy chainge with Rightfull spight,
Blame not my lutte.

Spyght asketh spight and changing change,

And falsyd faith must nedes be knowne,

The faute so grett, the case so straunge,

Of Right it must abrod be blown:

Then sins that by thyn own desartte

My soinges do tell how trew thou artt,
Blame not my lutte.

Blame but thy selffe that hast mysdown
And well desaruid to haue blame;
Change thou thy way so evyll bygown
And then my lute shall sownd that same;
But if tyll then my fyngeres play
By thy desartt their wonted way,

Blame not my lutte.

Farewell, vnknowne, for tho thow brake
My strynges in spight with grett desdayn
Yet haue I fownd owt for thy sake
Stringes for to strynge my lute agayne;
And yf perchaunce this folysh Rymyme
Do make the blush at any time

Blame nott my lutte.

Inverting the convention of the witless lover in the opening
lines, the speaker assumes full responsibility for songs which
document and expose her faults in a society unaccustomed to songs
which tell unpleasant truths. The second stanza, reinforcing the
first, indicates that his songs are "some what plain" as well as "sume
what strange" —— unembellished in style as well as iconoclastic in
content -— and the faults he exposes include habitual feigning as well

as inconstancy. As the poem continues, the mild excuses he originally

makes for the lute (it does not offend, it lacks wit, it sings

 

59

casually of "this or that") give way to more forceful claims for his
own moral and artistic position. Sensitive to his own retaliatory tone
(unlike "My lute, awakel"), he justifies his "Rightfull spight" in
terms of his commitment to a larger ethical framework which compels
him to speak out and make known to a wider audience the wrongs he
sees; he also makes it clear that she, not he, is to blame if the
content of his songs is offensive. But he strikes a delicate balance:
at the same time that he tells her bluntly to blame herself, he also
offers the kind of reciprocity extended in "Eche man me telleth."

"som wiser way" to respond to his accusations, he

Urging her to find
declares his willingness to change his song as soon as she changes her
behavior. Reinforcing his distaste for a relationship based upon
polite distortion, he appeals to her to change at the same time that
he warns her he will continue to expose her publicly if necessary -—
just as he is doing here.

The crucial final stanza has been oddly misunderstood. The lute
—— the instrument which accompanies his lyrics —— has been temporarily
silenced when she succeeds in snapping its strings. What he vows, in
contrast to the speaker in "My lute, awakel", is that he will find the
means to restring it, to restore its voice, so that he can go on
singing songs which tell the truth —— not in retaliation, but "for
[her] sake." To say that the speaker implies that he has found "a new

"29 —— the familiar reading of this passage -— is to

mistress
reduce a coherent argument to a meaningless non seguitur and to ignore

the carefully developed relationship between setting, imagery, and

   

6O

theme that characterizes the poem as a whole.

From beginning to end, the speaker in this masterly lyric defends
his unconventional performance of a conventional role. When he
reaffirms his intention to remain an active participant (a lute
player) in a society governed by values he does not share, he subtly
redefines his social role in terms of his artistic reponsibilities. In
doing so, he differs from the speaker in "My lute, awake!" who
articulates no comparable conception of a social and moral role for
poetry. He also differs from his counterpart in "Myne owne John

' who reluctantly sees those roles as mutually exclusive.

Poyntz,'
Wyatt's achievement in this lyric is brought into focus by a revealing
passage from one of George Turbervile's poems, "Two things in cheefe
did move me thus to write," composed some thirty or forty years later.
Turbervile's speaker frankly describes feigning as the natural
activity of the court poet. Although the behavior of his friends is ”a
death, and grieved me to the gall," he says, he nevertheless admits
blandly that "My pen must plead the sillie Suters case, / I had my

hire, so he mought purchase grace."30

Thus did I deale for others pleasure long,
(As who could well refuse to do the like?)
(61—62)
he continues, but what Turbervile's speaker dismisses as
parenthetical, Wyatt makes central. 31 Poems like "Blame not my

lute" are themselves the best rebuttal to C.S. Lewis's disparaging

view of Wyatt's lyrics and H.A. Mason's belief that he was "merely

 

 

 

61

32 Wyatt was the first to

supplying material for social occasions."
recognize that such lyrics are indeed grounded in "social occasions"
—— that is one of the points the poem makes —— and he goes out of his
way to point out that what his speaker has to say will make such a
social occasion an uncomfortable one for the addressee. Protesting
aesthetic and ethical lapses which Turbervile's speaker would find
objectionable, he not only affirms his social responsibility as well
as his personal and artistic integrity; he suggests that they are
inseparable. Nor does the poem imply that other members of his courtly
audience find his blunt lyrics offensive; the social order in which he
lives and writes is flexible enough to accomodate his kind of singing
and to permit the redefinition of a convention which voices its
values.

The poet—speaker in "Myne owne John Poyntz" finds it impossible,
while at court, to write poems that tell the truth but inconceivable
to write poems that lie; the poet-speaker in "Blame not my lute"
succeeds in accomodating himself to the conventions and contraints of
his society while retaining his personal and artistic independence and
integrity, as the speaker in the first satire does not, yet both poems
derive from Wyatt's preoccupation with the ethical bases of action and
his conviction that poetry constitutes such an action. It is hardly
surprising, therefore, that throughout his poetry Wyatt shows such
speakers meeting with variable success. Even when they manage to
implement their convictions, as is the case in "Blame not my lute" and

"Eche man me telleth,' they encounter obstacles in themselves and

 

w
I-IIIIIIII

62

their societies: in the latter, the speaker must balance introspective
reflection with the need to negotiate a complicated relationship; in
the former, the speaker must accomodate such negotiation to the
convictions which inform his art. Others, however, encounter obstacles
which are less readily overcome: the speaker in "My lute, awake!" is
silenced as a poet because he is consumed by his own turbulent
feelings; the protagonists in the first and third satires fail to
implement their values in their public lives not becase of personal
shortcomings but because of institutional constraints; and the speaker

in "Som fowles there be" fails because he is paralyzed, unable to act.

 

 

"Where wysedome makes the ways":
The Erring Poet—Speaker in Gascoigne's Lyrics

Wyatt's characteristic voice commands sustained attention because
of its integrity as well as its power and beauty; Gascoigne, in
contrast, writes in a voice which calls attention to its almost
boundless capacity for error. Wyatt's speakers are successful
courtiers skilled in mediating difficult relationships, yet they are
weary of the success they take for granted. Gascoigne's speakers,
however, hunger after the success which Wyatt's find so ennuyeux,
although they never meet with it, and their attention is riveted upon
failure in judgment and execution. Accordingly, Gascoigne acts out a
subtly different version of the relation between the poet and his
society than does Wyatt. Although Gascoigne sets his poems in a
concrete social context, lyrics like "The common speech is, spend and
God will send" (59) are not primarily concerned with evaluating the
drawbacks of the society in which they are set, nor are they built
upon the familiar court-country antithesis.1

On the contrary, Gascoigne tends in his lyrics to take the
shortcomings of the social order as givens, even when he sees clearly
that they are shortcomings. At the same time, he never seriously
considers removing himself from it. Instead, he is concerned with
trying to make sense of his own behavior in the world in which he is

immersed. Rather than lamenting its inadequacy, he concentrates on

63

 

 

64
coming to terms with his own. Much less concerned with the flawed
nature of social relationships than is Wyatt, he is far more critical
of himself. Therefore, while his erring speaker makes it clear that
the courtly hierarchy, the military, and the legal profession all fall
short of what they should be, his consideration of mediocrity and
corruption in key institutions is secondary. What he focuses on is the
whole sorry business of learning from his mistakes and coming to terms
with error and loss of opportunity. Caught up in a world in which he
seems always on the brink of some new difficulty, he nevertheless
fashions a role for poetry in helping him to mediate the claims of
that world and to reassure his quintessentially unquiet mind. What is
notable in Gascoigne's treatment of error and loss is his generous
view of human fallibility, his ambivalence about his own ability to
salvage remnants of value from the scrap—heap of failure that he
creates, and his surprisingly sophisticated consideration of the role
played by poetry. In the untitled sequence of seven sonnets beginning
with "In haste post haste, when fyrste my wandring mynde" (60), in
"Gascoignes Lullabie" (55), and in "Gascoignes wodmanship" (70), he
reflects upon those concerns.2 Like Wyatt's, Gascoigne's
poet—speakers use their poems to understand the social order as well
as to have an impact upon it; for them, the poem becomes a vehicle for
taking action as well as for assessing it.

" the least

"The common speech is, spend and God will send,
complicated of the poems discussed here, is didactic in a way that the

others are not, yet it illuminates many of the concerns expressed more

 

 

65

subtly in other lyrics. On the surface (but only on the surface) it
deals with the same subject as Wyatt's "A spending hand":

The common speech is, spend, and God will send,

But what sends he? a bottell and a bagge,

A staffe, a wallet, and a wofull ende,

For such as list in bravery so to bragge.

Then if thou covet coine enough to spend,

Learne first to spare thy budget at the brinke.

(1—6)

In contrast to Wyatt's satire, however, Gascoigne's poem takes its
proverbs seriously. This is advice to an innocent, warning of the
difficulty of amassing enough money to finance aspirations for a
career at court and the necessity of managing frugally whatever
resources one possesses; it is not a criticism of proverbial wisdom.
Nor is it a criticism of a society in which money is the major means
of advancement. Although he says,

I not denie but some men have good hap,

To climbe alofte by scales of courtly grace,

And winne the world with liberalitie,

(20—22)
his target is not the system which rewards "liberalitie" with power ——
with "winn[ing] the world" in a very real way. Almost as if he took "A
spending hand" at face value and missed its savage ironies, he focuses
on what happens to the individual who spends himself to the point of
ruin —— till "Till sutes of silke have swet out all their land" and
"Davie Debet . . . bids thee welcome to thine owne decay" (28, 30—31).
As the poem progresses, the language becomes more colorful, less

proverbial —- "Heape up bothe golde and silver safe in hooches, /

 

66

Catche, snatche, and scratch for scrapings and for crummes, / Before
thou decke thy hatte (on highe) with brooches" (42—44) —— but the
message remains the same, and the speaker returns, at the end, to the
kind of proverbial formulation with which he began:

Who spares the first and keepes the laste unspent,

Shall fynde that Sparing yeldes a goodly rent.
Remarkable in its matter—of—fact attitude toward catching, snatching,
and scratching, this poem never suggests that a life of such constant
scrambling -— and a power structure dominated by "haggard hawkes" who
"mislike an emptie hand" (26) —— is anything but natural. His advice,
in part and whole, suggests that while making it at court is
expensive, and while payoffs are an ordinary occurrence, success is a
matter of prudence —— of having accumulated the resources to bribe the
right people. The ominous undercurrents that do exist warn of the
spectre of poverty which will threaten if the speaker's advice is not
heeded, not of a way of life which will imperil the prospective
courtier's ”honest name."

Gascoigne's brief sonnet sequence looks directly at some of the
issues which "The common speech" glosses over, but it also raises
questions which "The common speech" leaves unanswered and reveals the
speaker's uncertainty about his own ability to assimilate the
implications of his own error. These seven sonnets, linked by
concatenation as well as by theme, apply a variant of the proverb
"haste makes waste" to the speaker's history.3 In contrast to "The

common speech," in which the speaker admonishes others, it is he, not

 

67

those he addresses, who has made serious mistakes and has gravely
misunderstood the nature of the world.
The first sonnet evokes the lure of the court for a young man:

In haste poste haste, when fyrste my wandring mynde,

Behelde the glistering Courte with gazing eye,

Such deepe delyghtes I seemde therein to fynde,

As myght beguyle a graver guest than I.

The stately pompe of Princes and their peeres,

Did seeme to swimme in flouddes of beaten golde,

The wanton worlds of yong delightfull yeeres,

Was not unlyke a heaven for to beholde,

Wherein did swarme (for every saint) a Dame,

So faire of hue, so freshe of their attire,

As might excell dame Cinthia for Fame,

Or conquer Cupide with his own desire.

These and suche lyke were baytes that blazed still

Before myne eye to feede my greedie will.
The speaker, whose mind is already "wandring," is enchanted with the
"glistering court," yet there are early hints that its attractions are
more apparent than real: the courtiers only seem to "swimme in
flouddes of beaten golde"; the "wanton worlde," if "not unlyke a

' is not quite like one either. But, because this is not

heaven,'
primarily one of the anti—courtly satires so popular in the sixteenth
century, the speaker does not really criticize the court's exotic show
even though he suggests a discrepancy between the appearance and the
reality. Instead, he sets the stage for the exploration of his own
errors that will follow in the ensuing poems, noting his
susceptibility to "baytes" at the same time that he makes allowances
for it; even a more sober and less "greedie" newcomer might be
similarly "beguile[d]," he indicates.

In the second poem, tempted by his initial view of a world of

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

   

68

"vain delight" and "dainty delicates," he languishes away from it,
until, with "foolish boldness" and "all in haste," he decides
impulsively to seek his fortune at court. In the third, arriving at
court where he is welcomed as a "gladsome guest," he describes how he
felt disgraced by the lack of finery he thought he needed "To prinke
me up, and make mee higher plaste" (42). The fourth sonnet describes
how he wasted his patrimony to acquire the garb of a courtier —- "Mee
thought it beste that boughes of boystrous oke, / Shoulde fyrste be
shread to make my feathers gaye" (47-48) —— and how he was ruined
financially: "The bough, the bodie, fyne, ferme, lease and lande, /
All were too little for the merchauntes hande" (55—56). In the fifth,
he explains that he decided to cut his losses and leave the court
after balancing his accounts and discovering that the rewards were not
worth the cost.

The last two sonnets are more complicated —— not in what he says
about his past actions, but in how he considers their implications for
his present and future. In the sixth, reflecting on his behavior and
generalizing from it, he observes that

My haste made waste, my brave and braynsicke barge,

Did floate to faste, to catche a thing of nought:

With leysure, measure, meane, and many mo,

I moughte have kepte a chaire of quiet state,

But hastie heades cannot be settled so.

(73—77)

Significantly, even though he sees that he tried "to catche a thing of
nought," he is less critical of a system which could make a "blazing

badge of bravery" a step to preferment than of his own failure to

69

govern his behavior "With Leysure, measure, meane, and many mo." "So
haste makes waste," he concludes, and continues,
and therefore nowe I say,
No haste but good, where wysedome makes the way.

(83—84)
The final sonnet offers an illustration of this proposition in the
parable of the slow—moving creature (in this case a snail) who
achieves its objective where a swift—moving but impulsive creature (in
this case a soldier) fails. But while this fable supports the claim
that "haste makes waste," it does not support the very different claim
that there is "no haste but good, where wysdome makes the way." That
declaration, which remains unsupported in the poem, is the focal point
of the speaker's ambivalence about his own behavior. Occurring three
times (it is repeated, by virtue of concatenation, as the first line
of the seventh sonnet), it reappears in the closing lines of the
sequence as well:

With Nevyle then I fynde this proverbe true,

That Haste makes waste, and therefore still I saye,

No haste but good, where wysedome makes the waye.

But what does it mean to make such an assertion in the context the
sequence has set up? Is the speaker implying that he has somehow been
able to make wisdom out of waste? This is what the hypotactic syntax
of the reworked couplet implies, yet he has spent the bulk of seven
sonnets proving just the opposite. Whether the problematical couplet

looks to the past or the future —— whether he refers to the "wisdom"

70

of having decided to leave the court, or whether he suggests that he
will hurry to act wisely in the future just as he hurried to act
wastefully in the past —— the speaker's elusive logic reveals his own
uncertainty about how to incorporate the facts of "waste" and loss of
opportunity into his assessment of himself. He remains uneasy about
his ability to turn loss into profit.

In another sense, however, the problem created by the presence of
words like the reiterated "therefore" in the couplet is one of syntax;
the claim that wisdom can come from waste, then, amounts to a verbal
trick —— one which reminds us that the sequence itself was written in
haste. In line with Gascoigne's characteristically ambivalent attitude
about his own work —— frequently self-deprecating, he nevertheless
alludes to the potential utility of his poetry -- he suggests here,
perhaps, that the speedily composed sonnets can be viewed as slight
productions which nevertheless contain the seeds of wisdom.

This undercurrent of ambivalence about his own ability to turn
loss into gain assumes increasing importance in his best known (and
more explicitly self—referential) lyrics, "Gascoignes Lullabie" and
"Gascoignes wodmanship." Ostensibly, their subjects are different: the
first deals with the speaker's response to the passage of time, the
second with his various professional failures; yet both focus on the
acceptance of change and loss, though the losses are of different

' the speaker's song both reconciles

kinds. In "Gascoignes Lullabie,'
him to and protects him from full awareness of the passage of time; in

"Gascoignes wodmanship," he reaches beyond the acceptance of past

71

error to reassess the meaning of failure and success, and uses the
occasion of the poem not merely to appeal for still another chance to
succeed but also to persuade his prospective patron of the merit of
his kind of "failure."

The "Lullabie" is not concerned with making sense of mistakes,

but with accepting the changes which come with time.

Sing lullabie, as women do,

Wherewith they bring their babes to rest,
And lullabie can I sing to

As womanly as can the best.

With lullabie they still the childe,

And if I be not much beguilde,

Full many wanton babes have I

Which must be stilld with lullabie,

he begins, and subsequent stanzas proceed to lull to sleep the

appetites and faculties of youth:

First lullaby my youthfull yeares,
It is now time to go to bed,
For crooked age and hoarie heares,
Have wonne the haven within my head:
With Lullabye then youth be still,
With Lullabye content thy will,
Since courage quayles, and commes behynde,
Goe sleepe, and so beguyle thy mynde.

Next Lullabye my gazing eyes,
Whiche woonted were to glaunce apace:
For every glasse maye nowe suffise,
To shew the furrowes in my face:
With Lullabye then wynke a whyle,
With Lullabye youre lookes beguyle:
Lette no fayre face, nor beautie bryghte
Entice you efte with vayne delyght.

And Lullabye my wanton will,
Lette reasons rule nowe reigne thy thought,
Since all too late I fynde by skill,
Howe deare I have thy fansies bought:

 

 

72

With Lullabye nowe take thyne ease,
With Lullabye thy doubtes appease:
For trust to this, if thou be still,
My bodie shall obeye thy will.

Eke Lullabye my loving boye,
My little Robyn take thy rest,
Synce Age is colde, and nothing coye,
Keepe close thy coyne, for so is best:
With Lullabye bee thou content,
With Lullabye thy lustes relente,
Lette others paye whiche have mo pence,
Thou arte to poore for suche expense.

But these middle stanzas, which seem so straightforward in their
recognition of the decline of youth, "gazing eyes," and sexual energy,
are really double—edged: they suggest, very gently, that the same
lullaby which induces sleep does so by diverting attention from
unpleasant realities. In the opening stanza, the fact that the speaker
is "not much beguilde" signals his ability to think clearly, to see
the necessity of accomodating to the changes dictated by age. But when
he attempts, in stanzas two and three, to "beguyle" his failing
powers, his words remind us that one effect of a lullaby is to induce
a soporific state which clouds mental processes, and that to beguile
can mean to delude or deceive. In effect, then these stanzas suggest
that the best way to deal with regret for the loss of youthful energy
(since, as lines 31—32 make clear, his body has no choice but to be
obedient), is to indulge one's self in one's imagination —— an
implication which becomes explicit in the final stanza:

Thus Lullabie my youth, myne eyes,
My will, my ware, and all that was,

I can no mo delayes devise,
But welcome payne, lette pleasure passe:

 

 

73

With Lullabye nowe take your leave,

With Lullabye youre dreames deceyve,

And when you rise with waking eye,

Remembre Gascoignes Lullabye.

These lines indicate the lullaby's dual function: to put to rest
the rebellious appetites of youth and to lull the mind into a
deceptive dream, allowing it to think that the loss of youth has not
occurred. But, in addition to acknowledging "that dreamers often lie,"
they also acknowledge the existence of a world beyond the dream: the
reader of the poem, like the person lulled to sleep by the lullaby,
will wake to a world in which hungry lions still roar. Finally, the
last four lines raise another question: who is being addressed (or,
perhaps, sung to)? On one hand, the speaker is reminding himself to
seek the solace of dreams in saying goodbye to "all that was"; on the
other hand, he is suggesting that both he and the reader/listener are
approaching the end of a poem, an artifact, "Gascoignes Lullaby,"
which is to be remembered so that it can be employed to deceive more
dreams in the future. As it calls attention to its own existence,
then, the poem suggests that the best way to cope with loss is to
construct a second world in which one pretends that the loss has not
occurred, and that the function of art is to deceive and beguile, not
to clarify.
But if waste is converted into wisdom by a verbal trick in his

sonnet sequence, and if pain is transformed into pleasure by a
deceiving dream in "Gascoignes Lullabie," failure and success are

V

redefined by a clear thinker in "Gascoignes wodmanship,' commonly

 

 

 

 

 

 

74

regarded as his finest poem.4 While not primarily a satire, it
contains satiric elements which play upon the collision between the
real and the ideal that Hallett Smith has called a prerequisite to the
satirical imagination. Both the "possibility of satire, or the
necessity for it," Smith observes, come from holding a picture of
human beings as the "pride of creation" that is at odds with their
actual behavior, their "antics under high heaven."5 In his
analysis of failure, Gascoigne holds up just such a picture.

Exploring the relationship between success and knowledge,
advancement and virtue, the poem centers in the relationship between
the individual and his society, in the borderline between success and
failure, and in the tension that results from the speaker's attempt to
combine the modes of contemplative awareness and action in an
imperfect world. Ostensibly a poem about failure, it both qualifies
and undercuts the appearance of failure by re-evaluating the behavior
that makes for success and by emphasizing the function of art -- of
poetry, specifically -— in clarifying the difference to those who are
in a position to reward success. Indeed, the very term "wodmanship"
refers to the practical skill or lore necessary to get along, to make
one's way in the world, and this woodman's greatest skill is with
words.

Gascoigne begins by explaining to his host and potential patron,
Lord Grey of Wilton, why he fails to hit the winter deer on a

hunt:6

 

75

My worthy Lord, I pray you wonder not

To see your wodman shoote so ofte awrie,

Nor that he stands amased like a sot,

And lets the harmlesse deare (unhurt) go by.

Or if he strike a doe which is but carren,

Laugh not good Lord, but favoure such a fault,

Take well in worth, he wold faine hit the barren,

But though his harte be good, his happe is naught:

And therefore now I crave your Lordships leave,

To tell you playne what is the cause of this:

First if it please your honour to perceive,

What makes your wodman shoote so ofte amisse,

Beleeve me L. the case is nothing strange,

He shootes awrie almost at every marke.
As wodman, the speaker fails in three ways on the hunt: he shoots and
misses; he hits the wrong target; or, absorbed in contemplation, he
fails to shoot at all. His central organizing metaphor provides an
effective vehicle for explaining his history of missing the mark in a
long line of pursuits, since his failures as a wodman are paralleled
in other occupations; he fails as a philosopher "Bycause his wanton
wittes went all awrie" (20), and as a lawyer because "he most mislikte
the thing, / Which most might helpe to guide his arrow streight"
(29—30). In his failure to "catch a courtly grace," he takes aim at
the wrong target, and depletes his funds by dressing himself up to
make an impression instead of prudently bribing his superiors.

So far, the man who "shootes awrie almost at every marke" appears
to attribute missing the mark in philosophy, in law, and at court to
his own shortcomings, not to the inherent shortcomings of those
pursuits or their pursuers. Before the mid—point of the poem, however,

he begins to undercut that judgment, and to qualify his negative

self—assessment, in his critical glances at the inelegant obscurity

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

76

that dominates legal thinking and writing and the bribery that
dominates the court. Thus, while he partially blames himself for poor
timing, lack of follow—through, and lack of perspicacity, he also
subtly begins the process of questioning the integrity of those who do
succeed as well as the worth of their success. His own imperfections
combine, then, with imperfections in the external world to bring about
failure, and foreshadow his difficulty in extracting order or meaning
from his own experience. Only in his indictment of the military is he
overtly satirical and unequivocally critical: here, for the first
time, he explicitly links his failure to his own integrity. His
characterization of the typical soldier is as sardonic as anything in
Wyatt, and he paints a picture of the soldier's "antics under high
heaven" that is expressly opposed to "all the vertues of the minde"
(63). Although he frankly admits his own cowardice —- he cannot "leade
a charge before himselfe be led" —- he also cannot "pinch the
painefull souldiers pay, / And sheare him out his share in ragged
sheetes" (77—78), or "pull the spoile from such as pill, / And seeme
full angrie at such foule offence" (81-82).

This section is most like Wyatt's indictment of his own society
and justification for separating himself from it in his first satire,
written some thirty—five to forty years earlier. Lawyers and courtiers
are undermined indirectly, the military overtly; but the impact is
cumulative, and all are included in the observation that

nowe adayes, the man that shootes not so,

Maye shoot amisse, even as your Woodman dothe.
(85—86)

77

This marks a turning point in the poem: the speaker's disdain for the
military is expanded and universalized, applied to his society as a
whole. He makes a clear moral judgment about those who do succeed in
Elizabethan society: if one is to avoid missing the mark, one must be
willing to pay the price; and that price includes corruption,
hypocrisy, flattery, bribery, and pedantry. Similarly, he realizes
that if he "shootes amisse," he does so not only because of his own
limitations, but because of limiting circumstances as well. "Success"

and "failure,"

seemingly so different, must be redefined in terms of
his enlarged understanding.

Yet that very understanding ~- the insight that forces the
speaker to challenge the accepted definition of success ——
exacerbates, paradoxically, the cause of still another failure: the
failure to shoot at all. Reflecting upon his "youthfull years
myspente," he says that he is obsessed with the notion that he must
have been born unlucky. However, "vayne presumption" leads him to
suggest that past and present failures are both more and less than
they seem:

For thus I thinke, not all the worlde (I guess,)
Shootes bet than I, nay some shootes not so well.
(99—100)

In this paradox upon which the poem turns, the scales have
tipped. The speaker begins to reassess his past failures in light of
the knowledge he has derived, and the benefits he has accrued, from

each. If he has failed as a philosopher —— if his "wanton wittes went

78

all awrie" —- he has nevertheless learned, from Aristotle, "to guyde
my manners all by comelynesse" (102). And, if "law was dark," he has
learned from Cicero "to discerne / Betweene sweete speeche and
barbarous rudenesse" (103—04). From the courtiers themselves, he
says, he has learned to take the measure of the world. In all these
achievements, he realizes, he has not missed the mark. Moreover, he
decides that those who have managed to "hit the marks that I do
misse, / And winne the meane which may the man mainteine" (117—18)
can neither
speake, nor write in pleasant wise,

Nor leade their life by Aristotles rule,

Nor argue well on questions that arise,

Nor pleade a case more than my Lord Maiors mule.

(113—16)

At first, this dual discovery —— that the assets of others are
less than they seem, but that his own merits do not necessarily
enable him to make his mark in a world in which cruder people succeed
readily —— immobilizes him, leading to still another missed
opportunity::

And whyles myne eyes beholde this mirroure thus,
The hearde goeth by, and farewell gentle does.
(121—22)
He neither remains fixed in immobility nor withdraws from the hunt,
however; instead, using all his resourcefulness to win one final
chance, he draws on his creative powers to try to convert failure

into success:

 

 

79

Let me imagine in this woorthlesse verse:

If right before mee, at my standings foote

There stood a Doe, and I shoulde strik hir deade,

And then shee prove a carrion carkas too,

What figure might I fynde within my head,

To scuse the rage whiche rulde mee so to doo?

Some myghte interprete by playne paraphrase,

That lack of skill or fortune led the chaunce,

But I must otherwyse expounde the case,

I says Jehova did this Doe advaunce,

And made hir bolde to stands before mee so,

Till I had thrust myne arrowe to hir harte,

That by the sodaine of hir overthrowe,

I myght endevour to amende my parte,

And turn myne eyes that they no more beholde,

Suche guylefull markes as seeme more than they be:

And though they glister outwardly lyke golde,

Are inwardly but brasse, as men may see:

And when I see the milke hang in hir teate,

Me thinkes it sayth, olde babe nowe learne to sucke,

Who in thy youthe couldst never learne the feate

To hitte the whytes whiche live with all good lucke.
(127-48)

In other words, he claims that what he imagines is what may
henceforth enable him to shoot right and finally hit the mark -— that
the ability to create second worlds is directly related to the ability
to survive and adapt in a primary world. Here, he not only suggests
that his failures are actually part of a divine plan to convince him
that the pursuit of the external trappings of success is unworthy of
him; he suggests as well that he possesses the ability to comprehend
and reveal to others such hidden truths. In contrast to those who are
limited to "plain paraphrase," he is able to find a "figure . . . in
[his] head" to discover and convey the significance of his own
history. In effect, he is claiming that he can use his verbal ability
-- his interpretive, creative, and persuasive powers —— to talk his

way into (and out of) just about anything —— a claim which is

 

80

reinforced by his slyly renewed appeal for patronage in the poem's

closing lines, in which he says he hopes he has told his tale in time:

Thus have I tolde my Lorde, (God graunt in season)
A tedious tale in rime, but little reason.

Accordingly, his explanation of his history of misfortune constitutes

a story —— one which not only assimilates and reworks the experience
of both failure and immobility but which constitutes an action —- a
new appeal for employment —— as well.

In that action, the roles of "wodman" and poet are conflated. On
one level, the speaker's "wodmanship" —— his skill as a hunter —— is a
ludicrous joke. But on another level, the woodman is someone who
possesses indispensable survival skills for making his way through the
forest of life —— skills which the speaker has just demonstrated in
clearing away the underbrush of apparent failure and persuading Lord
Grey of his true merit. Moreover, he is now ready, he implies, to put
those skills at Lord Grey's disposal: he is "ypp; wodman," not just
any woodman, as he points out more than once. Thus, instead of
presenting himself as an invited guest, he presents himself as a
subservient but useful (and expert) retainer: the ambiguous status of
the woodman parallels the ambiguous status of the poet who engages to
use his verbal powers to represent his patron effectively, and whose
verse is simultaneously "worthlesse" and a revelation of the hidden
shape of a divine plan.

In the poems considered here, the connection between the

speaker's conception of his role and skill as a poet and his ability

 

81
to confront and assimilate problematical areas of his own experience
is increasingly explicit.8 In the linked sonnets, the speaker
glosses over his uncertainty about his mistakes, short-circuiting his
explanation of the process by which waste is converted to wisdom and
implying that it is more a matter of rhetoric than anything else;
composed in haste, he implies, his sonnets contain nuggets of wisdom
which will perhaps be confirmed by future actions. In "Gascoignes
lullabie," the speaker views his poem as a way of assuaging the pain
caused by loss of youth if not the pain caused by foolish error, and
celebrates his ability to beguile himself. In "Gascoignes wodmanship,"
however, he has less need to be beguiled: confronting the fact of
error, he uses poetry to understand the implications of error. The
understanding created by imaginative insight provides the basis for
future action, which, he implies, will not only be useful to him but
to others. Thus, poetry will not only help him to survive in an
imperfect world; it will also enable him to educate those in power as
well as allow him to create a place in the world for the values which

the poet represents.

   

"Thy lips my history": The Public Context in Astrophil and Stella

Wyatt and Gascoigne both present speakers who are trying to do
their best in an imperfect world. At times, Wyatt's speakers are
unable to establish harmonious relationships with their society, as we
have seen: in some poems, they are overwhelmed by events, and lose
their perspective; in others, they need to retreat, to pull back from
the full complexity of their experience, in order to preserve their
personal or artistic integrity. Gascoigne's speakers err and fail
routinely —— that is their distinguishing feature —— but they never
neglect to try to discover and come to terms with the nature of their
own error. Even if their belated understanding does not allow them to
remedy specific circumstances, the speakers in Gascoigne's poems imply
the possibility of altered behavior in the future, and Gascoigne
maintains his characteristically generous attitude toward human
fallibility. In Sidney's Astrophil and Stella, however, we confront a
speaker who is increasingly reluctant to consider the implications of
his own behavior. Turning his back on his social role as well as on
his pursuit of the kind of poetry which would enable him to render his
experience in all of its complexity, Astrophil backs away from
confronting his own failure as the sequence progresses. Unlike his
creator, who argues eloquently in the Defence for the importance of

the poet and the usefulness of the knowledge his art imparts,

82

 

 

83

Astrophil increasingly sees poetry as an effortless exercise to serve
his private ends. Where Wyatt's speakers are generally morally
superior to the courtly world in which and about which they write (and
get into difficulties because of their blunt honesty), the courtly
world which Astrophil inhabits actually seems morally superior to him.
Like the recreant knight of chivalric literature with whom he has much
in common, Astrophil inherits a privileged position. Expected by his
friends and associates to play a significant role in the court's
diplomatic concerns, he turn his back on them. Perceiving at the
outset that his preoccupation with Stella will prove self—destructive,
he proceeds to rationalize and justify his inability to act in
accordance with the dictates of reason.

Scattered throughout Astrophil and Stella is a group of sonnets
establishing a public context —— social, civic, diplomatic, political,
military, even historical —- by means of which Astrophil is endowed
with a social role and responsibilities, and by means of which his

' or otherwise evaluated.

love for Stella is commented upon, "placed,'
As a group, these sonnets are apt to be overlooked. Their role in the
sequence is not a central one, and they are overshadowed —- justly,
perhaps —- by sonnets dealing with the status of the speaker as a
maker of poems or as a rational being capable of adhering to a chosen
course of action. But the importance of the public sonnets is
intrinsic, not merely illustrative, and they should not be overlooked.

They include 14, 18, 21, 23, 27, 30, 41, 53, and 75; when

grouped, they form a mini-sequence of their own which recapitulates

 

 

84

the patterns of self—deception and diminution that govern the sequence
as a whole.1 They form pairs among themselves: Sonnets 14 and 21

are addressed to a friend, a fellow courtier, but offer different
self-assessments; Sonnets l8 and 23, both introspective reflections,
are linked to 14 and 30, respectively, as well as to each other, but
23 is also linked to 27 and deals with a similar situation. In 41 and
53, the tournament sonnets, Stella is credited with inspiring both
victory and defeat; yet 41 is also linked to 23, 27, and 30 as
Astrophil imagines varied public reactions to his performance. Sonnet
75, which deals with an English king who sacrificed his crown to
private pleasure, stands alone; but it echoes and recapitulates the
others as Astrophil cites an historical example in order to justify
his own history.

