A New Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture

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How to go to your page This eBook contains two volumes. In the printed version of the book, each volume is paginated separately. To avoid duplicate page numbers in the electronic version, we have inserted a volume number before the page number, separated by a colon followed by a space. This matches how page numbers are cited in the Index. For example, to go to page 5 of Volume I, type I: 5 in the “page #” box at the top of the screen and click “Go.” To go to page 5 of Volume II, type II: 5… and so forth.

A New Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture Volume One

Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture This series offers comprehensive, newly written surveys of key periods and movements and certain major authors, in English literary culture and history. Extensive volumes provide new perspectives and positions on contexts and on canonical and post-canonical texts, orientating the beginning student in new fields of study and providing the experienced undergraduate and new graduate with current and new directions, as pioneered and developed by leading scholars in the field. Published Recently 49. A Companion to Emily Dickinson 50. A Companion to Digital Literary Studies 51. 52. 53. 54.

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the Arthurian Literature the Modern American Novel: 1900–1950 the Global Renaissance Thomas Hardy T. S. Eliot Samuel Beckett Twentieth-Century United States Fiction Tudor Literature Crime Fiction

67. A Companion to Medieval Poetry 68. A New Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture

Edited by Martha Nell Smith and Mary Loeffelholz Edited by Ray Siemens and Susan Schreibman Edited by David Paroissien Edited by Richard Brown Edited by Sara Castro-Klaren Edited by Haruko Momma and Michael Matto Edited by Greg Zacharias Edited by Cheryl Alexander Malcolm and David Malcolm Edited by Claudia L. Johnson and Clara Tuite Edited by Helen Fulton Edited by John T. Matthews Edited by Jyotsna G. Singh Edited by Keith Wilson Edited by David E. Chinitz Edited by S. E. Gontarski Edited by David Seed Edited by Kent Cartwright Edited by Charles Rzepka and Lee Horsley Edited by Corinne Saunders Edited by Michael Hattaway

A

NEW

CO MPA NION

TO

E NGLISH

R ENAISSANCE

L ITERATURE AND C ULTURE Volume One

EDITED BY MICHAEL HATTAWAY

A John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., Publication

This edition first published 2010 © 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd except for editorial material and organization © 2010 Michael Hattaway Edition history: Blackwell Publishers Ltd (1e, 2000) Blackwell Publishing was acquired by John Wiley & Sons in February 2007. Blackwell’s publishing program has been merged with Wiley’s global Scientific, Technical, and Medical business to form Wiley-Blackwell. Registered Office John Wiley & Sons Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, United Kingdom Editorial Offices 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148-5020, USA 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK For details of our global editorial offices, for customer services, and for information about how to apply for permission to reuse the copyright material in this book please see our website at www.wiley. com/wiley-blackwell. The right of Michael Hattaway to be identified as the author of the editorial material in this work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher. Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Designations used by companies to distinguish their products are often claimed as trademarks. All brand names and product names used in this book are trade names, service marks, trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners. The publisher is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book. This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold on the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services. If professional advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional should be sought. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A new companion to English Renaissance literature and culture / edited by Michael Hattaway. p. cm. – (Blackwell companions to literature and culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4051-8762-6 (alk. paper) 1. English literature–Early modern, 1500-1700–History and criticism–Handbooks, manuals, etc. 2. England–Civilization–16th century–Handbooks, manuals, etc. 3. England–Civilization– 17th century–Handbooks, manuals, etc. 4. Renaissance–England–Handbooks, manuals, etc. I. Hattaway, Michael. PR411.C663 2010 820.9′003–dc22 2009033117 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Set in 11 on 13 pt Garamond by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited Printed in Singapore 1

2010

Contents

VOLUME I List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Contributors

xi xiii xv

Asterisked items are essays that offer focused readings of particular texts 1

Introduction Michael Hattaway

Part One: Contexts, Readings, and Perspectives c.1500–c.1650

1

13

2

The English Language of the Early Modern Period Arja Nurmi

15

3

Literacy and Education Jean R. Brink

27

4

Rhetoric Gavin Alexander

38

5

History Patrick Collinson

55

6

Metaphor and Culture in Renaissance England Judith H. Anderson

74

7

Early Tudor Humanism Mary Thomas Crane

91

8

Platonism, Stoicism, Scepticism, and Classical Imitation Sarah Hutton

106

9

Translation Liz Oakley-Brown

120

vi

Contents

10

Mythology Jane Kingsley-Smith

134

11

Scientific Writing David Colclough

150

12 Publication: Print and Manuscript Michelle O’Callaghan

160

13

177

Early Modern Handwriting Grace Ioppolo

14 The Manuscript Transmission of Poetry Arthur F. Marotti

190

15 Poets, Friends, and Patrons: Donne and his Circle; Ben and his Tribe Robin Robbins

221

16 Law: Poetry and Jurisdiction Bradin Cormack

248

17

263

*Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Book 5: Poetry, Politics, and Justice Judith H. Anderson

18 *‘Law Makes the King’: Richard Hooker on Law and Princely Rule Torrance Kirby

274

19 Donne, Milton, and the Two Traditions of Religious Liberty Feisal G. Mohamed

289

20 Court and Coterie Culture Curtis Perry

304

21 *Courtship and Counsel: John Lyly’s Campaspe Greg Walker

320

22

329

*Bacon’s ‘Of Simulation and Dissimulation’ Martin Dzelzainis

23 The Literature of the Metropolis John A. Twyning

337

24

352

*Tales of the City: The Plays of Ben Jonson and Thomas Middleton Peter J. Smith

25 ‘An Emblem of Themselves’: Early Renaissance Country House Poetry Nicole Pohl

367

26 Literary Gardens, from More to Marvell Hester Lees-Jeffries

379

Contents

vii

27

English Reformations Patrick Collinson

396

28

*Translations of the Bible Gerald Hammond

419

29

*Lancelot Andrewes’ Good Friday 1604 Sermon Richard Harries

430

30 Theological Writings and Religious Polemic Donna B. Hamilton

438

31

Catholic Writings Robert S. Miola

449

32

Sectarian Writing Hilary Hinds

464

33 The English Broadside Print, c.1550–c.1650 Malcolm Jones

478

34

The Writing of Travel Peter Womack

527

35

England’s Experiences of Islam Stephan Schmuck

543

36

Reading the Body Jennifer Waldron

557

37

Physiognomy Sibylle Baumbach

582

38

Dreams and Dreamers Carole Levin

598

VOLUME II List of Illustrations

xi

Part Two: Genres and Modes

1

39 Theories of Literary Kinds John Roe

3

40 The Position of Poetry: Making and Defending Renaissance Poetics Arthur F. Kinney

15

41

28

Epic Rachel Falconer

42 Playhouses, Performances, and the Role of Drama Michael Hattaway

42

viii

Contents

43 Continuities between ‘Medieval’ and ‘Early Modern’ Drama Michael O’Connell

60

44

*Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy A. J. Piesse

70

45

Boys’ Plays Edel Lamb

80

46 Drama of the Inns of Court Alan H. Nelson and Jessica Winston

94

47

‘Tied to rules of flattery’? Court Drama and the Masque James Knowles

105

48

Women and Drama Alison Findlay

123

49

Political Plays Stephen Longstaffe

141

50

Jacobean Tragedy Rowland Wymer

154

51

Caroline Theatre Roy Booth

166

52 *John Ford, Mary Wroth, and the Final Scene of ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore Robyn Bolam

176

53 Local Drama and Custom Thomas Pettitt

184

54

*The Critical Elegy John Lyon

204

55

Allegory Clara Mucci

214

56

Pastoral Michelle O’Callaghan

225

57

Romance Helen Moore

238

58

Love Poetry Diana E. Henderson

249

59

Music and Poetry David Lindley

264

Contents 60

*Wyatt’s ‘Who so list to hunt’ Rachel Falconer

ix 278

61 *The Heart of the Labyrinth: Mary Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus Robyn Bolam

288

62

Ovidian Erotic Poems Boika Sokolova

299

63

*John Donne’s Nineteenth Elegy Germaine Greer

317

64

Traditions of Complaint and Satire John N. King

326

65 Folk Legends and Wonder Tales Thomas Pettitt

341

66 ‘Such pretty things would soon be gone’: The Neglected Genres of Popular Verse, 1480–1650 Malcolm Jones

359

67

Religious Verse Elizabeth Clarke

382

68

*Herbert’s ‘The Elixir’ Judith Weil

398

69 *Conversion and Poetry in Early Modern England Molly Murray

407

70

423

Prose Fiction Andrew Hadfield

71 The English Renaissance Essay: Churchyard, Cornwallis, Florio’s Montaigne, and Bacon John Lee

437

72

Diaries and Journals Elizabeth Clarke

447

73

Letters Jonathan Gibson

453

Part Three: Issues and Debates

461

74

463

Identity A. J. Piesse

75 Sexuality: A Renaissance Category? James Knowles

474

x 76

Contents Was There a Renaissance Feminism? Jean E. Howard

492

77 Drama as Text and Performance Andrea Stevens

502

78 The Debate on Witchcraft James Sharpe

513

79 Reconstructing the Past: History, Historicism, Histories James R. Siemon

523

80

Race: A Renaissance Category? Margo Hendricks

535

81

Writing the Nations Nicola Royan

545

82

Early Modern Ecology Ken Hiltner

555

Index of Names, Topics, and Institutions

569

List of Illustrations

1 2 3

The Battle of the Money-Bags and Strong-Boxes, engraving after Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c.1570)

2

The Pope Suppressed by King Henry the Eighth, anonymous woodcut illustrating Foxe’s Acts and Monuments (London, 1570)

7

Girolamo da Treviso, Protestant allegory showing the Pope being stoned by the four evangelists

8

4

‘Rainbow Portrait’ of Queen Elizabeth I (c.1600)

139

5

Woodcut engraving of ‘The secretarie Alphabet’ from John De Beau Chesne and John Baildon, A Book Containing Divers Sortes of Hands (London, 1571)

180

William Marshall, portrait of John Donne in his shroud, engraved frontispiece to his Devotions (London, 1634)

231

Title-page portrait of the Spanish ambassador to the court of James I, Diego Sarmiento de Acuña, count of Gondomar (1624)

359

Satirical etching known as The Monopolist or The Picture of a Patentee, after Wenceslas Hollar (c.1641–50)

361

The emblem attached to a poem addressed to Richard Cotton, ‘Patria cuique chara’

369

10

Title page to John Foxe, Acts and Monuments (London, 1641 edn.)

405

11

The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, from Richard Verstegan, Theatrum Crudelitatum Haereticorum Nostri Temporis (Antwerp, 1592)

408

12

A New Year’s Gift for Shrews (London, c.1630)

479

13

A Good Housewife, anonymous woodcut sheet (?London, c.1600)

480

14

Satires on marriage; anonymous engraved sheets (London, 1628)

482

15

The Funeral Obsequies of Sir-All-in-New-Fashions, anonymous engraved sheet (London, 1630)

489

6 7 8 9

xii

List of Illustrations

16

The Contented Cuckold, anonymous etched sheet (?London, c.1660)

491

17

Hunting Money, sheet engraved by Thomas Cross (London, c.1650)

492

18

The Four Complexions, sheets engraved by William Marshall (London, 1630s)

493

All do Ride the Ass, engraved sheet attributed to Renold Elstrack (London, 1607)

496

‘Fool’s Head World Map’, anonymous engraved sheet (?Antwerp, c.1590)

498

A Continued Inquisition Against Paper-Persecutors, anonymous engraved title page to Abraham Holland, A Scourge for Paper-Persecutors (London, 1625)

499

22

Shrovetide and Lent: pair of anonymous engraved sheets (London, 1636)

500

23

Jack a Lent by John Taylor, anonymous title-page woodcut (London, 1620)

502

24

We Three Loggerheads, anonymous oil painting on panel (c.1650)

505

25

Behold Rome’s Monster on his Monstrous Beast (?London, 1643)

514

26

The Lamb Speaketh, bound into William Turner’s The Hunting of the Romish Wolf (Emden, 1555)

516

27

Which of These Four … (London, 1623)

517

28

A Pass for the Romish Rabble (Amsterdam, 1624)

520

29

Title page to Thomas Walkington’s The Optic Glass of Humours (London, 1607)

559

Title page to Robert Fludd, Utriusque Cosmi … Historia (Frankfurt, 1617)

562

31

Poena sequens, from Geoffrey Whitney’s Choice of Emblems (Leyden, 1586)

568

32

The True Description of a Child with Ruffs (London, 1566)

571

33

The Roaring Girl or Moll Cut-Purse, title page to the play of the same name (London, 1611)

576

Giuseppe Arcimboldo, The Librarian (1566)

594

19 20 21

30

34

Acknowledgements

It has been a treat to work with all the members of the editorial and production teams at Wiley-Blackwell. Many contributors generously offered suggestions that helped me revise my plans for the work; particular thanks to those who were willing to contribute copy at comparatively short notice. The size of these volumes meant that for months my wife Judi had to put up with her husband’s absence and obsessive preoccupations: I owe her much more than a presentation copy.

Contributors

Gavin Alexander is a University Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Christ’s College. His recent publications include Writing After Sidney: The Literary Response to Sir Philip Sidney, 1586–1640 (2006), Renaissance Figures of Speech (2007), co-edited with Sylvia Adamson and Katrin Ettenhuber, and an edition of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writings on literature: Sidney’s ‘The Defence of Poesy’ and Selected Renaissance Literary Criticism (2004). Judith H. Anderson is Chancellor’s Professor of English in Indiana University and author of The Growth of a Personal Voice: ‘Piers Plowman’ and ‘The Faerie Queene’ (1976), Biographical Truth: The Representation of Historical Persons in Tudor-Stuart Writing (1984), Words That Matter: Linguistic Perception in Renaissance English (1996), Translating Investments: Metaphor and the Dynamic of Cultural Change in Tudor-Stuart England (2005), and Reading the Allegorical Intertext: Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton (2008); she is also a co-editor of Will’s Vision of Piers Plowman (1990), Spenser’s Life and the Subject of Biography (1996), and Integrating Literature and Writing Instruction: First-Year English, Humanities Core Courses, Seminars (2007). She is currently co-editing a book entitled Go Figure: Energies, Forms, and Institutions in the Early Modern World. Sibylle Baumbach is Assistant Professor and Research Coordinator at the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC), University of Giessen. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Munich and has taught at the University of California Santa Barbara and at Warwick University. She currently holds a FeodorLynen Fellowship at Stanford University and has published on Shakespeare, Romantic poetry, and the study of drama. Her current research foci include mythopoetics, metamorphosis, and literary dialogues. Robyn Bolam is Professor of Literature at St Mary’s University College, Twickenham. She formerly published as Marion Lomax, and her work includes: Stage Images and Traditions: Shakespeare to Ford (1987; repr. 2009); editions of ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore

xvi

Contributors

and Other Plays (1995) and Aphra Behn’s The Rover (1995; repr. 2008); the anthology Eliza’s Babes: Four Centuries of Women’s Poetry in English 1500–1900 (2005); and essays in Contemporary Women’s Poetry: Reading, Writing, Practice, ed. Deryn Rees-Jones and Alison Marks. (2000), The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s History Plays, ed. Michael Hattaway (2002), and Plotting Early Modern London, ed. Dieter Mehl et al. (2004). Roy Booth is a Senior Lecturer in the English Department at Royal Holloway, University of London. His particular interests in early modern literature include John Donne’s poems and the drama of the period, especially plays related to witchcraft. Recent publications on seventeenth-century poetry and witchcraft can be found online on the EMLS (Early Modern Literary Studies) website. His academic blog, ‘Early Modern Whale’, can also be found at . He is currently working on seventeenth-century astrology, and the controversy about it in the 1650s. Jean R. Brink is a Research Scholar at the Henry E. Huntington Library. An emeritus professor from Arizona State University, Tempe, she is the author of Michael Drayton Revisited (1990) and of articles on Elizabethan bibliography and biography. Recent articles have appeared in the Sidney Journal and the John Donne Journal. She is currently working on a documentary biography of Edmund Spenser. Elizabeth Clarke is Reader in English at the University of Warwick, where she has led the Perdita Project for the indexing of women’s manuscript writing, and the Nichols project to produce a new edition of John Nichols’ Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth I. She has just finished a book on the reading of the Song of Songs in the seventeenth century: Politics, Religion and the Song of Songs in SeventeenthCentury England (to be published by Palgrave Macmillan). David Colclough is Senior Lecturer in English at Queen Mary, University of London. He is the author of Freedom of Speech in Early Stuart England (2005) and the editor of John Donne’s Professional Lives (2003). He has recently completed an edition of New Atlantis for the Oxford Francis Bacon, and is currently editing volume 3 of the Oxford Edition of the Sermons of John Donne (Sermons to the Court of Charles I). Patrick Collinson is Regius Professor of Modern History, Emeritus, at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Trinity College. He previously held chairs at the universities of Sydney, Kent at Canterbury, and Sheffield. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, and the author of The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (1967, 1990), The Religion of Protestants (1982), and The Birthpangs of Puritan English (1987). He has also written on sixteenth-century historiography, with essays on William Camden. His article on Elizabeth I is the longest in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Bradin Cormack is Associate Professor in the English Department at the University of Chicago and Director of the Nicholson Center for British Studies there. His publications include A Power To Do Justice: Jurisdiction, English Literature, and the Rise of

Contributors

xvii

Common Law, 1509–1625 (2007) and The Forms of Renaissance Thought: New Essays on Literature and Culture, co-edited with Leonard Barkan and Sean Keilen (2008). Mary Thomas Crane is Professor of English at Boston College. She is the co-editor with Amy Boesky of Form and Reform in Renaissance England: Essays in Honor of Barbara Kiefer Lewalski (2000) and author of Framing Authority: Sayings, Self and Society in Sixteenth-Century England (1993) and Shakespeare’s Brain: Reading with Cognitive Theory (2001). Martin Dzelzainis is Professor of Early Modern Literature and Thought in the English Department at Royal Holloway, University of London. He edited The Prose Works of Andrew Marvell, volume 1: 1672–1673 (2003) with Annabel Patterson, and is general editor, with Paul Seaward, of the forthcoming Oxford University Press edition of The Works of Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon. He is currently completing The Flower in the Panther: Print and Censorship in England, 1662–1695 for Oxford University Press. Rachel Falconer is a Professor of English Literature at the University of Sheffield. Amongst her publications are Orpheus Disremembered: Milton and the Myth of the Poet Hero (1996), Hell in Contemporary Literature (2005), The Crossover Novel (2008), and as co-editor, Face to Face: Bakhtin Studies in Russia and the West (1997). Alison Findlay is Professor of Renaissance Drama at Lancaster University. She specialises in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century drama, gender issues, and performance practices. She is the author of Illegitimate Power: Bastards in Renaissance Drama (1994), A Feminist Perspective on Renaissance Drama (1998), and Playing Spaces in Early Women’s Drama (2006). She is co-author of Women and Dramatic Production 1550–1700 (2000), based on a research project using practical workshops and productions. She has published essays on Shakespeare and his contemporaries, and is currently a general editor of the Revels Plays. She is now working on Women in Shakespeare for the Shakespeare Dictionary series to be published by Continuum Press, followed by Much Ado About Nothing: A Text and its Theatrical Life, to be published by Macmillan. Jonathan Gibson works at the English Subject Centre, Royal Holloway, University of London. He has published research on a wide range of early modern topics, including letters, Elizabethan court poetry, the writings of Elizabeth I, manuscript construction, and Shakespeare, and is currently working on a book about the manuscripts of the courtier-poet Arthur Gorges. Germaine Greer is Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Studies, University of Warwick. Her books include The Female Eunuch (1969), The Obstacle Race: The Fortunes of Women Painters and their Work (1975), Kissing the Rod: An Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Women’s Verse (1988), Slip-Shod Sibyls: Recognition, Rejection and the Woman Poet (1995), John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (2000), The Boy (2003), Whitefella Jump Up: The Shortest Way to Nationhood (2004), and Shakespeare’s Wife (2007). She is

xviii

Contributors

also founder-director of Stump Cross Books, which publishes scholarly editions of work by early modern women. Andrew Hadfield is Professor of English at the University of Sussex. He is the author of a number of books, including Spenser’s Irish Experience (1997) and Shakespeare and Republicanism (2005), and the editor of others, including (with Matthew Dimmock) The Religions of the Book: Christian Perceptions, 1400–1660 (2008), and (with Raymond Gillespie) The Oxford History of the Irish Book, III: The Irish Book in English, 1550–1800 (2006). Donna B. Hamilton is Professor of English at the University of Maryland. Her publications include Virgil and The Tempest: The Politics of Imitation (1990); Shakespeare and the Politics of Protestant England (1992); Religion, Literature and Politics in PostReformation England, 1540–1688 (edited with Richard Strier, 1996); Anthony Munday and the Catholics, 1560–1633 (2005); A Concise Companion to English Renaissance Literature (edited, 2006); and an edition of The Puritan (2007), in Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works (general editors Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino). Gerald Hammond was the John Edward Taylor Professor of English Literature at the University of Manchester. He is the author of Fleeting Things: English Poets and Poems 1616–1660 (1990), The Making of the English Bible (1982), and The Reader and Shakespeare’s Young Man Sonnets (1981). Richard Harries was bishop of Oxford from 1987 to 2006. On his retirement he was made a life peer (Lord Harries of Pentregarth). He is currently Gresham Professor of Divinity, and an Honorary Professor of Theology, at King’s College, London. He is the author of books on a range of subjects, including Art and the Beauty of God (1993), The Passion in Art (2004), and The Re-enchantment of Morality (2008). He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Michael Hattaway is Professor of English Literature, Emeritus, in the University of Sheffield and Professor of English at New York University in London. His publications include (as author) Elizabethan Popular Theatre (1982); Hamlet: The Critics Debate (1987); Renaissance and Reformations: An Introduction to Early Modern English Literature (2005); William Shakespeare: King Richard II (2008); (as editor) As You Like It and 1–3 Henry VI for the New Cambridge Shakespeare; plays by Jonson and Beaumont; The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s History Plays (2002); and (as co-editor) The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Drama (1990 and 2003) and Shakespeare in the New Europe (1994). Diana E. Henderson is a Professor in the Literature Faculty at MIT, and also teaches in the Comparative Media Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies programmes. She is the author of Collaborations with the Past: Reshaping Shakespeare across Time and Media (2006), and Passion Made Public: Elizabethan Lyric, Gender and Performance (1995), and is the editor of Alternative Shakespeares 3 (2007), and Blackwell’s Concise Companion to Shakespeare on Screen (2006).

Contributors

xix

Margo Hendricks is an Associate Professor in the Department of Literature at the University of California at Santa Cruz. She is the co-editor, with Patricia Parker, of Women, Race and Writing in the Early Modern Period (1994). Other publications include articles on Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Behn, and on race and post-colonial identity. Ken Hiltner is an Associate Professor of English at the University of California Santa Barbara, where he is the Director of the Early Modern Center, as well as the Director of the Literature and the Environment Initiative. In addition to his book Milton and Ecology (2003), he has recently edited a collection of essays, Renaissance Ecology (2008). He is currently working on two books on ecocriticism. Hilary Hinds teaches in the Department of English and Creative Writing at Lancaster University. Her publications include God’s Englishwomen: Seventeenth-Century Sectarian Writing and Feminist Criticism (1996), an edition of Anna Trapnel’s The Cry of a Stone (2000), and (co-edited with Elspeth Graham, Elaine Hobby, and Helen Wilcox) Her Own Life: Autobiographical Writings by Seventeenth-Century Englishwomen (1989). Jean E. Howard is George Delacorte Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University, where she teaches Renaissance literature, feminist studies, and literary theory. Her books include Shakespeare’s Art of Orchestration: Stage Technique and Audience Response (1984); The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England (1994); Engendering a Nation: A Feminist Account of Shakespeare’s English Histories (1997), co-written with Phyllis Rackin; and Theater of a City: The Places of London Comedy 1598–1642 (2007), which won the Barnard Hewitt Prize for outstanding work in theatre history for 2008. In addition, Professor Howard is one of the co-editors of the Norton Shakespeare and has edited seven collections of essays. Sarah Hutton currently holds a chair at Aberystwyth University. Her publications include Anne Conway (2004), Benjamin Furly (1646–1714) (2007), Women, Science and Medicine (edited with Lynette Hunter, 1996), and Platonism and the English Imagination (edited with Anna Baldwin, 1994). She has also published articles on the Cambridge Platonists, Margaret Cavendish, Emilie du Châtelet, and Catharine Macaulay. She co-ordinates the AHRC research network on Anglo-French intellectual and cultural interchange. She is Director of the series International Archives of the History of Ideas. Grace Ioppolo is Professor of Shakespearean and Early Modern Drama in the Department of English and American Literature at the University of Reading. She is also the founder and director of the Henslowe–Alleyn Digitisation Project. Her publications include Dramatists and their Manuscripts in the Age of Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton and Heywood: Authorship, Authority and the Playhouse (2006) as well as Revising Shakespeare (1991) and Shakespeare Performed: Essays in Honor of R. A. Foakes (2000). She has produced critical editions of Shakespeare’s King Lear and Measure for Measure, and Middleton’s Hengist, King of Kent, and has published numerous articles on textual transmission and manuscript culture. She is the general editor of the ten-volume Complete Works of Thomas Heywood (forthcoming from Oxford University Press). With

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Contributors

Peter Beal she has co-edited Elizabeth I and the Culture of Writing (2007), a collection of essays on manuscripts written by, to, or for Queen Elizabeth, and English Manuscript Studies 11: Manuscripts and their Makers in the English Renaissance (2002). With S. P. Cerasano, she is preparing a critical edition for Oxford University Press of Edward Alleyn’s Diary. Malcolm Jones lectures in English language, literature, folklore and art history at the University of Sheffield. Before entering academia he worked in the British Museum and other museums and as a lexicographer. His book on the folkloric in late medieval European art, The Secret Middle Ages, won the Katherine Briggs Folklore Award (2003). More recently he has been working in the early modern period and his The Print in Early Modern England appears in 2010. Recent publications include ‘Washing the Ass’s Head – Exploring the Non-Religious Prints’, in M. McDonald (ed.), The Print Collection of Ferdinand Columbus (2004), 221–45, ‘Saints and other horse-mutilators, or why all Englishmen have tails’, in S. Hartmann (ed.), Flora in the Middle Ages (2007), 155–70, and ‘ “Lively representing the proverbs”: A Pack of Late SeventeenthCentury English playing cards engraved with proverb representations’, in K. Mckenna (ed.), The Proverbial ‘Pied Piper’: A Festschrift Volume of Essays in Honor of Wolfgang Mieder on the Occasion of his Sixty-Fifth Birthday (2009), 5–30. John N. King presently holds an appointment as Distinguished University Professor, and as Humanities Distinguished Professor of English and of Religious Studies, at the Ohio State University. His expertise extends to early modern British literature and culture, Reformation literary and cultural history, the history of the book, manuscript studies, and iconography. His books include English Reformation Literature: The Tudor Origins of the Protestant Tradition (1982), Tudor Royal Iconography: Literature and Art in an Age of Religious Crisis (1989), Spenser’s Poetry and the Reformation Tradition (1990), Milton and Religious Controversy: Satire and Polemic in Paradise Lost (2000), Voices of the English Reformation: A Sourcebook (2004), and Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and Early Modern English Print Culture (2006). He serves as editor of Reformation and coeditor of Literature and History. He is the recipient of a residency at the Rockefeller Foundation Study Center at Bellagio, Italy, and of fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Henry E. Huntington Library, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Lilly Endowment in conjunction with the National Humanities Center. Jane Kingsley-Smith is a Senior Lecturer at Roehampton University, London. She has published a number of articles on Shakespeare, and a monograph entitled Shakespeare’s Drama of Exile (2003). Her second book, Cupid in Early Modern Literature and Culture, is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. Arthur F. Kinney is Thomas W. Copeland Professor of Literary History and Director, Massachusetts Center for Renaissance Studies, at the University of MassachusettsAmherst. In 2006 he was given the Paul Oskar Kristeller Lifetime Achievement

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Award by the Renaissance Society of America. His most recent books are Shakespeare’s Webs: Networks of Meaning in Renaissance Drama (2004), and Shakespeare and Cognition (2006). Torrance Kirby is Professor of Ecclesiastical History and Director of the Centre for Research on Religion at McGill University. His most recent books are The Zurich Connection and Tudor Political Theology (2007) and Richard Hooker, Reformer and Platonist (2005). He recently edited two collections of essays, A Companion to Richard Hooker (2008) and A Companion to Peter Martyr Vermigli (2009). James Knowles is Professor of Medieval and Renaissance Literature and Head of School, School of English, University College Cork, Ireland. He teaches widely on early modern drama (especially Jonson, and the masque), Civil War writing, and on the cultural politics of the 1620s and 1630s. His publications include editions for the Oxford University Press Complete Works of Thomas Middleton, the Cambridge University Press Cambridge Works of Ben Jonson, and the Oxford Works of John Milton. In 2006 he was the co-curator for Royalist Refugees (Rubenshuis, Antwerp), and he has written extensively on the masque, and on Jonson’s Entertainment at Britain’s Burse. Edel Lamb in an Australian Research Council Post-Doctoral Fellow in the University of Sydney. She is the author of Performing Childhood in the Early Modern Theatre: The Children’s Playing Companies (1599–1613) (2008) and is currently writing a booklength study of early modern books for children. John Lee is a senior lecturer at the University of Bristol. He is the editor of the Everyman edition of Spenser’s Shorter Poems: A Selection (1998) and the author of Shakespeare’s Hamlet and the Controversies of Self (2000). Recent articles include ‘Montaigne, Shakespeare and imagination’ in the International Shakespeare Yearbook (2006), and ‘Shakespeare and the Great War’ in The Oxford Handbook of Twentieth-Century British and Irish War Poetry (2007). Hester Lees-Jeffries is Fellow and College Lecturer at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge. She is the author of England’s Helicon: Fountains in Early Modern Literature and Culture (2007), and of other essays on early modern literature; she has also edited the translation of Bernard Palissy’s treatise on water-supply by the Elizabethan poet Thomas Watson. She is currently working on various Shakespeare projects and editing James Shirley’s The Example. Carole Levin is Willa Cather Professor of History at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, where she specialises in early modern English history. Her books include The Heart and Stomach of a King: Elizabeth I and the Politics of Sex and Power (1994), The Reign of Elizabeth I (2002), and Dreaming the English Renaissance: Politics and Desire in Court and Country (2008). She was recently the co-curator of the exhibition ‘To Sleep, Perchance to Dream’ at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC.

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David Lindley is Professor of Renaissance Literature in the School of English at the University of Leeds. He has published on poetry and music, the court masque, the scandalous case of Frances Howard, and most recently on Shakespeare, including an edition of The Tempest for the New Cambridge Shakespeare and a book on Shakespeare and music for Arden. His edition of eleven of Jonson’s masques appears the Cambridge edition of the Works of Ben Jonson. Stephen Longstaffe is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Cumbria. He has published an edition of Jack Straw, a 1594 play on the Peasants’ Revolt, and articles and book chapters on aspects of political drama. His most recent publications are as editor of The Continuum Handbook to Shakespeare Studies, with Andrew Hiscock, and a collection of essays on Shakespeare’s 1 Henry IV. He is currently working on clowns in early modern drama. John Lyon teaches at the University of Bristol, where he is also Principal Investigator of the AHRC-funded Penguin Archive Project. He has published widely on literature from the sixteenth century to the present day. In addition to enduring interests in elegy and in influence, particularly Shakespearean, he is currently working on Ben Jonson, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Geoffrey Hill. Arthur F. Marotti is Distinguished Professor of English at Wayne State University. He is the author of John Donne, Coterie Poet (1986), Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric (1995), and Religious Ideology and Cultural Fantasy: Catholic and Anti-Catholic Discourses in Early Modern England (2005). He is currently working on a book on the personal anthologising of poetry in manuscript in early modern England. Robert S. Miola is the Gerard Manley Hopkins Professor of English and Lecturer in Classics at Loyola University of Maryland. He has written on classical backgrounds to early modern literature, Shakespeare, and Jonson, and recently published Early Modern Catholicism: An Anthology of Primary Sources (2007). Feisal G. Mohamed is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Illinois and author of In the Anteroom of Divinity: The Reformation of the Angels from Colet to Milton (2008). His articles have appeared in Milton Quarterly, Milton Studies, the University of Toronto Quarterly, the Journal of the History of Ideas, and Dissent Magazine, and his PMLA article, ‘Confronting religious violence: Milton’s Samson Agonistes’, received an Honorable Mention for the Modern Language Association’s William Riley Parker Prize. Tentatively entitled Milton and the Post-Secular Present, his current book project develops presentist interpretation of Milton with particular emphasis on debates in political theory and ethics, and on the issues of religious liberty and religious violence. Helen Moore is a Fellow of Corpus Christi College, and Lecturer in the Faculty of English, University of Oxford. She works predominantly in the fields of Anglo-continental literary relations and drama, and has edited the romance Amadis de Gaule

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(2004), and the play Guy of Warwick for the Malone Society (2006). She has also published essays on Shakespeare, prose fiction, early modern drama, and the reception of continental and classical texts in English. Clara Mucci is Professor of English Literature at the University of Chieti, Italy. She is the author of Liminal Personae (1995), Tempeste (1998), Il teatro delle streghe (2001), A memoria di donna (2004), Il dolore estremo: il trauma da Freud alla Shoah (2008), and I corpi di Elisabetta: sessualità, potere e poetica della cultura al tempo di Shakespeare (2009). She is also a practising clinical psychologist. Molly Murray is Assistant Professor of English at Columbia University. She is the author of The Poetics of Conversion in Early Modern English Literature: Verse and Change from Donne to Dryden (forthcoming from Cambridge University Press), as well as articles on Chaucer and Jonson. Her current project is a study of early modern literature and imprisonment. Alan H. Nelson is Professor Emeritus in the Department of English at the University of California, Berkeley. His specialisations are palaeography, bibliography, and the reconstruction of the literary life and times of medieval and Renaissance England from documentary sources. He is editor or co-editor of three collections in the Records of Early English Drama series: Cambridge (1989), Oxford (2004), and Inns of Court (forthcoming). He is also the author of Early Cambridge Theatres: University, College, and Town Stages, 1464–1720 (1994), and Monstrous Adversary: The Life of Edward de Vere, Seventeenth Earl of Oxford (2003). Arja Nurmi is an Academy of Finland Research Fellow working at the Research Unit for Variation, Contacts, and Change in English (VARIENG) at the Department of English, University of Helsinki. Her research interests include early and late modern English, historical sociolinguistics, and corpus linguistics. Her main publications focus on the history of English auxiliaries and code-switching during the entire written history of English. Liz Oakley-Brown is a Lecturer in Renaissance Literature at Lancaster University. Her principal area of research is concerned with the construction of early modern identities. She has published two co-edited collections, Translation and Nation: Towards a Cultural Politics of Englishness (with Roger Ellis, 2001) and The Rituals and Rhetoric of Queenship: Medieval to Early Modern (with Louise Wilkinson, forthcoming), and the monograph Ovid and the Cultural Politics of Translation in Early Modern England (2006). She is currently working on a book-length study of Thomas Churchyard’s writing. Michelle O’Callaghan is a Reader in the Department of English and American Literature at the University of Reading. She is the author of The ‘Shepheards Nation’: Jacobean Spenserians and Early Stuart Political Culture (2000), The English Wits: Literature and Sociability in Early Modern England (2007), and Thomas Middleton, Renaissance Dramatist (2009).

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Michael O’Connell, Professor of English at the University of California Santa Barbara, is the author of The Idolatrous Eye: Iconoclasm and Theater in Early Modern England (2000), Robert Burton (1986), Mirror and Veil: the Historical Dimension of Spenser’s Faerie Queene (1977), and of articles on Elizabethan and medieval drama, Shakespeare, Milton, Spenser, Petrarch, and Catullus. He has just completed an edition and translation of three Florentine sacre rappresentazioni from the late fifteenth century. Curtis Perry is Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In addition to articles and book chapters, he is the author of Literature and Favoritism in Early Modern England (2006) and The Making of Jacobean Culture: James I and the Renegotiation of Elizabethan Literary Practice (1997). He has also edited two scholarly collections – Material Culture and Cultural Materialisms in the Middle Ages and Renaissance (2001), and, with John Watkins, Shakespeare and the Middle Ages (2009) – as well as the drama anthology Eros and Power in English Renaissance Drama: Five Plays by Marlowe, Davenant, Massinger, Ford and Shakespeare (2008). Thomas Pettitt is an Associate Professor in English and Comparative Literature in the Institute of Literature, Media and Cultural Studies, University of Southern Denmark. He has published numerous articles on English and continental folk drama, pageantry, medieval and Renaissance theatre, ballads, and legends, and is currently working on the relationship between folklore, literature, and theatre in the late medieval and early modern periods. A. J. Piesse is Fellow and Senior Lecturer at Trinity College Dublin, where she works on late medieval and early modern theatre, with a special interest in Tudor moral interludes. She also has research interests in children’s literature. Nicole Pohl is Senior Lecturer at Oxford Brookes University. She works on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English literature with a particular interest in women’s writing and utopias/utopianism. She has published and edited books on women’s utopian writing in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, European salons, and epistolarity, and is currently editing the complete letters of Sarah Scott. Her publications include Women, Space and Utopia, 1600–1800 (2006), Gender and Utopia in the Eighteenth Century: Essays in English and French Utopian Writing (edited with Brenda Tooley, 2007), Reconsidering the Bluestockings (edited with Betty Schellenberg, 2002), and Female Communities 1600–1800: Literary Visions and Cultural Realities (edited with Rebecca D’Monté, 2000). Robin Robbins is an Emeritus Fellow of Wadham College, Oxford. He has produced a two-volume critical edition with commentary of Sir Thomas Browne’s Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1646–1672) (1981), and his two-volume annotated edition of The Poems of John Donne appeared in 2008. John Roe is Reader in English and Related Literature, University of York. He is the author of Shakespeare and Machiavelli (2002), and editor of Shakespeare: The Poems

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(updated 2006) and Inspiration and Technique: Ancient to Modern Views on Beauty and Art (with Michele Stanco, 2007). Nicola Royan is Lecturer in Medieval and Early Modern Literature in the School of English Studies at the University of Nottingham. She is a graduate of the University of Glasgow (the first candidate ever to read Joint Honours in Scottish Literature and Latin), and the University of Oxford. Her publications include four collections of essays, Literature, Letters and the Canonical in Early Modern Scotland (with Theo van Heijnsbergen, 2002), Forum for Modern Language Studies, 38/2 (with Ian Johnson, 2002), The Scots and Medieval Arthurian Legend (with Rhiannon Purdie, 2005), and Langage Cleir Illumynate: Scottish Poetry from Barbour to Drummond (2007). Other work includes “ ‘Mark your meroure be me’ ”: Richard Holland’s Buke of the Howlat’, in P. Bawcutt and J. Hadley Williams (eds.), A Companion to Medieval Scottish Poetry (2006), and ‘Scottish literature’, in D Johnson and E. Treharne (eds.), Readings in Medieval Texts (2005). She is editorial secretary of the Scottish Text Society, and one of the trustees of the Scottish Medievalists. She also sits on the board of Nottingham Medieval Studies. Stephan Schmuck was awarded a Ph.D. from Aberystwyth University in 2007. He is an Honorary Research Fellow of the Institute of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Wales, and is currently preparing a monograph provisionally entitled ‘Politics of Anxiety: Histories of Islam in Early Modern English Writings’. James Sharpe took his BA and D.Phil. degrees at Oxford and, after holding temporary posts at Durham and Exeter, has been employed at the University of York since 1973. He has researched and published extensively on crime and punishment in early modern England and on witchcraft. His publications on witchcraft include Instruments of Darkness: Witchcraft in England 1550–1750 (1996), The Bewitching of Anne Gunter (1999), and Witchcraft in Early Modern England (2001). James R. Siemon is Professor of English at Boston University. He is the author of Shakespearean Iconoclasm (1985) and Word Against Word: Shakespearean Utterance (2002). He has edited Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta (New Mermaids) and Shakespeare’s Richard III (Arden). Peter J. Smith is Reader in Renaissance Literature at Nottingham Trent University. His publications include Social Shakespeare: Aspects of Renaissance Dramaturgy and Contemporary Society (1995) and Hamlet: Theory in Practice (1996). His articles and reviews have appeared in Cahiers Elisabéthains, Critical Survey, Kaleidoscope, New Poetry Quarterly, Renaissance Quarterly, The Review of English Studies, Shakespeare, Shakespeare Bulletin, Shakespeare Survey, Speech and Drama, Sydney Studies in English, The Times Higher Educational Supplement, The Times Literary Supplement, and Year’s Work in English Studies. He has edited Marlowe’s Jew of Malta (1994), Edward II (1998), and Dekker’s The Shoemakers’ Holiday (2004). Since 1992 he has been associate editor of the international journal of Renaissance studies, Cahiers Elisabéthains.

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Boika Sokolova teaches Shakespeare and drama on the London Programmes of the University of California and the University of Notre Dame, as well as at the British American Drama Academy (BADA). She is co-author of Painting Shakespeare Red (2001), and has edited volumes of essays on Shakespeare’s reception and appropriation in Europe. Her latest publication is a study book on The Merchant of Venice (2009) (Humanities Ebooks: ). Andrea Stevens is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she teaches courses on Shakespeare and early modern drama. Her articles, essays, and reviews appear or are forthcoming in Theatre Notebook, English Literary Renaissance, Shakespeare Bulletin, and Thunder at a Playhouse: Essays on Shakespeare and the Early Modern Stage. Professor Stevens is currently at work on a book about the early modern special effects and materials most closely related to the body in performance, in particular theatrical paint. John A. Twyning is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Literature Program at the University of Pittsburgh. He is author of London Dispossessed: Literature and Social Space in the Early Modern City (1998), and is currently completing a book for Palgrave Macmillan entitled England’s Green and Pleasant Land: Reforming the Nation in Literature, Landscape and Architecture (2009). Jennifer Waldron is Assistant Professor of English and Director of the Program in Medieval and Renaissance Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. She has published essays on Shakespeare and Montaigne, and she is currently working on a book that addresses connections between theology and theatre in early modern England. The project, ‘Lively Images: Idolatry, Sacrifice, and Secular Theater in Post-Reformation England’, examines Elizabethan and Jacobean drama in the light of religious debates over the sacramental and symbolic powers of the human body. Greg Walker is the Masson Professor of English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. He has published widely in the fields of medieval and Renaissance literature, including, most recently, Medieval Drama: An Anthology (2000), Writing Under Tyranny: English Literature and the Henrician Reformation (2005), and The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Literature (co-edited with Elaine Treharne, 2010). Judith Weil is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Manitoba. She is the author of Christopher Marlowe: Merlin’s Prophet (1977) and Service and Dependency in Shakespeare’s Plays (2005) and co-editor, with Herbert Weil, of the New Cambridge King Henry IV, Part One (1997). Jessica Winston is an Associate Professor of English at Idaho State University. Her research interests focus on the literary culture of the Inns of Court, especially in the early Elizabethan period. Her articles appear in Studies in Philology, Early Theatre, Renaissance Quarterly, and The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Literature. Peter Womack is a Professor of Literature and Drama at the University of East Anglia. His books include Ben Jonson (1986), English Drama: A Cultural History (with

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Simon Shepherd, 1996) and English Renaissance Drama (2006). He is working on a book about dialogue for the New Critical Idiom series. Rowland Wymer is Chair and Head of English, Communication, Film and Media at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge. His publications include Suicide and Despair in the Jacobean Drama (1986), Webster and Ford (1995), and Derek Jarman (2005), as well as a number of co-edited collections of essays, including Neo-Historicism (2000) and The Accession of James I: Historical and Cultural Consequences (2006). He is currently working on a book on science fiction and religion and editing The Witch of Edmonton for the Oxford edition of The Complete Works of John Ford.