These sonnets do much more than simply evoke settings and stances
of courtly life or illustrate the speaker's inability to strike the
right balance between reason, will, and appetite. Sidney's
presentation of his speaker in scenes which call attention to
Astrophil's role as courtier, as knight, as friend, as counselor, and
as public figure not only expands and develops his characterization of
Astrophil; it also establishes norms and values against which his
behavior is measured. In validating Astrophil's intermittent
self—criticism by placing it in a social context and by attributing
similar criticisms to others, Sidney undercuts Astrophil's attempts at
self—justification at the same time that he underscores the thrust of

other sonnets and groups of sonnets, making it impossible for them to

 

 

85

be read as polite compliment and clarifying -— often dramatically ——
the extent to which Astrophil has become "a diminished thing." At the
same time, Sidney dramatizes his enduring concern —— shared by

predecessors and contemporaries —— with what David Kalstone calls

"2 It has been

relation of love to the demands of the active life
suggested recently that Sidney, frustrated by the society generating
the standards which Astrophil flouts, and blocked in his own
aspirations, wrote the history of his own sociopolitical difficulties
(including his preoccupation with power and submission) under the
guise of Astrophil's difficulties with Stella.3 But this approach,
while provocative, not only assumes an identity between poet and
speaker; it also ignores Sidney's demonstrable criticism of
Astrophil's failure to live up to received standards.4 Rather than
identifying himself directly or indirectly with the plight of his
protagonist, Sidney endorses, as we shall see, the norms and values of
Astrophil's critics. In doing so, he reaffirms a relation between poet
and society similar to that explored and endorsed in Wyatt's and
Gascoigne's self—referential lyrics.

Sidney's sequence focuses on Astrophil's ethics as well as on his
poetics, and his characterization of Astrophil is ironic rather than
sympathetic. Astrophil and Stella is carefully constructed to reveal a
speaker who is increasingly diminished and even dehumanized as a
result of his infatuation with Stella, and the last lines of Sonnet
lO7 —— "0 let not fooles in me thy workes reprove, / And scorning say,

"5

'See what it is to love' —- would make a fitting epigraph to

 

86

the sequence. By his own admission as well as by demonstration,
Astrophil is caught in a conflict in which his love for Stella leads
him to reject the full range of his human faculties —— his reason, his
ethical sensibility, his perception of the proper relation between
body and soul, his social role and responsibilities, and even his
status as a "maker" of poetry. The point is not that Astrophil is
entrapped by his love for Stella, but that he rejects the
applicability of his rational faculty or ethical sensibility to that
love: after relegating virtue to "some old Catoe's brest" in Sonnet 4,
for example, he urges reason in Sonnet 10 to "Leave sense, and those
which sense's objects be: / Deale thou with powers of thoughts, leave
love to will." In such sonnets, Alan Sinfield reminds us, Astrophil is
"shrugging off the most deeply ingrained commonplaces of Elizabethan
religion and philosophy."6
At several points in the sequence he is all too well aware of the
dangerous discrepancy between his course of action and his code of
values. At the end of Sonnet 2, for example, when he declares that he
is about to "employ the remnant of my wit, / To make myself beleeve,
that all is well, / While with a feeling skill I paint my hell," he
both knows that he is going to deceive himself and knows that he will
be irreparably diminished by his self-deception. Incapable of facing
that knowledge for more than a moment, however, Astrophil embarks upon
a process of self—justification which will attempt to conceal his
self—deception rather than unmask it. As the sequence progresses he

will lose, regain (in Sonnets 5, 18, and 47, for example), and lose

 

 

87
again even that shred of self—awareness. In Sonnet 47 —— one of the
most impressive tours de force in the entire sequence —— he reasserts

his ability to govern his own behavior and to "Leave following that,
which it is gaine to misse,” His reawakened integrity leads to a real
resolve to act —— "I may, I must, I can, I will, I do" —— but the
resolve is betrayed in the poem's stunnng double turn:
Let her go. Soft, but here she comes. Go to,

Unkind, I love you not: 0 me, that eye

Doth make my heart give to my tongue the lie.
Two sonnets later, even his memory of his temporary resolve has faded
as he takes delight in love's "Manage." In Sonnet 69 his conception of
virtue is so distorted that it is a condition to which he will
hypocritically pretend in order to gain Stella's approbation —- but
Paris is worth a mass. At the end of the sequence, reduced to what
Robert Montgomery has called a state of psychological paralysis,7
he declares that "in my joyes for thee [is] my only annoy." He has
indeed succeeded in what he set out to accomplish: having thoroughly
convinced himself that "all is well," he no longer understands that he
is deceived or diminished, and no longer understands the value of what
he has lost.

Sidney takes great pains to make it abundantly clear that
Astrophil's ability to "see my course to lose my selfe doth bend,"
however painful, is infinitely preferable to the moral position of
Sonnet 108. One reason why we are likely to agree, if we have read

carefully, is that another point of View has been established through

 

88

the pUblic sonnets.

Having rejected the claims of virtue in Sonnet 4 ("Vertue alas,
now let me take some rest") and the claims of reason in Sonnet 10
("Reason, in faith thou art well serv'd, that still"), Astrophil
attempts in Sonnet 14 to persuade a critical friend that he has done

neither:8

Alas have I not paine enough my friend,

Upon whose breast a fiercer Gripe doth tire

Then did on him who first stale downe the fire,
While Love on me doth all his quiver spend,

But with your Rubarb words yow must contend

To grieve me worse, in saying that Desire

Doth plunge my wel-form'd soule even in the mire
Of sinfull thoughts, which do in ruine end?

If that be sinne which doth the maners frame,
Well staid with truth in word and faith of deed,
Readie of wit and fearing nought but shame:

If that be sinne which in fixt hearts doth breed

A loathing of all loose unchastitie,

Then Love is sinne, and let me sinfull be.

 

At first he attempts to forestall censure by an appeal for pity; next,
responding to the friend's "Rubarb words," he insists that his
entanglement is consistent with truth, faith, manners, wit, and honor.
This sonnet turns on Astrophil's exploitation of a commonplace of

amour courtois -— that love confers virtue —- but it also establishes

 

the presence of another viewpoint.9 As early as the second

quatrain, when we learn that the friend has been critical, we discover
that Astrophil's associates do not share his belief that reason should
"Deale . . . with powers of thoughts, leave love to will" (10.8). At
the same time, Astrophil's capacity for duplicity is revealed by the

discrepancy between his public protestations of uprightness and his

 

89

earlier private accomodation; he had, of course, admitted in Sonnet 4
that his mouth was "too tender" for the "hard bit" of virtue.
But the reassurances of Sonnet 14 desert him when he is called

' and in Sonnet 18 he is far less complacent. If

into "Reason's audite,'
the former introduces into the sequence another source of judgment,
the latter affirms a code of values and a set of ranked obligations
which Astrophil will continue to recognize in moments of partial
lucidity, and which he will reject only in moments of moral or
intellectual blindness:
With what sharp checkes I in my selfe am shent,
When into Reason's audite I do go:
And by just counts my selfe a banckrout know
Of all those goods, which heav'n to me hath lent:
Unable quite to pay even Nature's rent,
Which unto it by birthright I do ow:
And which is worse, no good excuse can show,
But that my wealth I have most idly spent.
My youth doth waste, my knowledge brings forth toyes,
My wit doth strive those passions to defend,
Which for reward spoile it with vaine annoyes.
I see my course to lose my selfe doth bend:
I see and yet no greater sorow take,
Then that I lose no more for Stella's sake.
Focusing on the speaker's inability to achieve the proper relationship
between knowledge and action, this sonnet also acknowledges the
obligations deriving from birthright —— "Nature's rent" —— as it
distinguishes them from the speaker's obligations to use properly the
"goods" lent by "heav'n" and identifies self—destruction with the
failure to pursue an active life —— a productive life. Recognizing in

the octave that love for Stella has not enhanced his performance, and

providing details of his personal bankruptcy in the first four lines

 

90

of the sestet, Astrophil finds his misuse of time and talents
inexcusable. But in the couplet, when his thoughts turn to Stella, he
makes no attempt to translate knowledge into action: the very real
losses faced up to in lines 1—12 are converted into the currency of
polite but fatuous compliment which denies the legitimacy of
previously acknowledged debts.

His address to his friend in Sonnet 21 is more forthright than in
14:

Your words my friend (right healthfull caustiks) blame
My young minde marde, whom Love doth windlas_so,
That mine own writings like bad servants show

My wits, quicke in vaine thoughts, in vertue lame:

That Plato I read for nought, but if he tame
Such coltish gyres, that to my birth I owe
Nobler desires, least else that friendly foe,

Great expectation, weare a traine of shame.

For since mad March great promise made of me,

If now the May of my yeares much decline,

What can be hoped my harvest time will be

Sure you say well, your wisdome's golden mine
Dig deepe with learning's spade, now tell me this,
Hath this world ought so faire as Stella is?

Here, as is frequently the case in this sequence, the structure
of the sonnet recapitulates its sense: the bulk of the lines is
devoted to the presentation of a carefully worked out argument which,
however unanswerable, is flung aside in the final lines. The friend's
words, a source of annoyance before in 14, are now "right healthfull
caustiks"; and in Astrophil's recapitulation of his friend's extensive
criticism he seems to acknowledge —- and refrain from contradicting ——

its validity. Or does he? This sonnet is less straightforward,

perhaps, than it seems. Warned explicitly that he is misusing his

 

 

91

intellectual and literary gifts as well as courting public shame,
Astrophil seems to assent to the friend's judgment ("Sure you say
well") only to dismiss it, finally, as irrelevant. But all he may
really be doing in lines 1—8 is repeating the friend's argument back
to him. If these lines are merely a polite paraphrase, then the fear
that "Great expectation" might "weare a traine of shame" is the
friend's fear, not Astrophil's: in that case, it is the friend, not
Astrophil, who defines the misuse of the latter's talents; and
Astrophil's own viewpoint remains elusive.

In Sonnet 23, it is Astrophil himself who is preoccupied with his
own public image. His aim, however, is not to amend but to amuse
himself by imagining what is being said about his distracted and
melancholic manner. Those who know his past habits, he reflects, will
attribute his withdrawal to a love of learning, to the press of
diplomatic concerns, or even to his own desire for advancement; but he
knows better: his "dull pensiveness" is caused by "only Stella's eyes
and Stella's hart." Expressing passing regret but no real division or
struggle, he makes no attempt to justify himself: the scope of his
self—awareness has shrunk. Dismissing his associates as foolish
busybodies, he assumes fatuously that most of them credit him with
good intentions; in Sonnet 27, on the other hand, he suspects thst
they attribute his withdrawal from active virtue to "That poison foule
of bubling pride."

At this point in the sequence we know, from Astrophil himself,

that he has compromised and deceived himself and that he has attempted

 

92

to pacify and manipulate others; and our assessment is confirmed by
the introduction of another point of view -— the indirectly reported
criticisms by his friend in Sonnets l4 and 21 and the impressions of
his peers in Sonnets 23 and 27. In the former pair he responds, at
least, to specific charges against him; in the latter pair,
self—absorbed, he no longer bothers to do so. The unflattering picture
of Astrophil which emerges in these sonnets is reinforced powerfully

in Sonnet 30:

Whether the Turkish new—moone minded be
To fill his hornes this yeare on Christian coast;
How Poles' right king meanes, without leave of hoast,
To warme with ill—made fire cold Moscovy;
If French can yet three parts in one agree;
What now the Dutch in their full diets boast;
How Holland hearts, now so good townes be lost,
Trust in the shade of pleasing Orange tree;
How Ulster likes of that same golden bit,
Wherewith my father once made it half tame;
If in the Scottische Court be weltring yet;
These questions busie wits to me do frame;
I, cumbred with good maners, answer do,
But know not how, for still I think of you.

 

Here, in the only public context sonnet addressed directly to
Stella, he listens, utterly disengaged, to the political, military,
and diplomatic conversation of the court. According to every
Renaissance commonplace, he should be an active participant; but
"great expectation" has been reduced to a concern for appearances ——
an external adherence to the code of his class. Moreover, he tries to
pass off his recreancy as flattery —— a token of Stella's power over
him —— and implies, in doing so, that she shares his skewed

priorities. The many precise allusions in the octave to significant

93

international events are brought closer to home in the sestet —— not
only in geographic proximity, as he moves from the edges of Europe
(Turkey and Russia) to Scotland and Ireland, but also in flickering
recognition of the role his family has played in international
affairs.10 Astrophil inadvertently reveals that those he dismisses
here as "busie wits" and elsewhere as "curious" or "dustie" wits are
engaged in political speculation of real substance and import and
assume that he shares their concerns. Whatever his status at court,
his counsel is clearly expected.

Sidney never endorses Astrophil's attitude toward his fellow
courtiers by suggesting that their preoccupations are trivial -— mere
courtly gossip —— nor does he ever suggest that Astrophil rejects a
world in which foppish, self—serving behavior is customarily rewarded.
Instead, he takes pains to make us see that Astrophil's associates
consistently establish and reinforce an ethical norm: individually or
collectively, they demonstrate their concern for his welfare and
reputation; they warn him about the probable outcomes of his actions;
they appeal to his "Nobler desires"; and they invite him to
participate in decisions that will affect the welfare of the kingdom.
As the public context sonnets move from speculation about mental
processes and states of mind to the dramatization of scenes in which
concrete action is required, Astrophil's failure to act in accordance
with a given code becomes even more marked. That pattern continues in
the next pair, Sonnets 41 and 53.

The setting of these sonnets, reflecting the resurgence of

 

94

interest in chivalry that took place in Sidney's day, seems borrowed
from the world of medieval romance.11 The image of a beautiful but
inaccessible woman watching from a high window as her lover competes
in a tournament in the courtyard below is a romance cliche; all that
is missing is the description of her token.
Having this day my horse, my hand, my launce
Guided so well, that I obtain'd the prize,
Both by the judgement of the English eyes,
And of some sent from that sweet enemie Fraunce;
Horsemen my skill in horsemanship advaunce;
Towne—folkes my strength; a daintier judge applies
His praise to sleight, which from good use doth rise;
Some luckie wits impute it but to chaunce;
Others, because of both sides I do take
My bloud from them, who did excell in this,
Thinke Nature me a man of armes did make.
How farre they shoot awrie! the true cause is,
Stella lookt on, and from her heavenly face
Sent forth the beames, which made so faire my race.

In Sonnet 41, having acquitted himself with distinction, he
disclaims credit for chivalric success just as emphatically as he
disavows the "making" of his own poems elsewhere in the sequence. At
the outset, he acknowledges that he has performed creditably in
guiding horse, hand, and lance "so well, that [he] obtain'd the
prize," and his victory seems a major one in the eyes of the world.
There is, however, no more "inward tuch" to his jousting than to his
poetry; where onlookers attribute his performance to skill, to
strength, to sleight, to heritage, and even to chance, he confides the
truth: his prowess was inspired only by a glance from Stella. Here,

townsmen and horsemen think more clearly than he does; once again,

Sidney endorses the standards of those around Astrophil, not those of

 

 

95

Astrophil himself.
In Sonnet 41, Stella is the source of valor if not of virtue; in

Sonnet 53, its companion—piece, the situation is reversed. As "One

hand forgott to rule, th'other to fight," Astrophil, decked out in
Marse's liverie," humiliates himself in public. In describing the
incident, he unwittingly reveals how erratic his own behavior is and
how uncertain his own standards are. Stella's blush, of course,

suggests that she shares the priorities of townsmen, horsemen, and

court wits, and that she would have preferred backing a winner:12

In Martiall sports I had my cunning tride,
And yet to break more staves did me addresse:
While with the people's shouts I must confesse,
Youth, lucke, and praise, even fild my veines with pride.
When Cupid, having me his slave descride
In Marse's liverie, prauncing in the presse:
'What now sir foole,‘ said he, 'I would no lesse,
Looke here, I say.' I look'd, and Stella spide,
Who hard by made a window send forth light.
My heart then quak'd, then dazled were mine eyes,
One hand forgott to rule, th'other to fight.
Nor trumpets' sound I heard, nor friendly cries;
My Foe came on, and beat the aire for me,
Till that her blush taught me my shame to see.

In none of the public sonnets is Astrophil at war with himself,
engaged in a genuine struggle. At best, as in Sonnets 18 and 21, he is
a passive, even helpless observer of his own situation. Powerless to
take action, he is reduced to description. At worst, he has difficulty
distinguishing between victory and defeat. A conflict which had the
potential for civil war turns into a sorry story of appeasement and,
ultimately, of surrender —- as the diction and imagery of Sonnet 107

make clear, and as he himself inadvertently reveals in Sonnet 75:

 

96

Of all the kings that ever here did raigne,
Edward named fourth, as first in praise I name,
Not for his faire outside, nor well lined braine,
Although lesse gifts impe feathers oft on Fame,

Nor that he could young—wise, wise—valiant frame
His Sire's revenge, joyn'd with a kingdome's gaine:
And gain'd by Mars, could yet mad Mars so tame,
That Ballance weigh'd what sword did late obtaine,

Nor that he made the Flourdeluce so fraid,
Though strongly hedg'd of bloudy Lyon's pawes,

That wittie Lewis a tribute to him paid,
Nor this, nor that, nor any such small cause,
But only for this worthy knight durst prove
To lose his Crowne, rather than faile his love.

 

 

Reviewing English history, Astrophil singles out for special
praise Edward IV —— not because of his personal gifts, not because of
his military victories, and certainly not because of his exemplary
behavior -— but only because the example of Edward supports the
specious opposition between love and public responsibility that

Astrophil is trying to set up. As William Ringler points out,

The chroniclers and poets of the sixteenth
century, though they admired Edward's popularity
with the people, represented him as neither great
nor admirable . . . . the Mirror for Magistrates
said he died of 'surfeting and untemperate life'

. Sidney knew, and knew that his readers would
know, the unsavoury aspects of Edward's life and
character; so that he is being patently
sophistical.

 

What Astrophil first found difficult to excuse in himself, he can now
excuse in a king. His version of his own history is just as distorted
as his version of England's; and his stature in the public sphere is
just as compromised as it is in the artistic, the philosophical, or

the ethical. The public sonnets, holding up a mirror to a world of

 

 

97
unfulfilled obligations and cancelled values, reveal the changing
patterns of his self—appeasement.

Two of the most influential conduct books of the sixteenth
century, Castiglione's Il Cortegiano and Sir Thomas Elyot's The Boke
Named the Governour, shed light not only on Astrophil's behavior but
also on his friends' response to it. Both set forth explicit standards
to be emulated by a young aristocrat who wishes to play a significant
and virtuous role in his society; and by the standards of both books,
Astrophil fails. Where Castiglione's Ottaviano argues that most
attributes of a courtier are good only insofar as they are directed
toward a virtuous end, Astrophil shrugs off the implications of his
actions. Where Elyot believes that counselors should be wise men who
employ their wisdom in the active life for the benefit of others,
Astrophil listens and responds only because he is "cumbred with good
maners." Consider the qualities which Castiglione's Ottaviano
emphasizes:

the perfect courtier . . . may indeed be good and
worthy of praise, not, however, simply and in
himself, but in regard to the end to which he is
directed. For indeed if by being of noble birth,
graceful, charming, and expert in so many
exercises, the Courtier were to bring forth no
other fruit than to be what he is, I should not
judge it right for a man to devote so much study
and labor to acquiring this perfection of
Courtiership as anyone must do who wishes to
acquire it. . . . But if the activities of the
Courtier are directed to the good end to which
they ought to be directed, and which I have in
mind, I feel certain that they are not only not
harmful or vain, but most useful and deserving of

infinite praise.
Therefore, I think that the aim of the

 

98

perfect Courtier, which we have not spoken of up
to now, is so to win for himself, by means of the
accomplishments ascribed to him by these
gentlemen, the favor and mind of the prince whom
he serves that he may be able to tell him, and
always will tell him, the truth about everything
he needs to know, without fear or risk of
displeasing him . . . . And thus, having in
himself the goodness which these gentlemen
attributed to him, together with readiness of wit,
charm, prudence, knowledge of letters and of many
other things —— the Courtier will in every
instance be able adroitly to show the prince how
much honor and profit will come to him and to his
from justice, liberality, magnanimity, gentleness,
and the other virtues that befit a good prince .

. And because the real merit of good deeds
consists chiefly in two things, one of which is to
choose a truly good and to aim at, and the other
is to know how to find means timely and fitting to
attain that good end -— it is certain that a man
aims at the best end when he sees to it that his
prince is deceived by no one, listens to no
flatterers or slanderers or liars, and
distinguishes goodlgrom evil, loving the one and
hating the other.

According to Castiglione's formulation, Astrophil is one of those
who "bring[s] forth no other fruit than to be what he is"; and
Ottaviano's words closely parallel Astrophil's friends' rebukes. As we
have seen, Sidney places Astrophil in public settings -— most notably
in Sonnet 30, but also in Sonnets 23 and 27 -— in which all of the
commonplaces indicate that he should be using his "readinesse of wit,
charm, prudence, knowledge of letters and of many other things" in
order to influence his sovereign to act with "justice, liberality,
magnanimity, gentleness, and the other virtues that befit a good
prince." Considered from this perspective, Astrophil is culpable not

only because he has failed to govern himself or make full use of his

 

99

gifts, but also because he has utterly disregarded a Renaissance
truism that they should be used to help bring about the proper
governing of others. The same three sonnets -— 23, 27, and 30 -— are
illuminated by Elyot's discussion of consultation and "counsayle":
consultation occurs "where men devise together and reason what is to
be done," he explains, and counsel is the advice obtained from each
man thus assembled.15 Elyot's conception of the former as the last
part of "morall Sapience, and the beginning of sapience
politike"16 reinforces a reading of these sonnets that finds
Astrophil's self-preoccupied wihdrawal from action fatuous and
irresponsible.

Helpful as the conduct books are in revealing the cultural

pattern that stands behind Astrophil's actions, Sidney's preoccupation

with the conflict between private emotion and public responsibility ——

a concern which also informs the Arcadia -- links him to an earlier

body of literature as well. Whatever else Astrophil is —- and his
17 . .

roles are numerous —- he is also, as we have seen in the

tournament sonnets, a knight; and he has much in common with other
knights of literature. Specifically, he shares with them (and with his
closer antecendents, Pyrocles and Musidorus) a marked difficulty in
reconciling private inclination with public obligation. This
difficulty, far from being novel, forms the basis of two persistent
concerns of chivalric romance: the figure of the recreant knight and
the theme of the rival claims of love and chivalry.

Not all courtly literature shares the same view of romantic love.

 

100

In fact, the chivalric romances -— from Chretien de Troyes to Malory
—- offer views that differ subtly from each other but differ markedly
from the endorsement of uncritical and self-abasing adoration that is
associated with the conventions of amour courtois in lyric poetry of
the period. Despite their delight in otherworld journeys, magic
springs, dwarves and sorceresses, and elusive geography and
chronology, the romances are very much concerned with exploring and
explaining how the knight should live in this world —— how he should
behave with family and friends as well as with members of the

court.18 As a group, the romancers seek to place love in-human
experience by setting the lover in a social and/or political context
which legitimates and dramatizes other goals, values, and dimensions
of life, and which reveals over time the extent to which the lover's
behavior is compatible with them. The figure of the recreant knight
retains its vitality from Chretien to Sidney: Chretien's Erec, like
Sidney's Astrophil, is so wrapped up in the woman he loves that he
forgets his obligations and becomes the object of gossip; the greatest
difference is that Erec, genuinely ashamed of himself, succeeds in
changing his course. One of the most important virtues in the world of
the romances is that of mesure; and recreancy is most often the result

19 . . .
of an amor desmesure. Like his predecessors, Sidney computes

 

the cost of desmesurance in public currency. Like them, he rejects

 

emphatically the notion that love which flies in the face of other
responsibilities is ennobling.

Chretien suggests that a workable balance between the claims of

101

love and chivalry can be achieved, and he implies that the failure to
achieve such a balance is an individual failure, a remediable
condition, not a crack in the golden bowl of the chivalric code
itself. Investing Arthurian legend with political and social concerns
as he considers the privileges and responsibilities of the knight in
society, Chretien deals with different kinds of recreancy in Erec et
‘Epiggu in ngip, and in the unfinished Perceval. In all three the
protagonists, after meeting initial success, must come to terms with
their subsequent failure to carry out certain responsibilities in one
sphere or another as they move toward a more mature understanding of
their social roles and move from innocence to experience, from
ignorance to knowledge. But his treatment of Erec (whose similarities
to Astrophil are occasionally startling) is almost paradigmatic for
the genre.20
From the outset, Chretien takes pains to present Erec as clear

thinking, virtuous, courtly, and courageous; no rebel in the cause of
love, he shares the values of his world. His marriage to Enide —- no
budding midons —- is not merely sanctioned but welcomed by his own
father, King Lac, as well as by Arthur and Guenevere, both of whom pay
special tribute to the unassuming young woman when she first arrives
at court. But while Erec's supreme happiness with Enide meets with
public approval, it is also the source of his difficulty:

All loved her for her open heart, and whoever

could do her any service was glad and esteemed

himself the more . . . . But Erec loved her with

such a tender love that he cared no more for arms,
nor did he go to tournaments, nor have any desire

   

 

102

to joust; but he spent his time in cherishing his
wife. . . . His friends grieved over this . . . .
He was blamed so much on all sides by the knights
and squires that murmurs reached Enide's ears how
that her lord had turned craven about arms and
deeds of chivalry, and that his manner of life
was greatly changed. 21

Enide, who blames herself for Erec's recreancy, wants no part of a
love that turns its back on the courtly world. In contrast to
Chretien's Guenevere, who reproaches Lancelot severely for his
momentary reluctance to lose face on her behalf, Enide does not
measure Erec's love for her by his willingness to sacrifice dignity
or reputation. On the contrary, she reveals to him her own misgivings

and the misgivings of others:

In this land they all say —— the dark, the fair,
and the ruddy —— that it is a great pity that you
should renounce your arms; your reputation has
suffered from it. Everyone used to say not long
ago that in all the world there was known no
better or more gallant knight. Now they all go
about making game of you -— old and young, little
and great —— calling you a recreant. . . . It
grieves me when I hear it said, and yet it
grieves me more that they put the blame for it on
me. Yes, I am blamed for it, I regret to say, and
they all assert it is because I have so ensnared
and caught you that you are losing all your
merit, and do not care for aught but me. You must
choose another course.

And so he does. Recognizing the truth of her words, he prepares at
once to set out with her to restore his damaged reputation, and a
lengthy series of almost penitential adventures ensues.

Fittingly, in the final episode —— the "Joy of the Court" -—

Erec not only completes the long process of overcoming his own

 

103

but also helps extricate someone else, Mabonagrain, from the same
condition. Unlike Enide, whose love for her husband does not cloud her
judgment, Mabonagrain's wife has tricked him into abdicating all other
responsibilities. Confined in a mysterious garden which has all the

attributes of a locus amoenus but which is stifling, Mabonagrain is

 

miserable. Erec releases him from the bondage of the garden and from a
suffocating love which robs him of his social identity. If
Mabonagrain's forced withdrawal into a private world of love is viewed
by his society as a disaster, his release is a matter for three days
of celebration -— the "Joy of the Court." His own rehabilitation
complete, Erec himself is not only ready to return to Arthur's court;
having passed, as D.D.R. Owen observes, "from his earlier
self—centered chivalry to a state of social awareness,"23 he is
prepared to assume the kingship of his own land and bring joy to his
own court as well.

The similarities in the difficulties confronting Erec and
Astrophil highlight the differences in their responses: where Erec's
understanding grows, Astrophil's shrinks; where Erec comes to accept
his social role, Astrophil rejects his; where Erec is an exemplar,
Astrophil is a negative example. But if the comparison is
illuminating, is it not also "farfet"? Not really; Chretien's
narrative, far from being an isolated example, embodies and
articulates the social and ethical concerns of a large and influential
body of literature. Those concerns, subsumed in the figure of the

recreant knight and the theme of the rival claims of love and chivalry

 

 

104

which provide a framework for so much Arthurian literature, not only

dominate romance narrative throgh Malory; they also play a prominent

. . , . 24

role in Sidney 3 Arcadia
Given the persistence of chivalric attitudes and values in both

literature and social forms, it seems sensible to pay attention to the

influence of chivalric romance on a writer who is careful to establish

a context that Chretien would have understood at once. The public

sonnets in Astrophil and Stella raise many of the same questions

 

explored in the narrative romances. In his treatment of Astrophil's

amor desmesure and dramatization of his recreancy and its

 

consequences, Sidney draws on the chivalric tradition as much as he
does on Petrarchan sonnets or on the "pastoral-comical,
historical-pastoral, tragical-historical,
tragical—comical—historical-pastoral" heroics of Sannazaro and
Ariosto.

Understanding the context of the public context sonnets
reconfirms what a careful reading of the sequence as a whole reveals:
Sidney establishes a point of view grounded in ethical and social

norms which dictate the rejection of desmesurance and which find

 

Astrophil's self-absorbed behavior deficient. But the knights who
stand behind Astrophil are not poets: and when Castiglione and Elyot
write about courtiers and governors who make use of their skill in
poetry (or other art forms) to influence the policies of a prince,
they are addressing themselves primarily to the issue of courtier as

. . . . . . 25
poet, not poet as courtier; the difference 18 Significant.

 

105

Astrophil is a poet first of all, as he tells us in the sonnet that
introduces the sequence. In the poems which follow, he returns
intermittently to the subject of his poetic activity -- sometimes in
passing references, sometimes in detail. As a group, these poems about
poetry reveal the same narrowing of perspective, the same movement
from self—awareness to self—diminution, that defines the pattern of
the public sonnets.

In Sonnet l, "Loving in truth, and faine in verse my love to
show," he laments the fact that "words came halting forth, wanting
Invention's stay, / Invention, Nature's child, fled step—dame Studie's
blowes, / And others' feete still seem'd but strangers in my way"
(9—11), and implies that he will proceed by following his muse's
injunction to "'looke in thy heart and write.'" In this sonnet, he
analyzes his relation to his literary predecessors; considers the
difficulties inherent in reconciling convention and invention; and
considers his own affective, stylistic, and rhetorical priorities and
practices. His analysis demonstrates that he conceives of poetry as a
complex activity, one which will draw upon the full resources of his
intelligence, at the same time that it demonstrates his concern with
finding his own voice: the poem —- the product of this activity ——
must render in verse and without distortion what he really does think
and feel.

The next sonnet, trying to explain why he "call[s] it praise to
suffer Tyrannie," does just that. His recognition that he is employing

"the remnant of my wit, / To make my selfe beleeve, that all is well,

106

/ While with a feeling skill I paint my hell"(10—12), emerges from an
introspective and lucid analysis of his situation --— an analysis
grounded in careful reasoning and accurate reporting. In other
sonnets, however —- 3 and 6 are excellent examples —- he dismisses the
complexities of verse just as he elsewhere dismisses his public
obligations. Reflecting upon the poems of his predecessors and
contemporaries, he rejects "strange similes" in Sonnet 3, and decides
in Sonnet 6 that he can do without Petrarchan conceits, classical
allusions, pastoral conventions, and decorative embellishments. He
does not, however, get rid of extraneous or irrelevant elements in
order to sharpen the tools of his understanding. On the contrary, his
conception of verse has undergone a fundamental change; in these
discussions he is no longer concerned with evaluating his own
behavior. When he ends Sonnet 3 by saying of Stella's face that "all
my deed / But Copying is, what in her Nature writes," he reduces his
own role from thinker to copyist. The same constricting formulation
concludes Sonnet 6: "all the map of my state I display, / When
trembling voice brings forth that I do Stella love." The pattern is
repeated in other sonnets dealing with poetry: in 15, "You that do
search for everie purling spring," he criticizes those poets who seek
inspiration in classical models, rely on "Dictionarie's methode," or

rehash "poore Petrarch's long deceased woes." "You take wrong waies,

 

those far—fet helpes be such, / As do bewray a want of inward tuch,"
(9—10) he warns, offering instead a formula of his own to replace the

formula he rejects: "Stella behold, and then begin to endite" (14). A

 

107

similar argument informs 28, "You that with allegorie's curious
frame"; 35, "What may words say, or what may words not say"; 50,
"Stella, the fulnesse of my thoughts of thee"; 55, "Muses, I oft
invoked your holy ayde"; and 74, "I never drank of Aganippe well," in
which he basks complacently in his own verbal fluency. "How falles it
then, that with so smooth an ease / My thoughts I speake, and what I
speake doth flow / In verse, and that my verse best wits doth please?"
(9—11), he asks, almost redundantly, for the answer by now is
distressingly obvious: "My lips are sweet, inspired with Stella's
kisse" (14).

How, though, can we be sure that Sidney intends us to take
ironically a statement like "Not thou by praise, but praise in thee is
raisde"(35.13)? We know, in part, because of the way the public and
poetic contexts converge in Sonnet 90:

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 so ambitious am I, as to frame
A nest for my yong praise in Lawrell tree:
In truth I sweare, 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 this poem, the two contexts —— public and poetic -— are

clearly conflated. In his preoccupation with his activity as a poet,

Astrophil focuses on externals and reduces history to reputation,

 

 

108

achievement to ambition. Once again, he devalues the opinions of
others ("If thou praise not, all other praise is shame"). Astrophil is
deficient not just as a courtier because he fails to understand and
live up to public responsibilities: in his failure to understand and
implement the proper relation between public and private, convention
and invention, he is also deficient as a poet. Just as his earlier
fear that "Great expectation" would "weare a traine of shame" now
gives way to a bland obliteration of his own history, his earlier
conviction that artistic achievement depended on discovering his own
authentic voice and his proper relation to his own literary heritage
now gives way to his assumption that nothing authentic can flow from
his "wit or will," and to his denial of his very identity as a poet.
There is no suggestion that Astrophil would be diminished as a
poet, or that he would produce a trivialized art, were he to fulfill
the various expectations referred to repeatedly in the sequence and
examined here. Instead, he is deficient in terms of the standards
endorsed in the sequence itself as well as in Sidney's Defence, in
which, as Daniel Javitch reminds us, "the ethical and persuasive ends
previously attributed to the orator" are "appropriated by the poet,"
who is "able to create a world not only superior to the actual world
but capable of shaping and improving the everyday world men inhabit."
26 What Astrophil's society expects of him (what Sidney tells us
of it) stands in sharp contrast to what Wyatt's speakers' society
expects of them. There is no intimation in Sidney's sequence that

Astrophil's colleagues would like him to conform to polite

 

 

109

hypocrisies, to make his song "less straunge" —— to lie a little,
maybe, for the sake of appearances. When Wyatt's speakers withdraw
into a private world -- as they do, for example, in "In court to
serue" and "Myne owne John Poyntz" —— they do so because they are
morally superior to the courtly world around them; their ethical
sensitivity is, in fact, the basis of their rejection of that world.

" the speaker chooses, to put

In other poems, like "Blame not my lute,
it very simply,run:to cut and run but to stay put and fight back: to
use poetry as one means of presenting himself to his world, of
fashioning a viable public stance, while refusing to rein in his verse
to accede to the inappropriate demands of his society.