1

Introduction Michael Hattaway

What does it mean to speak of ‘the English Renaissance’? Within the three parts of these volumes, we approach the question in a variety of ways. Essays in Volume 1 define historical contexts and critical perspectives. Volume 2 is given over to describing literary genres and kinds of writing, and then to engaging with a number of critical issues and debates. These essays have been written during a time when our awareness of the textualisation of the world has been much enhanced: a good proportion of essays, those about ‘history’ as well as those about ‘literature’, make their way towards a sense of the realities of the period though a close analysis of language (see Chapter 6, Metaphor and Culture; Chapter 36, Reading the Body; Chapter 79, Reconstructing the Past: History, Historicism, Histories). However, no essay derives from a stand-alone theoretical position: all are put to the test by the readings that they generate, and certain essays, marked with an asterisk in the table of contents, offer readings of representative discourses or particular texts. The word ‘Renaissance’ designates ‘rebirth’, a metaphor applied, from its beginnings, to a cultural vision that originated in Italy. For the nineteenth and twentieth centuries this was projected in a seductively splendid synthesis by Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860). Burckhardt retrospectively laid out a master proposal to revive the art and learning of the classical world, to emulate the grandeur of ancient cities, to stimulate science and geographical discovery, and to produce art and literature that imitated antique models, an undertaking that was dedicated as much to the profane as to the spiritual. Rival city-states of Italy required monuments to enhance their fame, and thus ensured patronage for the writers and artists who duly bequeathed to posterity the texts and great architectural and visual exemplars with which we are all familiar. Gradual developments in the understanding of money as well of banking and bookkeeping enabled the accumulation of wealth to pay for the fame and glory these memorials of magnificence may have brought (Ferguson 2008). The engraving after Bruegel from c.1570 (Figure 1) shows how, pace Burckhardt, at least certain contem-

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Image not available in the electronic edition

Figure 1 The Battle of the Money-Bags and Strong-Boxes, engraving after Pieter Bruegel the Elder c.1570. A number of pottery banks approach to battle with the treasure chests, barrels, and strong-boxes on the right; coins, broken boxes, and bags litter the foreground. British Museum, London

poraries explained their own period in material terms. Here the heroics of virtue and glory are debased: it’s all for money – pottery banks, coming in from the left, battle with the treasure chests, barrels, and strong-boxes on the right. This Companion reminds its readers of some of the material constructions of culture, and also of the way so many ideas and institutions have been functional: instruments of power or parts of the apparatus of government. Yet Burckhardt’s idealising categories, which rest upon abstract notions like ‘genius’, ‘individuality’, and secularisation, have percolated into and informed all too many derivative handbooks for the period: it is certainly difficult to make them fit the English experience. England did enjoy a phenomenal energizing of literature: this is an age that, traditionally, has at its centre, Spenser and Sidney, Marlowe and Nashe, Shakespeare and Jonson. Ben Jonson, exceptionally, did publish his ‘works’ in a manner befit-

Introduction

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ting a Renaissance writer, creating large volumes to set alongside those containing texts by his classical exemplars (compare Erne 2003), although some of the dramatic genres he used and the commonplaces he deployed have medieval origins (Curtius 1953). The other writers too are as ‘medieval’ as they are ‘Renaissance’ – although any endeavour to categorise them in these terms would be not only equivocal but also misguided. However, no authors would have written the way they did without a typical ‘Renaissance’ education, in particular a vigorous training in classical rhetoric; none would have written what they did without being concerned with the dissemination and imitation of classical forms, many of which are reviewed in Part 2 (see also Bolgar 1954 and Chapter 4, Rhetoric). Ancient Rome occupied commanding heights in the imagination of the period, and the investigation of republicanism in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (1599) would not have been possible without Plutarch, the political radicalism of Marlowe and Jonson without Tacitus and Livy refracted through Machiavelli, the satires of Nashe without Juvenal and Horace (see Chapter 49, Political Plays; Chapter 64, Traditions of Complaint and Satire). Ovid’s influence is pervasive (see Chapter 62, Ovidian Erotic Poems) – as it was in ‘the Middle Ages’ – and Platonic ideas of love became familiar through Italian courtesy books. The Allegory of Love: Love, Beauty, and Pleasure, by Benvenuto Tisi (1481–1559) – called ‘Garofolo’ – in London’s National Gallery is on the cover of the first volume of this Companion. It shows Cupid presiding simultaneously (in the manner of older narrative pictures) over representations of a pair of lovers, now contemplating each other, later (perhaps) embracing (Wind 1967: 149). Its topic matches Donne’s ‘The Ecstasy’ – which, similarly, we might read either as a paean to Platonic love or as the recording of the voice of a cavalier seducer. The fact that many writers prefaced their work with a definition of the role of an ‘author’ (Masten 1997) shows how problematic this notion was. Much ‘publication’ was generated collectively, by writers and players in the theatres, by poets and musicians at court and at home. Wonderful songs might be created out of traditional or anonymous texts (see Chapter 59, Music and Poetry). Moreover, agendas for Renaissance authors were comprehensive – they were not confined to what is now called ‘literature’ (Hattaway 2005: 3–6): this was an age of polemic and satire as well as of madrigal verse, of political engagement as well as of lyric grace. Our own age is also inclined to read the personal as the political; we now recognise praise for the ‘golden’ qualities of certain love poets at the expense of the ‘drab’ verse produced by their socially engaged contemporaries as a sign of a past generation’s restrained and restrictive ‘literary canon’ (see Lewis 1954). This Companion ranges from roughly the period of Sir Thomas More (1478–1535) to that of John Milton (1608–74), although there is no attempt to be comprehensive. It moves from the period of humanism, the time of the revival of litterae humaniores, to the time when England had suffered the trauma of its Civil War (to some historians the first significant European revolution) and when Milton had, in Paradise Lost, written an epic that magnificently fused classical and Christian traditions in a text

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that remembers the scars of recent political and cultural upheaval. (Chapter 7, Early Tudor Humanism; Chapter 41, Epic; and Hill 1975). It was not until the seventeenth century, the ‘age of the baroque’ in continental Europe, that there was in England a sense of programmed and collective endeavour in the cognate arts of music, painting, and architecture. The Jacobean court masques (see Orgel and Strong 1973; Chapter 47, ‘Tied to Rules of Flattery?’: Court Drama and the Masque) that epitomise this high combinate art are contemporary with artefacts that are as ‘indecorous’ as Shakespeare’s Pericles (1607) or as backwardlooking as the translations of Iberian chivalric romance that continued to be enjoyed in a manner that suggests that Cervantes’ Don Quixote (1605) was quite disregarded (see Chapter 57, Romance). Printing may have generated a ‘communication revolution’, but the circulation of texts in manuscript was the preferred practice in some elite groups (see Chapter 12, Publication: Print and Manuscript and Chapter 14, The Manuscript Transmission of Poetry). There was no attempt to design great civic churches or to plan cities before the times of Inigo Jones (1573–1652) and Sir Christopher Wren (1632–1723), and country houses and gardens manifest an intriguing union of neoclassical and older romantic styles. While depictions of landscape are almost non-existent in English painting, there are intriguing discourses on literary topography (see Chapter 34, The Writing of Travel; Chapter 26, Literary Gardens, from More to Marvell). Great examples of English portrait painting abound, but their images are not life-like but iconic, their subjects explained by allegorical imprese or insets rather than fixed by gleams of ‘personality’ (see Strong 1969). The fact that diaries were only beginning to be written suggests that ‘a new concept of “individuality” ’ is problematic: it certainly did not emerge into the new seventeenth century from Act 1, scene 2, of Hamlet (see Chapter 72, Diaries and Journals, and Chapter 74, Identity). So any expedition to explore English culture that used as a map, say, Vasari’s Lives of the Artists, an Italian text of 1550 that in its own time set a cultural agenda, would rapidly lose its way – which is why this Companion could not be organised around a series of biographies of authors and their ‘works’. Furthermore, an ‘English Renaissance’ is technically an anachronism. The word ‘Renaissance’ is not recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary until the 1840s, the age of John Ruskin. Any idea of a cultural ‘revolution’ is certainly misleading: literary and visual artefacts of the period record patterns of evolution from medieval antecedents that are as least as important as their debts to new models of representation and orientation emerging from Italy and later from France (see Chapter 58, Love Poetry; Chapter 43, Continuities between ‘Medieval’ and ‘Early Modern’ Drama). ‘Renaissance’ also signals points of origin, for capitalist organisation of commerce and manufacture, for the reconstitution of political and family institutions, for patterns of identity, status, gender, race, and class, for philosophical and political thought. Yet it would be misleading in the extreme to point to specific beginnings for these phenomena, although essays in Part 3, ‘Issues and Debates’, do approach some of them. A cliché in cultural history is the emergence of ‘men of genius’ as a

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subspecies of that epistemological monstrosity ‘Renaissance man’. However, in this sense, ‘genius’ is another anachronism: the notion derives from the middle of the eighteenth century. Moreover, not only has it occluded the power of material forms and pressures in the production of talent but it is also a masculine construction that has excluded the writings of women. Essays in this volume concern themselves with writing by, about, and for women (see Ferguson 1996; Chapter 25, ‘An Emblem of Themselves’: Early Renaissance Country House Poetry; Chapter 61, The Heart Of The Labyrinth: Mary Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus; Chapter 48, Women and Drama; and Chapter 76, Was There a Renaissance Feminism?). ‘Renaissance’ is also, conventionally, an aristocratic phenomenon (although it took bourgeois capital to generate the necessary expenditure) and, in the fine arts, traditionally associated with connoisseurship: we redress this with essays on popular arts of the period (see Chapter 33, The English Broadside Print c.1550– c.1650; Chapter 66, ‘Such pretty things would soon be gone’: The Neglected Genres of Popular Verse, 1480–1650; Chapter 53, Local Drama and Custom; Chapter 65, Folk Legends and Wonder Tales.) Both strands in these volumes imply varieties of ‘counter-canon’. It has become fashionable to avoid problems of origin by relabeling the period the ‘early modern’, a term taken from social historians. It reminds us that the period saw the posing of some of the great political and cultural questions that have shaped the forging of modernity, and encourages us to look in texts for scepticism and doubt rather than reconciliation, harmony, and ‘closure’. It reminds us of the extension of travel and diplomacy, of knowledge of other cultures, and of the concomitant growth in commerce (see Singh 2009; Chapter 35, England’s Encounters with Islam; Chapter 80, Race: A Renaissance Category?). But this label also raises difficulties: like ‘Renaissance’, it suggests a break with a ‘medieval’ past, implies continuities with what comes later, and, dangerously, invites the importation back into our period of cultural paradigms that we associate with eighteenth-century Enlightenment and even the revolutionary epoch of the early nineteenth century. Many essays in this Companion reveal how distant this foreign country, sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury England, lies from the continents of classical decorum in the arts and of rationality and tolerance in politics and philosophy. Our period may well be better described as ‘Reformation England’, a hypothesis I endorse by choosing as a cover illustration for the second volume another painting by Garofolo in the National Gallery, Saint Augustine with the Holy Family and Saint Catherine of Alexandria (c.1520). It portrays an apocryphal story of how Augustine, while wrestling with the mysteries of the Trinity, met a child trying in vain with a seashell to scoop the ocean into a hole he had dug on the beach. When Augustine gently told him the task was impossible, the child (in fact Christ) told the saint that his intellectual task was no less futile. The saint’s vision, which relates to Augustine’s Platonism, is an emblem of the unbridgeable gap between faith and reason that is a starting point for so much Reformation theology.1 We have also included among the illustrations a selection of polemical prints, sometimes brutal and not sufficiently

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known, on which are inscribed religious divisions in the kingdom, divisions that, inevitably for the times, were also political. We reproduce an engraving of The Pope Suppressed by King Henry the Eighth from Foxe’s Acts and Monuments (Figure 2) as well as a painting by Girolamo da Treviso, owned by Henry VIII, the style of which, like that of Garofolo’s Saint Augustine, is immediately apparent as deriving from the Italian high Renaissance but the subject of which, the Pope being stoned by the four evangelists, recalls the religious division and the violence which beset England for a century and a half (see Figure 3; Chapter 27, English Reformations). The fissiparous energies of religious dissent and reform generated political factionalism and the scrutiny of institutions and culture that could, on the other hand, lead to literary analyses of the highest order (see Chapter 30, Theological Writings and Religious Polemic; Chapter 31, Catholic Writings; Chapter 32, Sectarian Writing). Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure (1603) is not only a massively intelligent probing of the ordeals of the Reformation but also a paradigm example of the way in which the secular and the religious were inseparable (compare Chapter 18, ‘Law Makes the King’: Hooker on Law and Princely Rule). In such a world Jacob Burckhardt’s idea of the Renaissance being categorised by the melting into air of ‘the veil of illusion’ scarcely fits the realities of early modern England (see Chapter 11, Scientific Writing). Nor did England see the emergence of states that were ‘works of art’ (see Burckhardt 1960: 81). Sir Thomas More may have produced a blueprint for an ordered society in his Utopia, but the kind of absolutism needed to sustain his ideals never existed in this period. The reach of the Tudor and Stuart regimes always exceeded their grasp, and essays record as many voices of dissent as consensual choruses. The notion of ‘Merry England’ can be traced back to the fourteenth century, but the Cade episodes in Shakespeare’s 2 Henry VI remind us that the happiness the phrase conjures is predicated on a myth of social equality. The rest of the play exposes not only aristocratic factionalism but also the terror of a regime dominated by warlords. Having noted that, however, we must not equate early modern dissent with modern radicalism. Most oppositional writing was fired by religious ideology rather than by political principles derived from any concept of rights. A single collection can offer neither one definitive overview of the period nor any monolithic account of how it was seen by contemporaries. Describing the course of history by means of narratives with beginnings, middles, and ends or enclosing parts of extensive cultural fields is problematic. Inspection of the map of these two volumes will reveal lacunae, and their organisation will complicate parts of what they seek to clarify. Their very title will have confronted readers with three difficulties. One is acknowledged: only limited attention could be paid to texts associated with three of the four nations that inhabit ‘the British Isles’ (see, however, Chapter 17, Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Book 5: Poetry, Politics, and Justice, and Chapter 81, Writing the Nations). That designation emerged in the seventeenth century as an instrument of English political and cultural hegemony – the endeavour is registered specifically in Shakespeare’s allegory of empire, Cymbeline (1610), where

Image not available in the electronic edition

Figure 2 The Pope Suppressed by King Henry the Eighth, anonymous woodcut, illustration to John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments (London, 1570), an iconic allegory of the English Reformation. Henry VIII enthroned treads on the body of the fallen Pope Clement VII, below whom are shown the Catholic clergy in disarray, Bishop Fisher leaning over the prostrate pope; the side-note reads: ‘The lamentable weeping and howling of all the religious rout for the fall of their god the Pope’. King Henry hands a bible to Archbishop Cranmer (Cromwell, the lord chancellor, stands behind him). This woodcut clearly recalls earlier images depicting demonstrations of papal supremacy that were a commonplace of Protestant polemic: Alexander III’s humiliation of Frederick Barbarossa (shown with his foot on the emperor’s neck) and Pope Celestine III’s similar treatment of Emperor Henry VI (shown kicking the crown of the emperor who kneels before him) – compare ‘The Popes have as well made foot-balls of the crowns of emperors as footstools of their necks’ (Henry More, Divine Dialogues, 1668). Contemporary English bibles use the phrase ‘making one’s enemies one’s foot-stool’, and the use of the motif in Marlowe’s 1 Tamburlaine reflects its popularity in Elizabethan England: compare ‘Sapores, when he had conquered Valerianus the Roman emperor, used him afterward most villainously, as his foot-stock [stool]’, from Bishop John Jewel’s Defence of the Apology (1567). British Library, London

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Image not available in the electronic edition

Figure 3 A Protestant allegory showing the Pope being stoned by the four evangelists, by Girolamo da Treviso (1497–1544). In the grisaille painting, owned by Henry VIII, the Pope has fallen across the bodies of Hypocrisy and Avarice, and in the foreground lie a cardinal’s hat and a document with seals, probably a papal bull. On a huge hill in the background a candle stands, symbolising the truth claimed by the ‘pure’ reformed church, an uncompromising binary contrast with the candle extinguished by a cooking pan in the immediate foreground, symbolising the false teachings of Rome (see p. 521). There are very similar woodcuts in the Coverdale Bible of 1535. Royal Collection, Windsor Castle

‘Britain’, the designation for a long wished for but never achieved nation-state, occurs no fewer than thirty-four times. (The mere thirteen instances of the word in the remainder of the Shakespearean canon often designate ‘Brittany’). Both narrative history and cultural multiplicity enhance the underlying problems that derive from using ‘Renaissance’ to designate both a period and a category of artistic styles within the art and culture of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Britain. The third problematic is the way the title links ‘literature’ with ‘culture’. Few readers will be surprised to find essays in the ‘Contexts, Readings, and Perspectives’ section on history, religion, language, and education cheek by jowl with accounts of ‘literature’. These essays and those on literary forms stand not as accounts of ‘background’ – a misleading metaphor, like ‘reflection’, ‘image’, or ‘portrait’ – that originates from the visual arts, but to kindle awareness of cultural pressures. Many essays investigate material and ideological environments as well as particular ‘literary’ texts.

Introduction

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This Companion acknowledges lines of cultural force, surveys some of the fault-lines generated by seismic movements in fiscal policy, religion, and politics, but does not treat of ‘culture’ as something analogous to a physical substance with consistent and enduring properties. No historicising programme is followed, nor are crisis and contestation privileged over consensualism. Cultural generalisations in the period are likely to be invalidated by the way in which at this time, far more than now, that imagined community of ‘Britain’ was possessed of a plurality of discrete cultures, created by regional and political difference, rank, religion, gender, or any combination of these (see Spufford 1974; Trill 1996; and Underdown 1985). Some contributors would read from texts to cultural conditions; fewer would insist that particular material conditions determine rather than enable the texts that are the subject of their essays. Theatrical representations of the market, for example, sketched in texts as different as Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday (1599), Middleton’s A Chaste Maid in Cheapside (1613), and Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair (1614), are as implicated in a traditional ‘moral economy’ as they are patterned by contemporary economies, and are structured around patterns of festivity that reach back to both the Christian calendrical year (Hutton 1994) and classical comedy (Salingar 1974) . Some essays seek to embed texts within early modern history and culture; others, particularly those devoted to readings, indicate how Renaissance texts might be read not only contextually but also from the perspectives of the theories and preconceptions of our own day. This needs no apology: we have long realised that, to tweak a familiar aspiration of Matthew Arnold, the endeavour to see a text as itself, ‘as it really was’, is impossible. All readings are mediated: by the irrecoverability of the past, by our membership of interpretative communities (is a work canonical or not, ‘major’ or ‘minor’?), as well as by preconceptions moulded by our own race, class, and gender. ‘Meanings’ are created as much by readers as by writers. In this second edition not only have former contributors updated and added to essays – the last two decades have revolutionised writings about this period – but new essays have been commissioned on many further topics and themes pertinent to its history and cultural achievements. Senior colleagues who wrote for the first edition recommended, at my request, younger scholars, whose contributions I have been proud to receive. Spelling in this volume, of quotations and, usually, titles, has been silently modernised. (Exceptions have been made when, for example, Spenser is cited or when modernisation would obscure a semantic point, particularly in quotations from manuscript sources.) I should like to express my thanks to David Daniell, Richard Dutton, Martin Dzelzainis, Andrew Hatfield, Diana Henderson, Jean Howard, Lorna Hutson, and James Siemon, all of whom commented on my original proposal for the volume. The selection of illustrations could not have been made without the encyclopaedic knowledge, generosity, and enthusiasm of my friend and colleague Malcolm Jones. From all contributors I have learned as much as I hoped – and more than I care to acknowledge. The editorial and production team at Wiley-Blackwell have been helpful,

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patient, and always good-humoured. Special thanks to Janet Moth, who expeditiously copy-edited these volumes with generous care and estimable understanding. My wife Judi has been a centre for a roaming life that took me once to Kraków where, as a guest of the Jagellionian University, I first drafted this introduction. She has had to listen to all too much about this book ever since.

Note 1

‘Saint Augustine is accompanied by Saint Catherine of Alexandria, with her traditional attribute of a wheel. Saint Stephen, who was one of the first deacons of the church and was stoned to death in about AD 35, is probably the saint visible (perhaps holding stones) in the left background. In the top left corner the Virgin and Child appear upon the clouds with

Saint Joseph and music-making angels’ (National Gallery caption). For the medieval legend from which the picture derives, see Ahl 1986:46; for an account of how the story is not only untrue but perverts Augustine’s doctrine of the Trinity, see O’Donnell 2005: 287–8 (I owe this latter reference to Torrance Kirby).

References and Further Reading Ahl, Diane Cole (1986). ‘Benozzo Gozzoli’s frescoes of the life of Saint Augustine in San Gimignano: their meaning in context’. Artibus et Historiae, 7, 35–53. Bolgar, R. R. (1954). The Classical Heritage and its Beneficiaries. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bray, Roger (ed.) (1995). The Blackwell History of Music in Britain, 2: The Sixteenth Century. Oxford: Blackwell. Burckhardt, Jacob. (1960 edn.). The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, trans. S. G. C. Middlemore. London: Phaidon. Collinson, Patrick (1982). The Religion of Protestants: The Church in English Society 1559–1625. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Collinson, Patrick (2003). The Reformation. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Curtius, Ernst Robert (1953). European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. W. R. Trask. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Erne, Lukas (2003). Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ferguson, Margaret W. (1996). ‘Renaissance concepts of the “woman writer” ’. In H. Wilcox (ed.), Women and Literature in Britain, 1500–

1700 (pp. 143–89). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ferguson, Niall (2008). The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World. London: Penguin. Ferguson, Wallace K. (1948). The Renaissance in Historical Thought: Five Centuries of Interpretation. Cambridge, MA: Riverside. Fernie, Ewan, Ramona Wray, Mark Thornton Burnett, and Clare McManus (eds.) (2005). Reconceiving the Renaissance: A Critical Reader. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Girouard, Mark (1983). Robert Smythson and the Elizabethan Country House. New Haven: Yale University Press. Grazia, M. de., M. Quilligan, and P. Stallybrass (eds.) (1996). Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Greenblatt, Stephen (1980). Renaissance SelfFashioning. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hattaway, Michael (2005). Renaissance and Reformations: An Introduction to Early Modern English Literature. Oxford: Blackwell. Helgerson, Richard (1992). Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Introduction Hill, Christopher (1975). The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Hutton, Ronald (1994). The Rise and Fall of Merry England: The Ritual Year 1400–1700. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lewis, C. S. (1954). English Literature in the Sixteenth Century. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Manley, L. (1995). Literature and Culture in Early Modern London. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Masten, Jeffrey (1997). Textual Intercourse: Collaboration, Authorship, and Sexualities in Renaissance Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Miller, David L., Sharon O’Dair, and Harold Weber (eds.) (1994). The Production of English Renaissance Culture. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Norbrook, D. (1984). Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Norbrook, D. (1999). Writing the English Renaissance: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627–1660. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. O’Donnell, James (2005). Augustine: A New Biography. New York: Ecco. Orgel, Stephen and Roy Strong (eds.) (1973). Inigo Jones: The Theatre of the Stuart Court. London: Sotheby Parke Bernet. Parry, G. (1981). The Golden Age Restor’d: The Culture of the Stuart Court 1603–1642. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Pincombe, Mike (2001). Elizabethan Humanism: Literature and Learning in the Later Sixteenth Century. London: Longman. Pocock, J. G. A. (1987). ‘Texts as events: reflections on the history of political thought’. In S. Zwicker and K. Sharpe (eds.), The Politics of Discourse (pp. 21–34). Berkeley: University of California Press. Salingar, Leo (1974). Shakespeare and the Traditions of Comedy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shuger, Deborah. K. (1990). Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Shuger, Deborah. K. (2001). Political Theologies in Shakespeare’s England. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Singh, Jyotsna G. (ed.) (2009). A Companion to the Global Renaissance: English Literature and Culture in the Era of Expansion. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Skinner, Quentin (1978). The Foundations of Modern Political Thought: The Age of Reformation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Spink, Ian (1992). The Blackwell History of Music in Britain, 3: The Seventeenth Century. Oxford: Blackwell. Spufford, Margaret (1974). Contrasting Communities: English Villagers in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Spufford, Margaret (1981). Small Books and Pleasant Histories: Popular Fiction and its Readership in Seventeenth-Century England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Strong, Roy (1969). The English Icon: Elizabethan and Jacobean Portraiture. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Strong, Roy (1979). The Renaissance Garden in England. London: Thames & Hudson. Thomas, Keith (1978 edn.). Religion and the Decline of Magic. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Thomas, Keith (2009). The Ends of Life: Roads to Fulfilment in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Trill, Suzanne (1996). ‘Religion and the construction of femininity’. In H. Wilcox (ed.), Women and Literature in Britain 1500–1700. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Underdown, David (1985). Revel, Riot, and Rebellion: Popular Politics and Culture in England 1603–1660. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Wind, Edgar (1967). Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance. London: Penguin. Woodbridge, Linda (1984). Women and the English Renaissance: Literature and the Nature of Womankind, 1540–1620. Brighton: Harvester. Wyatt, Michael (2005). The Italian Encounter with Tudor England: A Cultural Politics of Translation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Part One

Contexts, Readings, and Perspectives c.1500–c.1650

2

The English Language of the Early Modern Period Arja Nurmi

During the early modern English period (1500–1700), English began to resemble the language we know today. In order better to understand the language and the many subtle and not so subtle differences, we need to study not only linguistic backgrounds but also social contexts, because we cannot understand the distinctiveness of literature without knowing what was common and usual (Hulme 1962: 7). Because all languages change all the time, English around 1500 was very different from English around 1700. There were three ongoing social, political, and cultural processes that greatly influenced the shaping of the language: first, the spread of the printing presses and the increase in the number of printed texts; second, the vernacularisation of many genres previously written in Latin and/or French, such as science, law, and religion (and also, increasingly, fiction); and third, the intensified contact with not only continental Europe but the rest of the world through trade and exploration. These processes impacted different levels of the language in various ways, and the end result was increasing standardisation of writing and the rapid increase of the vocabulary, including large-scale borrowing from foreign languages. In addition to change, variation is another constant of all languages. Variation is conditioned by a great many social and language-related internal factors that jointly influence the linguistic choices of any individual speaker or writer. Social variables, such as a speaker’s (or writer’s) age, gender, social status, education, or geographical origin, and situational factors, such as the number of listeners or intended readers, the relationship and degree of familiarity between author and audience, and relative power differences, all determine how we choose our words now, and they had just as much impact in the early modern period. Many linguistic structures have complex conditions of their own, but there are also common processes that withstand patterns of variation, such as more common words being resistant to change. We are used to reading early modern English with modernised orthography, which makes it deceptively similar to present-day English. Therefore, it is sometimes useful to take a look at the language in its native form. The playwright Robert Daborne

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wrote the following letter to the theatre financier Philip Henslowe, and it shows English as it was actually written in private contexts at the time: ROBERT DABORNE TO PHILIP HENSLOWE, 5 JUNE 1613. Mr Hinchlow, the company told me yu wear expected thear yesterday to conclude about thear com ¯ ing over or goinge to Oxford, J have not only labord my own play which shall be ready before they come over but given Cyrill Tourneur an act of ye Arreignment of london to write yt we may have yt likewise ready for them, J wish yu had spoken wth them to know thear resolution for they depend vpon yr purpose, J hav sent yu 2 sheets more fayr written vpon my ffayth sr they shall not stay one howr for me, whearfor J beseech yu as heatherto so yu would now spare me 40s which stands me vpon to send over to my counsell in a matter concerns my whole estate & wher J deale otherways then to yr content may J & myne want ffryndship in distress so relijng one yr favor which shall never reap loss by me J rest ¯ aund t yr com ob: Daborne 5o June 1613 (Greg 1907: 71–2)

The most obvious difference from present-day English is the non-standard orthography. There are abbreviations using superscript characters, such as yr for your and sr for sir, and the double m in command is expressed with a macron above the single m (com¯aund). These are all fairly common in personal correspondence and other types of private handwritten texts. Capitalisation does not follow any clear rules, and so Daborne writes Oxford but london, Arreignment but resolution. Both there and their are given the spelling thear, and where is spelled wher, but wherefore is whearfor. Some of these choices are idiosyncratic, but many of the forms appear in the writings of others as well. There are also some conventions of the time followed by many educated writers, such as the Latinate convention of writing word-initial u as v in vpon. Punctuation does not follow our modern rules either: to our eyes the whole letter appears to be one long sentence with occasional commas thrown in. Since Daborne wrote for his living and was educated at Cambridge, these choices cannot be assigned to his ignorance, poor literacy, or even to a particularly low social status. The letter represents private writing, and the style may seem somewhat informal to us, but since the topic is important to Daborne (an advance for the play he is writing), it would seem likely he paid at least some attention to his linguistic choices in order to present a plausible case. Because we have been trained to follow rules for writing, it is quite hard for modern readers to understand that during the early modern English period there really was no standardised spelling or punctuation. The place of a comma or other punctuation mark in a text of the period may signify a breathing pause or emphasis, not a syntactic division, as is more frequent in current language. On the whole punctuation was often impressionistic, although the more educated writers often used the Latin model, at least in published texts. The use of apostrophes to mark elisions, for example, was

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mostly seen in scholarly writings; otherwise letters were elided without note (Partridge 1964: 2–3). In one text, a writer could also vary the spelling of a single word with no obvious purpose in mind. Indeed, people could write their own name in multiple ways (see e.g. Liberman 2009). Some of the spelling variation reflected different accents of spoken English, as particularly unpractised writers favoured pronunciation spellings, but much of it was seemingly random. There was an increasingly clear difference between published and private writing, as printed volumes began to show more uniform spellings thanks to the developing editorial practices of publishers. The printing standard slowly became the accepted spelling standard but, even in the eighteenth century, the differences between published and unpublished writing were notable. As standard orthography spread in public writing, regional variation in spoken language was increasingly hidden behind this uniform front. This does not mean that regional variants ceased to exist. Local dialects continued to be spoken, and also written in unpublished texts. On the other hand, the first stages of a standard or prestige pronunciation were also seen, a general dialect spoken by the upper strata of the metropolitan area. Evidence for this is found, for example, in the often told anecdote of Sir Walter Ralegh continuing to use his native Devon dialect at court. While this is evidence of the persistence of regional variation, it is at the same time evidence that Ralegh was distinctive enough in his linguistic practices to merit attention, and that there was a variety of English spoken at court consistent enough to compare regional accents to. Early modern English is frequently read out loud as if it were pronounced as English is today, but there were clear differences, which can be observed in rhyming words, for example. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream (2.2.67–70), Shakespeare rhymes approve and love and here and wear, which for most modern speakers do not rhyme. In fact, it was the vowel system of English that underwent the most notable changes during the period. There were some consonantal changes as well, but those are few in number. For example, even in the London area there were many variants of r, and it was still typically pronounced after vowels in words like far. The r-less pronunciation seems to have started its spread only in the eighteenth century (Nevalainen 2006: 126). Dropping final -g (writin’) and initial h- (’ouse) was also quite common, but this is frequent in present-day spoken language, too (Crystal 2005: 79–82). Long vowels and diphthongs are the most obvious cases where differences are found: meet was pronounced /me:t/ rather than the modern /mi:t/ and life sounded more like /ləif/ than /laif/ (Crystal 2005: 79–89). This shift in long vowels and diphthongs has long been identified under the title of the Great Vowel Shift. The changes have traditionally been described as more systematic than they appear to have been in actual fact, but it is still a useful concept in observing the large-scale changes in pronunciation starting in the fifteenth century and completed by the eighteenth (Nevalainen 2006: 120–4). Some changes took place in most dialects, others were localised to the south. For example, the long /u:/ in words like house and out shifted into the diphthong /ou/, except in the north, where the old pronunciation is still heard. The diphthong

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would have had several variants depending on the stage of the change and the speaker, ranging from /əu/ to /ɑυ/ (the last one closest to modern RP). Since our experience with early modern texts is as readers, the variation and change on other levels of the language is of more interest than pronunciation. As mentioned above, some of the variation was regional, and many features survive in traditional dialects even today. Some variation was social, the higher ranks of society speaking and writing in different ways from the lower strata. Because a large part of the population was still illiterate (by 1700 it has been estimated that only 20–30 percent could read and write), we do not have linguistic evidence from all groups evenly. While we can look at the literary representations of low-ranking people in contemporary drama and fiction as indicators of their speech, it is useful to bear in mind that writers then as now frequently resort to stereotypes and simplifications rather than faithful reproduction of authentic spoken language. On the level of grammar, many changes occurred, shaping English towards modern usage. The verbal system was reorganised in two ways: verb inflections were changing and disappearing, and auxiliary verbs settled into new functions (Rissanen 1999). In addition to the larger changes, many smaller differences from present-day English continued. For example, there was variation in the use of be and have as the perfect auxiliaries with verbs expressing movement or change of status (he has come vs he is come). Old strong past tense forms and participles were still in use for some verbs, as in climbed vs clombe, has wrote vs has written (Blake 1983: 82). Because in language most things are interconnected, the changes in the personal pronouns (the loss of thou) were tied to the inflectional changes of verbs. Modal auxiliaries are one verbal group that gained most of its current features during the early modern period. It is often claimed that one of the reasons behind the development of the modals is the decline of the subjunctive. Certainly there are some cases, particularly where should and would are used, when earlier a plain subjunctive would have appeared, but this is only a small sub-trend in the bigger picture. The frequency of modals seems to change fairly slowly, and the major shifts are in the patterns of meaning associated with verbs. On the one hand, there are still traces of the old lexical meanings: will and would can at times mean ‘want’. Also, could, might, should, and would are still occasionally used as straightforward past-tense forms of can, may, shall, and will, although their meanings were beginning to be increasingly independent of their old present-tense forms (see e.g. Gotti et al. 2002). Shall and will do not yet show the pattern of ‘shall in first person, will in second and third person’ that later became a rule that was enforced quite rigorously. This usage seems to have been southern in origin, and people speaking southern dialects may well have followed it, but, overall, there was free variation. Will was most often used to express fairly neutral futurity, and started to appear in its contracted form ’ll. Shall was already beginning to decline in frequency during the sixteenth century, most probably because, unlike other modal auxiliaries, it did not seem to develop new meanings.

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The most interesting development in the field of modality was the increase of epistemic (acceptable) meanings almost throughout the entire group of verbs (shall excepted). This seems to have begun in earnest during the sixteenth century among university-educated, high-ranking men, but spread to the language of women, and to the lower ranks, in time. Since epistemic modality expresses the process of logical thinking as well as the speaker’s or writer’s degree of certainty in their conclusion (compare He must be home by now and He may be home by now), it is not surprising that formal education is behind the origin of this pattern. It could even be argued that the increase of the meaning is tied to a general change in culture, connected to the rise of empirical thinking in science. The use of the auxiliary do was different from the current pattern in two major ways. First, do was not always used in questions, negated statements, and imperatives as it is today (Comes he not here?; Why comes he not himself?; I know thee not; Go not home). There is a gradual increase in the frequency of do in these contexts all through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with a setback around the first decade of the seventeenth century (Nurmi 1999: 167). By 1700 it was clearly more common to see these structures with do than without, although there were individual verbs (most persistently know and doubt) that resisted longer. The second main difference in the use of do was that it appeared frequently where it would not be seen these days, both in affirmative statements and imperatives (He may mean more than we poor men do know). Despite the temptation to read them as such, most instances of do are not in fact emphatic in these cases. Periphrastic do, when used in affirmative statements, seems to have been at least partially a stylistic device. There is evidence to connect it to a courtly style, giving indications of solemn, occasionally pompous speakers and writers. Because of the solemnity, do was also favoured in religious language, both the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer. On the other hand, do was also used in verse simply as a metrical filler and for freeing the main verb to the end of the line for better rhyming. An extreme example of this is the deliberately clunky Queen of the May speech in Beaumont’s Knight of the Burning Pestle: For now the fragrant flowers do spring and sprout in seemly sort, The little birds do sit and sing, the lambs do make fine sport.

The decline of periphrastic do in affirmative statements and imperatives mainly took place during the seventeenth century. Many reasons have been suggested, but the simultaneous pressure from prestigious Scottish courtiers, who used a do-less variant, and the influx of migrants from northern England, also speaking a do-less dialect, can be seen as two driving forces in the early stages of the decline (Nurmi 1999: 179–81). Once do was no longer associated with a high style it probably lost its usefulness and was increasingly only used for emphasis and in verse. The progressive (I am writing) also starts to be used noticeably during the seventeenth century, but it is still clearly lagging behind compared to modern English,

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both in frequency and also in the different syntactic patterns it appears in (Rissanen 1999). Without exaggerating greatly, it can be claimed that the structure appeared in the present and past tenses only during the early modern era, and not always then – it is lacking in many contexts where modern speakers would expect to see it. Because of the rarity of the form, it is difficult to establish any sociolinguistic patterns surrounding it, but it seems to be yet another form arising from the informal range of language use, spreading gradually to the more formal registers. The prefixed on-writing or a-writing seems to be somewhat archaic (and possibly dialectal) at this time, appearing most commonly in verse, where it, too, provides an occasionally useful extra syllable. As mentioned above, the other main type of change affecting the verbal system was the simplification of the inflectional system. This led, for example, to the subjunctive being indistinguishable from the indicative in all but the third person singular (he goes vs he go) and the verb be (Rissanen 1999: 228). Tied to the decline of thou, the corresponding verb ending (goest) also disappeared. The major element of variation in the inflectional system was provided by the third person singular indicative endings. The variance between -s and -th endings (he goeth vs he goes) continued for three centuries, but the most rapid changes took place around 1600, when -s started to gain ground. There were some frequently occurring verbs that resisted the change (most notably do and have, which continued to have the variants doth and hath beside does and has for much longer). The replacement of -th with -s was a very typical change in that it appeared first in the language of women and the lower social ranks, and was accepted by men and the higher social strata later. It was also typical in another way: the new form was in use in the northern dialects, and, with the constant migration going on in the period, spread first to London and from there to the rest of the country (Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg 2003). Another change concerning verbal inflections was also going on, linked to the changes in personal pronouns. As the second person singular pronoun thou was used less and less, the corresponding verbal ending also fell out of use. So, instead of thou goest we would see you go. While thou was still in use, it was in fact already quite rare, at least in written language, in the sixteenth century (Nevala 2004: 159–84). There may have been a small surge of popularity for the old form in the seventeenth century, but it was still clearly in the minority. The dialectal use of thou has continued in Yorkshire to this day. Thou seems to have been used for two main purposes: as an indicator of relative power, with social superiors addressing their inferiors with thou, and in expressions of intimacy, particularly between spouses, but also addressed to God. The most obvious cases of power imbalance can be seen between masters and servants, but also Sir Edward Coke’s often quoted ‘I thou thee, thou traitor‘, from the trial of Sir Walter Ralegh, refers to this usage, since it would have been extremely rude to use thou when addressing a knight, and the usage thus reflected Coke’s contempt for the accused Ralegh.

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The use of thou to denote intimacy between spouses seems to occur particularly when the relationship is a close one, or in passages of text where other endearments appear as well. It can also be presumed that the habit of addressing God with thou related to the intimacy of prayer. These two uses of thou are often difficult to separate from each other, since, for example, parents using thou to their children are usually resorting to it at times when they were expressing tenderness. In early modern society parents were regarded as socially clearly superior to children, but they were no different from modern parents in their love. It has been argued that a man’s position as the head of the family would make also the use of thou by husbands to their wives a matter of relative power rather than intimacy, but the existing texts seem to belie this explanation. Another change in the personal pronoun system was the replacement of ye with you. This took place in the course of the sixteenth century, and ye was already quite old-fashioned in Shakespeare’s day (Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg 2003: 60). This is another change where women were the early adopters and men lagged behind. The difference between the north and the south is also evident, as the new form you is more quickly adopted in the south and the old ye lingers in the north a while longer. Other changes in pronouns include the final disappearance of him as the third person singular non-personal pronoun and the spread of it to take its place. The relative pronoun system also sees the introduction of who to refer to human antecedents, replacing the earlier which as in ‘Margaret Roper, which desireth …’ (Rissanen 1999: 294). Linguistic patterns heavily stigmatised today, such as multiple negation (I do not know nothing) were still being used, although losing ground. A feature considered non-standard today, multiple negation was perfectly acceptable until the sixteenth century. By the end of it, only some linguistic environments supported its use, while in most cases simple negation was preferred. This seems to have been a trend led by men and those from the higher social strata (Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg 2003). While multiple negation has disappeared from standard English, it of course continues to be used in regional and informal varieties. There were many other small differences from current English, ongoing changes and patterns of variation. The -ly ending of adverbs was not compulsory, so it was possible to say come quick (Abbot 1870: 17). The comparative and superlative forms of adjectives were more commonly periphrastic in scholarly writings (more perfect), while informal texts show even long adjectives with inflectional endings (confidentest) (Nevalainen 2006: 98). In imperatives, the subject is often expressed: ‘hear you, Gossip’ (Rissanen 1999: 278). Word order was freer than in modern language, although some of the seeming freedom is merely due to poetic licence (Blake 1983: 118). There was inversion of subject and verb quite often after a sentence-initial adverb such as then or now: Then was I going prisoner to the Tower (Rissanen 1999: 264). In passives the by-agent (were received by my lord) alternated with the of-agent (were received of all the nobles) (Nevalainen 2006: 110).

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Some changes were shifts in frequency, such as the increase in the use of the ofgenitive (the forces of the King of Denmark), which wins space from the s-genitive (the King of Denmark’s forces) (Rissanen 1999: 101–202; Nevalainen 2006: 76). On the other hand, many seeming differences are features of spoken language even today; the differentiation of spoken and written language was just not similar to modern practices. One such example is sentence-initial and, which was not frowned upon in early modern English (Abbot 1870: 70–5). One of the most striking developments during the early modern period was the constant expansion of the lexis of English. There were several reasons for this. First, there was a process of vernacularisation going on, with English being used for new purposes, such as scientific writing. There was also a new reading public as the literacy of the population improved. This meant new kinds of texts, written for a non-specialist audience, one that was interested in learning new things but also in being entertained (Blake 1983: 16). Finally, increased international contacts brought with them the need to discuss new, hitherto unknown, things. New audiences for written texts meant that different registers of language are seen in writing: there is more informal language in fiction, for example, than ever before. Drama in particular provides us with approximations of the spoken language of the time, complete with stereotypical speakers of dialect, stylised versions of beggars’ cant, and the like. How much of the language is authentic and how much merely a production of stage conventions is hard to estimate (Blake 1981: 81). We also have more evidence of private writing, such as personal correspondence and journals, because a larger percentage of the population was literate. While these texts provide us with some insight into regional variation and informal language, the fact that the lowest strata were still illiterate remains. However, the mere existence of a wider range of language in use gives us a more complete picture of English than in the previous centuries. We cannot estimate how many of the words first seen in writing during the early modern period had already been in use in spoken language, or for how long. New words came to the language in the same ways as they always do. Existing words were given new meanings, new words were coined from old, and borrowing from foreign languages was frequent. There was a wealth of overlapping terms, many of which have later specialised into narrower meanings, but which at the time had a much broader meaning. There were also plenty of words that had a very brief life and limited usage in the language, surfacing briefly to be forgotten again. There was a wide variety of suffixes and prefixes used for forming new words (Nevalainen 2006: 61–4). Some, like -ness, were native, while others had been borrowed recently with their headword and then adopted for further coining with older loanwords and eventually the native word stock as well. There was also a process called conversion, where the word class of a word is changed. For example, the verb remove produced two nouns, one formed with a suffix (removal), the other without one (remove). With multiple strategies of word formation and many affixes with fairly similar meanings (un-, in-, dis-, de- all giving a negative meaning, for example) it is no wonder that the coining of new words was so frequent.

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There was a wide range of synonymous or near-synonymous words in early modern English. Some words have since disappeared, others have become specialised in meaning, and some have remained. To take one example, the word wit covered a great deal of ground. Originally, it expressed perception, but in this sense it had mostly been replaced by sense in early modern English. The second meaning of wit was cognition, where near-synonyms such as mind, understanding, knowledge, memory, cunning, science, conceit, conscience, intelligence, intellect, engine and ingeny gradually appeared. Finally, there was the expression sense of wit, with synonyms such as conceit, ingenuity, fancy, imagination, fantasy, and genius (Koivisto-Alanko 2000: 214). It may also have had sexual connotations (but see Williams 1997: 340–1). Each word had its own senses, and there were many overlaps among them. Cunning, for example, went from ‘knowledgeable, skilful’ to ‘clever’, and finally to the negatively valued ‘crafty’ that is most common these days (OED s.v. cunning). Beyond forming new words from old, borrowing them from other languages was a common trend. Most new loanwords were borrowed from Latin and French. Latin particularly contributed scholarly terms for the new genre of scientific writing (formula, fungus), but also other learned writings. French loans were more likely to be in the fields of law, the military and politics (colonel, cartridge). Particularly in the seventeenth century they also appear in terms referring to polite society (bourgeois, genteel ). While Latin and French had the most notable influence on English vocabulary during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, expanding trade and other contacts around the world meant that many other languages were also sources of loans. Of European languages, Spanish, Dutch, and Italian were particularly influential, but many languages around the world gave names to goods traded and new plants, animals, and natural phenomena encountered. The new layers of vocabulary introduced to the language are related to cultural changes associated with the Renaissance. The rise of humanism and the renewed interest in original classical sources, and the call Ad fontes (to the sources), led to an increase in the number of people studying Latin and Greek. Since also the range of people for whom education was available constantly increased, this meant that there was a larger number of people with ‘small Latin and less Greek’ than before. There would also have been more and more people who had a familiarity with central Latin and Greek terminology in scholarly fields, even if they did not possess active knowledge of either language. Another important source for scientific terminology was Arabic, which provided scholarly terms such as algebra. The spread of Renaissance cultural ideals from Italy through France and also Spain meant that many terms and concepts related to relevant pursuits would be borrowed from those languages. So, for example, fencing terms such as stockado would come from Italian, as would words describing music and painting (piano, fresco). Spanish provided loans referring to things found in the New World, such as cigar, but also other cultural references (anchovy, armada). In fact, culinary words seem to have been borrowed from all over Europe, since German Sauerkraut has its

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first mention in 1617. In addition to Italy, the Netherlands were one of the great centres of art, and it is not surprising words like landscape and easel were borrowed from Dutch. The Renaissance also marked the beginning of globalisation, with first the great explorers and then world-wide trade. The East India Company had traders all over Asia, and the merchants borrowed words for local items. Some were common only in the language of the trading community – witness the various synonyms for interpreter: dragoman, trenchman, jurebasso (Kaislaniemi 2009) – but others have remained in the language, such as tatami, which was borrowed from Japanese in the early seventeenth century. Foodstuffs (like saffron from Arabic) were commonly introduced with their borrowed names to the English diet, and so too were other cultural elements of trade partners. The word ramadan, for example, has been used in English since the sixteenth century. Trade and exploration led to a great deal of contact with other European traders, so it is not surprising that much naval terminology was gained from the Dutch, and many new foodstuffs were introduced to English via Spanish. Once the colonialisation of America started, new words describing the flora and fauna of the New World were introduced, borrowed from Native American languages. So, for example raccoon came from Algonquian, and woodchuck from Cree. Many of these borrowings remained more common in the language of settlers, and would be known only to those interested in explorers’ tales or the natural sciences. Early modern English saw the beginnings of American English, although during the seventeenth century there was still very little actual difference between the English of England and the English of America. Any differences are usually attributed to two factors. On the one hand, the mix of dialects the settlers brought with them shaped American English. The Puritans settling in Massachusetts Bay were largely from East Anglia, and the Quakers from the north Midlands migrated to the Delaware Valley, while gentry with their servants from southern England moved to Virginia. The other main reason for the early separation of American English was colonial lag: it has been suggested that the pace of language change in the reasonably isolated colonies was slower than in the mother country, leading to a later adoption of changes in America than in England (Nevalainen 2006: 146). During the early modern English period attitudes towards the English language changed, because much good writing became available, with new words for the new subjects being ubiquitously invented and imported (Barber 1997: 76–8). The main devices of classical rhetoric had also been domesticated, which also lead to a new-found appreciation of English (see Chapter 4, Rhetoric). This in turn was one of the reasons for attempts at the formal description and prescription of English. The earliest monolingual dictionaries of English began to appear in the seventeenth century (before that there were bi- and multi-lingual dictionaries for the learning of foreign languages), and they were one possible standardising influence (Barber 1997: 106). Some dictionaries attempted to provide help with hard words, particularly those of foreign origin, while others also introduced new words, seemingly coined by the

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dictionary-maker. There were also some grammars of English being compiled, some as early as the late sixteenth century, with a steadier flow of new publications during the seventeenth century (Barber 1997: 112). Many early grammarians tried to adapt English to the rules of Latin, copied from each other, and were less than systematic in their approach. The process of standardisation should not be considered as a end unto itself. While there were some attempts to provide rules and examples, there were many more levels of language that were gradually standardised into the form found in modern English. Most of these processes were gradual, and proceeded from the lower strata of society. Once the changes were accepted at the most prestigious levels of society, however, they eventually became part of the accepted and prescribed standard usage. Many such changes have been described in this essay (for example the replacement of -th by -s or the adoption of periphrastic do in questions and negated statements). Some changes seem to have spread from the higher levels of society downward, the loss of multiple negation being a clear example. The rules of grammar began to be formally codified only during the eighteenth century, but the existence of a standard language does not need codifiers, simply a consensus of speakers and writers as to what the standard is. There were and are many dialects which do not follow the rules of standard English in many of these respects. In fact, many of the features associated with standard language came into being in densely populated areas, particularly London (Nevalainen and Tieken-Boon van Ostade 2006: 292–3). There was a variable input of migrants from all over the country, and a great deal of dialect levelling and mixing. This also explains why so many of the features of standard English originate in the north even though their spread began in the south: immigrants brought their own dialect features with them and other Londoners adopted them. The writings extant in early modern English give us a great deal of information on the richness and variability of the language, blossoming in new uses with new means of expression. Never before had English stretched from the most informal daily language to the most solemn formal occasions, from the entertaining to the informative, in quite this way. New words, new rhetorical devices, new genres came into existence. More people could write and express themselves in a form that was preserved for posterity. Despite this multitude of sources available to us, we are still seeing only the tip of the iceberg. The real scope and richness of early modern English are beyond our reach, because the spoken language has not been preserved, except in poor imitations. References and Further Reading Abbot, E. A. (1870). A Shakespearian Grammar, 3rd edn. London: Macmillan. Barber, C. (1997). Early Modern English, 2nd edn. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Blake, N. F. (1981). Non-Standard Language in English Literature. London: Deutsch. Blake, N. F. (1983). Shakespeare’s Language. Misterton: Language Press.