Resonating in the work of both poets, however, is an affirmation
of that fundamental emphasis of English humanism: the assumption that
one's nature is confirmed or fulfilled by full participation in one's
society; that one's ethical status depends upon such participation;
and that one's failure to participate requires explicit justification.
Revisionist critics attribute Astrophil's behavior to Sidney's

smarting political wounds: Arthur Marotti insists that "The central

irony of Astrophil and Stella is that the heterocosm of love to which

 

the poet—lover has fled from the viciously competitive world of the

court is no compensation for sociopolitical defeat"; and Stallybrass

and Jones, stressing Sidney's inconclusive attempts to win a major

appointment, argue that "the suffering of the lover . . . functions as
. . . "27 .

a displacement of the sufferings of the courtier. But even if

this is the story of Sidney's life, as F.W. Levy has argued,28 it

110

is an explanation which Sidney repudiates in his sequence. Far from
presenting the world of the court as "viciously competitive," he takes
great pains to characterize its spokesperson —- Astrophil's friend ~—
as rational and thoughtful, concerned and sympathetic, equally
familiar with ethical philosophy and political realities. In fact,
Marotti's emphasis on "sociopolitical encoding" is a variant of an
argument developed by G.K. Hunter more than twenty years ago. In a
provocative discussion of the relationship of humanistic ideas and
ideals to the energetic literary activity occurring in the middle of
Elizabeth's reign, Hunter suggested that the humanistic credo —— "the
myth of state service as the natural end of a training in the
humanities" —— constituted not a strength but a "fatal weakness":
"Since Humanism was concerned to point spiritual energies and
enthusiasms into this world and so to ameliorate its condition, it
deprived the scholar of his natural refuge in contempt of the
practical world."29 But Hunter's implicit equation of poets with
scholars is misleading (his catch-all phrase, "up—and—coming
literati," hardly bridges the gap). While his argument might
illuminate the predicament of a Gabriel Harvey, it does not illuminate
the predicament of a poet—speaker like Astrophil. And, far from
seeking refuge in scholarly pursuits, Astrophil's creator argues
eloquently in the Defence that poetry is superior to philosophy -- to
abstract thought —— precisely because of its greater impact on the
actual lives of people who live in the "practical world." The central

flaw in the "powerful myth" of English humanism, Hunter believes, is

 

111

that poets and.othervuiters, deprived of their "natural refuge," have
no useful role to play in their societies.30 But Sidney does not
present his Astrophil as a poet—speaker whose society has deprived him
of a useful role, or who is seriously engaged in the dilemma Hunter
describes. Astrophil speaks as a member of a given society who is also

a poet, not as a clerc manque who is deprived of his refuge; and

 

Sidney's only fully-developed poet—speaker is presented as diminished

precisely because he abandons a role his creator endorses.

 

 

"At random from the truth":
Knowledge and Action in Shakespeare's Sonnets

A very different world from Sidney's stands behind Skakespeare's
sonnets. Far from being a courtier or an aristocrat —— a "child of
state" —- Shakespeare's speaker holds a more marginal place in his
society. We learn little about his actual role or rank; attempts to
identfy him as a man of the theatre, based on references to "motley,"

"public means,"

and "public manners" in Sonnets 110 and 111, have
proved inconclusive.l But whatever his status, the speaker does

make clear, in the sonnets to the young man, that he views himself as
someone "in disgrace with fortune and "men'Seyes" (29.1).2 In a
substantial number of poems, he frequently indicates that he is
deprived of the rewards of the world —— a place in it —- which
Astrophil so casually turns his back on.

Shakespeare's speaker does not merely dismiss the world of
fortune and friends as Astrophil does; instead, repeatedly lamenting
the fact that its rewards are not available to him, he makes use of
what J.B. Leishman calls the theme of compensation to rationalize its
loss.3 This process cuts two ways: first, the love of the friend
compensates the speaker for other losses, which then seem
insignificant by comparison (as in Sonnet 29); second, the pain caused

by the friend's absence, obtuseness, or treachery makes other gains

and rewards seem insignificant, as in Sonnet 90 ("Then hate me when

112

 

113

thou wilt, if ever, now"). Generally, the world standing behind these
sonnets —— the world for whose loss the speaker will be compensated ——
is, as Hallett Smith says, a social world rather than a natural
one.4 Frequently, however, it is represented by natural imagery:
occassionally, as in Sonnets 33, 34, 97, and 98, the social and
natural worlds are conflated —- "Ev'n so my sun one early morn did
shine"; in them, the "world well lost" is almost wholly imagined in
natural terms —— a morning and a day in the first pair, and a whole
season in the second.

In these sonnets of compensation (they include 25, 29, 30, 33,
34, 37, 66, 90, 91, 97, 98, and 112),5 there are only occassional
suggestions that the speaker's willingness, even eagerness, to be
compensated is misguided; no real sense, except in one poem, that he
is making a serious error in casting off "things of great repute."
Only twice in these poems, in Sonnets 34 and 112, does the speaker
seriously question the validity of his own compensatory thinking for
more than a passing moment. In the couplet of Sonnet 34 —- "Ah, but
those tears are pearl which thy love sheeds, / And they are rich, and
ransom all ill deeds" —— the friend's contrition makes up for "ill

' not just the accidents of fortune. The terms of the "ransom"

deeds,'
to which he willing agrees cause him some uneasy moments in Sonnet 35,
when he considers the possibility that he is" corrupting" himself by
"salving" the friend's "amiss" and "authorizing [his] trespass with

compare." And in Sonnet 112, he casts off more than material success

when he decides to allow the rightness or wrongness of his own actions

 

114

to be determined by the friend -— his "all the world" —— and cedes to
the friend the freedom to think and judge for him. But his decision in
112 to give up a certain amount of autonomy leads not only to the
self—assertion of 121 but also to the self-doubt of 113, in which he
introduces the mind/eye antithesis that will trouble him so much in
the second part of the sequence.6 For a moment, perplexed by the
discovery that his "most true mind thus maketh m'eyne untrue"
(113.14), he stands at the edge of an epistemological abyss, but the
moment passes in the self—indulgent reassurances that conclude Sonnet
114.

In the dark lady sonnets, however, the outside world is treated
very differently. The mind/eye opposition, glanced at in Sonnets 113
and 114, becomes a recurrent and compelling issue, and the judgments
of others-m—0utsiders- are given legitimacy as the speaker becomes
increasingly preoccupied with the difficulties of making accurate
judgments and dwells on the opposition between what he feels for her
and what others say of her. In these poems, though, the primary focus
is not epistemological but psychological and ethical. The validation
of the external source of judgment in the dark lady sonnets is used to
call attention to the problematical relation between knowledge and
action as the speaker comes to accept the valuations of others and
rages at his own inability to stop loving someone who, unlike
Astrophil's Stella, is attainable but unsuitable. On balance, we feel
that Astrophil's failure is an individual failure —— that if only he

could see clearly, he would be able to align his behavior with his

 

 

115

knowledge. Here, however, in what is almost a gloss on the plight of
his predecessor, Shakespeare's speaker seems trapped despite his very
real grasp of the situation. But a very different sort of poem
emerges: there is no suggestion that this unidealized speaker is
living wisely or profiting from his experience in any ordinary way,
yet he does achieve a certain fidelity or honesty in recording his
experience that Astrophil does not. Moreover, in some of these
sonnets, the speaker discovers complexity and reciprocity as well as
complicity.

In The Tension of the Lyre, his recent study of the sonnets,
Hallett Smith stresses the speaker's "great consciousness" of and
"more jaded view" of the social world in the sonnets to the dark
lady;7 that a critic as astute as Smith overlooks the sonnets in
the first part of the sequence which evoke and then dismiss the world
may be a measure of their success in elevating the private sphere.
Even a brief overview will help to define the significance of the
pattern they establish.

In Sonnet 25, "Let those who are in favor with their stars," the
speaker simply claims that he is luckier than the favorite of the
great prince, who can be cast aside with a frown, and luckier than the
unknown warrior, whose single loss may bring disgrace; barred from
such triumphs —— from "public honour and proud titles" —— he sees
their drawbacks as he reassures himself that he is secure in the
friend's love. Sonnets 29 and 30 are more complex and more

interesting; in the former, the speaker wishes for things that he has

116

never had; in the latter, he reflects on things he once had and lost.
In Sonnet 29 the speaker is restless, discontent, envious of the
successes of others; his very real misery is grounded in specific
detail: "Wishing me like to one more rich in hope, / Featured like
him, like him with friends possessed, / Desiring this man's art and
that man's scope" (5-7). Nevertheless, the "wealth" of the friend's
love is sufficient to cancel out the dearth of his "outcast state":
"For thy sweet love rememb'red such wealth brings, / That then I scorn
to change my state with kings" (13—14). The couplet,
characteristically trying to counterbalance the preceding quatrains,
works to make the complaints and losses of the previous lines seems
trivial. Like Sonnet 25, this poem stresses the superficial and
ephemeral aspects of fortune's gifts; it is a case of being jealous of
the good luck of others, not a case of turning one's back on "reason's
audite" or betraying one's birthright, as Astrohil does. Moreover, the
speaker's perceptive insight in line 8 -- "With that I most enjoy
contented least" —— reveals a more introspective side of his nature
which is less susceptible to discontent from passing disappointment.
In the next sonnet, "When to the sessions of sweet silent
thought," remembrance of the friend is called upon to compensate for
much more -— for acute personal losses, not just for lack of worldly
success or comforts. The speaker weeps not only for "love's long since
cancelled woe," but also for "precious friends hid in death's dateless
night"; morevoer, he re—experiences the pain of the old losses, which

he "new pay[s] as if not paid before." Not only that, he also

117

confronts his own irremediable misuse of time -- his "dear time's
waste." Once again, however, the love meets the challenge: thinking on
the friend, "All losses are restored, and sorrows end." All of the
speaker's memories here refer to personal relationships; there is no
broader social context, no reference to professional or artistic
ambitions, as there is in the previous poem, yet the way those
relationships are presented makes it impossible to take their loss
lightly, as the loss of public recognition is meant, finally, to be
taken lightly in Sonnet 29.

But if the friend's love has power to restore losses and put an
end to sorrows, his treachery also has power to destroy the speaker's
pleasure in "Suns of the world," as the couplet of Sonnet 33 reveals:
"Yet him for this my love no whit disdaineth; / Suns of the world may
stain when heav'n's sun staineth." The compensatory mood is
reestablished, however, in Sonnet 37, which follows a now recognizable
pattern: the speaker, "made lame by fortune's dearest spite," is

1

nevertheless "sufficed" by the friend's "abundance,' taking all his
"comfort" from the latter's "worth and truth." Later in the sequence,
Sonnet 90's "Give not a windy night a rainy morrow" conflates images
of the natural world with images of misfortune and loss, and states
explicitly the insignificance of worldly losses when weighing them
against the feared loss of the friend's love:

If thou wilt leave me, do not leave me last,

When other petty griefs have done their spite,

But in the onset come; so shall I taste
At first the very worst of fortune's might,

 

118

And other strains of woe, which now seem woe,
Compared with loss of thee will not seem so.
Compensation's negative corollary is demonstrated in Sonnet 98,
in which the opening simile —— "How like a winter hath my absence
been" -— is not only extended for all fourteen lines, but also
provides the basis of the next sonnet, "From you I have been absent in

' which reworks the imagery of its predecessor. Both poems

the spring,'
—— the former figuratively, the latter literally —— insist that the
beauties of the natural world are nothing without the friend: "For
summer and his pleasures wait on thee, / And thou away, the very birds
are mute" (ll—12).

Each of these sonnets, separately and together, works to
reinforce the speaker's conviction, reiterated in 91, that "thy love
is better than high birth to me." Each, in its way, downgrades the
relative importance of professional success, money, prestige, social
acceptance, and even friendship, as the speaker upgrades and
underscores the importance of a private world of love in light of

which the larger social world is well lost. Only once, in Sonnet 66,

is the world rejected because it is corrupt or profoundly uncongenial.

In all others, its rewards are worth having —- up to a point; their
loss causes pain -— up to a point. As the speaker analyzes the
relative merits of his circumstances —— of these gains and losses ——

he takes their measure himself and does not buttress his conclusions
by invoking the opinions of others as support. In some cases, his own

mental processes parallel his subjective valuations of his experience:

119

in Sonnets 29 and 30, for example, it is the process of remembering,
the act of thinking, that is the restorer of all losses. To a certain
extent, in these poems, the mind creates its own reality.

In general, though, the poems which turn away from the world -—
social or natural —— are not poems in which the speaker's judgment is
clouded or his words compromised. On the contrary, rather than turning
his back on lofty ambitions, worthwhile achievements, or truly
pressing responsibilities, he turns away instead from petty
preoccupation with wealth, status, and popularity to what he views as
the richer, less transitory rewards of the friend's love. As readers,
we are invited to share his perspective; there is no indication, in
the sonnets looked at so far, that the speaker's judgment is
distorted, that his assessment of events is inaccurate, or that his
weighing of priorities is skewed. But other sonnets or groups of
sonnets address themselves to that possibility.

Of course, in 35, the "civil war" sonnet, the speaker sees that
he is making himself an "accessory" to the friend's wrongdoing by
"authorizing" his trespass; his acknowledged complicity casts doubt on
the wisdom of the ransom agreed to in Sonnet 34. But Sonnet 34 itself
places a heavier burden on the power of compensation than do its
fellows; the friend himself is the agent of the speaker's misery, the
agent of treachery, as the opening lines make clear:

Why didst thou promise such a beauteous day,
And make me travel forth without my cloak,

To let base clouds o'ertake me in my way.
(1-3)

 

120

While the speaker has been betrayed, and while his "wound" and
"disgrace" are caused by the friend, his concern is with the
inadequacy of the friend's apology, a salve which "heals the wound and
cures not the disgrace": "Though thou repent, yet I have still the
loss." But the couplet emphasizes two subtle points: first, it is not
just the friend's love which has the power to "ransom all ill deeds,"
but his contrition: the speaker responds generously to his friend's
tears, and the couplet focuses upon the power of forgiveness, not on
the power of compensation. Second, there is a very real difference
between ransoming "ill deeds" —- paying a high price, knowing all too
well the cost they exact -- and glossing over them, disguising their
nature. Strictly speaking, Sonnet 34 is not a sonnet of compensation,
then, but a sonnet of guilt and contrition; as such, it is properly
linked with Sonnets 119—21 as well as with 133. But it is linked to
the compensatory sonnets (to 90 as well as to 33) by its imagery.
Reading 33 and 34 sequentially, we end, like the speaker, by
downgrading the relative importance of glorious mornings, other suns,
and even gilded streams. We feel their beauty: we feel their abrupt
and painful loss; but we also feel the sudden power of forgiveness to
make the loss less acute.

But a new element dominates Sonnets 93—96 and qualifies our
reading of the compensatory sonnets 97—98, to which they are linked by
figurative language as well as by order. In the first group, the
speaker's misgivings intensify, and his criticism of his friend -—

made explicit in Sonnet 35 and echoed in innuendos and undercurrents

 

121

throughout the interveing poems -— becomes even more overt. Sonnet 93
opens with the speaker's decision to "live, supposing thou art true, /
Like a deceived husband"; and Sonnets 95 and 96 attest to the friend's
power not to compensate for loss but to make the bad seem good. In the
former, he protests against the friend's ability to make him "bless an

' warning him in the couplet that such power will not

ill report,'
necessarily continue. But by Sonnet 96 he withdraws that threat and
defers:

Thou mak'st faults graces that to thee resort.

As on the finger of a throned queen ‘

The basest jewel will be well esteemed,

So are those errors that in thee are seen,

To truths translated, and for true things deemedk
(4-8)

" "sweet and lovely" is

But the friend's power to "make . . . shame
overlooked in the winter of Sonnet 97's discontent. To a certain
extent, however, the exposure of the friend's faults in 93, 95 , and
96 —- not to mention the insinuations of the inscrutable 94, "They
that have pow'r to hurt, and will do none" —— limits their endorsement
of the speaker's willingness to be compensated in the sonnets that
follow. 94's "summer's flow'r" (which may be a lily that festers)
casts doubt upon the certainties of Sonnet 97. It qualifies, if we
accept Q's order here, that powerful poem's "abundant issue" of
"summer and his pleasures"; it also undercuts the pastoral otium of
97's blander Spenserian successor, which is decorated with roses and

lilies -— the flowers subject to cankers and festering rot.

Throughout the sequence, the burden placed upon the compensatory

 

 

122

power of the friend's love has grown heavier, overcoming first
material deprivation, then canceling out acute losses, then ransoming
the friend's occassional acts of betrayal, then outweighing suspected
flaws in the character of the friend himself. In each case, however,
the speaker is presented as a man who knows what he is doing, what
kind of bargain he is striking: when one talks about paying a ransom,
one is generally aware of the cost. In Sonnet 35, for example, he is
exquisitely sensitive to such issues. At other points in the sequence
-— in Sonnets 97 and 98, for example -— we suspect, if we follow Q's
order, that the speaker tends at times to put aside his awareness of
the friend's faults and of his own complicity in "fairing the foul."
In general, however, the speaker is not blind to the friend's faults.
Rather, as a growing body of criticism has made clear, he uses the
sonnets to expose those faults to the reader while seeming to flatter
and court the less perceptive friend himself.9 If the speaker is
deceived, it is not about the friend but about his own ability to
continue to write such double—edged poems without being unduly
"confined" by this sort of constancy or compromised in the effort.
Thus, Jane Roessner writes that Sonnets 100—114 "are set up at once to
deceive and reveal: to appear to be genuine praises (and often,
seemingly designed to fool the young man into hearing them as such),
while in fact covertly revealing the corruption of the friend, and
ultimately, of the sonnets themselves which had first seemed to be
stays against corruption."10 But certain elements in Sonnets

110—112 suggest that the speaker is deceived about the implications of

 

123

his own actions and motivations. They introduce another perspective,

one which invites us to believe that the speaker errs in 112 when he

turns a deaf ear on critics as well as on flatterers and opts instead
for a private world to which alone he is alive.

In 110, it is his turn to feel contrite and to seek forgiveness.
He has not only made a public spectacle of himself, a "motley," in
some unspecified way; he has also, he admits, "Gored mine own
thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear" and "looked on truth / Askance
and strangely." In Sonnet 111, however, instead of accepting
responsibility for his own acts, his own situation, as he does in 110,
he attempts to blame "Fortune," "The guilty goddess of my harmful
deeds," for the fact that his "nature is subdued / To what it works
in, like the dyer's hand" (6—7). But as Rosalind could have told him,
and as she reminds Celia when the latter confuses "fortune's office"
with nature's, "Fortune reignes in gifts of the world, not in the
lineaments of Nature" (AYL. 1.2.40—42). The distinction reveals the
distortion in the speaker's thinking (and the author's likly view of
it) as he prepares to cede further responsibility for his own behavior
and assessment of it in Sonnet 112.

The uneasiness generated by Sonnet 112 is due to ambiguities and
ironies which are intrinsic, and not merely functions of context. In
it, the speaker abandons his independent judgment, his moral autonomy,
his critical faculty. He seeks to obliterate the memory of "vulgar

scandal" by turning away from "all the world besides" the friend:

124

For what care I who calls me well or ill,

So you o'er—green my bad, my good allow.

You are all my world, and I must strive

To know my shames and praises from your tongue.

(3-6)
He is no longer just asking for pity; he is explicitly giving up the
freedom (and responsibility) to judge for himself the rightness or
wrongness of his own actions: whether they are "shames" or "praises"
will be up to the friend. Hallett Smith finds "easy assurance" in the
phrase "you are all the world," but surely that assurance belongs to
the speaker, not to the creator. The denial of responsibility for
one's fundamental judgments, treated seriously here, is treated
playfully by Shakespeare in a very different context —— one which
mocks, in counterpoint, the untenable position of the speaker in the

sonnets. In Act IV, Scene 5 of The Taming of the Shrew, Petruchio

 

challenges Kate by insisting that day is night and that the sun
shining in the sky is really the moon, and threatens to keep her home

if she disagrees. Exhausted, she decides to play with him:

Petruchio: I say it is the moon.
Kate: I know it is the moon.
Petruchio: Nay then you lie; it is the blessed sun.

Kate: Then God blest, it [is] the blessed sun,
But sun it is not, when you say it is not;
And the moon changes even as your mind.
What you will have it nam'd, even that it is,
And so it shall be so for Katherine
(4.5.16-22)

But while Kate is distraught, she is not at wit's end; in her tactical

 

125

concession, she mocks Petruchio and his power play as well as herself.
Whatever we think of the trade—off she makes, the humor of the
interchange depends on her certainty (and ours) that the moon does not
change with his mind, that what she says would be ludicrous were it
taken seriously. What she pretends to do, the speaker in the sonnet
actually does. The problem is not just that he solipsistically turns
inward, but that he denies what Thomas Greene calls, in another
context, "the centered self," and seals himself off from critics as
well as flatterers.11 Nor is it a question of difficulty in
distinguishing between appearance and reality, as it is, say, in 93,
113, or certain key poems in the dark lady group in which the speaker
is genuinely perplexed, hard put to separate what is real from what is
illusory. Instead, he wills away the power to make such distinctions
as he wills away the rest of the world.12

By the end of this sonnet, Shakespeare's speaker has done what
Sidney's Astrophil has done: to say "None else to me, nor I to none
alive" is not very different from saying "Thine eyes my pride, thy
lips mine history." Both invest the person they love with sovereignty
over their rational faculties; both make that person the arbiter of
right and wrong; both yield their capacity for autonomous judgment.
But Shakespeare's speaker, whose turn of mind is perhaps more
speculative than Astrophil's, seems uneasy about his constricted
vision and uncentered self. He suspects, in Sonnet 113, that he is not
perceiving the world accurately and that his vision is

distorted.13 All the eye sees -— "The most sweet favor or

 

 

126

deformed'st creature —— is shaped to the friend's "feature":

Incapable of more, replete with you,
My most true mind thus maketh m'eyne untrue.

(13—14)

One kind of truth clashes with another; the truth of fidelity distorts
his vision of other worlds, other realities. As Roessner says, "Loving
the friend . . . would require being dead to all the world, being cut
off from all sights and sounds, living a confinement."14

The same potential epistemological chaos dominates the first half
of Sonnet 114 as the speaker continues to examine the possibility that
his love for the friend has distorted the workings of his mind,
teaching it "To make of monsters, and things indigest / Such cherubims
as your sweet resemble, / Creating every bad a perfect best" (5—7).
But while he frames his dilemma in terms of the mind/eye conflict --
an opposition which will be important in the dark lady poems -— he
does not follow through. Instead, producing what Stephen Booth calls
an "intellectual confection,"15 he plays games with his argument,
manipulating its premises sophistically. As Booth says, the ending is
"frivolous" in its "intellectual ingenuity."16 Complacent in his
cleverness, the spaeker backs away from the issues raised in Sonnet
113.

While he does not reconsider the connection between epistemology
and ethics in the sonnets to the friend, he does, in Sonnet 121,
reverse the position adopted in 112, revise his view of subjectivity,

and redefine what Giorgio Melchiori calls the "ethics of social

 

vI.I.,..Hv.\l . I A ...............1.....I. . - I.

127

behavior."17 Whatever one thinks of the aesthetic qualities of

Sonnets 119 and 120 —— Stephen Spender refers to the latter as
"doggerel"18 —- their "plot" links them to the aesthetically more
satisfying 110 and 111. In both pairs, the speaker is preoccupied with
guilt, with a strong sense of personal inadequacy or wrongdoing. Both
are exaggerated,emotionallyand verbally; the fulsome praise of the
first gives way to the effusive apologies of the second. More
important, though, is the difference in the way these feelings are
resolved: seeking pity and reassurance in the former pair, the speaker
is led, in 112, to place himself in the friend's orbit, to deny an
independent self as he denies the value of the outside world. Overcome
with recriminations and contrition in the latter pair, he ends in 121
by denying the importance of just about everything but himself.

While less opaque than 94, Sonnet 121 ("'Tis better to be vile
than vile esteemed") is a difficult poem whose complexities —— tonal
as well as syntactical —- are beyond the scope of this essay. It is,
however, fair to say that its speaker reasserts an ethical center in
himself, an independence, which he denied in 112, and that he
reappraises his relations with his society and its judgments. What is
difficult to decide is whether Sonnet 121's self-assertion represents
an advance in self—knowledge, a growth in‘hnsight from 112, or whether
the speaker simply oscillates between two unsatisfactory extremes ——
"You are my all the world" and "No, I am that I am." Hilton Landry
argues at length for the first view, describing as "moderate and

. . . 1
relative" the speaker's famous "declaration of independence." 9

 

 

128

But G. Wilson Knight thinks the speaker believes himself to be beyond
good and evil, and Stephen Booth insists that the "unmistakable"
Biblical echo in the phrase "I am that I am" makes the speaker sound
"smug, presumptuous and stupid."20 Melchiori's precise, extended
analysis is probably the most skillfully balanced: in his view, the
speaker opposes his individual personality to "the corrupt social
world that judges by perverted standards," but his individualism does
not provide a viable alternative; instead, it generates the
"uneasiness" of the third quatrain and the "Machiavellian" hypothesis
of the couplet.21 Structurally, the poem moves parabolically "from
an ambiguous statement through a shrill affirmation to an open doubt .
. in the octave it exposes and clears away the confusion between
social and ethical values; in the sestet it restates the
contradictions and tensions met in the attempt to reconcile the social
and ethical spheres."22
Melchiori's careful (and ultimately inconclusive) analysis of
this sonnet's contrapuntal ambiguities should deflect facile readings.
What counts here, however, is not settling on a preferred
interpretation but being sensitive to the speaker's continuing
preoccupations —- to his sense of the continuing and confusing
interplay between the self, the social world, and the ethical sphere.
Melchiori's suspicion that Sonnet 121"s "world of subjective reality
is by no means untainted"23 applies equally well to the dark lady
poems, which are informed by an extended and underlying conflict

between what others think and what the speaker thinks and feels —- a

 

 

 

 

129

reformulation of the mind/eye antithesis of Sonnet 113. Here, the
presence of the external world makes itself felt not in references to
the gifts of fortune, as in the compensatory sonnets to the friend,
but in matters of judgment —— as it does in 121 and as it fails to do
in 112.

In the dark lady poems, the speaker backs away from assertions
like "You are my all the world" as well as from its opposite, "No, I
am that I am." Instead, he struggles against and moves away from the
private judgments and subjective valuations of the poems to the young
man. In the latter group, the world makes itself felt as a system of
values, opinions, convictions, judgments held by others which are
antithetical to his own, but which he comes to endorse; the focus then
falls not merely on the content of a given judgment but on the factors
which inhibit its implementation.

Philip Edwards finds a "continuous play in these sonnets between
fairness-beauty-virtue and darkness—ugliness—vice" and suggests there
is a "sophistical confusion between the two poles."24 But that
confusion is largely confined to the early sonnets in the dark lady
group, in which the speaker first attempts to convince himself that
the rest of the world thinks as he does, and then, finding that it
does not, seeks self-justification. In the opening sonnet, 127, his
main concern is whether or not the woman conforms to conventional
standards of beauty; he not only develops an ingenious argument about
her coloring, but reassures himself that his view is shared by others:

"every tongue says beauty should look so" (14). Even the couplet of

 

130

129 —— "All this the world well knows, yet none knows well / To shun
the heav'n that leads men to this hell" —- reveals a similar
preoccupation with the predilictions of others; it insists on the
applicability of lines 1—10 ("All this") not to the speaker in
particular but to all men in general. Reflecting upon the difference
between his own assessment of the woman and the assessments made by
others, he dismisses the applicability of conventional standards in
130 ("My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun"), but he reveals his
reluctance to dismiss or diverge from "all the world" in 131:

To say they err I dare not be so bold,

Although I swear it to myself alone.

(7-8)

His own taste leads him to redefine beauty ("Thy black is fairest in
my judgment's place") and to distinguish between physical beauty and
moral worth at the same time that he decides to be obtuse about the
implications of the distinction:

In nothing art thou black save in thy deeds,

And thence this slander as I think proceeds.
The couplet's "slander" works two ways: first, she is slandered by
those who call her appearance foul when only her deeds are foul;
second, the speaker's muddled thinking is itself slanderous. In 132,
the redefinition of beauty begun in 127 is completed as the speaker
commits himself to a new alignment of antitheses, vowing to "swear
beauty herself is black, / And all they foul that thy complexion lack"

(13—14).

 

 

131

But after two Pairs of poems dealing with different subjects (133
and 134 with the triangle, 135 and 136 with "will"), the speaker
returns in 137 to the issues skirted or treated sophistically or
playfully in sonnets like 127 and 131. He does so, however, with a
radically altered outlook. Not only does he repudiate his own previous
self-justification; he also inaugurates a process of questioning, of
backing away from the answers, of continuing to unmask, that dominates
the rest of the sequence and resonates with the echoes of Sidney's
Astrophil.

This intriguing aspect of the relationship between Sidney's
sequence and Shakespeare's dark lady sonnets seems to have gone
unnoticed. In both, the speaker is caught in a problem-ridden
relationship which causes him great unhappiness: Stella, otherwise
suitable, is unattainable; the dark lady, otherwise unsuitable, is all
too attainable. Both speakers perceive the nature of their dilemmas,
but fail to extricate themselves; their understanding does not enable
them to achieve the proper relationship between reason, will, and
appetite. Both groups of poems, grounded in the commonplaces of
Renaissance faculty psychology, focus upon the problematical
relationship between knowledge and action. Both speakers face
strikingly similar impasses as they encounter contradictions between
their expressed values and their own actions.25

The crucial differences lie not in their situations but in their
responses. Astrophil, perceiving a collision of truths, backs away

from the knowledge in the course of the sequence; his ability to

132

comprehend the significance of his words and actions is diminished as
he seeks not to understand but to justify his own behavior. In
contrast, Shakespeare's speaker, though frequently tempted by
projection, rationalization, and self—deception, confronts his
situation much more directly and gives, in sonnets like 137, 147 and
152, an increasingly accurate account of his own predicament. At the
same time, however, his knowledge does not bring with it the power to
change. Having failed to align his behavior with his judgment —— "For
I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright, / Who art as black as
hell, as dark as night" (147.13—14) —— he is not necessarily "at
random from the truth," even though that truth may be, in every sense
of the word, "vainly" expressed.26

As we have seen, Sidney takes great pains to make it abundantly
clear that Astrophil's ability in Sonnet 18 to "see [his] course to
loose [him] selfe doth bend" is, however painful, infinitely
preferable to the moral position of Sonnet 108. At the end of the
sequence, Astrophil has indeed succeeded in what he set put in Sonnet
2 to accomplish: "To make myselfe beleeve, that all is well, / While
with a feeling skill I paint my hell." Declaring in 108 that "in my
joyes for thee [is] my own annoy," he has thoroughly convinced himself
that "all is well", and no longer understands that he is self—deceived
and diminished. Throughout the sequence, Sidney invites the reader to
perceive Astrophil's failure as an individual failure —— one which is
precipitated by a series of deliberate choices, and one which could be

qualified or modified, if not entirely averted, by the proper use of

 

 

133

his faculties. Shakespeare's speaker possesses a capacity for
rationalization and self—deception that equals, if not exceeds,
Astrophil's: for every sonnet in which he unmasks his behavior, there
are others in which he engages in a "willing" diminution, even
debasement, of self; in which he denies the implications of his
behavior as well as the responsibility for it; and in which he
attempts to conceal from himself his own complicity in "fairing the
foul." At the same time, however, the thrust of these poems is a
relentless thrust to kppp —— to pull back from the deception of the
self, of ideas, even of words —— and to apply the full range of his
faculties to the comprehension and articulation of hs predicament. If
he fails to extricate himself, it is not because he has failed to
think clearly. At crucial moments the sonnets reveal a speaker whose
understanding of his situation increases at the same time that his
relationship with the dark lady exacts a greater cost, and whose
ability to examine the implications of his own behavior is augmented
at the same time that heperceiveslfiessituation to be hopeless.

Look, for example, at Sonnet 137. Where Astrophil ends with the
discovery of an impasse, a contradiction, Shakespeare's speaker begins
with it:

Thou blind fool love, what dost thou to my eyes,
That they behold and see not what they see?
They know what beauty is, see where it lies,
Yet what the best is take the worst to be.
The questions which follow are unanswerable, but instead of using the

couplet to dismiss them, he uses it to reinforce them; instead of

 

134

undercutting his own earlier insights, as Astrophil does, he ends by
stating them more plainly than before and shifting responsibility from
a personified force ("Thou blind fool love") to himself:

In things right true my heart and eyes have erred,

And to this false plague are they now transferred.
Instead of insisting on his own powerlessness, he exercises his
capacity for accurate observation in documenting the distortions of
his own judgment. It is_hi§ eyes and heart, after all, which have
erred, and the couplet underscores his ability to be truthful about
his own ability to lie. Moreover, the anger that he directs at himself
in this poem emerges from the almost buoyant celebration of his
mistress's promsicuity and his own exuberant sexuality in the "will"
poems preceding it —— "The sea. all water, yet receives rain still."
Even more remarkably, perhaps, Sonnet 137's anger is transmuted into
the more tolerant appraisal of Sonnet 138, which genially advocates
mutual acceptance of mutual deceit.

The pattern governing Sonnet 137 is even more pronounced in
Sonnets 147 and 152. The shift from 146 ("Poor soul") to 147 marks a
major turning point. One critic, Philip Edwards, finds in 146 "hints
of tragedy in that a man should know what this poem knows and yet be
unable to avail himself of what the poem offers",28 but the
analysis of the relation between body and soul that occurs in this
poem does have a direct impact upon what follows. What happens next is
the speaker looks —— with greater intensity than before -- at what is

rather than what perhaps should be. In contrast to the poems which

135

follow it, Sonnet 147 is all direct statement: its powers of
observation, description, and analysis are acute; its language is
unadorned; even its metaphors are, as Stephen Booth puts it,
"efficient."29 In this poem the speaker begins to experience fully
and openly the despair which he fears in Sonnet 140 and to which he
alludes in 144. Contrary to his expectations, however, it emerges not
from madness or confusion but from clarity of vision and accuracy of
observation. On one level, his despair is caused by the discrepancy
between knowledge and action: reason, which should cure him of
self-destructive love -- a "disease" —- has not been acted upon, and
has therefore abandoned him; as a result, he is "past cure." On
another level, however, he is just as concerned with his "thoughts"
and "discourses —— how truthfully they are "expressed" —— as he is
with other forms of action. The couplet, which will be reworked in
Sonnet 152, attempts to achieve accuracy.

After the discoveries of Sonnet 147, the downward spiral of
Sonnets 148-51 seems inevitable. In 148, certain of nothing but
uncertainty, the speaker begins to suspect that the condition of
loving is in itself blinding; that it may, almost by definition, lead
to a compromised judgment and loss of integrity; and that what is
happening to him, and why, are beyond the limits of his understanding.
Recognition of that potential loss of integrity is made actual and
rendered dramatically in Sonnet 149: the questions that were
unanswerable before have become rhetorical now, as he offers his

debased submission to her as proof of his love. The mood changes

136

subtly in Sonnet 150, although the questions continue. Disgusted by
his own loss of autonomy and integrity, he asks:

Whence hast thou this becoming of things ill,

That in the very refuse of thy deeds

There is strength and warrantise of skill,

That, in my mind, thy worse all best exceeds?

(5-8)

His bitterness intensifies as his blindness lifts and his ability to
distinguish what is real from what is illusory returns; the retreat
into confusion is no longer viable, and he once again recognizes that
the crux of the problem is not his inability to see clearly but his
inability to align his feelings with what he sees. Knowing that he can

' all he can do is to deny his

"hear and see just cause of hate,'
"better part" in a twisted appeal for reciprocity based on a
self—destructive hatred of himself and her. Sonnet 151, despite its
preoccupation with conscience, acts out the couplet of its
predecessor.

Sonnet 152, however, admits and encompasses the facts that give
rise to irresolution, abdication of resonsibility, self—debasement,
and appeasement in its immediate predecessors; and it recycles the
despair of Sonnet 147 from which the speaker subsequently recoiled.
The self—destructive bitterness of his appeal for reciprocity in
Sonnet 151 is neutralized here as he reaches toward mutuality and
acknowledges the breadth and depth of his own complicity —— "But why

of two oaths' breach do I accuse thee, / When I break twenty?" -— at

the same time that he continues to love. Just as the speaker reworks

 

137

the couplet of Sonnet 147 in the interests of greater accuracy, he
reworks his formulation of the problem. He says, in effect, "I have
nothing to accuse you of because I have 'sworn deep oaths' that you
are true, kind, and loving —- all of which are 'foul lies.' " He
knows, however, precisely what he has done to land in this state of
perjury. The new couplet —- "For I have sworn thee fair: more perjured
eye, / To swear against the truth so foul a lie" -— marks a shift from
a psychological formulation to an ethical one. Unlike AstrQPhil,.Wh0
shifts all sovereignty and power to Stella in Sonnet 107,
Shakespeare's speaker here wrests sovereignty and responsiblity from
the dark lady. Where he previously blamed her, he now blames himself.
No longer taking refuge in the mistaken belief that he is mad, he
affirms his autonomy as well as culpability. He does so, moreover,
without falling prey to the subjectivity and solipsism that accompany
such efforts in the first part of the sequence.

To be sure, the understanding that the speaker achieves is
incomplete; no one is suggesting that he wins through to a
self-knowledge which is transforming. There is, throughout, a great
deal of projection -- a recurrent temptation to lash out at the woman
and condemn her for what he cannot accept in himself. Aside from
misgivings about her appearance, what he complains about the most is
her sexual activity, her promiscuity (he describes her in 137 as "the
bay where all men ride" and "the wide world's common place"). But the
truth is that he refuses to see her in any other terms. On the one

occassion when she is involved in a sexually neutral activity -—

 

138

playing a musical instrument -- he redefines it in terms of his own
preccupations; he envies the keys which "kiss" her hand instead of his
own "poor lips, which should that harvest reap," but which stand
blushing at the wood's "boldness." Moreover, he blatantly applies a
double standard to her liaison with his friend, prompting at least one
critic to observe that the morality of an act in these sonnets seems
to depend upon the gender of the person performing it.30 In the
speaker's rationalized formulation, the friend's affair with the dark
lady is the product of an odd blend of passivity and seflessness: "He
learned but surety—like to write for me, / Under that bond that him as
fast doth bind"; he is one who "came debtor for my sake" (133.7—8,11).
The woman, in contrast, is "covetous," a "usurer." As Linda Bamber
says of the mature tragedies, "there is a firm connection between
self—hatred, reversal of fortune, and misogyny. The hero's view of
women reaches bottom at the moment when he is out of control of
himself and his world; women are whores to men when it is no longer
possible for men to reconcile themselves to what they are."31
At times, the untenability of his proposition overwhelms and
disgusts him. In sonnets like 150, 151 and —— it must be said —- 146,
he seeks easy explanations by postulating a dichotomy between body and
soul: in the former two, he annihilates his soul -— his "nobler part"
—— to appease his body; in the latter, he speaks of annihilating his
body to appease his soul. In his View, his body and soul do not
coexist harmoniously but are anatagonists; it is a question of which

will destroy the other.

139

Frequently, he is anguished by his inability to perceive
correctly, to see as others do, to assign the proper value to what he
sees. When he does begin to see clearly —— to see, for example, that
he is "longing still / For that which longer nurseth the disease"
(147.1—2), he is appalled and repelled by the sight and attributes it
to the workings of a diseased mind, a distorted imagination.
Occassionally, he seems almost obsessed with the disjunction between
mind and eye, heart and eye: "How can it? 0 how can love's eye be
true," he asks in 148.

There is, of course, no real resolution; but despite the impasse,
despite the tendency to retreat into self—deception and/or
self-annihilation, there is an unmistakeable counter—pull to discard
sophistical confusions and self—justifications, to discard the
temporarily reassuring notion that unpleasant truths are the product
of derangement, to accept —— if not fully to understand —— the
implications of blindness and loss of judgment.Paradoxically, the
metaphorical blindness he experiences propels him into a new kind of
sight. As Leishman observes in passing, illusion is loved, even
cultivated, in the sonnets to the young man; in those to the dark
lady, it is hated.33

A recent article about these sonnets refers to the speaker as a
"man descending a staircase,"34 yet even a backward glance at
Asrophil suggests, by contrast, the inaccuracy of this
characterization. Where Astrophil ends by backing away from the

implications of his actions and denying the full use of his faculties,

140

Shakespeare's speaker does just the reverse. The clarity with which he
thinks and sees at crucial moments does not enable him to stop loving
or resolve the impasse at which he finds himself, but it does invest
him with considerable understanding and with the ability to give an
accurate accounting. Where Astrophil is enervated by his perception of
the gap between knowledge and action and is reduced to feeling only
"annoy," Shakespeare's speaker, in what is almost a gloss on the words
and thoughts of his predecessor, comes to discover complexity as well
as complicity. There are, it seems, aspects of the dark lady sonnets
which are not all that dark.

What of the final impasse —— the speaker's inability to move
beyond recognition to action? The contradiction which Shakespeare
explores here is one which preoccupied his predecessors as well.
Wyatt, beginning with the simple cataloguing of Petrarchan contraries
in poems like "I fynde no peace and all my warr is done," found an
explosive potential in such antitheses, manipulating them to reveal
the motions of a mind divided against itself, unable to act according
to the dictates of reason, unable to translate rational inference into

" for example, the speaker watches

action. In "Som fowles there be,
himself helplessly as he self—destructs, unable, apparently, to stop
himself. Ironically, the animals to whom he compares himself behave
more rationally (certainly more prudently) than he does, yet in the
chain of being which formed the basis of Renaissance psychology, human

beings surpass animals precisely because of their rational faculty.

Wyatt's poem does not hint at distorted thinking or muddled

141

priorities; the speaker's analysis is lucid and his mind clear; but
rational people simply do not destroy themselves —— and he does. In an
age when sapientia was increasingly identified with prudentia, when a
wise person was increasingly one who could incorporate knowledge into
lived experience, the impasse which Wyatt describes was unacceptable
and inexplicable. Wyatt pursues the subject as far as possible within
the sonnet itself, taking advantage of its form to render its
paradoxes psychologically; he explores but does not explain, and the
investigation ends with the poem.

His heirs, however, make that impasse the focal point of their
sonnet sequences. Sidney's Astrophil, as we have seen, refuses to
recognize the impasse as such and retreats from the complexity that
such a recognition would entail. At the end of the sequence, he is not
divided against himself -— as he is earlier and as Wyatt's speaker is
in "I fynd no peace" and "Som fowles there be" —— because he has taken
the easy way out and closed his mind to complexity. There is no gap
between knowledge and action at the end of Astrophil and Stella simply
because the protagonist's knowledge has shrunk to fit the scope of his
action, as his creator makes clear. Sidney's treatment differs from
Wyatt's in.cumaimportantzrespect: he links Astrophil's state to the

" to his refusal to

misuse of his faculties -- to his "infected will,
apply his reason to his predicament. As a result, the impasse at which
Astrophil finds himself is not inexplicable, not something that

results from a fundamental paradox in human nature. It is, instead,

something comprehensible, something which a less complacent person

 

 
 

142

might have managed to avoid. Presented in the sequence as the result
of willed stupidity, it would, presumably, yield to intelligence.
Shakespeare's speaker, more like Wyatt's than Sidney's, finds himself
at an impasse which does not yield to reason or to psychological
explanation, which hints at something intractable, something
potentially tragic, in his nature or in the nature of human
relationships. Like Montaigne, Shakespeare suspected that knowledge
does not necessarily have the power to make people happy or

good.35

In his recent study, The Playwright as Magician- Alvin Kernan

 

says that the poems to the dark lady "create a growing sense of
complexity, relativity, the intermixture of good and evil, the
simultaneous existence of logical opposites, which are central to the
dramatic conception of life. The young man and the Dark Lady are not
only characters but symbols as well of two views of life, and two

"36 Hallett Smith, however, believes that the world

kinds of art.
intruding in the dark lady sonnets is "one of disorder," full of the
breaking of vows and oaths, which are "the compacts of a stable
world."37 But what if that stability is illusory, as it is in the
first part of the sequence? Kernan's description seems closer to the
truth: while his characterization of the dark lady as the "Muse of
theater" may be somewhat fanciful, his characterization of the
experience of these poems —- the experience of complexity, relativity,

ambiguity —— is not.38 What Kernan describes is precisely what the

speaker must come to terms with.

 

 

 

"This man hath trauail'd well":
Jonson's Ambivalence toward Inclusive Experience

In his second epigram to William Roe, one of his best known and
most perfectly balanced poems, Jonson examines the ability of the
"centered" or "gathered" self to assimilate broad experience;1 but
he also raises questions about the nature of that experience which

remain unanswered:

Roe (and my joy to name) th'art now, to goe
Countries, and climes, manners, and men to know,
T<o>'extract, and choose the best of all these knowne,
And those to turne to bloud, and make thine owne:
May windes as soft as breath of kissing friends,
Attend thee hence; and there, may all thy ends
As the beginnings, here, proue purely sweet,
And perfect in a circle always meet.
So, when we, blast with thy returne, shall see
Thy selfe, with thy first thoughts, brought home by thee,
We each to other may this voice enspire;
This is that good AENEAS, past through fire,
Through seas, stormes, tempests: and imbarqu'd for hell,
Came backe vntouch'd. This man hath trauail'd well. 2
(CXXVIII)

Quite plainly, Roe is urged to "turn to bloud" the best of his new
experiences —— to incorporate them so thoroughly that they are
indistinguishable from his former self, to assimilate the best of what
he sees but to remain untouched, unchanged; and he is sent on his way
with the generous wish that the entire journey will prove as "sweet" as
its beginning, not with the warning that the course he is embarking on

is dangerous or that the knowledge he will acquire is threatening. The

belief that he will have endured a risky and frightening exposure

143

 

 

 

144

belongs to those who stay behind. In this sense, then, the epigram is
less paradoxical than it first appears. Even though the speaker includes
himself among those who will ultimately believe Roe to have come back
"untouched" -— the "we" of lines 9 and 11 -- lines 3 and 4 indicate that
the opposite will be true. Roe is reminded that his goal is to absorb
new experiences without altering his own nature —— without abandoning
his "first thoughts" in the "contentious surf of new experience," as
Wesley Trimpi puts it3 —- so that he will appear unchanged. Thus,
the poem turns on the familiar Jonsonian tension between circumference
and center (both must be present to complete a circle, and an
uncompleted journey would result in an incomplete circumference).4
The challenge Roe faces, then, is to maintain a balance between
centrifugal and centripetal tendencies, between the business of
inscribing the circle on one hand and retaining the proper center on the
other; and Jonson compliments him when he assumes his friend's success.
But even Jonson's celebrated preoccupation with the need to
equilibrate centrifugal and centripetal forces does not explain how the
interesting but unexceptionable things of this world —— "countries, and
climes, manners, and men" -— can become the "fire" and "hell" of lines
12 and 13, or how the benevolent "windes as soft as breath of kissing
friends" can turn into "seas, stormes, tempests." Nor does it account
for the travail/travel wordplay in the last line.5 Trimpi believes
the poem suggests that "knowledge is a risk," and that knowledge which
is "particularly rare and powerful is dangerous; men have gone to hell

for it and will again,"6 but that is not what the poem says: Roe is

 

 

145

setting out to see the world, not to brave the underworld. What accounts
for this contradictory shift in perspective, and for the sense of danger
emphasized in the last three lines? Is Roe a young man of discriminating
taste about to begin a prototypal grand tour, or is he a budding epic
hero? Will Roe's character be determined by his ability to absorb or
resist new knowledge, new experiences? Is he, in fact, about to acquire
a broad knowledge of the world, or a carefully selected extraction or
distillation of its most attractive offerings? Is it really possible to
absorb new elements into one's blood and yet remain "vntouch'd"? Why,
above all, does the speaker, who spends eight lines stressing the
potentially benevolent aspects of Roe's journey, adopt the view of those
who consider it perilous? If he wished to suggest that Roe's
stay—at—home friends were likely to exaggerate the dangers of the
unknown, he could easily have done so by changing the "we" to "they" or

' and disassociated himself from their concern, but

"your other friends,'
he includes himself among the ambivalent. Whether Jonson believes that
Roe is about to go to hell and back or on the adventure of a lifetime,
whether Roe will come back untouched, and why Jonson numbers himself, in
the end, among those who see what they hope will be a pleasant, fruitful
journey as a "travail" —- whether, in short, the world is hospitable or
hostile —— are questions that this poem asks but does not answer. What
they reveal is an underlying contradiction that pervades Jonson's verse.
On one hand, he emerges as a man of letters at home in the world,

concerned with developing a style suited for writing about the behavior

of real people; entering the world of his poetry is, as one critic puts

146

it, like "squeezing one's way to the rear of a crowded bus on a cold
wet winter's dusk."7 On the other hand, what Jonson feels about
riding crowded busses on cold wet days is distaste. On one hand, he
writes poems in which "life crowds in at every line"; on the other, he
creates a world "in which virtue and vice assume ideal forms."8 On
one hand, he consciously broadens the subject matter of poetry,
writing about everyday events and rejecting topics remote from actual
experience; on the other, he writes as an observer of others —- as a
judge deciding whom to acquit and whom to indict —— rather than as a
participant. He commends some friends for their worldliness, others
for their innocence. The aesthetic, ethical, and epistemological
foundations of his thought encourage the cultivation of a sense of
discovery, a commitment to experience; yet he begins the Cary-Morison
ode with the bizarre story of the Infant of Saguntum who, half-born,
takes a long look at the ugly, ransacked world he is about to enter,
and decides to turn around —— the "Wise child" who "didst hastily
returne, / And mad'st thy Mothers wombe thine urne"(7—8).

Moreover, while the epigram to Roe invites us to view Roe's
prospective journey from competing and contradictory points of view,
such a dual perspective is the exception, not the rule, in Jonson's
verse; on balance, he is unwilling to entertain the notion that ducks
can look like rabbits.9 Except for the epigram to Roe, he seems
unaware that he advocates mutually exclusive positions. Nor can these
contradictions be explained in terms of the centered self, as we have

seen: as the reactions of Roe's friends indicate, whether the world

 

 

147

proves hospitable or hostile depends not just on one's ability to
balance center and circumference, but on other factors which frequently
remain unidentified and elusive. In some poems, the world about which he
writes is hospitable if not actually benevolent; in it, the poet, like
other intelligent people, finds a comfortable home, and poetry itself
plays a significant role in human society. Other poems suggest
unequivocally that life is a state of siege rather than a series of
discoveries: the world is inherently dangerous, hostile to virtue; in
it, the poet, like other virtuous figures, is embattled and beleaguered,
if not actually despised.

Occasionally, Jonson endorses an attitude to human experience and
human society that is inclusive and even exuberant. In such poems, he
praises people for being good historians, writers about public affairs,
and public officials, and links their ability to fill these roles to
their support of or achievement in literary or other artistic fields. He
commends friends like Weston for having studied "the arts of life";
Savile for producing a translation of Tacitus that is informed by his
knowledge of the world; and Selden (whose wit can be bounded by "Nothing
but the round / Large clasp of Nature") for his active and productive
historical curiosity -— for qualities, in short, to which Jonson commits

H

himself in the Discoveries, where he describes wisdom as the

 

observation, knowledge, and use of things"; "sense," he maintains, "is

wrought out of experience, the knowledge of humane life, and
. 1 . . . . . . .
actions." 0 His admiration for Bacon's empir1c1sm is well known, but

he also celebrates in verse the mental agility of scholars like Selden

 

 

 

148

and Camden and Savile —— people who possess the qualities praised in the

Discoveries -- and endorses their energetic investigation and

 

understanding of contemporary experience as well as of past history.
"What skill, what faith thou hast in things! / What sight in searching
the most antique springs!" he says in an epigram to William Camden,
uniting admiration for his former teacher's antiquarian knowledge itself
with admiration for his confidence and diligence in pursuing it.

His most enthusiastic praise is directed to Selden, the jurist and

antiquarian, whom Jonson commends —- in a metaphor echoing the epigram
to Roe —— for having traveled broadly in his mind without having left
England:

Stand forth my Object, then you that have beene

Ever at home: yet have all Countries seene:

And like a Compasse keeping one foot still

Upon your Center, doe your Circle fill

Of generall knowledge;

(Und. XIV, 29-33)

But he also praises Selden's knowledge of human behavior in a way that
links perceptive observation of the present to knowledge of the past:
Selden has

watch'd men, manners too,
Heard what times past have said, seene what ours doe:

(33—34)
In just a few lines, Selden emerges as a man of letters who is as much
at home in the world as he is among his books. His scholarly activities
are not separated from the rest of his life; rather, the knowledge he

derives from the former seems part of his experience of the world, part

 

149

of his urbanity: in Jonson's colloquial idiom, "hearing" about the past
—- a casual, informal kind of activity —— is not all that different from
"seeing" what occurs in the present. Moreover, Selden's scholarship
itself is generous and inclusive as well as tenacious, as the following
lines make clear:

Which Grace shall I make love too first? your skill

Or faith in things? or is't your wealth and will

T<o> 'instruct and teach? or your unweary'd paine

Of Gathering? Bountie' in pouring out againe?

(35-38)

These values, in turn, are linked to what Jonson perceives as a
rigorous historical methodology: not only do Selden's confident
empiricism and painstaking investigations ferret out mistaken
assumptions about the past; his curiosity and energy also lead him to
fresh perceptions and "Innovations":

What fables have you vext! what truth redeem'd!
Antiquities search'd! Opinions dis—esteem'd!
Impostures branded! And Authorities urg'd!

What blots and errours, have you watch'd and purg'd
Records, and Authors of! how rectified,

Times, manners, customes! Innovations spide!

Sought out the Fountaines, Sources, Creekes, paths, wayes,
And noted the beginnings and decayes!

(39-46)
Jonson's poem was prefixed to Selden's Titles of Honour, published in
1614; and he concludes, after celebrating Selden's style, by praising
him for dedicating that volume not to an influential patron, but to a
friend and fellow scholar, Edward Hayward, who has "wrought / In the

same Mines of knowledge" and can therefore appreciate the true value of

150

Selden's achievement.
Throughout this epistle, Jonson praises Selden in a manner which is
neither short nor obscure:
I yeeld, I yeeld, the matter of your praise

Flowes in upon me, and I cannot raise

A banke against it. Nothing but the round

Large clasp of Nature, such a wit can bound,

(61—64)

he insists. In his recent study, Imitation and Praise in the Poems of

Ben Jonson,.Richard Peterson calls attention to the way in which Jonson

"11

 

"traces out ideals applicable simultaneously to life and to art.
Peterson's concern is with Jonson's "distinctive brand of imitatio, that
process of judicious gathering in, assimilation, and transformation or
turning whereby a good writer, and by extension a good man, shapes an
original and coherent work of art or a virtuous life";12 and the

lines to Selden celebrate an analogous achievement -— one which is is
historiographic rather than literary, but which represents to Jonson
many of the same values conferred by art.

The claims Jonson makes for Sir Henry Savile, whose translation of
Tacitus he admired, are more modest. He commends Savile's masterly
"merit" in filling gaps in the manuscript, but also praises him for
turning to the writing of history rather than claiming the place "at the
helme" to which his knowledge entitles him:

Although to write be lesser then to doo
It is the next deed, and a great one too.
We need a man that knowes the seuerall graces

Of historie, and how to apt their places,
Where breuitie, where splendor, and where height,

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Where sweetnesse is requir'd, and where weight;
We need a man, can speke of the intents,
The councells, actions, orders, and events
Of state, and censure them: we need his pen
Can write the things, the causes, and the men.
(Epi: XCV,25—34)
In Savile's case as in Selden's, a person must have knowledge of the
world as well as of style and scholarship to "write the things, the
causes, and the men."13 But while Jonson commends Savile for having
written well about the past, he also urges him to write about the
present —- to turn his talents to current English history. Savile is
fitted for this task, Jonson suggests, because his scholarly and
literary skills are supplemented by two other crucial qualities:
integrity and independence. Having decided "wisely" not to put himself
forward politically but to remain free from "faction," Savile is said to
be "so cleere of present crimes" that he "need'st not shrink at voyce of
after—times." Here, Jonson suggests that Savile's scholarly impartiality
would be compromised by partisan activity, not that that scholarly and
political activities are inherently incompatible. Rather, he insists
that the contemporary historian must master the raw materials of
history: one cannot "censure" the "events / Of State" without detailed
knowledge of the "intents" and "councells, actions, orders" that
comprise them.
Almost as explicitly as the epistle to Selden, Jonson's epigram to
Weston conflates artistic achievement with achievement in more mundane

spheres. As a compliment to England's Lord Treasurer, Jonson outlines

the artifacts he wishes he could offer as gifts:

 

   

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If to my mind, great Lord, I had a state,
I would present you now with curious plate
Of Noremberg, or Turkie; hang your roomes
Not with the Arras, but the Persian Loomes.
I would, if price, or prayer could them get,
Send in, what or Romano, Tintoret,
Titian, or Raphael, Michael Angelo,
Have left in fame to equall, or out—goe

The old Greek-hands in picture, or in stone.
(Und. LXXVII, 1—9)

 

But Weston, who was well known as a connoisseur, collector, and
shaper of Caroline taste, not only can "Discerne betweene a Statue, and
a Man," Jonson continues; he can also "Doe the things that Statues doe
deserve, / And act the businesse, which they paint, or carve" (14—16).
Jonson claims, in short, that the exemplary behavior represented in the
visual arts can be found in public life.

What you have studied are the arts of life;
To compose men, and manners; stint the strife
Of murmuring subjects; make the Nations know
What worlds of blessings to good kings they owe,
(17-20)
he decides, implicitly equating the fine arts with the very practical
art of governing well (or at least of minimizing the recalcitrance of
Charles I's "murmuring Subjects"). Jonson does not praise Weston's
learning as he does Savile's and Selden's, but he does suggest
unequivocally that Weston's application of the "arts of life" is of
inherent value.
Indeed, the equation of learning and doing in all three of these

poems is remarkable: it indicates a view of the world -- and a faith in

the possibility of civilized, educated people taking virtuous, humane

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action —— that is not troubled by the misgivings entering the last lines
of the epigram to William Roe. Other poems focus less on the application
of intellectual or imaginative gifts to the "arts of life" and more on
the intrinsic importance of action and the proper use of time. "When
nature bids us leave to live, 'tis late / Then to begin," Jonson warns
in another epigram to William Roe (LXX.1-2): "Each best day of our life
escapes us, first" (6). Similarly, the birthday ode to William Sidney
(E95. 14) indicates that private virtue -- being round within one's self
and straight —— is insufficient. The young man is cautioned against

"standing still" as well as "running wrong,"

and is urged not to rest on
the repute of his family name but to seek achievements in his own right:
"And he that stayes / To live untill to morrow' hath lost two dayes"
(49—50).

Like the birthday ode, the Cary-Morison ode (Upd. 70) stresses the
importance of using time well —- a feat Jonson attributes to Henry
Morison, who died at twenty but lived a full and exemplary life as

friend, son, statesman, and soldier; "got the harvest in" early (128);

and demonstrated that life could be "perfect" in "short measures" (74).

H H

Insisting that a person's life should be evaluated by the act, not the
"space," Jonson contrasts Morison's short but effective span of twenty
years with the long but miserable lives of two aging figures —— the
eighty—year—old Stirrer and the poet/dramatist-speaker: "life doth her
great actions spell, / By what was done and wrought / In season"

(59—61).

Still another group of poems focuses specifically on the suitability

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of poetry itself for conducting the business of life. By demonstration
and assertion as well as by conviction, Jonson insists on his role as a
lyric poet who is also, as Alexander Leggatt puts it, "a man among men,
part of a community."14 How the poet functions in his society, how

he helps to bring about its proper ordering, and whether eloquence will
be used for the right ends are questions which occupy Jonson throughout
his career. In fact, he is so preoccupied with his poetic identity that

almost a fourth of the Epigrammes and a third of The Forrest, let alone

 

 

a large number of poems in Underwood, have a self—conscious
poet—speaker. But what is most important is neither their number nor the
claims they make for the power of poetry or the role of the poet. What
is important is their ordinariness. In them, Jonson writes about poetry
as matter-of—factly as he writes about everything else —- in the style,
as his friend Francis Beaumont puts it, "which men / send Cheese to
towns with."15 He writes as if poetry were part of what can only be
called everyday life because of his conviction that poetry should be and
‘ggp be part of everyday life.16

Look, for example, at the handful of short poems which open the

Epigrammes: "To The Reader," "To My Booke," and "To My Booke—Seller"

 

establish a context which is at once self-referential, social, and
generic: in Epigram IX, Jonson announces his intention to write as poet,
not as herald; and the very brief X -— "Thou call'st me Ppgp, as a terme
of shame: / But I haue my reuenge made, in thy name" -— gives us a
foretaste of what that decision implies. And so it goes: his dead son

becomes his "best piece of poetrie"; Lucy, the Countess of Bedford, the

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"rare friend" asked for by "rare poems"; Lord Aubigny, the generous
patron.
Poems whose subject matter is confined to the topic of poetry are

rare, but include three in The Forrest -- "Why I Write Not of Love," the

 

untitled X ("And must I sing? what subject shall I choose?"), and "To

Elizabeth Countesse of Rutland" —— as well as Underwood's "A Fit of Rime

 

Against Rime" and "An Execration upon Vulcan." All but the epistle to
Elizabeth, which defends poetry's eternizing power and laments the low
regard in which it is currently held, underscore Jonson's commitment to
write poems which deal authentically with human experience, which avoid
stylistic and rhetorical artifice, and which reject stale, trite,
remote, or unsavory mythological subjects. He does not write love
poetry, he explains, because Cupid, who cannot be "fettered" by poets,
"Into my ri'mes could ne're be got / By any arte" (Egg. I,9—10); and he
accuses rhyme itself of distorting the experience it seeks to describe
—- "Cosening Judgement with a measure, / But false weight. / Wresting
words, from their true calling" (Egg. XXIX,5—8) —— though he does so in
rhyme. In the diatribe against Vulcan, he argues that the blaze which
destroyed his own house, books, and manuscripts was misdirected, and
that Vulcan's target really should have been the kind of writing Jonson
himself disparaged —— not just the popular pamphlet literature and "The
whole summe / Of errant Knight—hood, with the<ir> Dames, and Dwarfes, /
The<ir> charmed Boates, and the<ir> inchanted Wharfes," but also "the
strong lines, that soe the time doe catch" (Upd; XLIII,66—68,78) are

included in the trash to be burned:

156

These, had'st thou pleas'd either to dine, or sup,
Had made a meale for Vulcan to lick up.

(83—84)

More common are poems in which Jonson intersperses treatment of a
specific topic -— a friend, a complaint, an event -- with comments on
poetry or on his own concerns as a poet. "My Answer. The Poet to the
Painter," Jonson's response to William Burlase, is typical of this
approach: it uses the poem itself to emphasize the way in which a poem
can be a means of celebrating and even cementing a friendship; good
friends, like good writers, do not need the "flatt'ring Colours" of
rhetoric. It ends:

But, you are he can paint; I can but write:

A Poet hath no more but black and white,

Ne knowes he flatt'ring Colours, or false light.
Yet when of friendship I would draw the face,

A letter'd mind, and a large heart would place
To all posteritie; I will write Burlase,

(Und. LII,19-24)

In Epigramme CI, "Inviting a Friend to Supper," Jonson not only
uses the poem as an invitation to supper; in his hands, it becomes a
social occasion in itself, as he offers to share with a friend choice
morsels of Latin writers:

How so ere, my man
Shall reade a piece of Virgil, Tacitus
Livie, or of some better booke to us,

Of which wee'll speake our minds, amidst our meate;
And Ile professe no verses to repeate.

 

(20-23)

The poem subtly insists that literature is a customary part of a special

 

 

 

157

meal, a necessary part of civilized life —- and that the friend will
understand and share that belief. At least one critic has stressed the
fragile nature of the projected event —- "the host has to work against a
tight budget [and] his own tendency to egotism"18 -- but surely the
speaker's tone is confident, not tentative. He is inviting a friend to a
very real dinner that very night, not wistfully anticipating a future
possibility that is merely "wished-for." He knows exactly what he will
and will not be able to provide; he acknowledges his own tendency to
exaggerate; he sees that he mustn't mar the occasion by getting carried
away with the wish to recite his own lyrics. Jonson invites his friend
to share a civilized occasion in which poetry plays a recognized role at
the same time that he offers a realistic appraisal of himself and his
own resources.

Like the epigram, "An Epistle answering to one that asked to be
sealed of the tribe of Ben" (End, XLVII) affirms friendships based on
shared values, and implies the existence of a world in which generous
human relationships are possible and genuine bonds exist. In this poem,
however, the recipient is also an intimate to whom Jonson confides his
thoughts about himself:

Well, with mine owne fraile Pitcher, what to doe
I have decreed; keepe it from waves, and presse;

Lest it be justled, crack'd, made nought, or lesse:
Live to that point I will; for which I am man,

And dwell as in my Center, as I can,

Still looking too, and ever loving heaven;

With reverence using all the gifts then<ce> given.
(56-62)

In contrast to the generosity which informs Epigram C1, the

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"Epistle answering . . . ," and the tribute to Burlase, Jonson's epistle

to Drayton brutally but brilliantly insists on the impossibility of true
friendship —— even between poets —- when there are no shared standards,
no common ground, at the same time that it confidently establishes
complicity with understanding readers as it warns against the way in
which bad poetry will be misunderstood —— and accordingly misused —- by
the ignorant.

It hath been question'd, MICHAELx if I bee

A Friend at all, or if at all, to thee:
he begins, but we do not need to read as far as the following passage to
discern Jonson's private opinion of Drayton's style and subject matter,
or to figure out that Drayton would be safer in the company of admitted

enemies:

So shall our English Youth vrge on, and cry,

An Agincourt, an Agincourt’ or dye.
This booke! it is a Catechisme to fight,

And will be bought of euery Lord, and Knight,

That can but reade; who cannot, may in prose

Get broken peeces, and fight well by those. 19
(U.V.XXX,69-75)

In these poems, the poet—speaker, like the friends he admires, is
deeply involved in the world in which he lives -— engaged in the range
of social and professional activities that make up his everyday life and
provide the subject matter of his poetry. In contrast to such poems, in
which virtuous achievement and effective art are linked to a broad

knowledge of life -— to urbanity, one is almost tempted to say -- other

poems recommend retreat and retrenchment, discover dangers rather than

 

159

pleasures at every turn, and advocate a defensive response to a hostile
and ugly world. In two extreme cases —— the epistles to Sir Robert Wroth
and Katherine, Lady Aubigny -— Jonson goes so far as to commend his
addressees for disengaging themselves from a world which can only
corrupt them. Others examine the low esteem in which poetry is held,
describing a society in which the poet, like his creations, has no real

place. While several of these poems are from The Forrest -—the three

 

epistles, the epode, and the gentlewoman's farewell -— the point of view
they represent is not confined to that collection.

The opening line of the epistle to Wroth -— "How blest art thou,
canst loue the countrey, WROTH" —- suggests that not everyone is able to
share that young man's enthusiasm for rural life, but the potentially
interesting tension implicit in this point of view is never developed.
Nor is the speaker sure whether his addressee's way of life results from
"choice, or fate, or both" —- whether it results from intelligent
preference or from an accident of temperament. Wroth is congratulated
for pursuing a life free from the materialism and social climbing of
city life, which in turn is presented as hopelessly corrupt: soldiers
are guilty, lawyers dishonest; others, obsessed with seeking "place and
honour," are "glad to keepe / The secrets, that shall breake their
sleepe"(87—88). But unlike the owner of Penshurst, who manages a
productive estate, Wroth's life is composed of pleasant pastimes, not
purposeful activities: hunting, for example, is pursued more for

1

"exercise" than for "fare,' and there is no attention paid to the place

of the great house in the rural economy. Following J.C.A. Rathnell, who

160

shows the extent to which Jonson's tribute to Penshurst takes into
account the realities of the owner's financial difficulties, Leggatt
concludes that Penshurst is not "a good place in a dream, but a good

20

place in the real world." That cannot be said of Wroth's estate ——

' which compares

not, at least, from evidence in the poem. "To Penshurst,'
the Sidney family's manor not to the town but to the new vogue for
prodigy houses, stresses the way in which it functions effectively as a
center of rural economy and works for the reciprocal benefit of the
estate's dependents and owners;21 "To Sir Robert Wroth," in

contrast, concentrates on carefully regulated festivity and describes,
without irony, a world in which "Freedome doth with degree dispense"
precisely once a year, when the estate's rustics, whose "rudenesse then

' are graciously admitted to the great hall for a

is thought no sinne,’
Christmas party and treated to drink in which "their cares are drowned."
This is the setting, then, that fosters innocence: a life of harmless
but purposeless pleasure against a backdrop of care-ridden peasants
whose rough manners are tolerated only on specified formal occasions,
when they are encouraged to drink too much.22

Significantly, Jonson praises Wroth's innocence, not his active
virtue; the former does not derive from positive actions or qualities of
personal character, but depends, instead, on continued isolation from
possible sources of contamination. When Jonson says, "Striue, WROTH, to
liue long innocent," he implies that Wroth's innocence is a temporary

phenomenon, artificially maintained, and that the effort to preserve it

is bound ultimately to fail. What the poem unmistakably suggests is that

 

 

161

Wroth's innocence (its opposite seems to be guilt, not experience) will
not survive exposure to a more complex world. What is unclear, however,
is the extent to which the fault is Wroth's —— whether someone slightly
less susceptible to germs could risk exposure to the ills of urban
life.23
But no such ambiguity exists in the epistle to Lady Aubigny. If
Wroth's retirement, at least in the context of the poem, is pleasant if
narrow in scope, Lady Aubigny's decision to "decline her life" is more
like the defense of a fortress -— and it is a decision which Jonson
describes as "wise." He promises to hold up a mirror that is "subtile,
cleere, refin'd" enough to reveal not merely her physical beauty, but
"the beauties of [her] mind"; but the picture which emerges is a bleak
one:
Wherewith, then, Madame, can you better pay
This blessing of your starres, then by that way
Of vertue, which you tread? what if alone?
Without companions? 'Tis safe to haue none.
In single paths, dangers with ease are watch'd:
Contagion in the prease is soonest catch'd.
(53—58)
Even friendship is discouraged here; companions are not only a source of
possible "contagion"; they are also likely to distract her from the need
to watch out for threats. In contrast to Roe, whose exposure to "manners
and men" is at least assumed to be potentially beneficial, Lady
Aubigny's passage through the world offers no compensatory rewards.