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Blake, N. F. (2002). A Grammar of Shakespeare’s Language. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Blank, P. (1996). Broken English: Dialects and the Politics of Language in Renaissance Writings. London: Routledge. Brook, G. L. (1976). The Language of Shakespeare. London: Deutsch. Crystal, D. (2005). Pronouncing Shakespeare: The Globe Experiment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. For sound samples, . Cusack, B. (1998). Everyday English 1500–1700: A Reader. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Dobson, E. J. (1968). English Pronunciation 1500– 1700, 2nd edn. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Gotti, M., M. Dossena, R. Dury, R. Facchinetti, and M. Lima (2002). Variation in Central Modals: A Repertoire of Forms and Types of Usage in Middle English and Early Modern English. Bern: Peter Lang. Graham-White, A. (1995). Punctuation and its Dramatic Value in Shakespearian Drama. London: Associated University Presses. Greg, W. R. (ed.) (1907). Henslowe Papers, Being Documents Supplementary to Henslowe’s Diary. London: A. H. Bullen. Hope, J. (1994). The Authorship of Shakespeare’s Plays: A Socio-Linguistic Study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hulme, Hilda M. (1962). Explorations in Shakespeare’s Language; Some Problems of Lexical Meaning in the Dramatic Text. London: Longman. Kaislaniemi, S. (2009). ‘Jurebassos and Linguists: the East India Company and Early Modern English words for interpreter’. In R. W. McConchie, A. Honkapohja, and J. Tyrkkö (eds.), Selected Proceedings of the 2008 Symposium on New Approaches in English Historical Lexis (HEL-LEX 2) (pp. 60–73). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla. Koivisto-Alanko, P. (2000). Abstract Words in Abstract Worlds: Directionality and Prototypical Structure in the Semantic Change in English Nouns of Cognition. Helsinki: Société Néophilologique. Lass, R. (ed.) (1999). The Cambridge History of the English Language, vol. 3: 1476–1776. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Liberman, M. (2009). ‘In Defense of spellchecking’, Language Log, 11 April. . Nevala, M. (2004). Address in Early English Correspondence: Its Forms and Socio-Pragmatic Functions. Helsinki: Société Néophilologique. Nevalainen, T. (2006). An Introduction to Early Modern English. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Nevalainen, T. and H. Raumolin-Brunberg (2003). Historical Sociolinguistics: Language Change in Tudor and Stuart England. London: Longman. Nevalainen, T. and I. Tieken-Boon van Ostade (2006). ‘Standardisation’. In R. Hogg and D. Denison (eds.), A History of the English Language (pp. 271–311). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nurmi, A. (1999). A Social History of Periphrastic do. Helsinki: Société Néophilologique. Nurmi, A., M. Nevala, and M. PalanderCollin (eds.) (2009). The Language of Daily Life in England (1400–1800). Amsterdam: Benjamins. OED (The Oxford English Dictionary). OED Online. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Partridge, A. C. (1964). Orthography in Shakespeare and Elizabethan Drama. London: Edward Arnold. Rissanen, M. (1999). ‘Syntax’. In R. Lass (ed.), The Cambridge History of the English Language, vol. 3: 1476–1776 (pp. 187–331). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ronberg, G. (1992). A Way with Words: The Language of English Renaissance Literature. London: Edward Arnold. Salmon, V. and E. Burness (1987). Reader in the Language of Shakespearean Drama. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Walker, T. (2007). Thou and You in Early Modern English Dialogues: Trials, Depositions and Drama Comedy. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Williams, Gordon (1997). A Glossary of Shakespeare’s Sexual Language. London: Athlone. Wyld, H. C. (1936). A History of Modern Colloquial English, 3rd edn. Oxford: Blackwell.

3

Literacy and Education Jean R. Brink

We do not know how many people could read in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. There is virtually no reliable evidence enabling us to draw statistical conclusions about mass literacy in the English Renaissance. We do know that William Shakespeare and Edmund Spenser – and those fortunate enough to receive an Elizabethan or Jacobean grammar school education – were very well educated. Shakespeare attended a grammar school in Stratford where students were literate in English when they entered, and at school they learned Latin and were introduced to Greek. Spenser attended Merchant Taylors’ School in London, where Hebrew was part of the curriculum. A number of its graduates contributed to the celebrated King James version of the Bible. Grammar school students studied Greek and Roman literature and history in texts written in those languages, and they were trained to write and speak Latin. The printed word fascinated early modern society in part because of the phenomenal impact of the printing press; books previously produced laboriously in scriptoria and monasteries could be mass-produced for the first time. Religion also offered incentives for literacy. The Protestant Reformation coincided with and fuelled the development of printing. Sectarian reformers, or even Puritan critics of the established clergy, could enlist the printing press in their service, produce 1,500 copies of a pamphlet, and so rapidly disseminate their views to a mass audience. In the aftermath of the translation of the Bible into English, the Protestant clergy urged their congregations to learn to read so that they would have access to the Holy Scripture; if literacy could not ensure their parishioners’ salvation, reading texts might make them less susceptible to error. Knowledge of the Bible was a blessing to the ungodly as well as the godly. A thief or murderer could plead ‘benefit of clergy’ and have his sentence commuted. For a criminal, the capacity to read and translate a sentence from the Latin Bible could figure literally as a matter of life or death. The illiterate were sent to the gallows, while the literate were merely branded. Lawrence Stone has estimated that 47 per cent of the criminal classes were literate, but David Cressy, in his thorough and

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influential statistical study of literacy in the English Renaissance, has revised this estimate, arguing that Middlesex records show that 32 per cent of the capital felons under Elizabeth and 39 per cent under James successfully claimed benefit of clergy (Stone 1964: 28; Cressy 1980: 17). Even these less optimistic statistics on literacy suggest that criminals were as literate as, or more literate than, the population at large. Benefit of clergy may even have had a lasting impact on literary history. Early in his career, two days after the opening of his Every Man in His Humour, Ben Jonson killed Gabriel Spencer, who was a member of the Lord Admiral’s Men, the company of Philip Henslowe. Henslowe, whose Diary is the source of much that we know about Renaissance drama, reported news of the duel to Edward Alleyn, his son-in-law. He describes Jonson not as a playwright, but as a bricklayer, an uncelebrated occupation even among the trades: ‘I have lost one of my company, which hurteth me greatly – that is, Gabriel, for he is slain in Hoxton Fields by the hands of Benjamin Jonson, bricklayer.’1 Jonson was convicted and left the prison a branded felon but, because he could read Latin, escaped the gallows. David Cressy’s statistics on literacy conclude that 70 per cent of the male population was illiterate on the eve of the Civil War and that nearly all women and labourers were illiterate (Cressy 1980: 55–9). An influential study of play-going in Shakespeare’s London uses these statistics to claim that women were a significant presence in the theatres and that their presence indicates that audiences were illiterate: The high proportion of women at the playhouses testifies to the popularity of playgoing for the illiterate, since few women of any class, even in London, could write their names. Illiteracy among women in the country as a whole approached 90%, and did not drop significantly until the last quarter of the seventeenth century. (Gurr 1987: 55)

Cressy’s figures derive from statistical analysis of the relative percentages of people signing their names with a mark or signature in public documents. A signature is interpreted as evidence of functional literacy – the ability to read. Conversely, it is assumed that the illiterate signed with their mark. John Shakespeare, William’s father, for example, is frequently described as illiterate because he signed documents with a mark. Conclusions drawn from these statistical studies, once widely accepted, have received critical evaluation in the past ten years. It is now less generally agreed that the majority of people were illiterate and that nearly all women were.2 The early statistical data on literacy have been severely criticised on the grounds that reading and writing were taught separately and that many more people may have been able to read than to write. In addition, when the statistics are based on wills, it is important to consider that people drawing up their will were likely to be elderly or infirm and so more likely to sign with a mark than a signature. When statistics are derived from marks on political testimonials, such as loyalty oaths, marks may have been preferred over signatures because they conferred more anonymity.

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While it seems reasonable to assume that lower-class women, like lower-class men, were illiterate, the conclusion that women were illiterate irrespective of class is less persuasive. Occupations, such as printer, baker, bricklayer, can be used to differentiate men, but are of less value in differentiating women, who were more likely to have been employed in the home. The assumption that over 90 per cent of women were illiterate would be more convincing if it were based on selected and specific samples. It would be significant, for example, if it could be shown that 90 per cent of the women named as executors of their husband’s estate were illiterate, or if a high percentage of maids of honour serving at court were unable to write their own name. It is also important to keep in mind that women are likely to be under-represented in most data collected from public documents. Women made up only one-fifth of the legal depositions in rural areas, but the figures for London are much higher. Women made nearly 50 per cent of the depositions in London courts, the majority being described as wives or widows (Cressy 1980: 145–7). In studies of both male and female literacy, we lack data that would enable us to differentiate one decade from another. Nevertheless, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are all too frequently treated as one vast and unchanging backdrop to cultural events. According to David Cressy, no public documents that can be used for generalised statistical studies of literacy survive from the sixteenth century. The oath for the Establishment of the King’s Succession of 1534 was not universally administered. It was not until over a century later that suitable evidence for statistical studies of literacy was forthcoming. The Protestation Oath of 1641 is the starting point for most discussions of seventeenth-century literacy. By March 1642 almost everyone, who was male and over 18, had been given an opportunity to sign his name or mark to the Protestation Oath. This oath merely supported Protestantism, but the more radical Vow and Covenant, which followed the Protestation Oath, held that there had been a traitorous and popish plot to subvert reformed religion and liberty. Summarising these data, Cressy concludes that the evidence for male literacy in the 1640s is based on the signatures and marks of more than 40,000 men from over 400 parishes in twenty five counties; however, he adds the important qualification that this sample was not scientifically constructed and that the resulting statistics probably underestimate the literacy in urban as opposed to rural England. According to Cressy, statistical studies indicate an overpowering stratification by social class and gender: ‘The gentry and clergy were overwhelmingly literate; tradesmen and yeomen fell in the middle; husbandmen, labourers, and women were massively illiterate’ (Cressy 1980: 106). Substantive answers to social questions, such as who could read and write, who should be educated, and to what ends, are not always easy to answer, and the answers, even when they appear to be factual, are more difficult to interpret than most studies have acknowledged. For example, in the 1543 Act for the Advancement of True Religion, the government of Henry VIII spelled out the dangers of extending literacy to women and the lower classes: ‘No women nor artificers, ’prentices, journeymen, serving men of the degrees of yeomen or under, husbandmen, nor labourers were to

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be permitted to read the Bible in English’.3 Unless a sudden increase of literacy among women and the labouring class threatened religious and social stability, a decree of this kind must have been largely symbolic. It is likely that literacy was a class and gender marker. Prohibitions against female and lower-class literacy were reminders of status and endorsements of the hierarchical principle that women were to be subordinate to men just as servants were subject to their masters and the lower classes were expected to defer to the gentry. Statistical studies of literacy are based on incomplete data, but the same holds true for other quantitative approaches to estimating the numbers of those receiving an education in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. We need to be careful about judging either ease of access or the levels of education attained on the basis of modern statistical studies of book production or even book ownership. More than one observer lauded the availability of grammar schools in England, but expressed reservations about the accessibility of universities. In chapter 3 of The Description of England (1577), ‘Of Universities’, William Harrison states that, in addition to the universities, ‘there are a great number of grammar schools throughout the realm, and those very liberally endowed for the better relief of poor scholars, so that there are not many corporate towns now under the queen’s dominion, that have not one grammar school at the least, with a sufficient living for a master and usher appointed to the same’ (Holinshed 1807: II, 254, 252). The sixteenth century was progressive in its attitude towards educating the lower classes. Renaissance educators valued the humanist tradition in the classics that had produced them, and they advocated educating the poor as well as the rich, women as well as men. In his Utopia Sir Thomas More envisions an educated society in which all classes study classical texts (More 1964: IV, 158–9). Harrison, however, is less optimistic about the number of university fellowships likely to trickle down to the lower classes: ‘it is in my time a hard matter for a poor man’s child to come by a fellowship (though he be never so good a scholar, and worthy of that room) … In some grammar schools likewise, which send scholars to these universities, it is lamentable to see what bribery is used … such bribery is made, that poor men’s children are commonly shut out, and the richer sort received’ (Holinshed 1807: II, 252). Although in 1577 Harrison is sceptical about how fairly educational opportunities are in practice distributed, neither he nor his contemporaries question the principle that the poor should be educated. The seventeenth century was less egalitarian. Less than a century later, Sir Francis Bacon counselled James I against increasing educational opportunities. By 1611 Bacon subscribed to the opinion that there were too many grammar schools and that an excessive number could be dangerous: ‘Many persons will be bred unfit for other vocations, and unprofitable for that in which they are brought up, which fills the realm of indigent, idle and wanton people which are but materia rerum novarum’ (Bacon 1868: IV, 252–3). In the decades after the Civil War most people were even more fearful about educating the poor. They reasoned that to overproduce intellectuals by educating the humbly born beyond their station in life would breed social unrest.

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In 1678, a century after Harrison lamented social injustice, Christopher Wase is forced to acknowledge a broadly based opposition to educating the lower classes. He concedes that ‘there is an opinion commonly received that the scholars of England are overproportioned to the preferments for lettered persons’ (Wase 1678: 1): Hereupon the constitution of free schools cometh to be questioned, as diverting those whom Nature or Fortune had determined to the plough, the oar, or other handicrafts from their proper design, to the study of the liberal arts … Multiplying … foundations [he continues] is … represented as dangerous to the government. (Wase 1678: 1)

The quality and quantity of educational opportunities available to the lower classes and to women decreased as the seventeenth century came to an end. Lawrence Stone has concluded in quantitative terms, ‘English higher education did not get back to the level of the 1630s until after the first World War; did not surpass it until after the second’ (Stone 1964: 69). It was not until after the Second World War that AngloAmerican society was as committed to educating the lower classes as it had been in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Our picture of what actually occurred in the Renaissance educational system and of its impact on all classes of people remains uncertain, but we are remarkably well informed about theory as opposed to practice. Renaissance handbooks on education range from philosophical theories of government and social control, such as More’s Utopia (1516) and Machiavelli’s The Prince (1513, printed in 1532) to moral programmes such as those set out in Erasmus’ Education of a Christian Prince (1517) and Sir Thomas Elyot’s Book Named the Governor (1531). Sir Thomas Hoby’s translation of Castiglione’s The Courtier (1528, translated and printed 1561) was a courtesy book offering a portrait of the ideal courtier that also influenced books intended for those who aspired to be gentlemen. In the Schoolmaster (1570) Roger Ascham, who had been the pupil of Sir John Cheke, whom he describes as the best teacher, and the schoolmaster of Queen Elizabeth, whom he celebrates as the best student, outlined the principles of a humanist education. Ascham’s programme was aimed at the landed gentry and assumed a tutorial setting. In contrast, Richard Mulcaster, headmaster of Merchant Taylors’ School and later master of St Paul’s, wrote two handbooks, Positions (1581) and the Elementary (1582), concerned more directly with teaching the children of merchants and tradesmen, as well as the gentry, to read and write. In The First Part of the Elementary, Which Entreateth Chiefly of the Right Writing of our English Tongue (1582), he develops a system for spelling. He also explains what skills are to be taught – reading, writing, drawing, singing, and playing – and how and when these skills are to be introduced. As Mulcaster’s emphasis on fine arts might suggest, students from the Merchant Taylors’ School frequently performed at court in the decade between 1574 and 1584. These and other educational manuals indicate that there was considerable agreement on curriculum and methodology.4 Children first attended a petty school where they learned reading, writing, and counting, but girls might be taught needlework

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instead of writing and arithmetic. The child was to begin by learning his ABC, probably from a hornbook, and then, in ‘good reformation style’, read the catechism, psalter, and primer. The petty school was under the jurisdiction of the church, but that mattered little in terms of curriculum since church and state were in practice inseparable. In injunctions of 1536 and 1538 Henry VIII decreed that everyone should be taught the basic articles of faith, the Pater Noster, Ave Maria, Credo, and Decalogue, in English. The drive towards religious uniformity deeply influenced early education. In 1545 King Henry’s authorised Primer was published in English to supply ‘one uniform manner or course of praying throughout all our dominions’ (Baldwin 1943: 44). A translation was made available for those who knew Latin. All agreed that the ABC and catechism should be the first text, and that religious uniformity was essential; there was less consensus concerning which religious doctrines and practices should be uniform. Summarising the curriculum of the petty school, T. W. Baldwin concludes: ‘The emphasis here is on Reformation, not on Renaissance’ (Baldwin 1943: 32). Nowell’s Catechism, existing in three Latin versions of increasing difficulty, was approved by the bishops in 1562, but was not published until eight years later. Between 1570 and 1647 it went through forty-four editions in Latin, English, and Greek and so had a major impact on the way texts were interpreted. The master asks a question to which the student supplies a memorised answer. In addition, to inculcating specific doctrines, such as justification by faith, the catechism led the student to pay attention to correspondences between the Old and New Testaments. In Romans 5:14 ‘type’ is used in a strict theological sense when Paul calls Adam the typos of Christ, literally, ‘the figure of him that was to come’. A type in the Old Testament foreshadows its antitype in the New. If, for example, the master asks why the Decalogue refers to the Christians of the New Testament as well as the Israelites of the Old Testament, then the student is supposed to reply that the pharaoh of Egypt is a type of the devil and that Moses’ delivery of the Israelites from bondage in Egypt is a type of Christ’s delivery of the faithful Christian from the bondage of sin. This system of reading influenced Spenser and, later, metaphysical poets such as George Herbert. Typology also affected the design of Milton’s Paradise Lost. The catechism helped to establish typology as a system for reading the Bible but, as was true of the four kinds of sense or meaning categorised by Dante (see Chapter 55, Allegory, n. 1), its approach to allusions also influenced the reading and writing of secular texts. Nowell’s Largest Catechism was written in Ciceronian Latin, but no doubt was left as to the primacy of religion in the educational scheme of things: I see it belongeth to the order of my duty, my dear child, not so much to instruct thee civilly in learning and good manners, as to furnish thy mind, and that in thy tender years, with good opinions and true religion. (Nowell 1853: 113 [English] and 1 [Latin])

The schoolmaster was to prefer Christian to humanist objectives: ‘For this age of childhood ought to less, yea, also much more, to be trained with good lessons to

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godliness, than with good arts to humanity’ (Nowell 1853: 216). It is understandable that, theoretically, religion would be ranked over civility and learning, but these comments in the catechism go beyond establishing a hierarchy and set godliness in opposition to civility and humanism. Humanist educators viewed the education of women positively, but very little is known about schools for women. Nevertheless, from the comments of Renaissance schoolmasters who discuss contemporary practice, it is clear that women were involved in disseminating the basic literacy fostered by the petty school system. In Ludus Literarius or the Grammar School (1612), John Brinsley says that basic skills should be learned before admission to a grammar school, and comments that this might be a good job for a poor man or woman: ‘it would help some poor man or woman, who knew not how to live otherwise’ (Brinsley 1917: 17). He repeats his description of a woman as a possible instructor in a petty school: ‘Thus may any poor man or woman enter the little ones in a town together’ (1917: 20). In his New Discovery of the Old Art of Teaching School (1659), Charles Hoole says: The petty school … deserveth that more encouragement should be given to the teachers of it than that it should be left as a work for poor women or others whose necessities compel them to undertake it as a mere shelter from beggary. (Hoole 1913: 157)

We know very little about the gender of the students attending schools, but women were employed to teach children to spell, read, write, and cast accounts. Following the petty school, a student who had aptitude and parental support would enter a grammar school. Ben Jonson’s disparaging comment about Shakespeare’s grammar-school education, that he had ‘small Latin’ and ‘less Greek’, stimulated twentieth-century interest in the curriculum and pedagogy of the Elizabethan and Jacobean grammar schools (see Baldwin 1944). The Latin word-play in Love’s Labour’s Lost and the French puns in Henry V suggest that Shakespeare was well educated and allow us to infer that his audience was also linguistically sophisticated. In assessing Jonson’s deprecatory comment on Shakespeare’s learning, we need to keep in mind that Jonson was himself a formidable classical scholar who was awarded an honorary master of arts degrees by both Oxford and Cambridge. The uniformity prized in religious instruction in the petty school extended into the grammar-school curriculum. A student at Eton or Winchester was taught the same texts in the same manner as students at Merchant Taylors’ School or the Stratford grammar school. In addition to authorising a prayer book, Henry VIII decreed that William Lyly’s Grammar was to be the authorised introduction to Latin, and this remained the standard grammar-school text throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Renaissance educators regarded innovation with suspicion and used the term ‘new-fangled’ to express their distaste for change. In the Convocation of Canterbury in 1664 and again in 1675 attempts were made in the House of Lords to end the privileged status of Lyly’s Grammar, but it retained its official authority

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After concentrating on Lyly’s Grammar in the lower grammar school (approximately the first three years), the study of rhetoric began in the fourth form. Students composed elegant letters in Latin and began to study Greek. The dramatist Terence was particularly important as a text. Charles Hoole says that students must make him ‘wholly their own’: Terence, of all the school-authors that we read, doth deservedly challenge the first place, not only because Tully [Cicero] himself hath seemed to derive his eloquence from him. … The matter of it is full of morality, and the several actors therein most lively seem to personate the behaviour and properties … of people, even in this age of ours. (Hoole 1913: 137–8; see Chapter 8, Platonism, Stoicism, Scepticism and Classical Imitation)

In The Staple of News Jonson satirises schoolmasters for not spending enough time on the catechism and for letting the children speak plays and act fables, but Terence is exempted from this censure: ‘We send them to learn their grammar and their Terence, and they learn their play-books’ (Intermean 3 after 3.4). In terms of methodology, throughout all the forms most schoolmasters used the ‘double translation’ method advocated by Roger Ascham in the Schoolmaster. Students would be given verses from a text, such as Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and asked to parse them grammatically, identify tropes and figures, and suggest synonyms in Latin. Then, they would turn the passage into English prose and translate it back into Latin, taking care to ensure that each word was correctly placed grammatically and rhetorically; finally, the passage was turned into English verse. In some schools, grammatical translations were used. Students were asked to translate words and phrases into normal English word order before they returned the passage to Latin. The double translation method involved very close reading and caused students to pay more attention to specific word choice than to overall design or structure. Also, because Latin is a case grammar with a more flexible word order than English, Renaissance students learned to experiment with the syntax of the English sentence. The fifth form introduced the comparative grammar of Latin and Greek and focused on oratory, especially Demosthenes, Isocrates, and the all-important Cicero. Poetry was not neglected: students read Virgil’s Eclogues and Georgics with their schoolmasters. Hoole comments that after they had memorised sections of the Eclogues and worked with their schoolmaster on the Georgics, they might be left to read the Aeneid by themselves (1913: 180). In the fifth form students also prepared a commonplace book, a kind of mini-Bartlett’s Quotations, in which witty or apt phrases were arranged under headings such as ‘friendship’, ‘liberty’, and ‘law’. These sayings and stylistic set pieces could later be used in compositions and speeches. It is important to remember that, for the educated, Latin was a spoken language in the Renaissance. Montaigne, for example was not allowed to speak vernacular French until he was 6; his family, servants, and tutors spoke only Latin to him.