This makes, that wisely you decline your life,
Farre from the maze of custome, error, strife,"

(59-60)

162

he continues, suggesting in his use of the word "decline" an act of
turning away from, rejecting, as well as a process of carrying out —-
declining an invitation as opposed to declining a noun.24 To live

"farre from the maze of custome, error, strife," then, is not to live at
all, in one sense.

What follows suggests that Lady Aubigny's only alternative to this
rather chilling isolation, with only her conscience for company, is to
enter the "turning world" which is "giddie with change." Lines 71-88
describe what she has rejected —- the superficial, mindless, and
sometimes vicious ways of other women, whose weakness for following

fashion is, in fact, equated with exploiting and corrupting others:

You, Madame,.yong haue learn'd to shunne these shelues,

Whereon the most of mankinde wracke themselues,
And, keeping a iust course, haue earely put
Into your harbor, and all passage shut
'Gainst stormes, or pyrats, that might charge your peace."
(89—93)
In other words, the best defense against shipwreck is not to chance the
voyage in the first place. Having exhausted the possibilities of the
nautical metaphor at this point, Jonson sensibly shifts to land ——
fruitful with trees, roots, and branches, we learn —— as he suggests
that the honor of producing Aubigny's heir will more than compensate
Katherine for the trip cut short.25
Lady Aubigny, we need to remember, was a young woman when she

married Esme in 1607, ending Jonson's five years' sojourn in his

patron's house. On what basis does one decide, at such an age, to enter

 

163

the harbor early? Although the speaker claims the power to reveal her to
herself, the analysis of entropic decadence on which he bases his
argument is the product of his thinking, not hers —— and he bases it on
his own experience and observation of the world. Wroth, similarly, is
not presented as having chosen an innocent bucolic existence after
having been frustrated or repelled by the corruption of the city or by
the limitations of professions other than that of gentleman farmer: that
assessment belongs to the speaker; and Wroth, even more clearly than
Lady Aubigny, is being instructed and advised. But while the epistle to
Wroth hints that Wroth's personal limitations, at least in part, make
his retreat advisable and appropriate, there is no indication that Lady
Aubigny's centered virtue is vulnerable in any way. Nor is it a question
of balance and proportion, as it is in the epigram to Roe. This epistle
presents a world which on one hand is so utterly devoid of interest that
a person of intelligence and virtue could not find it tempting, and
which, on the other, is so fraught with unexpected dangers that not even
a formidable exemplar of virtue could afford to enter it carelessly.

But another poem in The Forrest —— "To the World. A farewell for a

 

Gentle-woman, vertuous and noble" —— offers a perspective which is
subtly different. Its speaker, a woman entering the "morne of age," is
in an excellent position to draw her own conclusions and needs no one to
speak for her. Her life seems to have been neither one of intellectual
or cultural concerns (unlike the countesses of Rutland and Bedford) nor
one of aristocratic tranquillity (unlike the lady of Penshurst or Lady

Aubigny); instead, she has been "planted" "in a soile"

 

164

Where breathe the basest of thy fooles;
Where enuious arts professed be,
And pride, and ignorance the schooles,
Where nothing is examin'd, weigh'd,
But, as 'tis rumor'd, so beleeu'd:
Where euery freedome is betray'd
And euery goodnesse tax'd, or grieu'd.
(46—52)

What needs to be stressed, though, is that she seems to have spent
the better part of a lifetime in that soil without being destroyed by it
—— as Jonson seems to fear Wroth and Lady Aubigny will be. Her
experience has been miserable —- "I know thou canst nor shew, nor beare
/ More hatred, then thou hast to mee," she insists -— but it does not
seem to have impaired her judgment. Nor has she been immobilized;
rather, she makes it clear that she has used her reason to extricate
herself from an unpleasant situation, and that she is not likely to
behave irrationally in the future:

What bird, or beast, is knowne so dull
That fled his cage, or broke his chaine,
And tasting ayre, and freedome, wull
Render his head in there againe?
If these, who have but sense, can shun
The engines, that have them annoy'd;
Little, for me, had reason done,
If I could not thy ginnes avoyd.
(29-36)

This poem cuts two ways. On one hand, her own ability to survive
undercuts her asssessment of the world's destructive powers. On the
other hand, what the gentlewoman says about the world corroborates what

Jonson tells Wroth and Lady Aubigny:26 that a worldly life has no

redeeming features, and that they are missing nothing worth having.

 

165

H

"False world, good-night, she begins; "My part is ended on thy stage";

and her assessment is unwaveringly negative. She leaves no room for
doubt that the world which is deceptively attractive to the naive is

filled with corruption and betrayal; she has been there, and she knows,

as she tells us repeatedly:27

I know thy formes are studyed arts,
Thy subtle wayes, be narrow straits;
Thy curtesie but sodaine starts,
And what thou call'st thy gifts are baits.
I know too, though thou strut, and paint,
Yet art thou both shrunke up, and old,
That only fooles make thee a saint,
And all thy good is to be sold.
I know thou whole art but a shop
Of toyes, and trifles, traps, and snares,
To take the weake, or make them stop:

Yet art thou falser than thy wares.
(9—20)

The poem seems at first to echo the familiar pattern of the

contemptus mundi tradition —— a pattern which is announced at the outset

 

by phrases like "False world, good—night" and "My part is ended on thy

stage,"

and reinforced by the end—stopped lines of the native didactic
tradition. The ending, however, undercuts that pattern, because the
gentlewoman does not, after all, seek the otherworldly alternatives

implied by the convention in whose idiom she speaks; instead, she

resolves not to wander (hardly an option in contemptus mundi

 

literature), but to endure, in some unspecified way: to "make my
strengths, such as they are, / Here in my bosome, and at home."
Significantly, given the nature of the epistles to Wroth and Lady

Aubigny, she not only finds it unnecessary to seek a safe harbor; she

 

166

decides in the end not to retreat after all, but stoically to endure

what she insists are the conditions of life itself:28

No,I doe know, that I was borne
To age, misfortune, sicknesse, griefe:
But I will beare these, with that scorne,
As shall not need thy false reliefe.
(61—64)
While the resolution that Jonson attributes to the gentlewoman is
somewhat more complex than that which he offers to Wroth and Lady
Aubigny, it does not afford her a comfortable place in human society;
her acquisition of knowledge comes, after all, when her "part is ended"
on the world's "stage."

The general advice offered in the "Epode" (Egg. X1) is as bleakly
pessimistic as any offered to Lady Aubigny or by the gentlewoman. Its
focus is the business of encountering "vice" and eradicating it —— a
difficult process which requires constant vigilance:

(since no brest is so sure,
Or safe, but shee'll procure
Some way of entrance) we must plant a guard

0f thoughts to watch, and ward
At th'eye and eare (the ports unto the minde).

(5-9)
Even this strict surveillance is ineffective, however, since the enemy
is within as well as without: reason itself is susceptible to distortion
and co—option by guerilla-like raids by rebellious "affections" —- the
most insidious of which is "blinde Desire." In this threatening world of
sentinels, spies, and treasonous forces, however, the speaker suddenly

and inexplicably asserts the existence of "true Love" —— "Pure, perfect,

 

 

 

167

nay divine . . . a golden chaine let downe from heaven" (46—47). But
before he can explain a) who is blessed with such perfection and why,
and b) who would reject it and why, he is interrupted by an eavesdropper
who —— having perhaps taken seriously the import of the first 42 lines
-— says bluntly that "there's no such thing" (67). The rest of the poem
is given over to the speaker's attempted rebuttal, which centers on
conventional sexual fidelity: offered the love of an ideal woman —— a
"divine" creature —— even a lout would be "fearefull" to "offend" her,
let alone "a noble, and right generous mind / (To vertuous moods
inclin'd) / That knowes the waight of guilt" (111-13). So much, then,
for the "golden chaine": the speaker's conclusion inadvertently confirms
the pessimism of his own opening as well as the objections of the
"vicious foole."

One could argue, perhaps, that beleaguered figures of virtue like
Wroth, Lady Aubigny, and the unnamed gentlewoman are not really
comparable to urban intellectuals like Camden or Selden or to successful
public figures like Weston, and that the differences in their
circumstances and natures account, at least in part, for differences in
their relationship to their societies. But the poems in which Jonson
examines his own role as a poet and reflects on his own relation to his
society reveal the same contradictions.

The opening lines of the epistle to Lady Aubigny indicate that he,
too, perceives himself to be in a state of siege. "'Tis growne almost a
danger to speake true / Of any good minde, now," he begins, describing

the hostility and viciousness of the world around them as well as its

168

power to make both "prais'd, and praisers suffer." Significantly, Jonson
himself does just the opposite of what he advises Lady Aubigny to do.
Rather than "declining" his own vocation, he congratulates himself -- if
somewhat pompously —- on risking criticism by praising her:
I, that haue suffer'd this; and, though forsooke
Of Fortune, haue not alter'd yet my looke,
Or so my selfe abandon'd, as because
Men are not iust, or keepe no holy lawes
Of nature, and societie, I should faint;
Or fear to draw true lines . . .
I, Madame, am become your praiser.
(15—21)
While he never considers it necessary to retrench for the sake of his
own integrity, he does see himself as the embattled scourge of a
"vicious" society which is willing to "indite [his] wit"; but he calls
attention both to his endurance and his determination not to "faint" or
"abandon" himself but to retaliate by "drawing true lines."

In the epistle to Elizabeth, Countess of Rutland, Jonson's target
is the baseness of a whole society so dominated by "almightie gold"
("that, for which all virtue now is sold, / And almost every vice .

/ That which to boote with hell, is thought worth heaven" [1—3]) that it
has no use for poetry: verse is "scorned" by "noble ignorants." But the
Countess of Rutland (Sidney's daughter) is the exception:
With you, I know, my offring will find grace.
For what a sinne 'gainst your great father's spirit,
Were it to thinke, that you should not inherit
His love unto the Muses, when his skill

Almost you have, or may have, when you will?
(30-34)

 

169

But when Jonson adds that "It is the Mpgg’ alone, can raise to
heaven"(41), he is not urging her to use her own considerable gifts, but
to recognize his own talents and to endorse (and perhaps underwrite) his
efforts on her behalf. He plans to immortalize her and the Countess of
Bedford in a poem so filled with "high, and noble matter, such as flies
/ From braines entranc'd"(89—90) that it will bring honor to author and
subjects alike:

Then all, that have but done mprp§§_least grace,

Shall thronging come, and boast the happy place
They hold in my strange ppgmg . . . .
(79-82)

Of course, he betrays the pain of his own "outcast state" and the depth
of his wish for acceptance at the same time that he reveals his deep
alienation from the values of the society whose approval he desires.
When he is vindicated, moreover, it will not be because the society
which currently rejects poetry comes to its senses: those most likely to
applaud him, he makes clear, are hangers-on who try to profit from the
success of others.

In the epistles to the Countess of Rutland and Lady Aubigny, both
of which were written in the first decade of the seventeenth century,
the poet—speaker has a troubled and unhappy relationship with his
society; he seeks reassurance by dwelling on his own poetic gifts and
courage in exercising them. Implicit in that mode of reassurance is the
assumption that the lyric poet should speak out and be listened to ——
that he would have a recognized social role in a properly organized

29

society. In Jonson's two odes to himself written after the New Inn

 

170

fiasco in 1629, the poet—speaker's relation to his society is even more
vexatious and problematical than in the epistles written some twenty
years earlier. There is, however, one major difference: in these odes,
Jonson abandons his earlier commitment to a socially responsible art and
an artistically responsible society —— a fact which has been overlooked
in the critical emphasis on the bitterness pervading these poems.
Contrasting lyric purpose with dramatic and opting for the former, he
vows in the first ode to "sing high and aloofe, / Safe from the wolves
black jaw, and the dull Asses hoofe" (Egg. XXIII,35—36); in the second,
he reiterates his intent to confound his critics, "leave the loathed
stage/ And the more loathsome age" and follow lyric models.30 Both
odes, despite their differences in tone and intent, suggest a view of
poetry which is private, defensive, and isolated from the society which
criticizes it.31 In both, lyric poetry is chosen because it frees

him from his social ties and allows him to pursue his art in isolation
—— a far cry from the objectives pursued in the epistles, let alone the
generous and urbane conviction that poetry should and can be a part of
everyday life, and that it should and can play an important role in
shaping human society.

These antithetical perspectives pervading Jonson's verse cannot be
explained away in terms of chronology, genre, collection, or audience,
nor are they peripheral to Jonson's artistic concerns. To question
whether the world is hospitable or not is simply another way of
questioning whether the cultural and intellectual values represented by

poetry are nourished or starved by the poet's society. For a poet whose

171

vision is not private and introspective but social -- "he could not
think of poetry without thinking of the society to which it belongs,"
Leggatt observes32 —— such a question is central, not marginal.

Both positions are unmistakeably present; both are asserted
unequivocally. Accordingly, it would be pointless as well as difficult
to argue that one is more characteristic or representative than the
other. Nor can it be argued convincingly that the relation between the
two positions is developmental: the "Epode" appeared early in Jonson's
career, in 1601; the epistle to Lady Aubigny, about ten years later;
and the odes to himself followed the New Inn failure in 1629, yet all
are informed by a similar perspective.33 Challenging those who

insist on Jonson's consistency, Ian Donaldson wonders whether writers
who lack the capacity to change their minds might not have certain
limitations —— moral as well as emotional or imaginative. Not only do
Jonson's plays satirize those who are incapable of change, he points
out, but "to read through the whole oeuvre is to be even more acutely
aware of the dynamic, shifting, and various nature of his moral

3" But Donaldson's remarks, while certainly applicable to

thought."
the plays, imply a fruitful inconsistency which is just not present in
the poems under consideration. Except for the epigram to Roe, Jonson
simply asserts the two positions separately and does not address
himself to the vexing question of their interrelationship. He does not
evaluate one position in terms of the other.

Moreover, these contradictions point back to the aesthetic,

ontological, and epistemological foundations of Jonson's thought. As

 

 

172

Trimpi has argued at some length, Jonson's adoption of the classical
plain style reflects his commitment to a resilient and inclusive

. . . . n . . . - "35
claSSiCism which is subtly senSitive to things experienced. For
Jonson, Trimpi says, classicism is "a habit of discovery, a constant
revaluation of epistemological methods in the investigation of

. 36 . . . . . . . .
experience." This pOSition, developed in the Discoveries, implies

 

a view of the world —— of human experience and the capacity to absorb
it, rework it, and put it to use -- that is essentially confident and

inclusive. To argue, as Jonson does in the Discoveries, that wisdom is

 

"wrought out of experience" is to say, very simply, that experience is a
source of wisdom, not an impediment to it -— that people are capable of
learning from their mistakes. Does Jonson endorse this position in one
group of poems but reject it in another?

In one sense, the poems to people like Savile and Weston and
Burlase do seem based upon such an inclusive and confident outlook, as
we have seen. In another sense, however, it can be argued that Jonson
backs away from this outlook in both groups. The virtue of those who do
find a comfortable place in the world is often static, not something
which grows out of a process of trial and error. When Jonson praises
people who pursue achievements and active lives, he praises them not for
working out difficult accomodations or for balancing competing goods,
but for managing not to err or fall from grace. pr_does John Selden
manage to achieve such an admirable blend of personal and scholarly
qualities? How does a man like Richard Weston manage to "Doe the things

that Statues do deserve" while implementing Charles I's economic

 

 

173

policies? Was there a pressing need for Savile "at the helme" —— a need
on which he had to turn his back in order to protect his independence or
integrity?

Regardless of what he says in the Discoveries, Jonson's poems do

 

not say that their experience has made these men wise; instead, like the

 

epistle to Lady Aubigny, these poems suggest that wisdom is antecedent
to experience; that the capacity for virtue is a fragile possession -- a
static entity which must be protected from damage rather than an
attribute which can be used (or even misused) without serious harm. In
both groups of poems, hecommendsiޣ;addressees for possessing and
retaining certain qualities, not for coping successfully with the
problematics of developing or applying them. Even his metaphors

" as we have

underscore this notion: in "An Epistle answering . . . ,
seen, he worries about protecting his "owne fraile Pitcher," "Lest it be
justled, crack'd" (56,57).37 Only in the opaque and ambiguous

"Epode" does he suggest for a moment that the "waight of guilt" is
compatible with nobility of spirit or generosity of mind.

Perhaps because he considers virtue as a fixed quantity, something
which people must strive not to lose or misuse, Jonson has little
interest in moral ambiguity. To put it as simply as possible, Jonson
does not readily assent to the proposition that good people do bad
things —— or even that they make mistakes. Is it really true, as he
claims, that only "bad men" could "hate" 3 person like Weston (U23:

75.6)? His moral vision does not often make room for mixed motives or

unavoidable compromises. He is not interested in how people respond to

 

174

situations requiring complex moral choices. His poems of admiration
celebrate and assert the fact of the ideal, not the process of attaining
it. Burlase is the epitome of friendship; Selden and Savile, of
disinterested scholarship; Weston, of leadership. They are as free from
the blots of experience as is Lady Aubigny. The point is not what
happens to them, not how they accomodate, not how they change —- but
that they do not change. For all their individuality, they remain ideal
types in less than ideal surroundings. If Jonson's poems show us what
kind of behavior to emulate and what to avoid, they do not show us
people in transition from one kind to the other -- people in the process
of moving from good to bad or from bad to good —— just as they do not
examine the practical, concrete ethical dilemmas which result when one
good clashes with another, or when public and private moralities clash.
Consider, in addition to the poems themselves, this passage from

the Discoveries (it occurs at the end of his famous remarks about

 

Shakespeare's failure to "blot lines"):

His wit was in his owne power; would the rule of it
had been so too. Many times hee fell into those
things, could not escape laughter: As when hee said
in the person of Caesar, one speaking to him;
Caesar, thou dost me wrong. Hee replyed: Caesar did
never wrong, but with just cause; and such like;
which were ridiculous.

 

 

(660—66)

But Jonson's words reveal the extent to which he has missed the

point. As Julius Caesar clearly indicates, Shakespeare was well aware

 

that the coexistence of such contraries was not impossible; the mixture

 

aimiHrTIIWTK- ..:.. _, I ....!-.-I.J I - _

 

175

of right and wrong, of honorable and dishonorable motives -— and the
difficulty of sorting them out -— is a major concern of the play. The
line which Jonson ridicules seems subsequently to have been

. 38 . . . .
reVised; but Julius Caesar remains a drama in which more than one

 

person encounters the problem of doing wrong with just cause. We do not
need Antony's final words to convince us that Brutus plotted and
carried out Caesar's assassination because of his commitment to
principles —— that he acted "in a general honest thought / And common
good to all" (5.5.71—72). Nor, on the other hand, are we comfortable
with the motives informing Antony's skillful manipulation of the mob's
raw emotions in his funeral oration at the forum -— or is he, as he
insists, simply a "plain, blunt man"(3.2.218) —- one whose love for his
friend blinds him to the reaction his words will provoke?39 Far from
making a ridiculous mistake, Shakespeare captured in a single phrase the
contradiction which shapes the play; and he would have assented, we
suspect, to the corollary (and equally contradictory) perception of

Thomas a Becket in T.S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral -- another

 

verse—drama about a politically motivated assassination:

The last temptation is the greatest treason,

To do the right deed for the wrong reason.
But Jonson, in contrast, insists in "An Epistle answering . . ." that
"Men that are safe, and sure, in all they doe, / Care not what trials
they are put unto" (1-2), and a third of the way through the poem he

reasserts his confidence in his own uncompromising standards:

 

176

Let these men have their wayes, and take their times
To vent their libels, and to issue rimes.

I have no portion in them, nor their deale
Of newes they get, to strew out the long meale,

I studie other friendships, and more one,

Then these can ever be; or else wish none.
(25-30)

Like Lady Aubigny, who is told that isolation is preferable to

contamination, he prefers no friends to imperfect friends.

Only in a few poems —— "To Heaven" and "On my first sonne" are
obvious examples -— is Jonson emotionally engaged in his own
uncertainty, preoccupied —— to borrow Trimpi's phrase once more -— with

the "contentious surf" of his own experience; only rarely does he
overlook faults. The most provocative example occurs in the epistle to
Selden, where he confides that he has "too oft preferr'd / Men past
their termes, and praised some names too much"(20—21):

Since, being deceiv'd, I turne a sharper eye

Upon my selfe, and aske to whom? and why?

And what I write? And vex it many dayes

Before men get a verse: much lesse a Praise;

So that my Reader is assur'd, I now

Meane what I speake: and still will keep that Vow.

(23—28)
If he has been taken in by others and has misapplied his talents as a
result, he has also proved resilient enough to recover from his
mistakes. For once, even Jonson admits and tolerates error, but at the
same time he insists it will never happen again!
These lines are intriguing not just because of our natural

curiosity about who has deceived him, what he has said that he no longer

means, or which poems he implicitly retracts, but because they suggest

 

 

177

two different views of poetry and experience. If he uses the poem at
hand —- the self—disclosing epistle —- to find out what he thinks by
reassessing his own experience and coming to terms with his own errors,
he also signals his renewed intent to pursue what one critic has called
"a rhetoric of praise and blame"41 -- to dispense poems like

judgments or rewards -- and to be even more rigorous in the future.

But the nature of his error is itself ambiguous. On one hand, lines
24-26 suggest that he has not chosen his subjects carefully enough —-
that lack of rigorous scrutiny has led him to praise some people more
than they deserve; on the other hand, the lines which precede them
suggest a different possibility:

Though I confesse (as every Muse hath err'd,
And mine not least) I have too oft preferr'd

Men, past their termes, and prais'd some names too much,
But 'twas with purpose to have made them such.

(19-22)
If he has praised some names "past their termes" -— more than their
actions merited -— he has done so knowingly, intentionally: he has tried

to use his verbal powers to figure forth ideal behavior, to attempt to
persuade others to be what he claims they are, so that they will imitate
in their lives the action of the poem. In this sense, his error is that
he has been too optimistic about the power of poetry to shape reality
and influence behavior.

Both meanings are present; both carry over into lines 23-25, when
he questions the purpose of writing ("and why") as well as its subject

and content ("To whom" and "what"). But in both cases, he locates the

 

178

source of error more in his own judgment than in the behavior of others.
Having been deceived in the past, whether about the merit of others or
about the transforming power of the poem, he now "turne[s] a sharper
eye" upon himself, Neverthess, the very real self—doubt that emerges in
these lines is relegated to the past. As he reassures his reader, he has
profited from the unpleasant experience of deception (self-deception)
and has regained his characteristic confidence in his own judgment.
Whether he refers to his decision to evaluate others more rigorously or
to accept a certain limitation inherent in poetry when he says "I now /
Meane what I speake: and still will keepe that Vow," he declares his
conviction that he will not err again.

Like the epigram to William Roe, which reveals a fundamental
ambivalence about the wisdom of exposing one's self to the experience of
change, the epistle to Selden reveals a similar ambivalence about the
wisdom of exposing one's self to possible error. In the epigram, Jonson
not only considers the young man's ability to "turns to bloud" his new
experiences, but also reveals his own uncertainty (as one of Roe's
friends) about how to assess and respond to Roe's opportunity. In the
epistle, Jonson's subject is his own ability similarly to assess and
incorporate the experience of error into his conception of the scope and
purpose of his art. Both suggest a precarious and indeterminate
resolution which may be more apparent than real; and the ambivalence
expressed so subtly in both is polarized throughout Jonson's verse. Like
the women and men about whom he writes, his poet—speakers are at times

beleaguered, in a state of siege, at times able gracefully but

 

179

powerfully to assume their appropriate role in a properly ordered
society. Never addressing explicitly this fundamental conflict or
contradiction, but articulating it only in the most subtle use of
pronouns —— the erring "I" of the epistle, the doubting "we" of the
epigram —— Jonson uses these poems to his friends to disclose his
underlying uncertainty about what he can and should do as a poet in his

world.

A. 1...... u: . .. “DJWMHIvDII‘MWlWULl
likllllllll'fllal

 

Conclusion

As the preceding chapter indicates, Jonson is deeply engrossed in
the relation of the poet to his society -- how he functions in it, how
he tries to bring about its prOper ordering, and whether his art will
be effective. Those concerns, of course, are shared by his
predecessors. Wyatt and Gascoigne both examine the shortcomings of the
social order about which they write (Wyatt, about the court;
Gascoigne, about the effects of social and economic change in several
spheres). Neither turns his back for very long on the difficult
society in which he lives, and both -— for all their differences --
stress the way in which the poet remains a member of the society which
he criticizes and the way in which his criticism is intended to help
shape that society. Sidney, in contrast, does not suggest that
Astrophil's difficulties are exacerbated by the shortcomings of the
world around him. Like Sidney, Shakespeare in the sonnets focuses less
on society per se than on crucial imbalances within the individual;
his concerns are ethical and psychological. In his treatment of the
poet's relation to his society, then, Jonson is closer to Wyatt and
Gascoigne than to the Sidney of Astrophil and Stella or the
Shakespeare of the sonnets. In important ways, Jonson does exactly
what Wyatt set out to do and talked about doing: using verse not to

feign, or to praise the unpraiseworthy, or distort what he observed,

180

 

 

181

but to assert the poet's obligation to speak plainly and truly. Like
Jonson, Wyatt uses poetry to express his frustration over the
impediments to writing such poetry.l

Each poet works out his own perspective, but all share
overlapping concerns which form patterns, as we will see, that are
significant in their own right. Those patterns, and the ideas which
shape them, do not belong to the poets alone; instead, they are part
of a much larger intellectual context, the detailed richness and
relevance of which has not been attended to, except in passing, by
literary critics. Clarified by scholarship familiar to intellectual
historians (the following discussion is deeply indebted to one of
them, Eugene F. Rice, Jr.),2 that context not only sheds light on
the concerns which have dominated this study —— the preoccupations of
individual poets —— but on the relationships among the poets and on
the patterns that emerge from their shared perspectives.

If it is possible to quote Jacob Burckhardt without implicitly
endorsing his thesis, the Renaissance "discovery of the world and of
man" fostered a proliferation of inquiries about what kind of
knowledge was of greatest potential value and how such knowledge
should best be used.3 Those inquiries focused on reassessing and
redefining the nature of wisdom —— sapientia -- a term whose meaning
changed radically over the course of the Renaissance. Described as an

art of living well by Cicero and Seneca —— an ars vivendi —— it had

 

been defined by Augustine as the knowledge and love of God. Even after

the Aristotelian revival of the middle ages, Augustine's elevation of

 

 

182

the divine and suppression of the human components of wisdom proved
more influential than Aquinas' attempts to strike a balance between
them.4 As patristic and medieval ways of thinking gives way to
increasing differentiation in the post-medieval world, however, and as
the idea of wisdom becomes increasingly secularized, we find several
competing conceptions of sapientia which flourish from Trecento
Florence to the late sixteenth century in the North. Not surprisingly,
they generate multiple strands of inquiry which coexist and overlap.
While the pattern they form is complex, and while unraveling its
separate strands is a task for the intellectual historian, some
discernable configurations do emerge. Broadly speaking, the
Renaissance reassessment of sapientia focused on the following issues:
whether wisdom is grounded in knowledge of the human or of the divine;
whether it is acquired by reason or by revelation; whether it is an
active or a contemplative virtue; and whether it is compatible with
prudence. Conceived as an active virtue, it is defined in ethical
terms; as a contemplative virtue, in intellectual terms.

To writers like Celtis and Bovillus, wisdom is an encyclopedic
knowledge of all things, human and divine, which gives Promethean
powers to those who possess it and which can be acquired by reason
alone.5 To the Florentine neoplatonists like Ficino and Pico, on
the contrary, wisdom is the product of divine illumination —- an
illumination of the world of ideas standing behind the deceptive,
illusory world of human experience. Beyond the reach of human reason,

it has nothing to do with life in the world.6 To Sir Thomas Elyot,

 

183

totally unmystical but just as much a neoplatonist as his Florentine
counterparts, wisdom is also the knowledge of the invisible but
intelligible world of ideas —- but knowledge which can be attained by
human reason alone. Where the Florentine neoplatonists view wisdom as
a mystical intuition of the divine, Elyot believes that the rational
faculty is powerful enough to achieve knowledge of God.7 But
Elyot, who addresses himself to the question of wisdom in Of The
knowledg which maketh a wise man. A Disputacion Platonike, as well as
in The Boke named the Governour, also writes —- contradictorily, it
would seem -— that it is human experience which produces the knowledge
that "maketh a man wise."8

Whether writing of human experience or of the world of ideas,
Elyot conceives of wisdom in terms of knowledge which is achieved
rather than in terms of action which is taken. But another group of
writers, like the poets considered in the preceding chapters,
concentrate their attention on how best to live in the world,
reappropriating the Ciceronian conception of wisdom as an ars vivendi
and transforming wisdom from an intellectual virtue to an ethical
virtue -- from knowledge to action. In such a formulation, people are
judged wise or unwise according to what they dp_-—how they act --
rather than according to what they kppp, 9 As a result, wisdom is
associated with the realm of moral philosophy, distinguished from
metaphysics and theology on one hand and from scientific inquiry on

the other.10

 

 

184

This conception of wisdom is fundamentally opposed to the
contemplative ideal. For every thinker like Francesco Filelfo, who
insists that the highest human activity is to contemplate the divine
and that the contemplative life is as superior to the active life as
the divine is to the human, there is a thinker like Coluccio Salutati,
one of the first in the Renaissance to define wisdom in terms of
ethical behavior and to argue that wisdom is rooted in action, in the
conduct of human life.11 Underlying the debate over such a
question -— a debate which continued for some two hundred years and
engaged major figures like Erasmus as well as a lesser—known
supporting cast -— is a concern about the usefulness of human
knowledge. This concern is most frequently formulated in discussions
of the relation between wisdom and prudence —— between sapientia and
prudentia, On one hand, the Venetian Giovanni Pontano argues that
those who are wise are by definition inept in the world of action, and
Pierre Charron uses the expression "faicte en clerc" to characterize a
thing badly done.12 On the other hand, the Florentine Leonardo
Bruni sees the philosopher not as someone who is isolated in
contemplation (and therefore inept in action), but as someone whose
intellectual achievements are actually enhanced by family and civic
activities.13 That assessment, in turn, suggests that certain
kinds of intellectual pursuits are more desirable than others: Bruni
believes, as Rice puts it, that it is better to know how "to live well
than to know the causes of frost, snow, and the colors of the

14

rainbow."

 

 

185

In essence, the Italian humanists of the late Trecento and early
Quattrocento establish paradigmatic formulations of arguments which
lie dormant throughout most of the fifteenth century but re—emerge as
central issues as the Renaissance moves north. Guillaume Bude, for
example, concludes that prudence and wisdom are incompatible; those
who seek the latter, even though it is nobler than the former, become
useless to themselves and others.15 Bude deplores the unwise
behavior of academically learned people whose lives are ethically
bankrupt: troubled by the kind of "wisdom" which does not result in
virtuous action, he reminds his readers that Aristotle judged
Anaxagoras and Thales wise but imprudent because their knowledge of
divine things, however admirable, was useless.16 Believing that
the pursuit of wisdom interferes with a full life in the world, Bude
continues to equate it with esoteric knowledge. Others, like Louis Le
Caron, Vives, and Erasmus attempt to minimize the conflict between
sapientia and prudentia by redefining sapientia in terms of its
desired end —— by making wisdom compatible with, even identical with,
ethical behavior.

Le Caron, for example, sees a closer relationship between wisdom
and prudence than Bude believes possible. He argues in his Dialogues
that wisdom must be sought in the world, in the company of others, and
that it is actually incompatible with solitude and the contemplative
life.17 Like Ronsard, who similarly endorses an active virtue
which yields success in political or social affairs over a purely

contemplative intellectual virtue, Le Caron praises the "active and

 

 

186

successful burgher" at the expense of the "improvident and frivolous
. "18 . , . . .
philosopher. Vives Introduction to Wisdom, a collection of
precepts, similarly focuses on how one must act in order to be
considered wise, not on what one must know; and Erasmus observes, in

The Praise of Folly, that frivolous arguments hide true wisdom.19

 

Neither Vives nor Erasmus, the major exponents of Christian humanism
in the north, attempts to sever wisdom from divine revelation —- both
define it as the possession of knowledge which will ensure salvation
-— but both indicate that such knowledge must be demonstrated in
action by living a good life and following an exemplary pattern.20

In itself, the notion that wisdom was not confined to esoteric
knowledge but could be attained and exemplified by people leading
active lives in the world is not necessarily anti—intellectual: it is
precisely because Bude values erudition that he deplores its misuse.
At the same time, any formulation which privileges the ideas of
successful burghers over those of philosophers, as does Le Caron's,
leaves the door open to potential devaluations of human learning. That
door is implicitly flung open by Pierre Charron late in the sixteenth
century. Charron prefers the culture of Sparta to that of Athens ——
not in spite of Spartan contempt for erudition and art, but because of
it.21 Charron, in fact, goes so far as to argue that the fruits of
speculative thought are not only irrelevant but are actually
impediments to the proper conduct of human life; he observes at one

point that the wise are rarely learned and the learned are rarely

. 22 . . .
wise. Erasmus, in contrast, refuses to believe that ethical and

 

 

 

——_——

187

intellectual virtues are mutually hostile, let alone mutually

exclusive; his Enchiridion eXplicitly identifies wisdom as the

 

combination of virtue and erudition.23

Clearly, there is a close relationship between the issues which
preoccupy English Renaissance poets focusing on the active life and
the issues which preoccupy a significant group of moral philosophers
from the fourteenth through the sixteenth centuries. All the poets
considered here focus on human things rather than divine things; all
suggest, implicitly if not explicitly, that wisdom is acquired as well
as demonstrated in experience; all examine, in different ways, the
relation between wisdom and prudence. Wyatt's exploration of the
relation between sapientia and prudentia resembles that of Bude, whose
work he knew, and he locates value in the use of time, the quality of
action, not in contemplation or abstract knowledge. Gascoigne and
Shakespeare, despite their vast differences, dwell on the almost
infinite capacity of human beings to learn from error -- a perspective
which grows naturally out of the notion that wisdom can best be
acquired in the normal course of human experience. Jonson, though he
does not share Charron's epistemological scepticism and resultant
elevation of the will over the intellect, is deeply divided, as
Charron is, on the issue of the active life: the latter insists that
virtue is proved in action at the same time that he advocates fleeing
base and vulgar opinions of the herd and withdrawing to a safe haven
in times of conflict.24 If Jonson seems to endorse an inclusive

attitude to experience in the Discoveries and in some poems, he

 

 

 

188

reassesses that endorsement in the gentlewoman's farewell and retracts
it altogether in the epistle to Lady Aubigny. In fact, as I have
argued, Jonson does not present people whose experience makes them
wise, to borrow Elyot's phrase. At best, experience does not erode
wisdom; at worst, experience is something to be shunned. In both
cases, wisdom antedates experience; Jonson shows people demonstrating
wisdom in action, but not acquiring it through action. For all of his
apparent similarity to the other poets considered here, then, Jonson's
conception of wisdom as a quality which is antecedent to experience
separates him from them.
Sidney, despite the fact that he pokes fun at the "sullain

gravitie" of the moral philosophers, recapitulates many of their

25 . . .
arguments. He not only echoes the emphaSis of writers like
Salutati, Bruni, and Le Caron on full human development within a
social context; he also argues explicitly, in the Defence, that
knowledge which leads to virtuous action is more valuable than
knowledge which merely yields intellectual understanding:2

This purifying of wit, this enriching of memorie,

enabling of judgement, and enlarging of conceit,

which commoly we cal learning, under what name so

ever it come forth, or to what immediate end

soever it be directed, the finall end is, to lead

and draw us to as high a perfection, as our

degenerate soules made worse by their

clay-lodgings, can be capable of. This according

to the inclination of man, bred many formed

impressions. For some that thought this felicity

principally to be gotten by knowledge, and no

knowledge to be so high or heavenly, as

acquaintance with the stars; gave theselves to

Astronomie: others perswading theselves to be
Demygods’ if they knew the causes of things,

 

189

became naturall and supernaturall Philosophers.
Some an admirable delight drew to Musicke; and
some the certaintie of demonstration to the
Mathematicks: but all one and other having this
scope to know, & by knowledge to lift up the minde
from the dungeon of the bodie, to the enjoying his
owne divine essence. But when by the ballance of
experience it was found, that the Astronomer
looking to the stars might fall in a ditch, that
the inquiring Philosopher might be blind in him
self, & the Mathematician, might draw forth a
straight line wih a crooked hart. Then 10 did
proofe, the overruler of opinions make manifest,
that all these are but serving sciences; which as
they have a private and in themselves, so yet are
they all directed to the highest end of the
mistresse knowledge by yeGreeks architectonics,
which stands as I thinke, in the knowledge of a
mans selfe, in the Ethike and Politique
consideration, wih the end of well doing, and not
of well knowing only. Even as the Sadlers next
ende is to make a good Saddle, but his further
ende, to serve a nobler facultie, which is
horsemanship, so the horsemans to souldiery: and
the souldier not only to have the skill, but to
performe the practise of a souldier. So that the
ending end of all earthly learning, being verteous
action, those skils that most serve to bring forth
that, have a most just title to be Princes over al
the rest: wherein if we can shew, the Poet is
worthy to have it before any other competitors.

 

 

 

 

The point, however, is not to define causal links between a
philosophical framework and what the poets say but to establish more
concretely the intellectual context in which they write. To pin down
correspondences precisely would require a separate study: Astrophil

and Stella, for example, eclectically blends more than one strand of

 

sapiential inquiry in its mixture of platonism and active

. 27 .
humanism. Moreover, the poets frequently View the moral
phiIOSOphers as inferior competitors: accordingly, using the

conclusions of the latter as a guide to the beliefs of the former can

190

be deceptive. Neither Gascoigne nor Jonson, for example, draws
invidious distinctions between scientia and sapientia. Gascoigne's
"Wodmanship" never implies that knowledge makes people vicious, only
that it can be misused and that its possession does not guarantee the
kind of virtue necessary for true success. In fact, it is the
speaker's understading of the true value of Aristotle and Cicero that
helps him to assess his own value in relaton to the shortcomings of
others. Jonson, similarly, frequently suggests that knowledge of
history and a broad experience of human life enhance one's ability to
make appropriate decisions, whether in public or private life: Weston
and Savile make choices which benefit their societies, and those
choices are informed by active involvement in the fine arts and
historical inquiry.

Moreover, while understanding the intellectual context in which
the poets write is helpful, the history of the Renaissance idea of
wisdom is far more complicated than the writings of the moral
philosophers suggest. A thorough exploration which met methodological
standards commonly applied to work in the history of ideas would have
to consider how the idea of wisdom was diffused in the popular culture
of the time —— in the pamphlet literature and the drama, for
example.28 Needless to say, this study makes no such attempt, but
even a cursory glance at a single treatment of one issue —- the
relation betweeen wisdom and prudence -— indicates the extent to which
the questions are far more complex than intellectual historians have

indicated. Does Prospero give up "wisdom" —- arcane knowledge —— when

 

 

191

he decides to drown his book? Is such a sacrifice necessary if he is
to return to Milan and govern effectively? Or does he, over the course

' acquire a different kind of

of the play's "two hours' traffic,’
ethical knowledge —— one which is rooted in action -— in place of the
knowledge of the mage? But isn't it precisely his access to magic that
enables him to arrange Miranda's meeting with Ferdinand and his own
encounter with Antonio? Doesn't such knowledge, therefore, benefit
both his family and community —- something which esoteric knowledge
was not supposed to do? Does the play, in fact, ask us to consider
competing conceptions of wisdom? Forced to respond quickly to
fast—moving events and new threats to his plans, does Prospero perhaps
learn to behave prudently gpg_wisely? If so, does the play suggest
that sapientia and prudentia can be reconciled?

The answers, of course, lie in the play itself, not in its
sources. Just as Shakespeare evaluates and transforms the ideas of
people like Bude and le Caron in The Tempest and just (as Robert
Ornstein has shown) as he evaluates and criticizes the inherited Tudor
myth in the histories,29 the poets considered in this study
challenge and transform contemporary and inherited ideas about wisdom.
If the philosophers defend a conception of wisdom which is rooted in
action, the poets ask what happens when such ideas are put into
practice. If they do not necessarily search for generalizations, they
do evaluate ways of taking action as they rivet their attention on the
impediments to action. Reviewing their search for a reliable guide to

action, we not only encounter a critique of proverbial wisdom and of

 

192

the ability to act in accordance with reason; we can also see how they
define their behavior as poets in terms of their conception of the
impediments to action.

Wyatt, massively preoccupied with the relationship between
inherited ethical precepts and the complex, changing world in which he
finds himself, exposes the gap between them. "A spending hand" reveals
the inadequacy of proverbial morality, demonstrating how it can be
used to justify vicious behavior. Bryan is instructed in prudence, not
wisdom, as he is told what he must do to provide for himself and
reminded that a "hand that always poureth out" needs "a bringer in as
fast"; the dishonest man can, in fact, do very well for himself if he
interprets certain proverbs literally and carries out their
injunctions precisely. Much in the tone of Robert Frost's "Provide!
Provide!" proverbial wisdom is used to justify, however sardonically,
a whole range of consciously opportunistic actions.30 The
treatment of proverbial wisdom in "My mothers maydes" is more
complicated: cliches about country and city life are superseded by the
realization that every way of life has drawbacks and that externals do
not determine whether one lives wisely or well. The issue in this poem
is not the "choice of life," but the problems inherent in any choice.
Country life is no protection against foolishness or the desire for
advcancement, and fails to teach wisdom, while city life at least
teaches prudence —— the management of practical affairs. Prudence
leads to viciousness in "A spending hand," but not in "My mothers

maydes": the greatest criticism as well as the greatest sympathy is

193

directed at the country mouse who is unequipped to deal with the
temptations of a complex and confusing world.

Gascoigne, unlike Wyatt, does not really question the value of
proverbial wisdom. He begins one well—known poem by arguing that "the
common speech" —— "spend and God will send" —— cannot be believed, but
proceeds by replacing one truism with another, and ends it by
endorsing a whole series of proverbial utterances. The poem is less
an analysis of the deficiencies of "the common speech" itself than a
selection among its varieties. Similarly, the argument of his
prototypal sonnet sequence defends the proverbial saying "haste makes
waste." Though the modification he offers in the conclusion -- 9N9

haste butggood, where wysedome makes the waye" —— contradicts the

 

import of the proverb, he neither acknowledges nor resolves the
contradiction between the two assertions.

In Astrophil and Stella, Sidney treats received wisdom

 

differently, focusing on familiar ethical and psychological
formulations rather than on proverbial sayings. First, he affirms the
long—standing and widely accepted view that fulfilling one's social
responsibilities is essential to one's full human development —- a
notion which, as we have seen, is not confined to Renaissance thinkers
but is found among medieval writers as well. Very clearly, Astrophil
is not an exemplar who is immobilized by his encounter with a corrupt
or vicious courtly society —- with "power's babie—creatures," to
borrow Greville's decription.31 Instead, Sidney locates the fault

in the self-indulgent and muddled Astrophil, not in his society.

 

194

Similarly, Sidney affirms many of the standard working assumptions of
Renaissance faculty psychology in his refusal to sanction Astrophil's
privileging of will over reason, endorsing throughout the sequence the
belief that reason should deal with the concrete circumstances of
life, not just with "thought," and that love should not be left to
"will." Lest the point be missed, Astrophil himself makes explicit the
true nature of his own clever rationalizations in such admissions as
"My best wits still their owne disgrace invent" (19.5).

At the same time, however, Sidney does not allow his sequence to
offer pat answers. He does not, for example, tie up loose ends by
putting the palinodic sonnets "Thou blind man's marke, thou foole's

' and "Leave me 0 Love, which reachest but to dust"

selfe chosen snare,'
at the end of the sequence —- or even within the sequence. To the
dismay of some critics, he does not offer the perspective which those
sonnets contain as a "solution" to Astrophil's problem.32 As a
result, Astrophil ends much as we find him early in the sequence:
caught between two extremes, knowing that "It is most true, that eyes
are form'd to serve / The inward light: and that the heavenly part /
Ought to be king," yet protesting that "Desire still cries, 'give me
some food'" (5.1-3, 71.14).

Shakespeare accomplishes the same end by following the opposite
strategy: putting sonnet 146, "Poor soul, the center of my sinful
earth" (which parallels "Leave me 0 Love") at such a point in the

sequence as to demonstrate the inefficaciousness of its observations.

In the very next poem, "My love is as a fever, longing still," the

195

"rebel powers" of the speaker's "sinful earth" are victorious, even
rampant; traditional formulations fail to make a difference in the
speaker's ability to change the way he acts. In neither sequence does
the insight associated with a spiritual realm solve or even mitigate
the very real problems which both protagonists face.

If traditional spiritual observations offer no relief, neither do
simplistic explanations of morally complex predicaments based on
oppositions between public vice and private virtue or sophisticated
corruption and innocent simplicity. Wyatt focuses on demolishing the
predictable court—country dichotomy. In the first satire, the speaker
seems to deal with the complexities of life at court by resorting to a
simple antithesis, contrasting the innocence of life at his country
estate with the corruption of life at Henry's court. But unlike
Spenser's Colin, who contentedly plays to please himself, Wyatt's
speaker defensively seeks his friend's approval as he proceeds to
justify a course of action which he indicates will be hard for his
friend to understand. Moreover, the remaining satires comment on the
inadequacy of this response: one insists that "eche kind of lyffe" is
potentially diseased; the other exposes the swinish realities of rural
existence. Gascoigne's speaker, even less tempted by retreat, focuses
on finding a way to maximize his own resorces in the face of confusion
and waste.

Sidney and Shakespeare similarly reject the temptation to resolve
complex moral choices by constructing and then withdrawing to private

worlds: Astrophil's retreat to a private world of love is shown to be

 

196

self—destructive as well as self-deceptive; Shakespeare's speaker's
retreat ends at one extreme in solipsism and at the other extreme in
an epistemological nightmare. In Jonson's poems, as we have seen, the
issue is bounced back and forth but never resolved, but Jonson
approaches the question from the opposite direction: where the others
warn against retreating from complexity, Jonson focuses on the dangers
of jumping in -— of contaminating one's self in a polluted stream.
More serious and more challenging than the criticism of
proverbial wisdom or popular formulations is the examination of the
inability to act in accordance with reason. On one hand, Wyatt is a
poet who is able to look directly at himself and his world, assess
what he sees, weigh the real against the ideal, note the
discrepancies, and proceed to act in a way that affirms the ideal
within the limitations of the real. In this sense, then, his poetry
assimilates experience in a rich and complex way: if he does not write
of "countries and climes, manners and men," he does chart the voyage
of one particularly fine human mind as it tries to come to terms with
dishonesty and shabby behavior. Contrary to Stephen Greenblatt's
assertion, Wyatt's response to such an environment is not to meet
treachery with treachery, viciousness with viciousness. What is so
striking about Wyatt's achievement, as Thomas Greene says, is that he
takes the world's measure so accurately but does not falter by
responding in kind: "Few poetic speakers are more lucid than Wyatt's
at his best, lucid about themselves, their moral predicaments, their

confusions, their failures when judged either by the standards of the

 

197

world or of eroded idealisms."33 But Wyatt does chart another kind

of perilous journey. In "Som fowles there be," the only thing the
speaker learns from experience is that he is unable to learn from
experience. As he describes the conditions that cause him to seek
self-destruction, all he can say is that he knows what he is doing and
is nevertheless powerless to stop himself. But this poem treats a
specific situation, a single weakness: "My galley charged," in

contrast, is far more bleak. Here, the absence of reason is universal,

endemic: in the tempest imagery of the poem, reason —— the quality
which makes people fully human —— is "drowned" by the element of life
itself.

Gascoigne's treatment of the kind of wisdom that is gained from
experience contains no comparably terrifying perceptions; instead, he
holds out the hope that those who fail, even repeatedly, can still
profit from their errors by gaining in self—knowledge and knowledge of
the world; the mistakes which open "The common speech" lead to a
perspective which is explicitly identified with "wisdom" in the final

I

poem,"No haste but good, where wysedome makes the waye,' and the

 

sequentiality and concatenation of the series reinforces the
progressive, experiential nature of this development.

Sidney's Astrophil, the antithesis of Gascoigne's speaker, fails
utterly to learn from experience -- not because his situation is
inherently unyielding, and not because he is thrown off balance by
looking too closely into an abyss of irrationality, but precisely

because he backs away from knowledge of himself which makes him

198

uncomfortable or which challenges his self-indulgence. In Gascoigne's
world, waste can generate wisdom, success can grow out of failure.
Success itself is finally redefined, measured —— in "Wodmanship" above
all —— by the speaker's increased understanding of his own predicament
and by his discovery that the apparent success of others is illusory
when measured by the proper yardsticks. Such an increased
understanding, in contrast, is precisely what Sidney's Astrophil fails
to achieve. Sidney does not suggest that Astrophil is incapable of
learning from his mistakes —- incapable of absorbing the bitter
lessons of his experience and revising his course —- but only that he
lacks the resolve to see such efforts through. In his case, they end
in false starts and wasted opportunities. There is all the difference
in the world between the predicament facing Astrophil, who backs away
from acknowledging his situation for what it is, and that facing the

' who sees his situation clearly but

speaker in "Som fowles there be,'
is helpless to change it. Where Wyatt's speaker's inability to act in
accordance with reason is inexplicable, Astrophil's is not.

At the same time, however, Sidney's treatment of the gap between
action and knowledge is fully developed where Wyatt's is sporadic and
occasional. Recycling the Petrarchan conventions of antithesis and
paradox in poems like "I find no peace," Wyatt probes their
implications and invests them with a new level of significance as he
explores the dark side of human irrationality, but his encounters with

the terror of unreason are momentary. Sidney's sequential treatment of

Astrophil's irrational behavior is far more fully orchestrated; it

 

r .. ..:...r.. I IIII.II.,

 

199

constitutes, as I have argued, a major theme in the sequence. At
several points in Astrophil and Stella, Astrophil is unable to act in
accordance with reason. Rather than lamenting the fact that the
rational faculty should "fust in us unused," as Hamlet will, his
solution is to banish reason to a realm which has nothing to do with
action —- nothing to do with the realities of his life —— when he
tells it to "deale . . . with powers of thoughts, leave love to will"
(5.8). Indeed, his commitment to unreason is both "willed" and
"willful" in every sense of those words. But if Sidney does not focus
consistently on the gap between what Astrophil knows and what he does,
it is because Astrophil knows less and less as the sequence proceeds
—- and because the gap narrows accordingly. Sidney's speaker, unlike
Wyatt's and Gascoigne's, does not perceive the significance of his own
behavior.

Only in Shakespeare's sonnets do these separate strands —— the
acquisition of wisdom from experience, the clarification of one's own
situation, and the inability to change it —- come together in a fully
articulated pattern. Like Astrophil, Shakespeare's speaker errs and
deceives himself; unlike him, he pulls back from error, sees through
his own self—deception, and does his best to "tell the story of [his]
days" accurately. Thrust into a net of relationships in which almost
every action he takes is morally ambiguous if not questionable, he
survives his own mistakes -- including his his weakness for
"authorizing . . . trespass with compare" and "b1ess[ing] an ill

report." Shakespeare's sonnets —- especially those in the dark lady

 

200

group —— endorse the conviction of his predecessors that wisdom is
indeed derived from experience, that what is most worth knowing can
only be known if one leaves one's self open to the complexities of
human life. In the end, the lessons of such experience can be bitter,
possibly tragic. Like Wyatt's speaker who fears that reason is
"drowned," Shakespeare's speaker sees himself at one point as a
mortally ill madman on whom reason—as—physician has given up. Drawing
on Wyatt, Gascoigne, and Sidney, Shakespeare shows his speaker coming
to terms, over the course of the sequence, with painfully acquired
knowledge of himself and others, as well as with the recognition that
such knowledge does not necessarily generate tangible change. In the
first part of the sequence he discovers that the private, compensatory
world he tries to create yields only a solipsistic confusion, and that
poetry, far from conferring immortality, can instead be used to
conceal and distort the truth. In the second part (in which poetry is
never explicitly mentioned)34 he discovers that telling the truth
is the best he can do. Shakespeare thus brings together with special
intensity two themes which recur individually in the work of his
predecessors: the belief that wisdom is derived from experience and
applicable to it, and the perception that there is also a residual,
intractable element in human experience which does not yield to
change.

Jonson, so concerned with the surfaces of the questions occupying
his predecessors and contemporaries, differs from them in more

important ways than he resembles them. Wyatt's most outstanding

 

201

achievement, we recall, is his creation of a voice which is profoundly
engaged with experience, which insists on asking for (and offering)
reciprocity and fair play in a world of shifting loyalties and
uncertainties. Most impressive of all is the bold way in which it
establishes the powerful reality of such a world at the same time that
it insists and assumes that fair play is possible within it. Nor does
it tie expectations of fairness to unrealistic assumptions about the
infallibility or even superiority of a chosen few. Jonson, however,
has little patience with those who have erred, little toleration of
human fallibility. He rarely presents the uncentered or uncertain self
sympathetically. In his world, knaves remain knaves, fools fools. He
would never have written a poem like Wyatt's "My galley charged with

' in which an intelligent and articulate speaker

forgetfulness,'
announces that his reason is "drowned." Suggesting that a person
bereft of reason could or should be taken seriously or sympathetically
would surely be just as absurd, in his opinion, as believing that one
could do wrong with just cause. Moreover, Jonson has none of
Gascoigne's generous view of human fallibility; he does not present
speakers who learn as much from failure as from success, who accept
their own tendency to repeat mistakes, whose wisdom may be nothing
more than an attempt to beguile themselves. Unlike his contemporary
Fulke Greville, he does not write for those "that are weatherbeaten in
the Sea of this World, such as having lost the sight of their Gardens,
.35

and Groves.'

Because he has little if any patience with the uncentered self,

202

Jonson really does not explore the impediments to ethical action in
the same way that Wyatt, Gascoigne, Sidney, and Shakespeare do. As a
result, his conception of the relation between knowledge and action is
superficial compared to theirs. In his view, determining what is right
-- and proceeding to do it —— is not difficult. Even in his
self—disclosing epistle to Selden, when Jonson realizes that he has
deceived himself about his own ability to judge others and assess his
own powers, he quickly regains his characteristic confidence in his
own judgment. In effect, what Jonson allows himself to learn from
mistakes is that they should not be allowed to occur.

One final form of action to be evaluated is the act of writing
the poem. In addition to mastering the introspective lyric, Wyatt uses
the poem to discover and communicate the dynamics of personal and
social relationships: by making the point that the poem is the
appropriate vehicle for doing so, he also articulates and defends the
role of the poet in human society. In "Lullabie" and "Wodmanship,"
Gascoigne similarly uses the poem as a way of coming to terms with
himself and sorting out his misgivings about his own use of time, but
in "Wodmanship" he also uses the poem to mold social relationships, to
influence hierarchical structures, and to demonstrate the powerful
combination of imagination and rhetorical skill. If Wyatt's
characteristic speaker is a person who tries to do the right thing and
wonders why others do not value fair play as much as he does,
Gascoigne's is an unlucky bungler who calls attention to his own

. 7 . . .
mistakes.3 Despite their differences, both speakers, however,

 

 

 

 

203

emerge as morally superior to the prevailing social order at the same
time that they reaffirm their continuing participation in it. Both,
learning from trial and error, reach certain conclusions about
themselves and their calling; both claim the role of poet as educator
and exemplar; both accept and assert their membership in the group to
which they address themselves.

Antithetically, Sidney's Astrophil is both isolated from and
inferior to the associates whom he patronizes; a negative example, he
begins by committing himself to making poems which will employ
figurative, formal, and logical elements to deal adequately with
complex situations, but soon reduces this endeavor to an exercise -—
"copying." Ceasing to berate himself because his "knowledge brings
forth toyes," he comes to disavow his own identity as an artist,
inviting Stella —— and posterity —— to obliterate his "poet's name."
Withdrawing to a private world and turning his back on his own social
obligations, he also turns his back on the educative role of the poet
which his creator endorses so eloquently in the Defence. In his
sequence, Sidney blames Astrophil, not the courtly society to which he
belongs, making its spokespersons representatives of reason and
endorsing their views.

The emphasis in Shakespeare's sonnets falls on the function of
poetry in personal rather than social relationships. Shakespeare's
speaker begins to come to terms with his own capacity for misusing his
verbal powers in a different way as he comes to confront poetry's

power --not necessarily to confer immortality in the future but to

 

 

204

conceal and even distort the truth about the present. In addition to
criticizing the rival poet for excessive praise of the young man
(e.g., "I never saw that you did painting need"), he discovers his own
propensity for "fairing the foul" and increasingly accepts the
consequences of his own actions. Even when not referring to his own
poems, the speaker worries about using his analytical and verbal skill
to define his situation accurately and to represent its emotional,
ethical, and behavioral complexities without distortion.

Jonson remains ambivalent. The epistle to Selden suggests that at
one point he believed to some extent in the transforming power of
poetry —— in its ability to elicit the best possible behavior from
others in response to praise. At the other extreme, the late odes to
himself circumscribe the role of lyric poetry, confining it to an
isolated introspection that protects the poet from the buffetings of
his society rather than connecting him with it. on balance, however,
Jonson's verse, even when troubled, underscores his conviction that
poetry is a natural medium for communicating in everyday situations
and that it invests simple human transactions with an aesthetic
dimension and an allusive resonance.

In different ways, all five poets are preoccupied with making use
of poetry as they address some of the most problematical aspects of
their worlds. Whether they focus on personal relationships (as does
Shakespeare) or social relationships (as does Gascoigne), they create
poet—speakers who explicitly employ their poetic skills and implicitly

employ their rhetorical skills to the dual process of comprehending

   

205

and affecting such relationships. As poets, those speakers not only
deal with the difficult process of assimilating their own experience
in all of its complexity but also use the poem itself as a mode of
action as they question and redefine the role of the poet in the

world.

 

 

 

Notes

Introduction

1 The Poems and Letter of Andrew Marvell, ed. H.M.
Margoliouth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), I, p. 85. Other
quotations from Marvell are from this edition and will be cited
parenthetically.

2 Harold Toliver, Marvell's Ironic Vision (New Haven and
London: Yale University Press, 1965), pp. 150-51, and Joseph H.
Summers, The Heirs of Donne and Jonson (New York and London: Oxford
University Press, 1970), pp. 153—55.

 

3 Cleanth Brooks, "Andrew Marvell: Puritan Austerity with
Classical Grace," in Poetic Traditions of the English Renaissance
eds. Maynard Mack and George deForest Lord (New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 1982), p. 227.

4 A.D. Nuttall, "Two Unassimilable Men," in Shakespearian
Comedy, Stratford—upon—Avon Studies, 14 (London: Edward Arnold, 1972),
pp. 228-29.

The best analysis remains Douglas Bush's The Renaissance
and English Humanism (1939; rpt. London: Oxford University Press,
1965).

 

Among the critics reinforcing this notion is Joseph
Mazzeo (Renaissance and Revolution: The Remaking of European Thought
[New York: Pantheon Books, 1965], p. 53). For a radically different
view, see Louis Adrian Montrose, "Of Gentlemen and Shepherds: The
Politics of Elizabethan Pastoral Form," ELHJ 50 (1983), 415-59.

7 Pointed out by Eugene F. Rice, The Renaissance Idea of
Wisdom (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958), p. 154. In
Des Vertus Intellectuelles et Moralles. Discours prononce a l'Academie
du Palais par Ronsard en Presence de Henri III. Oeuvres Completes
ed. Gustave Cohen [Paris: Bibliotheque de la Pleiade, 1950], 11,
1030—34), Ronsard responds to the king's inquiry whether the moral or
intellectual virtues are more important ("si les vertus moralles sont
plus louables, plus necessaires et plus excellentes que les
intellectuelles" [1030]). The former win; the latter are judged less
useful in the conduct of public affairs ("pource qu'il y a plusieurs
sciences intellectuelles qui ne sont utiles au maniment des affaires
publicques, comme est la phisique, l'astrologie, la judiciare et
beaucoup d'autres telles curiositez, si nous comparons telles vertus

206

 

207

intellectuelles aux moralles, les vertus moralles les passeront de
beaucoup" [1032]). This, he continues, was recognized not just by
Socrates, who turned contemplation into action by bringing philosophy
into the lives of of urban men ("aux hommes et la logea dedans les
citez, tournant la contemplation en l'action" [1033]), but also by
Pericles, Themistocles, and Aristides; in contrast, contemplatives
like Anaxagoras, Thales, and Democritus never contributed to their
republic by living the lives of good citizens ("ils n'ont jamais rien
profitte a leur repoublique pour en acquerir le nom de bons citoyens"
[1033]).

8 Sir Thomas Wyatt, The Quyete of Mynde, in Collected Poems
of Sir Thomas Wyatt, eds. Kenneth Muir and Patricia Thomson
(Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1969 [hereafter cited as
Muir-Thomson]), Appendix B, p. 443. Stephen Greenblatt's reminder that
"there is no translation that is not at the same time an
interpretation" surely applies to Wyatt's essay as well as to his
poetry (Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare [Chicago
and London: University of Chicago Press, 1980], p. 115).

 

 

 

9 Arthur 0. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the

Histogy of an Idea (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1936;
rpt. 1966), p. 25.

 

 

O Lovejoy, p. 25.
11 G.K. Hunter, John Lyly: The Humanist as Courtier (London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), pp. 13, 6.

12 Hunter, p. 13

 

3 Hunter, p. 13.

14 Rice deals with a broad spectrum of European writers,
tracing changes in the history of the idea of wisdom through
antiquity, the patristic and medieval periods, and the Renaissance.
Focusing primarily on the writings of moral philosophers, he does not
deal with imaginative literature in general or with English poets in
particular. Nevertheless, his solid and useful intellectual history
provides a helpful framework for the specific issues I consider, and
places them in perspective in a rich cultural heritage. I discovered
his book after developing the basic plan for this study and locating
its governing ideas in the poetry itself, but found his work
indispensable, especially in the process of placing my findings in a
broader context.

'5 Rice, p. 150; Cicero, De Officiis, 1, vi, 19 and II, ii,
5—6, trans. Walter Miller (Loeb Classical Library XXI, (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard Univerity Press, 1968), pp. 20—21 and 170—73. "All
these professions [astronomy, mathematics, dialectics, and civil law]

 

 

 

208

are occupied with the search after truth; but to be drawn by study
away from active life is contrary to moral duty. For the whole glory
of virtue is in activity" (p. 21).

'6 Bush, p. 127.

17 Hunter, p. 6.

18 Thus, Hunter's belief that the involvement of Elizabethan
humanists in the nation's political life proved "crippling" (p. 14)
has been revived with variations in recent years by the exponents of
the new historicism. See, for example, Jonathan Goldberg, "The
Politics of Renaissance Literature: A Review Essay," ELH, 49 (1982),
514-42.

9 Bush, pp. 113—14. See also Milton, "Of Education,"
Complete Prose Works of John Milton, II, ed. Ernest Sirluck (New Haven
and London: Yale University Press, 1959), pp. 357-415: "I call
therefore a compleate and generous Education that which fits a man to
perform justly, skilfully, and magnanimously all the offices both
private and publicke of peace and war" (pp. 377—79).

20 For Wyatt, see the following chapter; for Vives, see
Marian Leona Tobriner, ed. and introd., Vives' Introduction to Wisdom:
A Renaissance Textbook (New York: Teachers College Press, 1968).

21 The Shepheardes Calendar ("Iune," 71-72), in Spenser.
Poetical Works ed. J.C. Smith and E. de Selincourt-(London, Oxford,
and New York: Oxford University Press, 1912; rpt. 1975), p. 442.

22 For two excellent treatments of Milton's —— and the epic
narrator's —- presence in Paradise Lost, see George DeForest Lord,
"Milton's Dialogue with Omniscience in Paradise Lost," and Janet
Adelman, "Creation and the Place of the Poet in Paradise Lost," in
Louis L. Martz and Aubrey Williams, eds., The Author in His Work:
Essays on a Problem in Criticism (New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 1978), pp. 31-50 and 71-84, resp.

23 Richard Helgerson, "The Laureate and the Literary System"
and "The New Poet Presents Himself," in his Self—Crowned Laureates:
Spenser, Jonson, Milton and the Literary System (Berkeley, Los
Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1983), pp. 21-54
and 55-100. See also Harry Berger, Jr.,"Orpheus, Pan, and the Poetics
of Misogyny: Spenser's Critique of Pastoral Love and Art," ELHJ 50
(1983), 27-60; David L. Miller, "Spenser's Vocation, Spenser's
Career," ELH, 50 (1983), 197-231; and Montrose, "'The perfecte paterne
of a Poete': The Poetics of Courtship in The Shepheardes Calendggf'
TSLL, 21 (1979), 34—67.

24

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fulke Greville, A Treatise of Religion, 98.1—3, quoted in

 

209

Richard Waswo, The Fatal Mirror: Themes and Techniques in the Poetry
of Fulke Greville (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia,
1972), p. 3.

25 All quotation from Caelica are from Geoffrey Bullough,
ed., Poems and Dramas of Fulke Greville, First Lord Brooke (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1945). See also Charles Larson, Fulke
Greville (Boston: Twayne, 1980), pp. l4, l8; F.J. Levy, "Fulke
Greville: The Courtier as Philosophic Poet," Modern Language Quarterly,
33 (1972), 443; and Ronald A. Rebholz, The Life of Fulke Greville,
First Lord Brooke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), pp. 237-38.

26 In Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, 1554-1628: A Critical
Biography (Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press,
1971), Joan Rees points to his "deep and powerful religious conviction
of the inherent and ineradicable sinfulness of the world and the tense
situation of men, who are called to be in the world but not of it" (p.

1).

 

 

 

 

 

 

27 Rebholz, p. 293. "How did Greville relate his engagement

with literature to his view of the corruption of all worldly matters?"
Rees asks (p. 182); after looking at Caelica LXVI, she turns to the
Treatie of Humane Learning for an answer -— precisely because Caelica
with one exception, ignores this question. Basically, Rees concludes
that in Caelica LXVI and the Treatie Greville, like Calvin and
Milton, believed that "Where the inward man is corrupt, books and
learning can only serve corruption. Where the heart and mind are pure,
on the other hand, the truths of revelation are the only learning
worthy of contemplation" (p. 187). See her useful discussion (pp.
187-98) of how this position is worked out in detail in the Treatie
28 The Poems of Sir Walter Ralegh, ed. Agnes M.C. Latham
(Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1929), pp. 45, 43.

29 Stephen Greenblatt, Sir Walter Ralegh: The Renaissance Man
and his Roles (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973).

30 M.M. Mahood, Poetry and Humanism (1950; rpt. Port
Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1967), p. 38.

31 Arthur Marotti disagrees; see his "John Donne and
Patronage," in Patronage in the Renaissance. eds. Guy Fitch Lytle and
Stephen Orgel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), pp.
207-34. Marotti argues that Donne deeply resented his lack of
employment at court, and that poems like "The Canonization," far from
rejecting the pursuit of power, as is commonly assumed, project
Donne's fascination with it: the poem's imagery reveals, he says, that
Donne's mind is never very far from thoughts of states and princes.

 

 

 

 

 

32 "Affliction [1]" (38). All quotation from Herbert are from

 

210

F.E. Hutchinson, ed., The Works of George Herbert (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1941, rpt. 1972).

33 As Helen Vendler says, "his primary subject is the
workings of his own mind and heart rather than the expression of
certain religious beliefs," and his poems insist upon the "absolute
primacy of lived experience" The Poetry of George Herbert [Cambridge,
Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 1975], pp. 4,6). Waswo
(pp. 139—42) and Larson (pp. 127-28) also compare Greville to Herbert.