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If Hebrew were to be included in the curriculum, it was introduced in the sixth form along with Homer and a long list of Greek writers including Pindar, Euripides, Sophocles, and Aristophanes. Latin authors, such as Horace, Lucan, Martial, Persius, Seneca, and Plautus, were also studied. The sheer concentration of the method limited the number of texts that could be read, and those texts appearing in the curriculum were read selectively as they are in modern anthologies. Hoole concludes his section on ‘The Master’s Method’ in A New Discovery of the Old Art of Teaching School by announcing that he has described what is ‘commonly practised’ in England and foreign countries, and that the curriculum and pedagogy are ‘proportioned to the ordinary capacities of children under fifteen years of age’ (1913: 204–5, emphasis added). Medieval universities were intended to train the clergy, and Renaissance universities retained this focus. The religious and political battles between Anglicanism and Puritanism spilled over into the universities. Many fellowships were specifically limited to those who intended to enter the church. Universities offered undergraduate degrees, but they concentrated upon the professions – theology, medicine, law, and music. In addition to clerical training, the university also promoted social mobility. All university graduates were considered gentlemen; nearly one-half of those enrolled at Oxford and Cambridge at the turn of the century were members of the gentry or the nobility. Women were not allowed to take degrees until the twentieth century, nor was a female presence encouraged. Married men were not allowed to hold fellowships, and Elizabeth was reluctant to promote the careers of university dons who married. After studying at either Oxford or Cambridge, young men might enter one of the four law schools located in London, known as the Inns of Court. A university degree was not a prerequisite to entrance; it was possible to go immediately from a grammar school to the Inner Temple, Middle Temple, Gray’s Inn, or Lincoln’s Inn. Students attending the Inns of Court might study the common law and actually pursue a career as a lawyer. The Inns also served as a lodging place for those who may have had as much interest in the London theatres as the common law and who planned to spend some time in London before settling down to the management of a country estate. We are inclined to conceive of the history of education in terms of the development of institutions, the petty school, grammar school, and university. We can assess the importance of societies, such as the Society of Antiquaries, whose papers have survived. We know that great collections of manuscripts, books, and art were put together by private collectors and preserved as part of family traditions. The climate of a culture is more difficult to assess, but the Renaissance seems to have fostered intellectual curiosity and aspiration. In his Novum Organon Sir Francis Bacon set out to write the new ‘organon’, the replacement for the corpus of Aristotle surviving from the ancient and medieval worlds. We have examples of extraordinary intellectual energy – particularly in respect to translations of texts from classical and modern languages. These translations, some of which have become classics in their own right, were produced not by professional scholars, but by those with an interest in culture: Sir Thomas North’s Plutarch, George Chapman’s Homer, Lucy Hutchinson’s Lucretius, John Florio’s

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Montaigne, Sir Thomas Hoby’s translation of the Courtier, Arthur Golding and George Sandys’ Ovid, Sir John Harington’s Ariosto. Those committed to the active life also respected contemplation. The explorer Sir Humphrey Gilbert, who drew up an elaborate plan for an idealised Elizabethan academy, sat on the deck reading More’s Utopia as his ship sank. We know that Sir Walter Ralegh, Gilbert’s half-brother, whiled away his years of imprisonment in the Tower writing a history of the world. Commitment to education helped to shape Renaissance literature. In a letter to Ralegh about the Faerie Queene, Edmund Spenser acknowledges that his aim is ‘to fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline’ (‘Letter of the Authors’).

Notes 1

Henslowe’s Diary cited in Jonson 1925–52: I, 18. 2 A number of seminal studies of readers and reading have drawn upon the practices of a broad sampling of readers to challenge these assumptions: see Anderson and Sauer 2002; Ferguson 2003; Gillespie 2005; Hackel 2005; and Sherman 2008.

3 34 and 35 Henry VIII.c.1. Cited in Cressy 1980: 44. The following scholars have cited this Act as evidence of widespread literacy: J. W. Adamson (1946: 44); Richard Altick (1957: 16, 25); H. S. Bennett (1969: 27). 4 For useful background and analysis, see Hattaway 2005 and Mulder 1969.

References and Further Reading Adamson, J. W. (1946). The Illiterate Anglo Saxon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Altick, Richard (1957). The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800– 1900. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Andersen, Jennifer and Elizabeth Sauer (eds.) (2002). Books and Readers in Early Modern England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Ascham, Roger (1570; repr. 1967). The Schoolmaster, ed. Lawrence V. Ryan. Folger Shakespeare Library. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Atkins, S. H. (1970). Aids to Research in Education: A Select Check-list of Printed Material on Education Published in English to 1800. Willerby, Hull: University of Hull Institute of Education. Bacon, Francis (1868). The Letters and Life of Francis Bacon, ed. J. Spedding, 14 vols. London. Baldwin, T. W. (1943). William Shakspere’s Petty School. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Baldwin, T. W. (1944). William Shakspere’s Small Latine & Lesse Greeke, 2 vols. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Bennett, H. S. (1969). English Books and Readers, 1445–1557. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brinsley, John (1612, 1627; repr. 1917). Ludus Literarius, or the Grammar Schoole, ed. E. T. Capagnac. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Brinsley, John (1622; repr. 1943). A Consolation for our Grammar Schooles. New York: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints. Bushnell, Rebecca W. (1996). A Culture of Teaching: Early Modern Humanism in Theory and Practice. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Cressy, David (1980). Literacy and the Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Elsky, Martin (1989). Authorizing Words: Speech, Writing, and Print in the English Renaissance. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, Ferguson, Margaret W. (2003). Dido’s Daughters: Literacy, Gender, and Empire in Early Modern England and France. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Literacy and Education Gillespie, Raymond (2005). Reading Ireland: Print, Reading and Social Change in Early Modern Ireland. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Grafton, Anthony and Lisa Jardine (1986). From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gurr, Andrew. (1987). Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hackel, Heidi Brayman (2005) Reading Material in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hattaway, Michael (2005). Renaissance and Reformations. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Holinshed, Raphael (1577, 1587; repr. 1807). Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland. Collected and published by Raphael Holinshed, William Harrison, et al., 6 vols. London: J. Johnson. Hoole, Charles (1659; repr. 1913). A New Discovery of the Old Art of Teaching Schoole, in Four Small Treatises, ed. E. T. Campagnac. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Jonson, Ben (1925–52). The Works, ed. C. H. Herford, P. Simpson, and E. Simpson. 11 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Kelly-Gardol, J. (1977). ‘Did Women Have a Renaissance?’ In R. Bridenthal and C. Koonz (eds.), Becoming Visible: Women in European History (pp. 137–64). Boston: Houghton Mifflin. More, Thomas (1964). Yale Edition of the Complete Works of St. Thomas More: Utopia, 21 vols. New Haven: Yale University Press. Morgan, Victor, with Christopher Brooke (2004). A History of the University of Cambridge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Mulcaster, Richard (1581; repr. 1887). Positions: … Which Are Necessarie for the Training vp of Children, ed. Robert Hebert Quick. London: Longman, Green & Co. Mulcaster, Richard (1582; repr. 1925). The First Part of the Elementarie, which entreateth chefelie of the right writing of our English tung, ed. E. T. Campagnac. Tudor and Stuart Library. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Mulder, John R. (1969) The Temple of the Mind: Education and Literacy in Seventeenth-Century England. New York: Pegasus. Nowell, Alexander (1853). A Catechism. Written in Latin by Alexander Nowell, Dean of St. Paul’s: Together with the Same Catechism Translated into English by Thomas Norton, ed. G. E. Gorrie. Parker Society 32. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sanders, Eve Rachel (1998). Gender and Literacy on Stage in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sherman, William H. (2008). Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Spufford, Margaret (1982). Small Books and Pleasant Histories: Popular Fiction and its Readership in Seventeenth-Century England. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Stone, Lawrence (1964). ‘The educational revolution in England, 1560–1640’. Past and Present, 28, 41–80. Stone, Lawrence (1969). ‘Literacy and education in England, 1640–1900’. Past and Present, 42, 69–139. Wase, Christopher (1678). Considerations concerning Free Schools as Settled in England. London: Mr Simon Millers. Watson, Foster (1908). The English Grammar Schools to 1660. New York: August M. Kelley.

4

Rhetoric Gavin Alexander

Amongst all the ornaments of arts, rhetoric is to be had in highest reputation, without the which all the rest are naked. Thomas Nashe (1589)

Rhetoric is the systematic and practically oriented study of the techniques and resources of verbal persuasion. Rhetoric or oratory is all about persuading a particular audience by appeals to reason and emotion, with care taken to consider well who they are, and also what they think of the speaker. It is a contingent art, ready to adapt its resources to changing discourses and occasions. The theory and practice of rhetoric is, as Nashe’s metaphors suggest, much concerned with surface appearances: the question of whether rhetoric defines substance as well as style, matter as well as words, thought as well as expression, is therefore never far away. Rhetoric became the master-discipline of Renaissance learning and the central focus of education: its impact can be felt in all areas of Renaissance culture. I propose here to concentrate on its role in the formation of literary works, because it is here that rhetoric itself is most subtly scrutinised and explored, and because the implications of rhetorical paradigms for our understanding of literature of this period are often imperfectly worked out. The connections of rhetoric to literature, and to the theory of literature, are many, and the question of precedence is always contested: not only do literary works contain a great deal of rhetoric, but also rhetorical theory claims to comprehend all of literature.

Backgrounds Rhetoric’s roots lie in the ancient Greek colonies of Sicily, whence the art got a foothold in mainland Greece and, especially, Athens. By the time of the major Greek dramatists of the fifth century BC and, in the next generations, the philosophers, it had a high status, and was accruing a substantial body of written theory. It was ideally

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suited to a democracy, where every citizen must be able to speak for himself in political debate or in a legal case. But rhetoric also purported to be a sort of master-discipline, since all human arts and sciences have recourse to verbal expression and argument. Already in these early days some philosophers, most notably Plato, were trying to dent rhetoric’s prestige, either out of professional rivalry (because it encroached on what philosophy viewed as its turf – dialectical argument) or out of a more sincere worry about the apparent ‘indifference of rhetoric to the truth, whether known or unknown, and its substitution of emotional pressure for argument’ (Fantham 1989: 229). Those criticisms have never been resolved, and our customary derogatory use of the word ‘rhetoric’ has its roots in an ancient controversy. From Greece rhetoric spread to Rome, and in that empire’s less truly democratic culture its major developments were in forensic oratory. Cicero was the finest exponent of legal rhetoric, and his legacy can still be powerfully felt in the courtroom performances of today’s lawyers, real and imaginary. I will return to the question of what all this has to do with literature, but for now we may just observe that classical rhetorical theory always used illustrations from the poets, that some of the earliest of rhetorical devices were in fact drawn from literature, and that every literary writer before the modern era had a systematic rhetorical education. Moreover, rhetorical theory was always looking to proliferate, to expand outwards from the practices at its core to touch all areas of human communication. Similarly, there were seen to be no limits to the range of other expertises needed by the effective speaker, as Cicero insisted: The art of speaking well, that is to say, of speaking with knowledge, skill, and elegance, has no delimited territory, within whose borders it is enclosed and confined. All things whatsoever, that can fall under the discussion of human beings, must be aptly dealt with by him who professes to have this power, or he must abandon the name of eloquent. (Cicero, De oratore, 2.2.5)

The art never fell altogether out of view or out of use, but the European Renaissance saw a major resurgence, spurred on by the discovery in the corners of monastic libraries of many lost orations of Cicero, and a full text of the greatest of classical treatises on rhetoric, Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria (‘The Education of an Orator’). Since much of the impetus of social, cultural, and political development in the Renaissance came from the imitation of Greece and Rome, it is no surprise that rhetoric became central to the humanist curriculum, and that a proper context for its exploitation seemed to have emerged. The educated man might only use his rhetoric in fighting a case in court or in writing love letters, but he had been taught it in the hope that it might enable him to make a contribution to political life or win the favour of a monarch: it was the skill that best expressed the civic values of humanism. Before we go any further, we need to look briefly at the basic outlines of rhetorical theory. First of all, the orator, in whatever situation he must act, has three fundamental and interlinked aims: to teach (docere), to delight (delectare), and to move (movere).

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Now, although rhetoric would claim to have something to offer whenever a person opens his or her mouth, in practice it identified three kinds of situation in which society would recognise its persuasive presence. These three kinds of rhetoric are: (1) epideictic or demonstrative rhetoric, which is concerned with praise and dispraise, often ceremonial, and was seen as containing some of the earliest literary forms, like the odes of Pindar; (2) deliberative rhetoric, which is concerned with persuasion and dissuasion in political debate – whether to adopt this policy or not; and (3) forensic rhetoric, which is concerned with legal argument, for the prosecution or for the defence. As Thomas Wilson, one of the first English theorists, explains in The Art of Rhetoric (1553): Nothing can be handled by this art but the same is contained within one of these three causes. Either the matter consisteth in praise or dispraise of a thing [epideictic]; or else in consulting whether the cause be profitable or unprofitable [deliberative]; or lastly whether the matter be right or wrong [forensic]. (Vickers 1999: 82)

Because of this insistence that any verbal performance could be slotted into one of the three rhetorical kinds, there was very early on a problem: not all literature can be happily classified as epideictic oratory. Where, for instance, does one put drama or epic poetry in this classification? Aristotle, in the earliest surviving rhetoric book, identified three means of persuasion. These are logos, or argument; ethos, the projected moral character of the speaker; and pathos, the strong emotions performed or aroused by the speaker. What this tripartite division makes clear is that rhetoric persuades not only (perhaps in some cases not even primarily) by the force of its logic, but also by making the audience want to believe in the speaker, and by manipulating their passions. The theory next identifies five basic skills, sometimes called the five parts, which became the headings under which most textbooks treated rhetoric, and which also corresponded to the order in which an oration would evolve. The first skill, and therefore the first stage of rhetorical composition, is inventio (discovery), which consists in seeking out arguments and examples, from the so-called commonplaces or topics, which can be applied to the case in hand. The next skill, dispositio (arrangement), concerns the casting of these materials into the conventional form of an oration, with its various traditional stages between opening and conclusion. Elocutio, the third skill, involves choosing a style of expression, and within the decorum of that style selecting figures of speech to colour what is said. Memoria, the next skill, involves simply committing the oration to memory, although even here a substantial theory of the art of memory evolved. And finally, actio or pronuntiatio was the name given to the delivery of the oration; its science included the codification of types of emphatic gesture and the training of the voice. Elocutio was always the area of rhetoric where literature was most in play, and consequently it is the area that will most concern us. It distinguished kinds of style (e.g. high/grand, middle/mixed, low/plain), and it is these same kinds that are invoked

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when we talk of Milton’s grand style or Herbert’s plain style. And, in discussion of the scores and sometimes hundreds of rhetorical figures, it distinguished between schemes (devices which are about the patterning and arrangement of words) and tropes (devices which involve changes of meaning, like metaphor). Another popular division was between figures of speech (schemes) and figures of thought, which might be figures that impose a pattern on a larger scale (e.g. prolepsis, by which an objection to an argument is anticipated and seen off), or might be something more complex. Tropes in some cases stand outside this binary division, and in other cases are classed as a sub-category of figures of thought. But these bewildering distinctions need not detain us further. Again, Wilson is a good guide to the hierarchy of the three styles: There are three manner of styles or inditings: the great or mighty kind, when we use great words or vehement figures. The small kind, when we moderate our heat by meaner words, and use not the most stirring sentences. The low kind, when we use no metaphors nor translated words, nor yet use any amplifications, but go plainly to work and speak altogether in common words. (cited in Vickers 1999: 123–4)

The styles were sometimes multiplied to five or more, and throughout the Renaissance particular variants of them were identified and practised. But as Debora Shuger tells us: The significance of these categories does not lie in their descriptive precision; they are crucial because Renaissance theorists use these terms to relate the formal characteristics of discourse to larger cultural issues. Renaissance rhetorics, that is, employ stylistic categories to articulate the political, philosophical, and theological implications of lexical or syntactic patternings. (Shuger 1999: 177)

To talk of Milton’s grand style and Herbert’s plain style is to imply something not just about each poet’s rhetorical preferences but about their position in society and about their position in relation both to their subject matter and to their various audiences, in earth and in heaven. Much of the taxonomic energy of classical and Renaissance rhetoricians was expended on the rhetorical figures, with each creating subtly different categorisations, organising the figures into different groupings, adjusting the emphases of their definitions, or even inventing new terms. Richard Lanham observes that ‘the central point about the nomenclature of rhetorical figuration’ is ‘that the confusion has been a creative one … The vast pool of terms for verbal ornamentation has acted like a gene pool for the rhetorical imagination, stimulating us to look at language in another way’ (Lanham 1991: 79). Henry Peacham summarises the point of figurative speech in the preface to his handbook, The Garden of Eloquence (1577): For by figures, as it were by sundry streams, that great and forcible flood of eloquence is most plentifully and pleasantly poured forth – by the great might of figures, which

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Gavin Alexander is no other thing than wisdom speaking eloquently, the orator may lead his hearers which way he list, and draw them to what affection he will: he may make them to be angry, to be pleased, to laugh, to weep, and lament; to love, to abhor, and loathe; to hope, to fear, to covet, to be satisfied, to envy, to have pity and compassion; to marvel, to believe, to repent; and, briefly, to be moved with any affection that shall serve best for his purpose. By figures he may make his speech as clear as the noon day, or, contrariwise, as it were with clouds and foggy mists, he may cover it with darkness; he may stir up storms and troublesome tempests, or, contrariwise, cause and procure a quiet and silent calmness; he may set forth any matter with a goodly perspicuity, and paint out any person, deed, or thing so cunningly with these colours that it shall seem rather a lively image painted in tables than a report expressed with the tongue. (Alexander 2004: 251)

There is nothing that language might hope to achieve that one or other of the figures cannot accomplish. And there is no effect to be found in language use that a figurative analysis will not help us to understand. Because rhetorical theory was so comfortable to claim imaginative literature as falling under its aegis, the theory of literature in the Renaissance was heavily dependent on rhetorical ideas. Poetry was described as being the originator of human society and civilised values – a thought adapted from classical defences of rhetoric. The aims of imaginative literature were found to be the same as those of rhetoric – the ‘affective triad’ of teaching, delighting, and moving. And literary works were of course composed – and therefore could be analysed – according to the model of the five parts of rhetoric and using such devices as the rhetorical figures. Attempts to make literary theory rhetorical – from such a broad treatment as Puttenham’s Art of English Poesy (1589) through to such a specialised treatise as Abraham Fraunce’s Arcadian Rhetoric (1588) – tended, indeed, to focus on the elocutionary stage, so that literary students of rhetoric would associate ‘rhetoric’ not with orations or types of argument but with ‘figures of speech’. The problem always, for the likes of Puttenham as for us, is that the rhetorical tradition, while envisaging the orator as the complete man, and rhetoric as subsuming all kinds of speech, concentrates on an oratory which is clearly of a different kind from imaginative literature, and not just because much literature tends to be read silently rather than performed. We find, therefore, that it is easier to theorise rhetorically about images of oratory in literary works than it is to treat the works themselves rhetorically; that is to say, we can admire the rhetoric of a character like Mark Antony in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, but find the theory inappropriate to describe the craft of the author in any but the most general terms. On what level do we recognise, and judge, rhetorical skill? What of dialogue and narrative, which rhetoric can describe, but which are less clearly formal oratory? This problem is especially vexatious in those echoes of the textbooks in Shakespeare’s plays. The question always is, ‘Whose rhetoric?’ Do we locate the consciousness of use of rhetorical figures, for instance, in the author, or in the character: do we discover a rhetorical scenario within the plot or the writing?

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Rhetoric teaches speakers to use their words carefully and calculatedly. It imagines an audience ready to be won over – one might even say gullible. But of course audiences will include those with a rhetorical training, and rhetoric during the period with which we are concerned came to recognise explicitly that it was a science of reading and interpretation as well as one of composition and performance. We need, then, to imagine readers fascinated by the rhetorical performances in the poems and works of prose fiction that they read, and audiences alive to the rhetorical skill on display on many levels in the plays they saw. In this way, works of Renaissance literature become texts that we can scrutinise with a minutely attentive rhetorical sensibility, always asking not only what the theory of a particular device might tell us about its use, but also to whom we should attribute the rhetorical intention that motivates that use. Of course, it is also possible to think of literary rhetoric as to an extent unconscious, the result of a half-forgotten rhetorical training rather than of consciously rhetorical composition. Does it matter that writers like Shakespeare and Milton learnt how to write speeches in character as part of their school training (Baldwin 1944; Clark 1948)? The so-called ‘school exercises’ or progymnasmata on which Renaissance schoolboys cut their rhetorical teeth included such tasks as delivering a narrative of a course of events, offering an encomium (praise) or vituperation (dispraise) of a person or thing, presenting a description of a person or place, and creating a speech in the voice of a fictitious, mythical, or historical character. As students developed their skills they would begin to practise whole speeches or declamations, which would be either suasoriae – deliberative exercises in advising a historical or mythical character faced with a difficult choice as to the correct course of action – or controversiae – exercises in legal oratory. They would then go on to engage in disputations, being set the task of arguing on one or other side of an issue. It was by way of set disputations that university undergraduates were examined, and the skill was frequently shown off before monarchs and noble visitors. The ability to see the arguments on both sides of the question (in utramque partem) was thus fundamental to the development of rhetorical skill and is quite clearly a common component in the intellectual formation of anyone who had undergone a basic early modern education (Altman 1978; Skinner 1996: 27–30, 97–9; Skinner 2007). The particular emphasis of that training was more on the rhetorical potential than on the ethical implications of the two sides of any question: not ‘Is this right or wrong?’ but ‘How can this be made the more persuasive case?’ To return to the school exercises, with their jigsaw-puzzle approach to the development of key rhetorical skills, one thing we can see quite readily is why scenes of high rhetorical artifice in literature – set-piece descriptions, passionate speeches – can often appear somewhat isolated from their surroundings, fragments of rhetorical excess that might seem to belong in the schoolroom. But it is not only composition that can seem a matter more of parts than of a whole. Because the tiniest building blocks can be rhetorically labelled – the use of this rhetorical figure to embellish that rhetorical commonplace – a rhetorically conscious reading can encourage a fragmentary rather

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than a holistic approach to literary analysis. We see something of this in the margins of early modern books, where the marginal notes of contemporary readers show a commitment to the labelling of parts rather than a habit of response to wholes (see e.g. Adamson et al. 2007: frontispiece). But rhetorical thinking can be subtler than that, and so can its uses to literary composition and analysis.