 

 

Stanley Fish, who makes a similar point, believes that in
the "anti-aesthetic" of "Jordan (II)" Herbert views the plain style as
a temptation, not as a solution (Self—Consuming Artifacts: The
Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature [Berkeley, Los Angeles,
and London: University of California Press, 1972], n. 21, p. 199). See
also pp. 177-79, 219-22, as well as Barbara Leah Harman, Costly
Monuments: Representations of the Self in George Herbert's Poetry
(Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 1982), p. 34.

35 It can be and has been argued that Herbert does more than
make the kind of figurative and/or literal assertions I have been
describing in this particular poem —— that, in fact, he uses the poem
as a place where open-ended "making" can occur. See, for example,
Vendler's chapter on the "reinvented poem" (pp. 25—56) in which she
stresses the "provisional quality" of much of Herbert's verse (p. 25):
"Herbert 'reinvents' the poem afresh as he goes along. He is
constantly criticizing what he has already written and he often finds
the original conception inadequate" (p. 29). In this sense, the
experience of writing or "making" the poem is a process of discovering
what it is he really thinks —— of putting time to good use. See
Harman, p. 199, n15, and Richard Strier, "Humanizing Herbert," Journal
of Modern Philology, 74 [1976], 78—88), for a critique of Vendler's
emphasis on the poem as process.

36 As Vendler says, "The very indirectness and
inarticulateness of the final definition, coupled with the large claim
of the last three words, limits the secular world suddenly to its own
now impoverished inventory, which until this moment had seemed the
spirited sum of all things and all doings. The closing definition is
careful not to make verse a means of passage to God. Not 'By using
verse, I can reach thee' but 'While I use verse, I am with thee,’ says
Herbert. The final revenge on all those nouns and verbs is fairly

earned" (p. 183).

 

 

 

7 Daniel Javitch, Poetry and Courtliness in Renaissance
England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978).

38 For a helpful exposition of the principles informing this
critical approach, see Goldberg, pp. 514-42.

 

211

39 4.4.38-39, The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore
Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974), p. 1172. All quotations from
Shakespeare's plays are from this edition and will be cited
parenthetically.

"0 Quoted in The Renaissance Philosophy of Man, ed. Ernst
Cassirer, Paul Oskar Kristeller, and John Herman Randall, Jr., trans.
Hans Nachod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), p. 34.

Chapter One

1 Greenblatt, Renaissance Self—Fashionipg, p. 7. As Thomas
Greene points out in his review (Comparative Literature [1982], 186),
Greenblatt's book, however brilliant, is wrong about Wyatt. It is,
nevertheless, the most important work on Wyatt to appear in years.

2 Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, p. 120 ("Wyatt
remains within a context governed by the essential values of
domination and submission . . . Wyatt cannot fashion himself in
opposition to power and the conventions power deploys").

3 Muir-Thomson, CCLIX, p. 252. All quotations from Wyatt are
from this edition and will be identified parenthetically. We still do
not possess a scholarly edition of Wyatt that is generally accepted as
authoritative; for a discussion of widely recognized shortcomings in
Muir—Thomson, see H.A. Mason, Editing Wyatt (Cambridge: Cambridge
Quarterly Publications, 1972), and Joost Daalder's.review of
Muir—Thomson, "Editing Wyatt," Essays in Criticism, XXIII (1973),
399—413; for a helpful guide to the textual problems still plaguing
Wyatt critics, see Richard Harrier, The Canon of Sir Thomas Wyatt's
Poetry (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975). Ronald A.
Rebholz's edition Sir Thomas Wyatt: The Complete Poems [New York:
Penguin Books, 1978]) contains some of the best commentary, critical
and historical, and helpfully groups poems by genre rather than by
manuscript, but employs modernized spelling and punctuation. Daalder's
Sir Thomas Wyatt: Collected Poems (London: Oxford University Press,
1975), another recent edition with modernized spelling, groups poems
by manuscript but separates ascribed and unascribed lyrics within
manuscripts. The difficulty of producing a definitive edition is
closely tied to the difficulty (the impossibility, perhaps) of
establishing the Wyatt canon with any certainty. In fact, one of the
problems with Greenblatt's book, Greene's review points out, is that
Greenblatt bases one crux of his argument on a poem whose authorship
is widely regarded as uncertain ("To wette yout yee withoutyn teare"
[CLXX]), despite the fact that it is included in the major editions.
To minimize such problems, I have confined my discussion to poems
which textual experts confidently attribute to Wyatt on the basis of
external as well as internal evidence.

 

 

 

212

Thomas A. Hannen, "The Humanism of Sir Thomas Wyatt," in

The Rhetoric of Renaissance Poetry from Wyatt to Milton, ed. Thomas O.
Sloan and Raymond B. Waddington (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1974), p. 43. Hannen's essay, like mine, is broadly concerned
with Wyatt's relation to the humanist tradition. His emphasis on
rhetoric, however, leads him in a direction different than the one I
pursue, and he emphasizes two lyrics ("What vaileth trouth?" and "Ys
yt possyble?") to which I refer only in passing. Hannen's study, like
Greenblatt's, is useful because it focuses squarely on what Wyatt
thought —— a subject which has been dealt with only peripherally, and
which has generally been subordinated to a concern with Wyatt's
metrical sophistication, his relation to his sources, or his texts.
Recent emphasis on Wyatt as a poet who uses lyric forms for serious
inquiry begins in earnest with Douglas Peterson's important chapter in
his The English Lyric from Wyatt to Donne: A Study of the Plain and
Eloquent Styles (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), pp.
87—119; Peterson argues correctly that Wyatt is "the first poet in
sixteenth—century England to have used the plain style within the
native song tradition to deal seriously with ideas" (p. 118). Other
significant studies of Wyatt include Donald M. Friedman, "The 'Thing'
in Wyatt's Mind," Essays in Criticism, 16 (1966), 375—81, and "The
Mind in the Poem: Wyatt's 'They flee from me,'" SEE, 7 (1967), 1—13;
H.A. Mason, Humanism and Poetry in the Early Tudor Period (London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1959); and Patricia Thomson, Sir Thomas
Wyatt and His Background (Stanford: Stanford Univrsity Press, 1964).

5 I discuss these three sonnets in order of their increasing
complexity, not according to any assumptions about.chronological
order. It is tricky enough to establish the Wyatt canon, let alone its
chronology.

 

 

 

 

6 See Peterson, pp. 266-68, for the place of "Ffarewell,
Love" in the history of the penitential lyric. He views it as a
significant break with the medieval didactic tradition because it
justifies renunciation "not on the grounds that renunciation is
necessary for salvation, but on the grounds that desire is
self-inflicted privation" (p. 267). As Friedman puts it, this

"palinodic sonnet . . . is remarkable in that love is rejected not
because it is sinful or irrational but because it is tiring .

the emphasis falls . . . on the poet's wearied realization that he has
squandered the powers of his mind" ("The 'Thing' in Wyatt's Mind, "
376).

Because this sonnet turns on line 8 instead of line 9, and
because of the incongruity between its formal units and
logical/syntactical units, it may be inappropriate to speak of a
sestet at all. Any temptation to speculate that the break after line 7
enacts the motions of a mind divided against itself should be
tempered, however, by the fact that Wyatt's unusual structure follows
that of his Petrarchan original, "Son animali al mondo di 31 altera"

 

 

213

(Francesco Petrarca, Rime,19, Introduzione e Note di Guido Bezzola
(Milano: Biblioteca Universale Rizzoli, 1976), p. 107.). In both
Petrarch and Wyatt, line 8 "forms a bridge passage, concluding the
octave and introducing the sestet" (Muir-Thomson, p. 284). But formal
and syntactical units are congruent in Petrarch where they are
incongruent in Wyatt. For an excellent discussion of Wyatt's use of
Petrarch, see Greene, The Light in Trgy: Imitation and Discovery in
Renaissance Poetry (New Haven and London: Yale University Press,
1982), pp. 246-57.

8 "It may be good, like it who list" (XXI). See Hannen's
helpful discussion of this poem (pp. 52—55).

9 As the OED points out, two very different words -— one from
Old French and one from Middle English —— have run together and are
virtually impossible to distinguish from Caxton on. Spellings include
devis, devys, devise, and device.

10 OED 6a, b.

11 Like "Eche man me telleth," one of Wyatt's few wholly
original sonnets, it is in fact so unified in tone that J.W. Lever has
argued that it contains no real sestet and is actually a prototypal
English sonnet (The Elizabethan Love Sonnet [London: Methuen, 1956],
p. 27). But whether or not lines 9-12 comprise a quatrain, the second
part of the poem underscores the first; the couplet reveals an angry

intensity —- a loss of composure -- that is perhaps absent from the
previous lines, but it does not undercut them.
12

The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, eds. Edward Surtz,
S.J., and J.H. Hexter (New Haven and London: Yale University Press,
1965), IV, p. 99.34—35 ("& in tempestate nauis destituenda est,
quoniam uentos inhibere non possis" [98.27-28]).

13 Thomas Warton, The History of English Poetry, in Wyatt:
The Critical Heritage, ed. Patricia Thomson (London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 1974), pp. 43-44.

1" As Greenblatt point out,"For the briefest moment we
glimpse an unpleasant answer to the question with which the poem has
begun . . . the poet's country freedom is in fact a kind of house
arrest" (Renaissance Self—Fashioning p. 132).

15 Rebholz, Sir Thomas Wyatt (p. 442). Greenblatt emphasizes
its "essential link between language and power" (Renaissance
Self—Fashioning, p. 130).

16 Only the Muir-Thomson edition prints line 19 as "my tonge"
rather than "my tune." "Tune" is printed by Rebholz, Daalder, and Muir
(Collected Poems of Sir Thomas Wyatt [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,

 

 

214

1949, rpt. 1963]). The fact that lines 1-52 are missing from the
Egerton ms. —- the copy-text for the remainder of the poem -—
complicates the editorial problem. Both Tottel and the Devonshire ms.
print "tune"; the Parker ms. (Rebholz's copy-text for lines 1—52)
prints "tonge"; and the line is missing from the Arundel and Hill mss.

17 Rebholz, Sir Thomas Wyatt, p. 446; Friedman, "The 'Thing'
in Wyatt's Mind," 375—81.

18 The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, pp. 101.1—2 ("quod
in bonum nequis uertere, efficias saltem, ut sit quam minime malum"
[p. 100.1-2]) and p. 103.9—15 ("Porro nihil occurrit, in quo
prodessequicquam possis, in eos delatus collegas, qui uel optimum
uirum facilius corruperint, quam ipsi corrigantur, quorum peruersa
consuetudine uel deprauaberis, uel ipse integer atque innocens,
alienae malitiae, stultitiaeque praetexeris, tantum abest ut aliquid
possit in melius obliquo illo ductu conuertere" [p. 102.8—13]).

19 Rebholz, Sir Thomas Wyatrr p. 450. See Greenblatt,
Renaissance Self—Fashioning (pp. 133—35), for the best treatment of
the poetic (as opposed to the biographical) implications of Wyatt's
decision to make Brian the spokesperson of honesty, and for its effect
on the reader. For a diplomatic historian's view of the satire (and
contribution to the continuing debate over its dating). see David
Starkey, "The Court: Castiglione's Ideal and Tudor Reality; being a
discussion of Sir Thomas Wyatt's Satire addressed to Sir Francis
Bryan," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 45 (1982),
232-29. .

20 Hallett Smith, "The Art of Sir Thomas Wyatt," Huntington
Library Quarterly, 9 (1946), pp. 350, 351. But there is no conclusive
evidence that "Lament my losse" is by Wyatt: Harrier classifies it
among the "doubtful poems" (p. 54). See also Muir-Thomson, p. 423.

21 Others include "All hevy myndes" (LXXXIV); "Might I as
well within my song belaye" (CLIII); "My pen, take payn a lytyll
space" (CLXXIX); "As power and wytt wyll me Assyst" (CLXXXVIII); "Sins
you will nedes that I shall sing" (CCIX); "Now of all chaunge"
(CCXXVI); and "Such is the course" (CCL). It seems clear, too, that
when Wyatt refers to his "songs," he means words, not music; when a
lyric which begins "Me list no more to sing" also says "Marke well, I
say, this text" (CCX, 1, 29), the connection seems self—evident. The
relation of words and music in the early Tudor period is
problematical, as the divergent conclusions of John Stevens and
Winifred Maynard indicate, but both seem to agree on this point.
Stevens, arguing that most "songs" by Wyatt and his contemporaries
were ppp written to be accompanied by music, and that Wyatt probably
knew very little about music in any case, points out that musical and
literary references occasionally occur, as they do above, in the same
poem (Music and Poetry in the Early Tudor Court [Lincoln: University

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

215

of Nebraska Press, 1961], p. 123). Maynard, who believes that Wyatt,
following Serafino, may well have introduced the practice of writing
art songs for the lute to England, nevertheless sees his references to
"song" as "purely conventional alternatives to literary texts"; in "My
lute, awake!" she says, the lute's voice is joining with his own ("The
Lyrics of Wyatt: Poems or Songs?" RES, 16 (1965), 253, 251.

Stevens, p. 85. For important critical treatments of
Wyatt's penitential psalms, see Greenblatt, pp. 115—27; Mason,
Humanism and Poetry, pp. 206—21; R.G. Twombly, "Thomas Wyatt's
Paraphrase of the Penitential Psalms of David," TSLL ,12 (1970),
345—80; and Hallett Smith, "English Metrical Psalms in the Sixteenth
Century and their Literary Significance," Huntington Library Quarterly,
9 (1946), 249—71.

23 See Muir—Thomson, pp. 356-58, and Mason, Humanism and
Poetry, pp. 203—21, for a full discussion of Wyatt's use of his
sources in the penitential psalms.

 

 

4 Greenblatt, p. 121.

25 There are strong and interesting parallels between the
difficulty David experiences in accepting forgiveness as a real
possibility (it is what motivates the despair from which he emerges in
Psalm 130) and the similar difficulty encountered by Marlowe's
Faustus.

26 C.S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century,
Excluding Drama (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954), p. 230.

27 For a full discussion of Wyatt's departure from the
tradition of the courtly love lyric, see Peterson, pp. 87—119.

28 While this poem appears only in the Devonshire ms., in a
section comprised of non—Wyatt poems, and while the only external
evidence for Wyatt's authorship is a "W" at the end of the third
stanza, Harrier includes it in the Wyatt canon "in view of the style
of the poem and the authority of the 'W' " (p. 52).

29

 

 

Muir—Thomson, p. 420.

George Turbervile, "Two things in cheefe did move me thus
to write" (lines 42 and 47-48), Tragical Tales and Other Poems
(Edinburgh: 1837, rpt. from the edition of M.D. LXXXVII), quoted in
C.T. Prouty, George Gascoigne: Elizabethan Courtier, Soldier, and Poet
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1942), p. 118.

31 . .
Peterson, who sees the same relationshlp, has made a
similar point: "What is especially interesting about Turbervile's
version is the way in which it confirms Wyatt's earlier charge that

 

 

 

216

hypocrisy and affectation are nurtured in court society, in the
writing of verse as well as in social relationships. These are
precisely the vices which the proponents of the plain style from Wyatt
to George Herbert proudly proclaim their own habits of plain speaking
avoid" (p. 125).

Mason, Humanism and Poetry, p. 171.

 

Chapter Two

1 C.T. Prouty, ed., George Gascoigne's A Hundreth Sundrie
Flowres (Columbia, Mo.: University of Missouri Studies, 17 [1942], p.
154). All quotations from Gascoigne's poems are from Prouty's edition
of A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres and will be cited parenthetically.

2 My shift from referring to "Gascoigne's speaker" to
"Gascoigne" within one paragraph is neither careless nor arbitrary.
The question of who is speaking in his lyrics is complicated by the
fact that not only do several of them refer to biographical incidents;
the speaker makes clear that those incidents are part of his
biography. Yet "Gascoigne's lullabie," the title and last line of
which would seem to place it in the same category, seems to defy such
classification for purely biographical reasons: if Prouty's dating is
correct (and it has never been challenged), then this poem, in which
the speaker laments the onset of age, was probably written when
Gascoigne was about 25 at the most. In view of the ambiguity which
Gascoigne himself creates, it seems best to refer to the speaker when
discussing individual poems, and to refer to Gascoigne the poet when
discussing themes which reappear in several poems. See Prouty, A
Hundreth Sundrie Flowres, pp. 34—37, for the argument that the poems
in this collection are both sequentially and chronologically ordered.
Prouty offers evidence that "Gascoignes wodmanship" refers to events
which occurred in the winter of 1572—73, the sonnet sequence to 1563.
He places the "Lullaby" at about the same time as the sonnet sequence.

3 The poem is prefaced by "Alexander Nevile delivered him
this theame: Sat cito, si sat bene, whereupon he compiled these seven
Sonets in sequence, therein bewraying his owne Nimis cito: and
therwith his Vix bene, as foloweth (Prouty, A Hundreth Sundrie
Flowres, p. 155).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

4 In his influential essay, "The 16th Century Lyric in
England: A Critical and Historical Reinterpretation" Poetr 52
(1939), 138—72, 320—32; 54 (1939), 35—51, Yvor Winters calls
"Gascoignes wodmanship" one of the greatest lyrics of the sixteenth
century, surpassed in his view only by Shakespeare's sonnets.
Peterson's The English Lyric from Wyatt to Donne contains an
important analysis of Gascoigne's use of rhetorical devices in
organizing the poem as well as a lucid discussion of Gascoigne's

 

 

217

contribution to anti-courtly writing in the plain style (pp. 152-63).
See also Ronald C. Johnson, George Gascoigne (New York: Twayne, 1972).

 

5 Hallett Smith, Elizabethan Poetry: A Study in Conventions,
Meaning and Expression (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1952), p. 206.

 

"Gascoignes wodmanship written to the L. Grey of wilton
uppon this occasion, the sayde L. Grey delighting (amongst many other
[good qualities) in chusing of his winter deare, and killing the same
with his bowe, did furnishe master Gascoigne with a crossbowe cum
Pertinencijc,_and vouchsafed to use his company in the said exercisee,
calling him one of his wodmen. Now master Gascoigne shooting very
often, could never hitte any deare, yea and often times he let the
heard_passe by as though he had not seene them. Whereat when this
noble Lord took some pastime, and had oftenrput him in remembrance of
his good skill in choosing, and redinesse in killing of a winter
deare, he thonght good thus to excuse it in verse" (Prouty, A Hundreth
Sundrie Flowres, p. 181).

 

Javitch makes a similar point in "The Impure Motives of
Elizabethan Poetry," Genre, 15 (1982), 225-38. See that essay and his
Poetry and Courtliness in Renaissance England for important
discussions of the "subtle kind of self-advertising" that the
Elizabethan court poets engaged in ("The Impure Motives," p. 226) and
the place of Puttenham's The Arte of English Poesie as a document in
the history of such self—advertising.

 

Chapter Three

1 This reading of the sequence —- that it deals with patterns
of self-deception and diminution —— draws upon, and is reinforced by,
a substantial body of criticism reassessing Astrophil and Stella_ See
especially Alan Sinfield, "Astrophil's Self—Deception," Essays in
Criticism 28 (1978), 1—18, and "Sidney and Astrophil," SE;; 20
(1980), 25L41. See also Richard C. McCoy, Sir Philip Sidney: Rebellion
in Arcadia (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1979);
David Kalstone, Sidney's Poetry: Contexts and Interpretations
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965); and Robert
Montgomery, Symmetry and Sense: The Poetry of Sir Philip Sidney
(Austin, University of Texas Press, 1961). For recent revisionist
treatments of Sidney's sequence, see Marotti, "'Love is not love':
Elizabethan Sonnet Sequences and the Social Order," ELH, 49 (1982),
396—427; Montrose, "Celebration and Insinuation: Sir Philip Sidney and
the Motives of Elizabethan Courtship," Renaissance Drama,,N.S. 8
(1977), 3-35. Other relevant studies include James J. Scanlon,
"Sidney's Astrophil and Stella: 'See what it is to love' Sensually!"
_§EL, 16 (1976), 65-74; Andrew W. Weiner, "Structure and 'Fore Conceit'
in Astrophil and Stella,fl'TSLL’ 16 (1974-75), 1-15; J.G. Nichols, The

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

218

Poetry of Sir Philip Sidney: An Interpretation in the Context of His
Life and Times (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1974); and
Richard A. Lanham, "Astrophil and Stella: Pure and Impure Persuasion,'
.ELR, 2 (1972), 100-15. For a traditional view, see Lever, pp. 51—91;
John Danby, Poets on Fortune's Hill: Studies in Sidney, Shakespeare,
Beaumont and Fletcher (1952; rpt. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat,
1966); and A.C. Hamilton, "Sidney's Astrophel and Stella as a Sonnet
Sequence," ELH, 36 (1969), 59-87.

 

I

 

2 Kalstone, p. 42.

Marotti, for example, argues that Sidney writes as a failed
politician to a coterie audience which would have understood "the
metaphorizing of love as ambition": "Lady Rich was for him, as was
Anne Boleyn for Wyatt, a fit symbol of his unattained and unattainable
social and political goals" ("'Love is not love,'" p. 400). Similarly,
Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass suggest that "the
contradictory tyrannies of court life . . . find their counterparts in
the contradictory tyrannies of love" and believe that the sequence
effects "a complex displacement of the ideological pressures of the
court" ("Courtship and Courtiership: The Politics of Astrpphil and
Stella" [presented and distributed at a special session on
revisionist literary history of the English Renaissance at the 1982
MLA convention], p. 2). But Javitch argues persuasively that Sidney's
sequence is free of those sociopolitical or "extrapoetic" agendas
present in much Elizabethan verse: "I would contend that one of the
principal though unstated aims of his sonnet sequence was to rebuke
prior Elizabethan writers of amatory verse, not solely for the
inferior quality of their verse but for the extra—amatory and
extra-literary motives that had prompted it" ("The Impure Motives of
Elizabethan Poetry," 233). Kalstone take the traditional view that the
sequence sets the public world at a comic distance, making it seem
irrelevant to the private world of love (p. 143). For a different
perspective, see John Stevens, Music and Poetry in the Early Tudor
Court, Stevens points out "one of the central paradoxes in the 'game
of love' —— that the desired fruit of personal experience of love is
joyous social activity. The 'game' is private but it is played in
public" (p. 187).

Furthermore, it also overlooks this important point made by
Richard McCoy: even when Sidney does deal with struggles which have
politcal implications, their origins tend to be "romantic and
psychological": "Sidney's characters find the tyranny of their own
emotions as menacing as the intervention of authority, and they have
difficulty negotiating a responsible and autonomous course. The
conflicts that result are prompted by a sudden eruption of impulse
rather than by serious differences of policy" (pp. 26-27). Moreover,
while Sidney was indeed preoccupied with the "fictive exploration of
the problems of sovereignty, obedience, and autonomy," those concerns
are "muted" in Astrophil and Stella (p.21). I agree with much of what

 

 

219

McCoy says about Sidney's sequence —- with one important exception. He
implies that Sidney is unaware that Astrophil is riddled with conflict
and ambivalence —— that Astrophil's conflicts are, in fact,
projections of Sidney's. I am arguing, in contrast, that Sidney knew
exactly what he was doing. Far from projecting his own difficulties
onto Astrophil, he demonstrates Astrophil's psychological and
emotional excesses as carefully as he reveals his speaker's rhetorical
flourishes.

All quotations from Astrophil and Stella are from The Poems
of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. William A. Ringler, Jr. (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1962).

 

 

6 Sinfield, "Sidney and Astrophil," p. 26.
7 Montgomery, p. 103.

8 Rees (pp. 102-03) and Marotti, "'Love is not love'" (p.
405), suggest that the friend in these sonnets was probably Greville.

Sinfield points out that, much later in the sequence,
Stella's words in the fourth song and the third person narrator in the
eighth song also introduce another perspective and "intensify the
reader's sense that there is another point of view to be stated"
("Astrophil's Self-Deception," pp. 14-15).

10 I do not mean to suggest a biographical reading which
equates the history of Astrophil's family with the very similar
history of the Sidney family. These lines illustrate the complexity of
the biographical question; Sidney's father was, after all, governor of
Ireland. See Sinfield's "Sidney and Astrophil" for a balanced,
cliche—free discussion of the subtleties involved.

11 Arthurian literature was popular in Sidney's day; in the
Defence, he mentions the story of King Arthur in the same breath as
the Orlando Furioso, Sidney himself was an enthusiastic participant in
tournaments, including the Accession Day tilts which have been seen as
a serious attempt to stimulate interest in chivalry. As McCoy points
out, "the mystique of chivalric glory was a persistent anachronism" in
Eliabethan culture (p. 9); see Frances Yates, "Elizabethan Chivalry:
The Romance of the Accession Day Tilts," JWCI, 20 (1957), 4-25 (rpt.
in Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century [London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975], pp. 88—111). For a perceptive
discussion of Sidney's relation to the ludic tradition outlined by
Johan Huizinga (Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture
[London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1949]), see Dorothy Connell, "Play
and the Courtly Maker," in her Sir Philip Sidney: The Maker's Mind
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977). Observing that "Huizinga's concept of
play allows psychological complexity" and that such activity is "not
simply a consciously-indulged pretence or a form of nostalgia" (p.

 

 

 

 

 

w

.-

220

54), Connell links Sidney's active participation in neo-chivalric
tournaments and tilts to the conception of life as self-conscious
game. See also Arthur B. Ferguson, The Indian Summer of English
Chivalry (Durham: Duke University Press, 1960).

12 She may feel the same way in Sonnet 64, "No more, my
deare, no more these counsels trie," in which Astrophil is no longer
even ashamed of failure. Astrophil brags here about his willingness to
risk the "worst disgrace" of fortune for Stella's sake ("Let all the
earth with scorne recount my case"), but I have not grouped 64 with
the public context sonnets because it is unclear whether Stella is
attempting in her counsels to dissuade him from disgracing himself or
simply from pursuing her -- whether or not she separates herself from
his perspective on social responsibility.

3 Ringler, p. 481. See also McCoy, p. 91.

1" Baldesar Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, trans.
Charles S. Singleton (New York: Anchor Books, 1959), pp. 288—90.

15 Sir Thomas Elyot, The Boke Named the Governour, ed. Henry
Herbert Stephen Croft, III (London: 1883, rpt. New York: Burt
Franklin, 1967), p. 430.

6 Elyot, p. 447.

17 As Richard B. Young reminds us in "English Petrarke: A
Study of Sidney's Astrophel and Stella," in Three Studies in the
Renaissance: Sidney, Jonson, Milton (New Haven: Yale Sudies in
English, Yale University Press, 1958), pp. 1—88.

18 The romancers' utter lack of interest in matters of
circumstantial realism does not prevent them from being as bourgeois
in spirit as they are didactic in intent. But for an opposing view see
Erich Auerbach, "The Knight Sets Forth," in his Mimesis: The
Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R.
Trask (1946; rpt. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), pp.
123—42. For a view closer to my own, see John Stevens, Medieval
Romance: Themes and Approaches (London: Hutchinson University Library,
1973). See also Charles Muscatine, "Realism and Romance," in his
Chaucer and the French Tradition: A Study in Style and Meaning
(Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press,
1957), pp. 41—57.

19 John A. Yunck, Introd. and trans., Eneas: A
Twelfth-Century French Romance (New York and London: Columbia
University Press, 1974), p. 29.

20 Of course, Astrophil is a courtier, Erec a knight; but in
Chretien's source, the Mabinogi tale of Gereint Son of Erbin, the

 

 

221

recreant Gereint is a member of the court, like Astrophil, and is
criticized for abandoning courtly pursuits. Gereint's recreancy is
overcome at court, not away from it, and Chretien's decision to ground
Erec's recreancy in the world of tournaments and active chivalry
represents a definite departure from his source. See D.D.R. Owen,
Introd. and Notes, Arthurian Romances (New York and London: Dent and
Dutton,1976), pp. dxii, 363, and Thomas Jones and Gwyn Jones, The
Mabinogion rev. .(London and New York. Everyman' 5 Library, 1974).
In a broader sense, Erec et Enide is characteristic of the genre, not
idiosyncratic. Chretien's Yvain also seeks a balance between the rival
claims of love and chivalry, and the hero of his unfinished Perceval
must also learn to redefine the stakes of the chivalric game in which
he is a key player. Similarly, Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival
presents romantic love as compatible with and productive of both
social and spiritual stability; both Chretien and Wolfram advocate
what Jean Frappier has called "an equilibrium between romantic love
and social duty" ("Chretien de Troyes," in Arthurian Literature in the
Middle Ages, ed. Roger Sherman Loomis [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959],
p. 170). An exception to the rule is Gottfried von Strassburg's
Tristan Gottfried's exaltation of his lovers and his consciously
orchestrated dismissal of the consequences of their love are anomalous
in romance narrative. In contrast to the Tristan, the literature
dealing with the Lancelot—Guenevere—Arthur triangle is consistently,
acutely, and sometimes tragically aware that the public consequences
are massive. For a fine discusson, see P.E. Tucker, "Chivalry in the
Morte," in Essays on Malory, ed. J.A.W. Bennett (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1963), pp. 64—103. See also Larry Benson, Malory's Morte
Darthur (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1976);
D.S. Brewer, Introd., Malory: The Morte Darthur (Evanston:
Northwestern Univrsity Press, 1974), pp. 1—37; R.T. Davies, "The
Worshipful Way in Malory," in Patterns of Love and Courtesy, ed. John
Lawler (London: Edward Arnold, 1966), pp. 157— 77; C. S. Lewis, "The
English Prose Morte, " in Essays on Malory, pp. 7— 28; and Eugene
Vinaver, ed. , The Works of Sir Thomas Malory, 2nd ed. (1967; rpt.
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), vol. 3, pp. 1615- 26.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

21 Chretien de Troyes, Erec et Enide, Arthurian Romances, p.
32.
22 . . .
Chretien de Troyes, Erec et Enide, Arthurian Romances,
pp. 33-34.

23 D.D.R. Owen, Arthurian Romances, p. 365.

24 There is growing recognition that the ancestry of Sidney's
narrative has many branches and includes more than the popular Amadis
de Gaule, Sannazaro's Arcadia, and the Greek prose romances: in
recent years, critics as diverse as Walter Davis, Richard Lanham, and
Jean Robertson have all discussed, from different perspectives, the
influence of medieval romance on both versions (Walter R. Davis,"A Map

 

222

of Arcadia: Sidney's Romance in Its Tradition," and Richard A. Lanham,
"The Old Arcadia," in Sidney's Arcadia [New Haven: Yale Studies in
English, Yale University Press, 1965], pp. 1—179 and 181-405, resp.;
and Jean Robertson, Introd., The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia [The
Old Arcadia] by Sir Philip Sidney [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973], pp.
xv-xli). While Robertson rejects the idea that they contributed "any
real ethos behind the sentiment and the emotion" (p. xxiv), Lanham's
iconoclastic study of the Old Arcadia disagrees. He points out, quite
rightly, that the Greek romances take place in a political vacuum and
offer "no organizing principles, no standard of behavior implicit in
the organization of society and against which we are to judge the
behavior of the protagonists" (p. 386). And although he finds Sidney's
ethical framework more complex than that of his predecessors, Lanham
links the 01d Arcadia's central concerns -— the continual interplay
between public and private spheres, the struggle between reason and
emotion -— to the preoccupations of chivalric romance. This essay
makes no attempt to discuss thematic similarities between the Arcadia
-- old, new, or composite -— and chivalric romance on one hand and
Astrophil and Stella on the other; there is very real disagreement
among critics about the implications of the differences in .
characterization, in plot, in narrative technique, and even in genre
between the cancelled and revised Arcadias, and to treat them casually
would lead to real distortion. But there is common agreement about the
obvious: Pyrocles and Musidorus temporarily turn their backs on a
world of heroic obligation in order to pursue private romantic
interests; their story, along with Basilius', provides Sidney with a
framework for exploring the rival claims of love and chivalry in terms
of the dichotomies so dear to the Elizabethans: engagement and
detachment, reason and passion, social order and sOcial anarchy. For a
helpful discussion of the relation of the Amadis de Gaule to Sidney's
poetry, see John J. O'Connor, Amadis de Gaule and its Influence on
Elizabethan Literature (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press,
1970). For Sidney's use of Malory, see Marcus S. Goldman, Sir Philip
Sidney and the Arcadia (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1934).
25 For an excellent discussion of this issue, see Javitch,
Poetry and Courtliness in Renaissance England, pp. 151—62.

26 As Javitch points out in Poetry and Courtliness, Sidney
suggests "that the ethical and persuasive ends previously attributed
to the orator have now been appropriated by the poet" (p. 104); both
he and Spenser "believe that the poet is able to create a world not
only superior to the actual world but capable of shaping and improving
the everyday world men inhabit" (p. 152).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Marotti, "'Love is not love,'" p. 405, and Stallybrass and
Jones, p. 15.

28
5—18).

F.J. Levy, "Philip Sidney Reconsidered," ELR, 2 (1972),

223

29 Hunter, pp. 15, 14.

30 Hunter, p. 15. For a useful critique of Hunter's
formulation, see Javitch, Poetry and Courtliness, pp.13—15. See also
Hanna H. Gray, "Renaissance Humanism: The Pursuit of Eloquence," JHIJ
24 (1963), 497—514 (rpt. in Renaissance Essays, eds. Paul Oskar
Kristeller and Philip P. Wiener [New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1969]).

 

Chapter Four

1 See, for example, Alvin B. Kernan, The Playwright as
Magician: Shakeepeare's Image of the Poet in the English Public
Theatre (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1979), pp.
44—48, and James Winny, The Master-Mistress: A Study of Shakeepeare's
Sonnets (London: Chatto and Windus, 1968), pp. 80—85. Kernan considers
Sonnet 111 "one of the crucial documents in the history of the
artist's turn away from patronage to the public marketplace as a
source of support" (p. 45); Winny, following Boswell, emphatically
rejects the notion that these poems suggest any connections with the
stage.

 

 

Sonnet 29, line 1. All quotations from Shakespeare's
sonnets are from Stephen Booth's edition (New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 1977).

3 J. B. Leishman, Themes and Variations in Shakespeare's
Sonnets (London: Hutchinson, 1961), pp. 202—13. Leishman concludes
that there is "no real precedent in previous love-poetry" for this
theme, although there are resemblances in Petrarch and Ronsard to its
corollary, " 'the catalogue of uncompensating delights' " (p. 209).
Leishman's discussion focuses on sources and analogues, not on the
issues considered here.

 

4 Hallett Smith, The Tension of the Lyre: Poetry in
Shakespeare's Sonnets (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1981), p. 68.

5 Leishman's selection is somwehat different; he identifies
25, 29, 30, 31, 37, 66, 90, 91, and 92 as compensatory sonnets.