Rhetorical Theory and Literary Practice Puttenham introduces the third book of his The Art of English Poesy with these remarks: so is there yet requisite to the perfection of this art another manner of exornation, which resteth in the fashioning of our maker’s language and style, to such purpose as it may delight and allure as well the mind as the ear of the hearers with a certain novelty and strange manner of conveyance, disguising it no little from the ordinary and accustomed, nevertheless making it nothing the more unseemly or misbecoming, but rather decenter [more decorous] and more agreeable to any civil ear and understanding. (Alexander 2004: 133)

Puttenham then devotes more than a hundred pages to an effort to graft rhetoric on to poetry. His primary emphasis, as signalled in the quotation, is on elocutio and figures of speech. His explanation, rather confused in a number of ways, misses out what I think is one of the central reasons why imaginative literature could make such heavy use of rhetorical figures without its language seeming to come too close to the rhetoric of the law court or forum. The key point, which Quintilian expresses succinctly, is that rhetoric is in the first place an attempt to codify natural language use: ‘It was, then, nature that created speech, and observation that originated the art of speaking’ (Institutio oratoria, 3.2.3). The patterns of speech, which are described and classified in the rhetoric textbooks, are found in everyday speech – in those cases the figures are not tools of composition, but merely analytical labels for natural modes of expression. Here is the rhetorically minded literary theorist known as ‘Longinus’, writing in the first century AD, on the figure hyperbaton, in which syntax is deliberately disordered: This figure consists in arranging words and thoughts out of the natural sequence, and is, as it were, the truest mark of vehement emotion. Just as people who are really angry or frightened or indignant, or are carried away by jealousy or some other feeling – there are countless emotions, no one can say how many – often put forward one point and then spring off to another with various illogical interpolations, and then wheel round again to their original position, while, under the stress of their excitement, like a ship before a veering wind, they lay their words and thoughts first on one tack then another, and keep altering the natural order of sequence into innumerable variations – so, too, in the best prose writers the use of hyperbaton allows imitation to approach the effects of nature. For art is only perfect when it looks like nature and Nature succeeds only when she conceals latent art. (On the Sublime, ch. 22)

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When a fictional character uses a figure of speech, it may of course be taken to signify that a rhetorical consciousness is at work in that character. But in many cases we should look at the character’s rhetoric rather differently, as created by the author to tell us something about that character. The particular figure of speech, if we look at the theory, will present the orator with the opportunity to simulate an emotion or state of mind. In fictional contexts, the figure may simply signify that emotion or state of mind in a character who speaks instinctively and without artifice. The simulation is the author’s, and not the character’s. This point is made very clearly, even ironically, in Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece (1594), a poem based on a central Roman myth about the foundations of the republic, although Shakespeare’s interest is for the most part elsewhere. The degenerate Prince Tarquin takes advantage of Collatinus’ absence to try to seduce his wife Lucrece, and, when this fails, rapes her; Lucrece, after sending for her husband and making him swear to avenge her, commits suicide. The Rape of Lucrece is a long poem, considering how simple the plot is, for the reason that it contains a good deal of oratory: Tarquin’s failed persuasions, Lucrece’s failed dissuasions, and then, after the rape, Lucrece’s lament and her staged suicide in front of her husband. Shakespeare’s method is a simple one of bringing together two concerns: sexual violence and rhetoric. He makes these two concerns collide, overlap, swap places; he uses the metaphors of one to describe the other. The relation of rhetorical persuasion to violence, of word to action, of good rhetoric to bad, of language to virtue, are all as a result made themes of the poem. When Shakespeare begins Lucrece’s attempt to dissuade Tarquin (with memories perhaps of the suasoria type of declamation practised at school) he uses his favourite trick of attributing natural, innocent eloquence to the chaste woman. Lucrece uses an instinctive rhetoric, full of hyperbaton: Her modest eloquence with sighs is mixed, Which to her oratory adds more grace. She puts the period often from his place, And midst the sentence so her accent breaks, That twice she doth begin ere once she speaks. (563–7)

Other figures are implied here, like aposiopesis, where a sentence is broken off incomplete, and anacoluthon, where a sentence ends on a different tack, and with a different grammatical structure, from what its beginning had anticipated. Both are explained in the handbooks as indicating a high degree of emotional upset and confusion, through sorrow, shame, fear, or anger. It is not that Lucrece is consciously or cynically simulating the emotions these figures are supposed to communicate: Shakespeare is the one doing that. But to refer to her speech as ‘eloquence’ and ‘oratory’ does make us ask the question, and serves by irony to emphasise Lucrece’s physical and rhetorical powerlessness: she cannot use rhetoric deliberately because she is not in control of the

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situation; Tarquin is in control, and so it is silence which he ultimately inflicts on her. Shakespeare uses aposiopesis to represent this, as Tarquin interrupts Lucrece in mid-sentence, stops her mouth with her nightdress, and rapes her: ‘ “No more,” quoth he, “by heaven, I will not hear thee” ’ (667). Lucrece cries, but she is silent as Tarquin ‘pens her piteous clamours in her head’ (681). Tarquin then slinks away, and Lucrece’s plaint begins, unheard of course. The archetype of female complaint is the nightingale, who sings beautifully but incomprehensibly: a sort of eloquent silence. This is because the nightingale is the mythical Philomela, who had her tongue cut out after being raped by Tereus, a tale, Titus Andronicus makes clear, that Shakespeare will have studied at school in Ovid’s retelling. Lucrece addresses this bird, and proposes a duet with it, before moving on to consider a painting of the fall of Troy. Seeing ‘despairing Hecuba’ (1447) Lucrece is moved, because this woman lacks a tongue to express her grief, and so Lucrece lends her hers. In this long section of the poem, Lucrece responds to literary archetypes of silent grief by giving voice sympathetically; and yet there is nobody to hear her. The challenge for Lucrece is to overcome silence and be heard: she must tell her husband of her shame so that he will avenge it. But this is somehow not enough – and here again is a way in which rhetoric cannot entirely serve her – for she must also kill herself so that he believes her. This is the ultimate rhetorical challenge: to speak performatively, to produce an argument from which deeds will result. But the deed in this case must murder language: Lucrece has to speak her way to a suicide, and Shakespeare represents her wonderfully overcoming the lure of aposiopesis, which is the overwhelming instinct of real sorrow, anger, fear, and shame. She finishes the sentence, and breaks rhetoric: Here with a sigh as if her heart would break, She throws forth Tarquin’s name: ‘He, he,’ she says, But more than ‘he’ her poor tongue could not speak, Till after many accents and delays, Untimely breathings, sick and short assays, She utters this, ‘He, he, fair lords, ’tis he, That guides this hand to give this wound to me.’ (1716–22)

By speaking and being heard Lucrece regains the autonomy Tarquin had taken from her, and breaks the silence he had forced on her. The figure aposiopesis – with which Shakespeare had earlier represented Tarquin’s silencing of Lucrece – hovers over this moment like a ghost of the rapist. The moment Lucrece gains control of her words, she is able to determine her deeds; the sentence she manages to finish thus ends with her suicide, and she finally achieves rhetorical power and autonomy, at the cost of her own life. We can return for a moment to Aristotle’s trio of means of persuasion: logos, ethos, pathos. If Shakespeare’s poem moves us, it is certainly by the force of its ideas, by its

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depiction of character, and by its representation of suffering and strong emotion. But rhetoric can – we must never forget – describe the motives and verbal performances of the author’s characters as well as the author himself. The idea of ethos – the convincing moral character that ought to come naturally but might just be simulated, a veneer – problematises any and every character in Renaissance literature. It demands that we think of character not only as something created by an author, but also as something projected by each and every person. An author might make a character sincere, and his or her rhetoric natural. But rhetoric encourages us to view that character as – if only partially and fleetingly – rhetorically self-conscious, and in control of the image he or she projects. The rhetorical concern with surfaces means not only that language will be seen as separate from the ideas that it adorns, but also that character will be seen to be a covering for a mind, which might or might not accord with the mask that is worn (Alexander 2007). Here is Quintilian on ethos, characteristically ambiguous on this most important of questions for rhetoric – must we mean what we say? The heart of the matter as regards arousing emotions, so far as I can see, lies in being moved by them oneself. The mere imitation of grief or anger or indignation may in fact sometimes be ridiculous, if we fail to adapt our feelings to the emotion as well as our words and our face. … Consequently, where we wish to give an impression of reality, let us assimilate ourselves to the emotions of those who really suffer; let our speech spring from the very attitude that we want to produce in the judge. Will the hearer feel sorrow, when I, whose object in speaking is to make him feel it, feel none? Will he be angry, if the person who is trying to excite his anger suffers nothing resembling the emotions he is calling for? Will he weep when the speaker’s eyes are dry? (Institutio oratoria, 6.2.26–7)

What, exactly, is ‘an impression of reality’ (the Latin word is verisimilis, a term which developed its own currency in later, Aristotelian, literary theory of the Renaissance)? And can tears be feigned? As soon as we think of moral character as not essential but performed, even Lucrece is opened to criticism. The double rhetoric of character and author is not only a (thoroughly desirable) complicating factor when we think about rhetorical intentions. It also produces a double rhetoric of audience response. The audience within a work may be aligned with that outside it, or completely at odds. The discrepancy is most clearly visible in works of literature that give us the impression that we are overhearing something private, and that we are meant to be overhearing. Here is an Elizabethan love sonnet that, though in many respects typical, very actively exploits this rhetorical condition: O be not grieved that these my papers should Bewray unto the world how fair thou art: Or that my wits have showed, the best they could, The chastest flame that ever warmèd heart.

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Delia does not love the poet, and does not wish to be loved by him; she is unpersuaded by his poetry, and tends rather to assume that it is as irksome as his love. The poet insists, however, that it will affect other readers more powerfully, that they will value it and keep it alive, and that they will see an image of Delia so impressive that her transient beauty will continue to be esteemed after her death. The poem has a quieter faith that its poet will also persuade these other readers that his love for Delia was genuine – that, at least, is the note on which it ends: ‘Yet count it no disgrace that I have loved thee.’ If we are persuaded by this poem that its poet is in love and has not either invented his Delia or feigned his passions, then this is through the same rhetoric by which it appears to be seeking to persuade her to take him and his verses seriously – the humility and servility of this last line especially. Most love poems are like this to some extent, addressed simultaneously to a beloved and to an audience, persuading one of one thing and the other of another: a double rhetoric. Philip Sidney gives us a glimpse of this double rhetoric in the Defence of Poesy (c.1580; published 1595); he is discussing love poetry and implies that writing of love requires being in love, or at least seeming so: But truly, many of such writings as come under the banner of unresistible love, if I were a mistress, would never persuade me they were in love, so coldly they apply fiery speeches, as men that had rather read lovers’ writings … than that in truth they feel those passions. (Alexander 2004: 49)

Of course, to persuade a mistress that one is in love does not require that one be in love. In this respect the sincerity of the lover is very like that of the orator, a rhetorical performance necessary to achieve a goal. The success of the lover, like that of the orator, depends not so much on the rights and wrongs of the case as on the power of the arguments, and the projection of a convincing ethos or character. If this is not bad enough, much love poetry is bound into a rhetorical condition where the desired end result is not love but sex, where love is feigned to this end. In the Roman poet Ovid’s Art of Love, its title an ironic echo of more serious works of technical instruction (we might think of Aristotle’s Art of Rhetoric and Horace’s Art of Poetry), the lover is urged to learn rhetoric:

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Learn eloquence, ye noble youth of Rome; It will not only at the bar o’ercome: Sweet words the people and the senate move, But the chief end of eloquence is love … In a familiar style your thoughts convey, And write such things as present you would say; Such words as from the heart may seem to move; ’Tis wit enough, to make her think you love … (1.459–68, in Dryden’s translation – published in 1709)

Love, like rhetoric and poetry, is an art that can be learned. And it is an art which can employ these other arts: Ovid indeed sets women up as a fourth kind of audience for rhetoric alongside judge, senate, or people, as if there ought to be a fourth category of amorous oratory to accompany the traditional threesome of forensic, deliberative, and epideictic. Students of the art of amorous rhetoric are not hard to find in Renaissance poetry. We might think of Donne’s calculated persuasions in ‘The Flea’, or the famous rhetoric of Andrew Marvell’s ‘To his Coy Mistress’: Had we but world enough, and time, This coyness, Lady, were no crime … But at my back I always hear Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near; And yonder all before us lie Deserts of vast eternity. Thy beauty shall no more be found; Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound My echoing song: then worms shall try That long-preserved virginity: And your quaint honour turn to dust; And into ashes all my lust. The grave’s a fine and private place, But none, I think, do there embrace. (1–2; 21–32)

What is this poem’s context, and what are we to think as we listen to it? Marvell employs the same commonplaces as Daniel, but his dispositio and elocutio put them to a very different use. This poem is an exercise in argument, a suasoria, and it is important to remember that whatever we make of the poem and of its author is down to its rhetoric and to the character its orator constructs. To discuss Marvell as if he says this sort of thing is to confuse real life with oratory, essential moral character with projected ethos. Within the poem the amorous orator is acting as his own counsel, fighting his own case, wanting to win the argument so that he can sleep with his mistress. But outside the poem, the lover is the client and the author is his lawyer or

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speech-writer, his eloquence for hire, and he is anxious to win the argument out of professional pride. The amorous orator is rather affectionately satirised by Christopher Marlowe in Hero and Leander (published in 1598, after Marlowe’s death). Marlowe had translated Ovid’s elegies, and was as adept as any at the classically inspired rhetoric of courtship. What he does in Hero and Leander is to introduce a tinge of realism into a classically derived tale of star-crossed lovers. Hero is the priestess of Venus, and lives in Sestos, the westernmost point of Asia Minor. Leander is from Abydos, the easternmost point in Europe and a short swim from Sestos across the Hellespont. They are not meant to be together, but love finds a way. Much of the poem is given over to highly conventional amorous rhetoric, and describes Hero’s responses, quite prepared to love the young man, but equally happy to put off the embarrassing business of love while she listens to him and occasionally raises a feigned objection: And now begins Leander to display Love’s holy fire, with words, with sighs and tears, Which like sweet music entered Hero’s ears; And yet at every word she turned aside, And always cut him off as he replied. At last, like to a bold, sharp sophister, With cheerful hope thus he accosted her. (192–8)

The comical rhyme, extending back to the eighth syllable of each line to almost match ‘sophister’ and ‘accosted her’, highlights a pleasant double meaning. He is a sophist: his arguments will be mere sophistry, specious, clever, but empty. But a sophister was also in Marlowe’s day a second- or third-year Cambridge undergraduate, a teenager of perhaps 15 or 16. Marlowe studied at Corpus Christi College in Cambridge, and whilst there, would have honed both his honourable and his disreputable rhetorical skills. Leander as sophister has not yet graduated to the real world; the skills he has acquired have all been exercised in the laboratory of the schoolroom and tutorial. He has not had to make a real argument before. Consequently, his speeches are made to sound deliberately rehearsed: Wild savages, that drink of running springs, Think water far excels all earthly things; But they that daily taste neat wine despise it. Virginity, albeit some highly prize it, Compared with marriage, had you tried them both, Differs as much as wine and water doth. (259–64)

(One suspects, as he says it, that Leander’s mother still waters his wine; and we can be certain that virginity is all that Leander has yet tried.)

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This idol which you term ‘virginity’ Is neither essence subject to the eye, No, nor to any one exterior sense, Nor hath it any place of residence, Nor is’t of earth or mould celestial, Or capable of any form at all. Of that which hath no being do not boast: Things that are not at all, are never lost. (269–76)

And so on, with all Andrew Marvell’s panache but without his worldliness. All credit to Leander, then, that he manages in the end to persuade Hero, if she needs persuading: O who can tell the greeting These greedy lovers had at their first meeting. He asked, she gave, and nothing was denied; Both to each other quickly were affied. Look how their hands, so were their hearts united, And what he did, she willingly requited. (Sweet are the kisses, the embracements sweet, When like desires and affections meet.) (507–14)

The narrator’s rhetoric is getting ahead of things here; despite the gushing language the two lovers are still just sitting on the bed, holding hands, and pecking each other now and again on the cheek. Until Hero takes charge: Therefore unto him hastily she goes, And like light Salmacis her body throws Upon his bosom, where with yielding eyes She offers up herself a sacrifice … Like Aesop’s cock this jewel he enjoyed, And as a brother with his sister toyed, Supposing nothing else was to be done, Now he her favour and good will had won. … Albeit Leander, rude in love and raw, Long dallying with Hero nothing saw That might delight him more, yet he suspected Some amorous rites or other were neglected. (529–32; 535–8; 545–8)

Eventually animal instinct takes over and supplies the defects in Leander’s education. Marlowe’s trick in Hero and Leander is to open up the seam between rhetoric as a taught skill and one’s motives in employing it. At the same time he looks at the old

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question of the orator’s sincerity, but with a fresh twist. Leander is sincere, but manages, by using all the rhetorical tricks he has been taught, not to look it. His oratory is so well learnt that he has never had to ask what he is speaking about. Works of Renaissance literature question rhetoric at the same time as they gratefully employ its resources. They do this with a light touch and for comic effect: so much of the verbal wit of Shakespeare’s plays is about those gaps between words and things that it was rhetoric’s job to explore and exploit. And they do this with persistence and moral seriousness. We might think of the funeral scene in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (3.2), with Brutus’ ingenuous but rather clumsy scheme-filled speech trumped by Antony’s powerful tropes, and a brilliant combination of logos, ethos, and high pathos. Shakespeare makes Antony both a powerful, grief-stricken friend whose rhetoric comes from the heart and a cynical phoney who plays politics with words just for the love of the game. Or we might think of the love–hate relationship with rhetoric of John Milton, with virtuous eloquence disarming specious rhetoric in Comus, and the Satan of Paradise Lost – whom Milton explicitly compares at the moment of Eve’s temptation to ‘some orator renowned / In Athens or free Rome, where eloquence / Flourished’ (9.670–2) – achieving the fall of man by the rhetorical skill of his serpent tongue. It is in religious poetry that the need to question and even to bypass rhetoric is felt most strongly. Love poets and dramatists only play with the idea of not needing persuasive speech, at the same time as they employ it. But the stakes are higher for the Christian poet, and sincerity is not to be simulated when one auditor is not a gullible mistress but an omniscient deity. We can end by looking at a poem from the posthumously printed collection known as The Temple (1633) by George Herbert, sometime public orator in the University of Cambridge, but in later life a pious clergyman and devotional poet: Jordan (II) When first my lines of heavenly joys made mention, Such was their lustre, they did so excel, That I sought out quaint words, and trim invention; My thoughts began to burnish, sprout, and swell, Curling with metaphors a plain intention, Decking the sense, as if it were to sell. Thousands of notions in my brain did run, Offering their service, if I were not sped: I often blotted what I had begun; This was not quick enough, and that was dead. Nothing could seem too rich to clothe the sun, Much less those joys which trample on his head. As flames do work and wind when they ascend, So did I weave myself into the sense. But while I bustled, I might hear a friend

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Whisper, ‘How wide is all this long pretence! There is in love a sweetness ready penned: Copy out only that, and save expense.’

Christ addresses Herbert at this poem’s end in what is an echo (or sacred parody) of a number of sonnets by Sidney, such as the first of Astrophil and Stella, which ends: ‘ “Fool,” said my muse to me, “look in thy heart and write.” ’ He should simply write about love and not try to be too clever. Looking back, the poet’s attempts to marry rhetoric and devotion seem doomed. Invention, the first stage of rhetoric, is already at odds with the poet’s pious ‘plain intention’ even before that is curled (a metaphor) by the metaphors which elocutio contributes (3–5). We have, though, a gap similar to that found in such Elizabethan love sonnets as Sidney’s or Daniel’s between the rhetorical practice described and that presented. This poem is not unrhetorical, and yet it must describe the options of ornate rhetoric and extreme unrhetorical plainness. It does this in a sort of triumphantly self-defeating way. Metaphor is employed ironically, to criticise past metaphors, as we saw in ‘Curling with metaphors’ and as we see again when the past poet fails to approach heaven precisely because he is too sophisticated simply to name it, coming up instead with the metaphor and periphrasis of ‘those joys which trample’ on the ‘head’ of ‘the sun’ (11–12). But can one really speak or write without inventio, dispositio, and elocutio? Is it possible to be unrhetorical, or is this just another rhetorical pose? Rhetorical theory codifies a number of pitfalls that wait on any attempt to do without rhetoric, gestures which rhetoric will claim as its own, including the figures of aphelia – plainness of writing or speech – and parrhesia – candid speech – and the plain style itself. Herbert knows this, though many of his poems are a contest between a determination to say only ‘Thou art still my God’ (‘The Forerunners’) or just ‘My God, my king’ (‘Jordan (I)’) and a wish to redeem rhetoric, to save it from sin and bring it back to the paths of virtue. And that is what in the end Herbert manages in his collection of devotional poems, The Temple. Rhetoric is employed to good ends, safely within the walls of the imaginary church that encloses Herbert’s art. Though the Devil may encourage its abuse, Herbert can still believe that God intended man to know the art of rhetoric.

References and Further Reading Adamson, S. (1999). ‘Literary language’. In R. Lass (ed.), The Cambridge History of the English Language, vol. 3: 1476–1776 (pp. 539– 653). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Adamson, S., G. Alexander, and K. Ettenhuber (eds.) (2007). Renaissance Figures of Speech. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Alexander, G. (ed.) (2004). Sidney’s ‘The Defence of Poesy’ and Selected Renaissance Literary Criticism. London: Penguin. Alexander, G. (2007). ‘Prosopopoeia: the speaking figure’. In S. Adamsom, G. Alexander, and K. Ettenhuber (eds.), Renaissance Figures of Speech (pp. 97–112). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Altman, Joel B. (1978). The Tudor Play of Mind: Rhetorical Inquiry and the Development of Elizabethan Drama. Berkeley: University of California Press. Baldwin, T. W. (1944). William Shakspere’s Small Latine and Less Greeke. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Clark, D. L. (1948). John Milton at St. Paul’s School: A Study of Ancient Rhetoric in English Renaissance Education. New York: Columbia University Press. Fantham, E. (1989). ‘The growth of literature and criticism at Rome’. In G. A. Kennedy (ed.). The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism: Classical Criticism (pp. 220–44). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Halliwell, S. et al. (eds.) (1995). Aristotle: ‘Poetics’; Longinus: ‘On the Sublime; Demetrius: ‘On Style’. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Howell, W. S. (1956). Logic and Rhetoric in England, 1500–1700. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Jost, W. and W. Olmsted (eds.) (2003). A Companion to Rhetoric and Rhetorical Criticism. Oxford: Blackwell. Kennedy, G. A. (1994). A New History of Classical Rhetoric. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kennedy, G. A. (1999). Classical Rhetoric and its Christian and Secular Tradition from Ancient to Modern Times. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Lanham, R. A. (1976) The Motives of Eloquence: Literary Rhetoric in the Renaissance. New Haven: Yale University Press. Lanham, R. A. (1991). A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms, 2nd edn. Berkeley: University of California Press.