 

 

Everyone writing on the sonnets makes working assumptions,
however tentative and implicit, about their order. This essay assumes
Q's order, but is not a study of the sonnets' arrangement. For a
useful summary of criticism on the subject, see Smith, The Tension of
the Lyre, pp. 115—125. "There are various reasons for the adopting the
order of the 1609 Quarto," he says, "The first and most obvious is
laziness. The second is skepticism about any of the arrangements that
have so far been offered" (pp. 121, 122). A recent essay by Carol
Thomas Neely ("The Structure of English Renaissance Sonnet Sequences,"

 

 

224

ELH, 45 [1978], 359—89) offers a third reason: she documents the
presence of a structural pattern which "validates the standing order"
of this and other sequences and helps to account for their "perplexing
conclusions" (p. 359). As Booth points out, "the 1609 sequence seems
to need interpretation or reorganization not because it is disordered
but because it is so obviously ordered" An Essay on Shakespeare's
Sonnets (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1969), p. 12).

7 Smith, The Tension of the Lyre, p. 45.

8 For a detailed discussion of the metaphorical links between
these sonnets, see Booth, Essay, pp. 3-12.

9 In addition to Booth's line—by-line commentary on
individual sonnets, see, for example, Anne Ferry, All In War with Time
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975); Carol Thomas
Neely, "Detachment and Engagement in Shakespeare's Sonnets: 94, 116,
and 129," PMLA, 92 (1977), 83-95; and Jane Roessner, "Double Exposure:
Shakespeare's Sonnets 100—114,".ELH; 46 (1979), 357-78.

 

Roessner, p. 359.

11 Thomas M. Greene, "Ben Jonson and the Centered Self," SEL,
10 (1970), 325—48.

12 See Booth, Shakespeare's Sonnets, pp. 364-72, for a
detailed discussion of the textual crux in line 14 and the arguments
for and against various emendations: "the Q text, 'That all the world
besides me thinkes y'are dead,' does not make ready sense without
emendation," he concludes, suggesting that Sonnet 112 is an
"unfinished poem or one that Shakespeare abandoned in frustration" (p.
369).

13 For the intellectual history of the mind/eye relationship,
see Forrest Robinson, The Shape of Things Known: Sidney's Apolggy in
Its Philosqphical Tradition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1972). For a discussion of the mind/eye relationship in
Renaissance faculty psychology, see Ruth Leila Anderson, Elizabethan
yPeychology and Shakeepeare's Plays (Iowa City: University of Iowa
Humanistic Studies, 1927), pp 92—113. See also J. B. Bamborough, The
Little World of Man (London: Longmans, Green, 1952).

 

 

 

 

Roessner, p. 358.

15 Booth, Shakespeare's Sonnets, p. 378.

16 Booth, Shakespeare's Sonnets, p. 377.

 

Giorgio Melchiori, " 'Tis Better to be Vile': Sonnet 121
and the Ethics of Social Behavior," in his Shakespeare's Dramatic

 

 

225

Meditations: An Experiment in Criticism (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1976), pp. 71-103.

18 Stephen Spender, "The Alike and the Other," in The Riddle
of Shakespeare's Sonnets, ed. Edward Hubler (New York: Basic Books,
1962), p. 113.

19 Hilton Landry, Interpretations in Shakespeare's Sonnets
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1963), p.
93. Landry also points out the connection between this poem and Sonnet
112 (p. 87).

20 G. Wilson Knight, The Mutual Flame (London: Methuen,
1955), p. 49; Booth, Shakeepeare's Sonnets, p. 410.

 

 

21 Melchiori, pp. 90, 92.
22 Melchiori, p. 92.
23

Melchiori, p. 74.

4 Philip Edwards, "The Sonnets to the Dark Woman," in his
Shakeapeare and the Confines of Art (London: Methuen, 1968), p. 23.

25 In The Elizabethan Love Sonnet, J.W. Lever sees links
betwen Astrophil and Stella and the dark lady sonnets; the "story" of
the latter is "broadly reminiscent" of the former outline (p. 174).
However, his reading of Sidney's sequence is traditional: "But Sidney
was interpreting the romance experience through contemporary life and
ideas; Shakespeare consciously aimed at negating all its values.
Therefore the resemblance of the Mistress series to Astrophil and
Stella was rather like that of a parody to its original" (pp. 174).

26 Most criticism of the dark lady poems tends to focus on
individual sonnets (e,g, 129, 130, 138, 144, 146); the relatively few
studies which hazard assessments of the "progress" of these poems tend
either to rearrange Q's order or to emphasize the speakers's
increasing demoralization. Two interesting essays avoid the first
temptation and equivocate on the second. Edwards suggests that
sonnnets 127—54 "were put forward by Shakespeare as a coherent
sequence" (p. 18) in which the speaker attempts to deal with "the
peculiarly unhappy fact of his predicament" by trying out "different
objectifications of the intolerable position he finds himself in -—
and none of them 'works' "(p. 27). But he also argues that
"Shakespeare sets poetry the task of describing a certain kind of of
hopelessness and he shows poetry pulling like a tidal current away
from hopelessness toward resolution of one kind or another" (pp.
30-31). Michael J.B. Allen's title, "Shakespeare's Man Descending a
Staircase," (Shakespeare Survey, 31 [Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1978], pp. 127-38), implies progressive decline, but ultimately

 

 

 

 

 

 

226

backs away from assessing the direction of the dark lady poems as a
whole. His essay seeks to "vindicate" some of the "weaker" sonnets by
examining their contexts in the 1609 order, and to validate that order
by showing how the "eXplosive juxtapositions" force the reader "to
begin to concentrate on the transitory, intensely volatile,
unpredictable mixtures themselves . . . . The Dark Lady sequence
places us in the position of a maker: as we proceed, we make larger
meanings from the succession of smaller ones" (p. 128). Other relevant
treatments of the dark lady sonnets include: Patrick Cruttwell, The
Shakespearean Moment (London: Chatto and Windus, 1954, rpt. Glamorgan:
Lewis Reprints, 1970), pp. 1-38; Edward Hubler, The Sense of
Shakespeare's Sonnets (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1952),
pp. 38-63; Smith, The Tension of the Lyre,_pp. 43-68; and Winny, pp.
90-120.

27 For a fine discussion of this poem, see Edward A. Snow,
"Loves of Comfort and Despair: A Reading of Shakespeare's Sonnet 138,"
.ELH, 47 (1980), 462-83. "In Sonnet 138 the laughter of the gods has
been internalized," Snow says (p. 465), agreeing with Hubler's
description of its "amused contentment" (The Sense of Shakespeare's
Sonnets, p. 45). See Snow, p. 481, n5, for a summary of the critical
opposition.

28 Edwards, p. 29.

 

 

 

29 Booth, Shakespeare's Sonnets, p. 517.

30 Judith Kegan Gardiner, in an unpublished paper presented
at a 1982 MLA Special Session, "Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare:
Revision and New Directions."

31 Linda Bamber, Comic Women, Tragic Men: A Studyrof Gender
and Genre in Shakespeare (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1982),
p. 15.

32 As Edwards points out, he is "afraid of his own facility
for consoling himself" (p. 26).

33

 

 

Leishman, p. 199.

34 The title of Allen's article.

35 "Apology for Raymond Sebond," in The Complete Essays of
Montaigne ’trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1948), pp. 358-59).

36 Kernan claims that as the "plot" moves from the young man
to the dark lady, it moves "from a lyric to a dramatic conception of
life, from simplicity and certainty to complexity and ambiguity, and
the Poet moves in the same direction, from the great house to the

 

 

227

public theater" (p. 43). He makes a similar argument in "Shakespeare's
Essays on Dramatic Poesy: The Nature and Function of Theater within
the Sonnets and the Plays," in The Author in His Work, pp. 179-82.
Cruttwell also attributes the change in the sonnets' "texture" to a
"multiple, critical, dramatic" sensibility which finds its "true home"
in the London theatre, not in the courtly world which was hospitable
to the simpler poetry of more lyrical sonneteers (p. 26).

37 Smith, The Tension of the Lyre, p. 54.

 

 

38 Neely's important discoveries about structural patterns in
two—part English and Italian sonnet sequences demonstrate that the
shorter second parts of Italian sequences are preoccupied with
sublimation, renunciation, and even transcendence, but that the second
parts of English sequences, in contrast, are marked by increased
eroticism and mutuality, which lead to irresolvable conflicts
("Structure," pp. 359-89). This, she says, helps to account for
characteristic strategies of closure in the English sequences: "to
stop abruptly in medias res, acknowledging the futility of the
enterprise," "to achieve detachment from irresolvable conflicts by
moving the verse into a new mode, genre, or voice," or "to provide a
narrative resolution, however precarious" (p. 375). Her essay helps to
make sense of the presence of the two anacreontic poems at the end of
the sequence -— excellent examples of the shift to another poetic mode
which she describes. The accuracy of the speaker's analysis in 152
reveals fundamental contradictions; if the sequence ended there, it
would indeed end abruptly, along the lines of the first strategy of
closure she identifies. Sidney's does: his decision to pursue the
first strategy and not allow a transforming or transcendent ending has
made some critics unhappy enough to meddle with the contents of
Astrophil and Stella, preferring that it end with one if not both of
the palinodic poems concluding Certaine Sonnets [see Conclusion, n
32]. Ironically, as the sequence is actually constructed, it would be
more than enough if Astrophil paid proper attention to the things of
this world, let alone "aspire to higher things." Numerous
Shakespearean critics have proposed similar rearrangements that
"clarify" the speaker's progress toward greater self-knowledge or
toward probable resolution of his predicament; Sonnets 129 and 146
generally play key roles in such schemes (In The Shakespeare Sonnet
Order: Poems and Groups [Berkeley and Los Angeles: Universty of
California Press, 1968], Brents Stirling says that 129 and 146 form
Poem "E" which comes after the linked group 147-52 and in effect
concludes the sequence [p. 22]; Winny's desire to rearrange is
tentatively expressed -— "If there is a case for arranging these poems
in a different order, it would have the object of clarifying the
development of the lover's self-awareness" [p. 92] - but it
nevertheless forms the basis of his analysis.) Not surprisingly,
Shakespeare's sequence is more daring than Sidney's; by introducing
sonnets like 146 which show the speaker grasping for transcendence but
by refusing to end on such a note, he "places" such moments in the
larger context of the speaker's experience. His decision in the dark

 

 

 

228

lady poems to concentrate the speaker's experience in the here and
now, however disorderly and contradictory, is not only a move toward a
dramatic conception of life, as Kernan puts it in The Playwright as
Magician; it is also, as Neely demonstrates, a decision shared, in its
essentials, by other sonneteers.

Chapter Five

1 See Thomas Greene, "Ben Jonson and the Centered Self,"
325-48, and "The Flexibility of the Self in Renaissance Literature,"
in The Disciplines of Criticism: Essays in Literary Theory,
Interpretation, and History, ed. Peter Demetz, Thomas Greene, and
Lowry Nelson, Jr. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1968),
pp.241—64.

Quotations from Jonson's poems are from Ben Jonson, eds.
C.H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson, VIII (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1925—32), and will be identified parenthetically.

Wesley Trimpi, Ben Jonson's Poems: A Study of the Plain
Style (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1962), p. 174.

4 See Richard Peterson, Imitation and Praise in the Poems of
Ben Jonson (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1981), pp.
27—29, 33-43, and Greene, "Ben Jonson and the Centered Self,"
pp.326-33.

5 In the Renaissance, the spelling of "travel" (to go on a
journey) and "travail" (to exert one's self, weary one's self, put
one's self to trouble) were the same -- hence the precision of
Jonson's pun. See OED I,1b,2,5.

 

6 Trimpi, p. 174.

7 W.H. Herendeen, "Like a Circle Bounded in Itself: Jonson,
Camden, and the Strategies of Praise," Journal of Medieval and
_Benaissance Studies, 11:2 (1981), p.143.

8 Edward Partridge, "Jonson's Epigrammes: The Named and the
Nameless," SLI, 6 (1973), p.164; and Alexander Leggatt, Ben Jonson:
_His Vision and His Art (London and New York: Methuen, 1981), p.277,
resp.

9 See E.H. Gombrich's discussion of the rabbit/duck puzzle in
Art and Illusion: A Study of the Psychology of Pictorial
Representation (New York: Pantheon Books, 1960), pp. 5—6, quoted in
Norman Rabkin, Shakespeare and the Problem of Meaning (Chicago and
London: University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 34—35.

 

 

229

10 Discoveries. 11.1867—68, 1887-88, and 1757—58, resp., in
Herford and Simpson, VIII. In the Discoveries he also says, "I could
never thinke the study of Wisdome confin'd only to the Philosopher: or
of Piety to the Divinei or of State to the Politicke. But that he
which can faine a Common-wealth (which is the Poet) can governe it
with Counsels, strengthen it with Lawes, correct it with Iudgments,
informe it with Religion, and Morals; is all these" (1032-38). See
also Trimpi, p.148: "Nearly the entire Discoveries deals with the
intellectual disciplines of the humanistic mind rather than with
particular works we more easily regard as literary today. The passages
on style relate writing to the acquisition and the use of knowledge;
they are general and present a theory of style which speaks with an
'antiquity of voice' about the necessity and difficulty of extending
the range of human experience in the present world."

 

 

 

 

1 Richard Peterson, p. xiii.

2 Richard Peterson, p.xiv. See also Thomas M. Greene,
"Accommodations of Mobility in the Poetry of Ben Jonson," in his The
Light in Troy, Greene views the "imitative act" as "a kind of
diachronic metaphorizing, an intertextual translation" (p.278).

 

13 . . .
"To make someth1ng, moreover, 1s to act," and in the world

of necessary action, the poet has his rightful place, a recognized
social role, L.C. Knights says of these lines to Savile ("Ben Jonson:
Public Attitudes and Social Poetry," in A Celebration of Ben Jonson ,
ed. William Blissett, Julian Patrick, and R.W. Van Fossen [Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1973], p. 178).

4 Leggatt, p. 91.
15 "To Mr B.J." (13—14), Herford and Simpson, XI. p. 378~

16 He also thought it could be overdone: "It is a ryming Age,
and Verses swarme / At every stall," he complains (Und. 44.27—28).
Responding to critics bothered by the fact that so much of Jonson's
verse is occasional, Jonathan Kamholtz says that Jonson redefines and
"rechannels many of the crucial elements of occasional poetry": "He
transforms people into poetic problems; public occasions become,
literally, poetic occasions" ("Ben Jonson's Epigrammes and Poetic
Occasions," SEL, 23 [1983], 78).

17 "Morsels of Roman history appear side by side with coneys

and larks," Peterson says (p.31). Greene, who complains that the
phrase "civilized urbanity" only "grossly" describes the tone of
Jonson's poem (The Light in Troy, p. 280), sees another dimension of
the relationship between hospitality and imitation: the subtext itself
is " 'entertained,' received into a wealthy human complex that invests
it with a kernel of signifying potential it might otherwise have
appeared to lack. Has anyone ever given more to Martial, enhanced his

 

 

230

achievement more, than Jonson in his imitations?" (p.285; see also
pp.283-84). For a fine discussion of friendship in Jonson's poetry,
see Hugh Maclean, "Ben Jonson's Poems: Notes on the Ordered Society,"
in Essays in English Literature from the Renaissance to the Victorian
Age, Presented to A.S.P. Woodhouse, ed. Millar Maclure and F.W. Watt
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1964), pp. 43-68.

 

18 Leggatt, p. 117.

19 The wonder is that Drayton printed it as a compliment.
William B. Hunter, Jr. points out that Drayton himself took it at face
value, prefixing it to his 1627 volume, The Battaile of Agincourt .

. The Miseries of Queene Margarite . . . . Nymphidia . . . . The
Quest of Cynthia. The Shepheards Sirena. The Moone Calfe. Elegies upon
Sundry Occasions (The Complete Poetry of Ben Jonson [New York:
Norton, 1963], pp.379, 380). Herford and Simpson also take it at face
value: allowing that relations between Drayton and Jonson were
"chequered," they nevertheless conclude that "Drayton's abounding and
unequal poetry received in his time no heartier, more heartfelt, or,
on the whole, more judicious praise" (11,376). One more aspect of
Jonson's lines to Drayton needs to be addressed. Almost as explicitly
as the Cary-Morison ode, "An Epistle answering . . . ," and other
poems in which he identifies himself, this poem makes it clear that
the speaker is Ben Jonson, not a fictive voice; rather than dwelling
upon conventional distinctions between poet and speaker, it might be
more useful, in Jonson's case, to think in terms of Wayne Booth's
conception of the implied author, which he distinguishes both from
narrator and historical author. Greene (The Light in Troy) argues
similarly that Jonson turns poems into performances, creating in the
process the character of " 'Ben Jonson' who lives up to the role he
has led us to expect him to play" (pp.286, 87).

 

 

 

 

O Leggatt, p. 122. In "Jonson, Lord Lisle, and Penshurst"
(ELR, 1 [1971], 250-60), Rathnell provides the kind of historical
detail which makes his and Leggatt's inferences persuasive: "The
Mediterranean fruits to which Jonson refers in his poem —— quinces,
peaches, grapes, and apricots —- suggest a literary rather than a
Kentish landscape, but in fact they are precisely the products of his
orchard in which Lord Lisle took most pride," he points out, citing
numerous letters in which the owner of Penshurst worried about early
frosts, ordered new species, and distributed produce to friends at
court.

21 See G.R. Hibbard, "The Country House Poem of the
Seventeenth Century," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes,
19 (1956), 159-74; and William A. McClung, The Country House in
English Renaissance Poetry (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London:
University of California Press, 1977). McClung takes issue with
Hibbard's view that Jonson is reacting against neoclassical
architectural influences in "To Penshurst" (the Italianate style did

 

 

 

 

 

 

231

not appear in country houses until well into the Caroline period, he
observes); despite differences in method and premises, however, both
studies conclude that Jonson criticizes the taste and motives of those
who built impressive country estates solely to seek favor by
entertaining their superiors.

22 For an opposing view, see Geoffrey Walton, From
Metaphysical to Augustan: Studies in Tone and Sensibility in the
Seventeenth Century (London: Bowes and Bowes, 1955). In Jonson's poem
to Wroth, he says, "The Golden Age is thus naturalized in the hall of
an English mansion in a real agricultural setting, and we end with an
almost Homeric scene of feasting, in which bounty and humanity have
temporarily overthrown the whole social hierarchy" (pp.33-34).

 

Inexplicably, after establishing in detail the corruption
of the army and other arenas of public life, Jonson exhorts Wroth to
go forth and serve his country. Judith Kegan Gardiner, who stresses
the poem's "disunifying" qualities, points out the same contradiction
(Craftsmanship in Context: The Development of Ben Jonson's Poetry [The
Hague and Paris: Mouton, 1975], pp. 66, 71). Leggatt's view of the
epistle to Wroth is more positive than mine, though he acknowledges
the "chill" behind Jonson's advice (p. 132); Gardiner shares my
reservations. For evidence that Jonson may have disliked Wroth -- he
reportedly told Drummond that Wroth's wife, Lady Mary (Robert Sidney's
daughter), was "unworthily maried on a Jealous husband" —- see Herford
and Simpson, I,142, and McClung, p.130.

24 See Richard Peterson (pp.26-27) for Jonson's transitive
and intransitive uses of "decline." See also OED 1,11,12,13,20.

25 He does anticipate a future for her —- a virtuous one -—
as Aubigny's wife and the producer of his heir, but he confines her to
pleasing Aubigny and submerging her own identity in his after having
"declined" her own life.

26 What he has already told Wroth and what he will tell Lady
Aubigny, if the poems in The Forrest are read sequentially. Kamholtz
has attempted to do so; see his "Ben Jonson's Green World: Structure
and Imaginative Unity in The Forrest (SP, 78 (1981), 170-93. His
reading, while less than fully convincingj'is interesting in its
attempt to conflate the Latin interest in collections of silvae -—
shared by Jonson -- with the Renaissance fascination with green
worlds. See Also Alastair Fowler, "The Silva Tradition in Jonson's The
Forrest," in Poetic Traditions of the English Renaissance, pp. 163-80.

27

 

 

Pointed out by Philip McGuire.

28 . .
As Gardiner says, "Part of the strength and surprise of
the poem's ending is that after what seems to be a conventional
religious poem rejecting the world, the woman elects to stay in the

 

232

world as we understand it and does not make any overt plea to, or even
mention of, God or heaven. Furthermore, the mode of her withdrawal
from the world is unclear. She does not appear to be entering a
convent; she is not even covertly wishing for death like the speaker
of 'To Heaven'. Her final resolution is a declaration of moral
independence, of stoic self—sufficiency as well as of Christian trust"
(p.72). Gardiner also points out that the final poem in The Forrest,
"To Heaven," is not simply opposed to "To the World," but has much in
common wih it (p.72).

29 See Gabriele Bernhard Jackson, "Asper-Criticus—Quintus-
Horatius- Flaccus-Jonson," in her Vision and Judgment in Ben Jonson's
Drama (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1968), pp. 5-52,
for Jonson's treatment of the artist figure in the plays. See Leggatt
(pp. 89-98), for a perceptive and illuminating analysis of Jonson's
treatment of the social role of the poet in Poetaster (See also "The
Poet as Character," pp. 199—232).

 

Quotations from The New Inn ode are from The Complete
Plays of Ben Jonson, ed. G.A. Wilkes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982),
vol. IV, p. 471.

31 See Trimpi for a more positive reading of the first ode:
"The poet, then, in order to be free of the ignorant and at the same
time to write, must turn from the stage to the smaller audience of
learned men. His poems may then make the greatest possible use of his
knowledge, and his poetic talent may enable others to share in that
knowledge. The ode is a philosophical statement about the powers of
the human mind and the powers of literature if it properly makes use
of the mind" (p. 204). But the ode itself says nothing about sharing
knowledge with a smaller but more receptive audience; it anticipates
the compensatory rewards of singing "high and aloofe." Gardiner says
of the second ode that "the combination of the words 'loathed' and
'loathsome' . . . demonstrates one of the,tactical flaws of the poem:
it is clear what Jonson personally loathes, but the poet does not
altogether convince his reader that the objects of his loathing are
objectively 'loathsome' to anyone else" (p.130).

 

 

2 Leggatt, p.89. "If a healthy culture is necessary to a
healthy society, it follows that the role of poet is of supreme
importance. Jonson has somehing like Sidney's view of the poet as
teacher, but with a distinctly social emphasis" (p. 91), he adds.

33 Gardiner argues explicitly (if somewhat mechanically) for
a developmental reading. While her view is carefully developed on the
whole, she tends to equate chronology of publication with chronology
of composition -- a problem when dealing with Under-wood especially.
She treats it as his "later lyric work" (p.86), but the epistle to
Selden, for example, was first published in 1614, but omitted —- along
with other prefatory poems -- from Jonson's 1616 folio.

 

 

 

233

3" Ian Donaldson, "Jonson and the Moralists," in Two

Renaissance Mythmakers: Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson, ed. Alvin

Kernan (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press,
1977), pp.148, 154).

 

5 Trimpi, p. 206.

6 Trimpi, p. 144.

37 Richard Peterson takes a very different view of the
epistle: it is, he says, "a celebration not simply of survival by
withdrawal but of self-knowledge which extends beyond mere inventory
of one's contents to a confident sense of copious inner resources to
be shared with the proper companions" (p. 112). See his chapter, "The
Full Circle: Poet as Vessel" (pp.112-57) for a rich discussion of "An
Epistle answering . ."

38 The Riverside text reads "Know, Caesar doth not wrong, nor
without cause / Will he be satisfied" (3.1.47). In his Riverside
introduction to the play, Frank Kermode unaccountably attributes
Jonson's remarks about the "nonsense line" not to the Discoveries but
to the conversations with Drummond of Hawthornden: "But Jonson was not
on oath in the Drummond conversations, and this may be no more than
inaccurate gossip based on a joking parody of the line as we have it"
(p.1100). This is an odd lapse from a critic of Kermode's stature (and
from the Riverside editors); the only specific mention of
Shakespeare's flaws as a dramatist in the conversations with Drummond
is the famous complaint about the seacoast of Bohemia (11.208-210
[Herford and Simpson, I, p. 138]).

39 As Rabkin says, in Julius Caesar Shakespeare "present[s]
one of the defining moments in world history in such a way that his
audience cannot determine whether the protagonist is the best or worst
of men, whether the central action springs from disinterested idealism
or vainglorious egotism, whether that action is virtuous and necessary
or wicked and gratuitous" (p. 61). In his own drama, Jonson tends to
avoid mixing motives as scrupulously as he avoids mixing genres: in
Catiline, his own play about a political conspiracy, there is no
difficulty in distinguishing the "good" characters from the "bad."
Cicero, the conspirators' target, epitomizes stalwart virtue and
traditional morality, even though he is a bit of an underdog in the
consular campaign. The conspirators, in contrast, are personally and
politically unwholesome and unappealing. Upstarts and malcontents who
act for selfish motives, they are seeking power, not fighting to
preserve a principle. They are, moreover, not very intelligent: their
own ineptness gives them away. And the potentially interesting
character of Fulvia is never really developed, even though her role of
go—between is frequently a focal point of moral complexity in
Renaissance drama. At first she seems to act with small-minded

 

 

 

 

 

 
 
 

 

 

234

self-interest; but her real reasons for breaking with the conspirators
(and divulging their plans to the oppposing side) are never made
explicit; and then she is abruptly dropped.

"0 T.S. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral, The Complete Poems

and Plays (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1958), p.196.
41

 

 

Gardiner, p. 168.

Conclusion

Jonson, of course, works under none of the constraints that
Wyatt indicates he felt as a court poet. As Isabel Rivers observes,
Jonson felt free to move in and out of court society, and to criticize
it as well as profit from his association with it: "He held a place in
James's court that Spenser would have envied while asserting an
independence of which Pope would not have been ashamed" (The Poetry of

 

Conservatism: A Study of Poets and Public Affairs from Jonson toerpe
[Cambridge: Rivers Press, 1973], p. 21). In fact, Jonson's world was
limited only by the diversity of London, and he moved freely in it.
The severe constraints of his late years, after the accession of
Charles, were imposed by financial insecurity, poor health, and
theatrical unpopularity, but they followed a lengthy period of
reasonably fruitful bids for patronage, and reasonable personal
success in town and at court. In essence, then, what is a major issue
for Wyatt is something which Jonson can take for granted, and which he
puts into practice over a period of some thirty years.

 

My summary of the changing conception of wisdom is heavily
derived from (though not entirely limited to) Rice's The Renaissance
Idea of Wisdom. Even when my observations are based upon the texts in
question as well as upon Rice's analysis, they are obviously highly
derivative. Naturally, I cite Rice whenever appropriate, but his
monograph is so central to my summary that it is hard to do justice
through conventional documentation to his framing of the questions.

3 This famous phrase, the title of a major chapter in English
translations of Jacob Burckhardt's 1860 landmark study, The
Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, is associated with
Burckhardt's long-discredited conviction that Renaissance
individualism represented an abrupt break with medieval patterns of
thought: "It was a simple matter for him, since Renaissance day
banished medieval night, and the few gleams of individualism that he
discerned in the Middle Ages, such as the Goliardic songs, were
obviously the first rays of dawn," says Douglas Bush in a useful
summary of early twentieth century conceptions of the term
"Renaissance" ( The Renaissance and English Humanism, p. 27). For a
more current view, see Hanna Gray, "Renaissance Humanism: The Pursuit
of Eloquence."

 

 

 

235

4 Rice, pp. 4—5, 8, 19—20.
5 Rice, pp. 93-123.
Rice, pp. 58-68; Paul Oskar Kristeller, Renaissance

Thought: The Classic, Scholastic, and Humanist Strains (New York:
Harper Torchbooks, 1961), pp. 48-69.

 

7 Rice, pp. 85—89; Sir Thomas Elyot, "What is the true
signification of understandynge," The Boke Named The Governour (III,
xxiv), vol. II, pp. 369-82.

 

8 Similarly, Leonardo da Vinci calls wisdom the daughter of
experience ("1a figliola della sperienza") in his Pensieri (40),
quoted in Rice, p. 100. Elyot, "of Experience whiche haue preceded our
tyme, with a defense of Histories," Governour (III, xxv), vol. II, pp.
383—401. Elyot's Bankette of Sapience (London: Thomas Bertelet, 1534)
is less relevant here than his other writings; as its title suggests,
it is simply an eclectic assortment of sententiae from other writers,
as Rice points out (p. 85).

 

 

9 Rice, p. 150.
0 Rice, pp. 4, 78-79.
1 Rice, pp. 37—43.
2 Rice, pp. 56, 182.

Rice, p. 46. See also Hans Baron, "The Historical
Background of the Florentine Renaissance," History, N.S. XXII
(1937-38), 315—27.

4 Rice, p. 47.

15 In his De philolqgia libri II (Paris: Badius Ascensius,
1532), V,r, translated and summarized by Rice, p. 150.

'6 Rice, p. 151.

 

17 Louis Le Caron, (Les Dialogues de Loys Le Caron [Paris:
I. Longis, 1556]), quoted in Rice, p. 152.

18 Rice, p. 153.

19 See Tobriner, pp. 71-74; Rice, pp. 161—62; and Erasmus,
The Praise of Foliy, ed. and trans. Hoyt Hopewell Hudson (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1941, p. 83).

236

20 Rice, p. 160.

In contrast to Charron, Bude considers wisdom nobler than
prudence and laments its ineffectiveness (Rice, p. 182).

Rice, p. 182. Two editions of Charron's De la Sagesse
livres trois (Bordeaux: S. Millanges, 1601), translated by Samson
Lennard were published in London in the early years of the seventeenth
century —- one in 1608 (STC 1442) and one in 1613 (STC 5051). "Science
is feruile, bafe, and mechanicall in refpect of wifedom," Charron says
in the 1608 edition: "wifedome and learning feldome concurre and meete
together" (III, xiv, pp. 504, 506).

23

 

Rice, p. 160.

24 Rice, p. 201-02; Charron, III, iv. One shortcoming in
Rice's study is his habit of simply summarizing the content of
someone's work without taking note of its contradictions.

25 Sir Philip Sidney, The Defence of Poesie, in The Prose
Works of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Albert Feuillerat (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1912, rpt. 1962), vol. III, p. 12.

6 Sidney, Defence, pp. 11—12.

27 Reiterating ne0platonic commonplaces, AstrOphil calls
earthly beauty "but a shade" of heavenly beauty and refers to
humankind as "pilgrims" on earth who "should in soule up to our
country move" (5.10, 12-13). But when he laments that his "knowledge
brings forth toyes" (18.9), he endorses a different attitude toward
human experience.

28 For the classic -— and still relevant -- statement, see
Arthur 0. Lovejoy, "The Study of the History of Ideas," in The Great
Chain of Being: A Study in the History of an Idea (pp. 3-23): "Any
unit-idea which the historian thus isolates he next seeks to trace
through more than one -- ultimately, indeed, through all —- of the
provinces of history in which it figures in any important degree .

. the working of a given conception, of an explicit or tacit
presupposition, of a type of mental habit, or of a specific thesis or
argument, needs, if its nature and its historic role are to be fully
understood, to be traced connectedly through all the phases of men's
reflective life in which those workings manifest themselves, or
through as many of them as the historian's resources permit" (p. 15).
For an historian's perspective on the critical problems generated by
treating works of imaginative literature as documents of intellectual
history, see pp. 16—17. See also Lovejoy's "The Historiography of
Ideas," in his Essays in the History of Ideas (1948; rpt. New York:
Capricorn Books, 1960), pp. 1-13.

237

29 Robert Ornstein, A Kingdom for a Stage: The Achievement of
Shakespeare's History Plays (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University
Press, 1972).

30 Frost's poem concludes, "Better to go down dignified /
With boughten friendship at your side / Than none at all. Provide!
Provide!" (The Complete Poems of Robert Frost [New York: Henry Holt,
1949], p. 404). Is Frost glancing wryly at those who hedge their bets
by making such provisions, or is he drily warning of what will happen
to those who fail to do so? The tone is just as controlled, just as
double-edged, as Wyatt's in the epistle to Brian.

31 In Caelica CI ("Mans Youth it is a field of large
desires"), he speaks contemptuously of "powers babie-creatures" who
"dare set rates / Of scorn upon Worth, Honour upon Sinne" (33—34).

32 As does David Kalstone in Sidney's Poetry: Contexts and
Interpretations: "The only possible dramatic resolution for Astrophel

 

 

 

 

and Stella comes in two sonnets long printed as part of the sequence,
but now divorced from it by critical consent since there is no
sixteenth-century precedent for their inclusion. For a poet so
pesimistic about desire and about the possible refining power of love,
there is real relief in the finality and assurance of the two poems
printed for the first time among Certaine Sonets appended to the folio
of 1598" (p. 178). In contrast, Dorothy Connell argues that Sidney's
palinodic sonnets were written early, not late, and that they
represent an attitude toward earthly beauty and human experience which
Sidney emphatically rejected in the bulk of his writing (Sir Philip
Sidney: The Maker's Mind [pp. 12-14; see also p. 49, n 1]). See

 

 

 

Ringler, pp. 423-24, for the history of various attempts to place
Certaine Sonets 31 and 32 at the end of Astrophil and Stella and for a
summary of the critical response to such attempts.

33
p. 186.
34 . . . .

As far as I can determ1ne, no other cr1t1c has p01nted out

that the speaker in the dark lady poems is not a poet—speaker: the
references to verbal discourse or assertion (e.g., "I have sworn thee
fair" are general, not specific to literary discourse, in contrast to

the literary self-consciousness of the poems to the young man. The
implications of this difference remain unexplored.

 

 

In his review of Greenblatt's Renaissance Self-Fashioning,

 

35 "Life of Sir Philip Sidney," in Selected Writings of Fulke
Greville, ed. Joan Rees (London: Athlone Press, 1973), p. 152.

 

Backing away from emotionally painful situations as well
as morally problematical ones, Jonson's final comment in Epigramme XLV
on the death of his son is a hope (expressed by the dead child) that
he will avoid such grief in the future by not caring for anyone so

238

deeply.

37 The mistakes which are explicitly mentioned in the poems
—- failing at various careers, wasting his inheritance, etc. —- seem
to have been mistakes which Gascoigne made in his own life as well.
That he had a reputation for being a bungler, even a luckless buffoon,
is suggested by C.T. Prouty in George Gascoigne: Elizabethan Courtier,

 

Soldier, and Poet, Amassing details of "the unhappy events which
seemed continually to dog Gascoigne's every move," Prouty documents
Gascoigne's disastrous involvement in legal quarrels, lawsuits, and
imprisonment for bad debts (pp. 23—49).

 

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