McDonald, R. (2001). Shakespeare and the Arts of Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mack, P. (2002). Elizabethan Rhetoric: Theory and Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Murphy, J. J. (ed.) (1983). Renaissance Eloquence: Studies in the Theory and Practice of Renaissance Rhetoric. Berkeley: University of California Press. Quintilian (2001). The Orator’s Education, trans. D. A. Russell. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rebhorn, W. A. (1995). The Emperor of Men’s Minds: Literature and the Renaissance Discourse of Rhetoric. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Rhodes, N. (1992). The Power of Eloquence and English Renaissance Literature. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Shuger, D. (1999). ‘Conceptions of style’. In G. P. Norton (ed.), The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism: The Renaissance (pp. 176–86). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Skinner, Q. (1996). Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Skinner, Q. (2007). ‘Paradiastole: redescribing the vices as virtues’. In S. Adamson, G. Alexander, and K. Ettenhuber (eds.), Renaissance Figures of Speech (pp. 149–63). Cambridge: Cambridge University press Vickers, B. (1989). In Defence of Rhetoric. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Vickers, B. (ed.) (1999). English Renaissance Literary Criticism. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

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History Patrick Collinson

I In his Apology for Poetry, Sir Philip Sidney had some fun at the expense of the historian, ‘loaden with old mouse-eaten records, authorising himself (for the most part) upon other histories, whose greatest authorities are built upon the notable foundations of hearsay’. And yet the historian boasted that it was he who held the key to ‘virtue and virtuous actions’. Sidney, who was making the case for poetry – which is to say fiction – as more useful than history, the kind of fiction contained in his own great romance Arcadia, dismissed such claims. The historian was tied ‘not to what should be but to what is’, ‘to the particular truth of things and not to the general reason of things’. Only poetry had the capacity to instruct as well as to delight, the instruction sugared with the pill of delight (Sidney 1973: 105–14). These sentiments have a deceptively postmodernist resonance, as historical positivism came under relentless attack in the late twentieth century. But Sidney belongs not to our own times but to the context of a sustained Renaissance debate about the ars historica, a debate that had taken off from where Aristotle (on Sidney’s side), in contention with Plato, had left it, and which was perpetuated in some of the writings of Cicero, without adding much to those classical exchanges (Grafton 2007). Anthony Grafton, the leading expositor of the subject, taking a Europe-wide view, writes that ‘the genre of the Artes historicae grew from deep roots in ancient and fifteenth-century thought, took a clear shape in the middle of the sixteenth century, and assumed canonical form in the years from 1576 to 1579’ (Grafton 2007: 21). At its heart was a principle clearly enunciated by Cicero. The art of history was something practised by the rhetorician. History was a branch of rhetoric, a matter of production rather than consumption (research). Invented speeches, what this or that historical character should have said, rather than anything which he could be shown to have said, were legitimate, a standard part of the rhetorical repertoire (Grafton 2007: 11).

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Sidney’s Aristotelian jeu d’esprit at the expense of the ars historica flew in the face of what every preface to every work of history was saying in defence of its subject, and such apologies were merely repetitive of the old classical tropes. Sidney had only to quote Cicero when he wrote, ironically, of history as ‘the witness of times, the light of virtue, the life of memory, the mistress of life’ (Sidney 1973: 105). This was the ultimate cracked gramophone record. George Nadel has written of these authors as gripped by a strange repetition compulsion, repetition of the same commonplaces about historia magistra vitae century after century, generation after generation trying on the same grand Ciceronian garments (Grafton 2007: 30–1). William Camden, a friend of Sidney, wrote in the preface to his Annals of Elizabeth (1615) that to take away from history truth, ‘the beautifullest creature in the world’, was to poison the mind of the reader (MacCaffrey 1970: 4). As for the didactic exploitation of historical truth, the Protestant historian John Foxe told readers of his ‘Book of Martyrs’ that he took pity on ‘the simple flock of Christ’, who knew so little of the ‘true descent of the church’, ‘and all for ignorance of history’ (Foxe 1583: sig. *iijv). Commending a history of their own county to the gentlemen of Kent, William Lambarde wrote in 1576: There is nothing either for our instruction more profitable, or to our minds more delectable … than the study of histories, nor for the gentlemen of England, no history so meet as the history of England. (Lambarde 1970: vii–x)

(Nor, naturally, for the gentlemen of Kent, the history of Kent.) Such high-flown sentiments often failed to make contact with what writers whom we might want to identify as historians of one kind or another actually did. ‘Historians? The categories were very fluid, and malleable. The words ‘story’ and ‘history’, which for us mean rather different things, were for this period interchangeable. The total fiction of a Shakespeare play could be sold to the world as A Pleasant Conceited History Called the Taming of a Shrew (Worden 2006: 81). ‘Truth’ itself was a very slippery commodity. From a broadsheet of 1565, The True Description of Two Monstrous Children Born at Herne in Kent to The True History of the Tragic Loves of Hipolito and Isabella, Neapolitans (1628), the word ‘true’ was almost a health warning. Ben Jonson, in The Staple of News, said of such ‘true’ reports: ‘no syllable of truth in them’. Sidney admitted that often the historian was obliged to make up his stories, or to make sense of them only by ‘borrowing weight’ from poets (as we might say, by contriving a beginning, a middle and an end), so that there was no absolute difference between history and fiction (Collinson 1997b: 42–3). And more than merely ‘authorising’ himself on other histories, many a sixteenthcentury historian indulged in what we should regard as plagiarism on a massive scale. If Livy or Tacitus had already said it, why trouble to tell it differently? Sir John Hayward, in his book on Henry IV’s usurpation, took the Ciceronian trope about rhetoric as a licence to lift almost everything from other and mostly classical historians, word for word. A huge amount of the whole was quarried from Tacitus, both speeches

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and characterisations, many of which would reappear after a costume change in Hayward’s later works on the Norman Conquest and the reign of Edward VI. In the context of the late Elizabethan debate over the succession, the Henry IV book, with its risky dedication to the earl of Essex, was political dynamite and got its author into serious trouble. But when Queen Elizabeth asked whether Hayward could be done for treason, Francis Bacon thought not, but said that he had committed ‘very apparent theft’, ‘for he had taken most of the sentences of Cornelius Tacitus and translated them into English, and put them in his text’. (This is interesting evidence that the concept of plagiarism was not foreign to the minds of that time.) Actually Bacon flattered Hayward, since his principal source was Sir Henry Savile’s translation of Tacitus (1591). The problematics of all this are very interesting. Was this plagiarism or a kind of creative writing, a legitimate reworking of those ancient materials? Should we deny Hayward the accolade of historian? And did the staging of fourteenth-century English politics in Tacitean language and character mean that in human affairs, certainly in politics, nothing really ever changes? If so, this leaves little room for history as we understand it, that past where they did things differently, and which depends, critically, on a relativist sense of anachronism (Manning 1991; Richardson 1999). The history of history in the English Renaissance has been written back to front, as a slow upward progression from such dubious practices to something like our modern idea of what history ought to be (Levy 1967). Camden’s Annals of Elizabeth was a history of the reign based on, as it were, the National Archives, its author making much of his Herculean labours in ‘great piles and heaps of papers and writings of all sorts’. His pages contained no invented speeches. He also claimed to be an impartial witness to the times. ‘Prejudices I have shunned’ (MacCaffrey 1970: 3–8). So Camden gets a pat on the head for placing history, in Hugh Trevor-Roper’s words, ‘on a new base of scientific documentation’. F J. Levy called this ‘the new history’. Much historiographical industry has been devoted to discovering ‘how and why English historiography found its modern method’ (Woolf 2003: 6). But keeping our ears cocked for sounds of the first cuckoo of spring is a risky business. We may miss Camden’s motive in his exercise in archival positivism: not an aspiration to be a seventeenth-century von Ranke so much as the need to protect himself against the very real dangers which surrounded the historian of recent politics, politics which in this case included the judicial murder of his sovereign’s mother. He told his great contemporary, the French historian Jacques-Auguste de Thou, author of Historia sui temporis, that ‘history is in the beginning envy, in the continuation labour and in the end hatred’. Camden put himself in a position to say: ‘Well, however inconvenient it may seem, that is what the record tells us.’ But this should not detract from Camden’s capacity, inspired by his model, de Thou, to venture some distance beyond the conventions of the ars historica, as currently practised (Collinson 1998, 2003), nor from the importance of Camden’s example for future historiography, beyond the age of the ars historica. So what did the sixteenth century understand by ‘history’? For Francis Bacon, history, if not the same thing as the whole of knowledge, was the empirical basis of

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all knowledge. A linguistic fossil of this taxonomy survives in our phrase ‘natural history’. Yet the title of ‘historian’ was more restricted. The investigation of the past, antiquity, was not the same thing as history, and Camden, the somewhat reluctant historian of Elizabeth, did not consider his great work of antiquarianism, Britannia (1584), which explored such evidences of the past as place names, ancient ruins, and buried coins, to constitute history, nor himself, in that antiquarian capacity, to be an historian (Collinson 1998). The essence of history lay in literary composition, which had no place in ‘mere’ antiquarianism. At one point in Britannia Camden asks the reader to ‘give me leave to act the part of an Historian, which I shall presently lay aside again, as not being sufficiently qualified for such an undertaking’ (cit. Levy 2006: 412). (But this was in itself a rhetorical trope, the device by which an author does something that he has said he will not do.) There was another reason why a ‘mere’ antiquarian might be reluctant to claim the status of a historian, which is to say the annalist of high politics. This was the principle that such a historian should have had direct and personal experience of that exalted world, which had, for example, been the case with Machiavelli. The Elizabethan MP Francis Alford, angling for the post of official Elizabethan historian, told Sir Francis Walsingham: ‘To write a story there appertaineth more than a scholar’s knowledge.’ Lord Burghley himself, if he were not too busy, was the obvious man to ‘write the story of Her Majesty’s reign’. But, failing that, Alford, with a record of not very distinguished public service, would be glad to take it on, if suitably rewarded. Some hopes! Camden was not a servant of the Crown, but thanks to what has been called the Westminster Connection he was close to those who were. Having represented himself in the preface to his Annals as virtually Burghley’s amanuensis, his claims about immersion in the state papers to which Burghley had given him access were clearly meant to provide credentials, which were the next best thing to direct involvement in those high affairs. Sir Henry Savile’s dedication of his Tacitus to the queen refers, flatteringly, to her own ‘admirable compositions’ and ‘excellent translations of histories (if I can call them translations, which have so infinitely exceeded the originals)’. He wishes that she might be her own Tacitus. Camden later assumed the same courtly pose. He would be content if James I were to publish the fourth part of his Annals over his own name (Collinson 1998: 157–8). So it was that Francis Bacon left to mere ‘factors’ (research assistants) the gathering of the necessary facts and documents. The historian was above such a menial task. Bacon’s own History of the Reign of King Henry the Seventh (1622) did not dispense entirely with ‘research’, but in its most essential respects it was a work of literary invention. It was also a prescriptive political treatise, written for the instruction of James I and the future Charles I. History was present as well as past politics: which makes it strange that, not quite understanding what Bacon was really about, his account of the reign became the foundation for much that would be written about it until well into the twentieth century. Historians, authorising themselves upon other histories, seem to have been unduly captivated by Bacon’s account of the avarice of Henry Tudor.1

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The humble antiquary continued to be fair game for the caricaturist. John Earle drew his portrait in the collection of characters called Microcosmography (1628). ‘A great admirer he is of the rust of old monuments … Printed books he contemns as a novelty of this latter age, but a manuscript he pores on everlastingly.’ ‘Old women should like him well, for he is enamoured of wrinkles, and loves all things, as Dutchmen do cheese, the better for being mouldy and worm-eaten’ (Earle 1966: 26–30). Yet antiquarians had serious business in hand, even after the government of James I stepped in to stop them reading scholarly papers to each other in the Society of Antiquaries. This is where we may hope to find the critical testing of evidence that we associate with our own historical protocols. The labour of the antiquarians, studying things rather than texts, what we call archaeology, required a sense of what for ‘politic’ historians was almost irrelevant, the unattainable ‘otherness’ of the past. In this respect the historians were lagging behind (Pocock 1967: 6). Arthur Ferguson even suggests that if we hope to find examples of historical consciousness and a sense of historical perspective, the critical sense of anachronism, the political narratives formally designated as ‘histories’ are almost the last place where we should be looking (Ferguson 1979). An understanding of historical process was more likely to figure not as an end in itself but as a necessary approach to the illumination of particular issues, in the fields of law, theology, and, above all, language. It was with a sense of language as a social and historical phenomenon that Edmund Spenser’s schoolmaster, Richard Mulcaster, could write in his Elementary (1582), a book on the principles of English grammar, that whereas the English of his own day was at the peak of its development, like Greek in the time of Demosthenes or Latin in Cicero’s day, ‘when the age of our people, which now use the tongue so well, is dead and departed, there will another succeed, and with the people the tongue will alter and change’. In The Art of English Poesie, George Puttenham wrote of language ‘by little and little, as it were insensibly, bringing in of many corruptions that creep along with the time’ (Campagnac 1925: 83, 179; Vickers 1999: 225). More recently, Daniel Woolf has vastly extended the canvas of historical sense, in his The Social Circulation of the Past, which explores the texture of historical consciousness in the broadest cultural context, taking us far beyond the covers of the books classified as history. ‘Every individual in Tudor and Stuart England, of whatever social degree, had memories of the past as lived experience’ (Woolf 2003: 274). As the Oklahoma folks in The Grapes of Wrath said, as they packed up their things and headed for California: ‘How will we know it’s us without our past?’ To come back to those books. It is not that Renaissance historians did not know that good history ought to transcend both mere antiquarianism and rhetoric for rhetoric’s sake. Thomas Blundeville, in his The True Order and Method of Writing and Reading Histories (1574), little more than a digest of books by two Italians, Francesco Patrizzi and Giacomo Aconcio, disparaged those who, ‘having consumed all their life time in histories’, knew nothing except useless dates, genealogies ‘and such like stuff ’ (cit. Woolf 1990: 5). Camden could quote with approval the ancient historian Polybius (but as a Renaissance man, preferring to quote Polybius than to say it himself):

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In other words, Shakespeare’s words, a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing. But it remains a question how far these historians practised what they preached. They had more interest in teaching from the past, or what purported to be the past, than in learning from it, or rather, learning about it.

II All that being said, ‘history’, for the educated and half-educated classes of the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, would have meant not English history but Greek and especially Roman historians, their past the past to which that present was taught to relate. The history chair that Camden endowed in Oxford we should call a Professorship of Ancient History. When Savile translated some of the Histories of Tacitus as The End of Nero and Beginning of Galba, a story of imperial monarchy degenerating into tyranny, the impact on political consciousness, and perhaps practice, was profound (Salmon 1991; Worden 1994). Yet educated Elizabethans were not totally dependent on such translations. Sallust, author of The Conspiracy of Catiline and a model for Tacitus who, unlike Tacitus, wrote easy and accessible Latin, was published several times in London, but not in English until 1608. More commonly the standard editions of these classics were products not so much of the underdeveloped English book trade as of the great continental publishing houses. Tutors in Oxford and Cambridge, who were giving up more and more of their time to educating the sons of the gentry and aristocracy, introduced them to ‘history’ as a soft but for their purposes useful option, and that normally meant Roman history. It was for their benefit, no doubt, that translations were made: North’s Plutarch (1579), Chapman’s Homer (an enterprise begun in 1598). These translations were also a feature of cultural nationalism, somewhat like the enterprise of Bible translation. For all his posturing against the historians, Philip Sidney was saturated in this kind of history, and in the moderns, from Machiavelli to Bodin and Contarini. He had prepared for a diplomatic mission by reading some of the Decades of Livy. Gabriel Harvey recorded in the margin of the copy they both used (an edition printed in Basle in 1555, now preserved at Princeton) that he and Sidney had ‘privately discussed these three books of Livy, scrutinising them so far as we could from all points of view, applying a political analysis’. Such shared experiences were typical of the pedagogical and reading practices of the age, commonly on record in the universal practice of ‘commonplacing’ in little notebooks. Harvey had conducted readings of Livy with others, much as a modern musician might conduct master classes (Jardine and Grafton 1990; Worden 2006: 79). Another kind of history that was familiar to all dedicated Bible readers, and even to the much greater numbers who heard the Bible read, Sunday by Sunday, in church,

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was sacred, Old Testament history, which must have been more accessible than many events closer in time, its geography more familiar than America. It became a constantly reiterated theme of sermons to connect, even identify, England with ancient Israel, ‘right parallels’, London with Jerusalem, and to apply to England the threatening strictures of the Old Testament prophets, Jeremiah and Hosea. If God had all but given over his chosen people, Israel, why should be overlook the great sins of the new Israel, England? A seventeenth-century preacher told his auditory, which consisted of both houses of Parliament, that if they would not learn from history, God would make them the next history.2 Ever since Eusebius of Caesarea invented the subject in the fourth century, ecclesiastical history, a continuation of the biblical story, had been considered a distinct subject, separate from civil history. When Camden endowed a chair of history at Oxford, the first professor, Degory Wheare, was alarmed to be told that he would have to lecture on ecclesiastical history, a subject of which he claimed to be ignorant. Camden reassured him, however, that it was his intention that his professor should profess only civil history (Jones 1943–4: 175). In his own Annals of Queen Elizabeth, Camden explained that he could not entirely omit ‘ecclesiastical matters’, since ‘Religion and the Commonwealth cannot be parted asunder.’ (That was what Eusebius found, in writing his history in the age of Constantine’s conversion, when church and state had become effectively one thing: Christendom.) But he would deal with them ‘with a light and chary hand’; and, it has to be said, with an evident distaste for what on one occasion he called the religious ‘effervescence’ of certain ‘vehement’ ecclesiastics, which was to say, Puritans (Collinson 2003: 87; MacCaffrey 1970: 6). Archbishop Matthew Parker, Elizabeth’s first archbishop, made a notable contribution to the genre in his history of the seventy archbishops of Canterbury, De antiquitate Britannicae ecclesiae (1572–4). But the ecclesiastical history with which Protestant Elizabethans and their children were most familiar was John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, popularly known as ‘The Book of Martyrs’, an account of ‘matters ecclesiastical passed in the Church of Christ, from the primitive beginnings to these our days.’ Defending the distinctive importance of his subject, Foxe observed that men delighted in the chronicles of war, ‘the hurly-burlies of realms and people’. But how much better for Christians to recall the lives, acts, and doings, not of bloody warriors, but of mild and constant martyrs. ‘For doubtless such as these are more worthy of honour than an hundred Alexanders, Hectors, Scipios and warlike Julies … Such as these are the true conquerors of the world’ (Foxe, 1583: Sig. *vir). Foxe’s book began life as a modest text in Latin, written to instruct a European readership about the history of persecutions in England from the time of John Wyclif. The first, greatly expanded, English edition appeared in 1563, with further enlarged versions in Foxe’s lifetime in 1570 (1570 was a landmark in the history of this text), 1576, and 1583. This was not only the largest book ever published in England. It was a protean text which changed its shape, content, and even purpose, from edition to edition, growing in density and detail as Foxe approached his own times, the years of the Marian persecution, and altering in tone and intention in the various abridge-

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ments of the vast work which followed. (Foxe 1583; Highley and King 2002; King 2006; Loades 1997, 1999). This was virtually contemporary history with an appeal that invites comparison with Louis de Jong’s multi-volume history of the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, which attracted tens of thousands of Dutch readers. Foxe was the ultimate historical revisionist, turning the received history of the church on its head, identifying truth with what had been heresy, as well as with the suppressed and almost invisible martyr minority, while falsity abided with the pomp and pride of the Roman church. That he was able to do this was entirely owing to the fact that the repressed martyr church, the Protestants, were now, in Elizabethan England, on top; a Constantinian fact with which he was never entirely comfortable. Although Foxe was capable of suppressing inconvenient facts (not all of his heretics could have passed a test of their Protestant credentials), he made almost nothing up, following his sources (the ‘monuments’ of the title) very closely. Again, as with Camden, no invented speeches. The protocols of ecclesiastical history, as laid down by Eusebius, were closer to what we now expect from history than political history in the classical mould. Many of Foxe’s informants were the victims themselves, or the eyewitnesses to their sufferings, so that it could be said that the book was written by the people to whom it belonged, the product of the godly community, which it served to construct. And, as with Eusebian ecclesiastical history, Foxe’s pages were peopled by characters who would not be seen dead in any work of history in the classical mould: a poor illiterate Cardiff fisherman, the daughter of a Suffolk farmer, raised not at the university but at the tail of a plough, a blind teenage girl from the Weald of Kent. In many respects the kind of history now labelled as ‘new’, as in ‘the new social history’, derives from ecclesiastical, martyrological history, not from classical historiography. According to a once influential reading of Foxe, his book instilled into the whole English nation a sense of its exceptionality as the only elect nation of God, the modern Israel (Haller 1964). That was far from Foxe’s purpose, although no author can hope to control the sense which generations of readers will make of any book, least of all of a book of several million words. It may be symbolic that Foxe’s friend Sir Francis Drake took the 1576 edition on board the Golden Hind when he circumnavigated the globe, and made use of it (Parry 1999). However, exaggerated claims have been made about the capacity of this huge and scarcely affordable tome to penetrate extensively even the literate population, let alone ‘the unlearned sort’ for whom Foxe ostensibly wrote. Its bulk was self-defeating, and it is unlikely that as many as 10,000 copies were printed of all editions up to the Civil War, one copy for every 16,000 people living through those generations. There were, to be sure, many ‘little foxes’, which catered for a variety of interests (Oliver 1943). It did not take long for Foxe to be challenged from the other side of the tracks. This was not only in searing critiques of his book as a pack of lies: Nicholas Harpsfield (who as himself a persecutor had featured in the ‘Book of Martyrs’) led the way in his Dialogi sex contra … oppugnatores et pseudomartyres (Antwerp, 1566). Catholic exiles from the Elizabethan Protestant regime, whether overseas or in a kind of ghetto in their

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own country, were soon provided with counter-martyrologies, accounts of the deaths of Catholic dissidents and missionary priests, especially by the brilliant publicist Richard Verstegan, author of Theatrum crudelitatum haereticorum nostri temporis (Antwerp, 1587) (Dillon 2002). Verstegan attempted to organise the publication of a ‘general ecclesiastical history of the Church of England’, a counterblast to Foxe. The roots of this enterprise lay in the proto-history of England, the Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum by the eighth-century monk of Jarrow, the Venerable Bede, which Thomas Stapleton had translated and published in Antwerp in 1565. Although this grand design came to nothing, many of the constituent parts of the projected general history were promulgated, notably an electrifying book by Nicholas Sander, De Origine ac Progressu Schismatis Anglicani (1585) (Heal 2006; Highley 2006). Yet another dimension of history, ‘popular’ rather than learned, was to be found in the memories of common people, connecting time, locality, and present needs. ‘We old men are old chronicles’, says a character in a dialogue of 1608; and John Aubrey called such village patriarchs ‘living histories’. It has been said that the English landscape was ‘a vast repository of memory’, a repository radically revised but not abolished as the Reformation attempted to extinguish such ancient landmarks and objects of devotion as sacred wells, stones, and trees, not to speak of more recent relics, the ruins of the religious houses dissolved by Henry VIII (Aston 1984; Walsham forthcoming). This memory bank endlessly interacted with written records and stories, such as the tales of Robin Hood, so that there may have been no purely oral historical traditions. Aubrey himself remembered that his nurse ‘was excellent at these old stories’, and ‘had the history from the conquest down to Carl. I [Charles I] in ballad’. (Where had she had them from?) George Puttenham noted the tradition of communal singing of ‘historical reports’, and ‘stories of old time’ (Fox 1999; Worden 2006: 80). It is a good question whether Shakespeare, and other historical dramatists, could assume in their audiences an at least basic knowledge of English history, the stories of kings and queens, and this at a time (the long 1590s) when history plays were enormously popular, often refracting current concerns about the future, as the endless Elizabethan succession crisis came to its inevitable conclusion. Thomas Heywood doesn’t quite close the question down, but he certainly sheds light on it, when he tells us that plays have made the ignorant more apprehensive, taught the unlearned the knowledge of many famous histories, instructed such as cannot read in the discovery of all our English chronicles. (Worden 2006: 80–1; see also Archer 2006: 210)

At the other extreme from localised memory, Elizabethan readers were introduced to more exotic landscapes. William Thomas produced the first English History of Italy (1549), and 1591 saw the publication of Giles Fletcher’s Of the Russe common wealth, the first English book to engage with Russia. In this literature ‘the other’ was often deployed patriotically and even xenophobically. In The Glory of England (1615), Thomas Gaisford drew comparisons with China, India, and Turkey. ‘My joy exceedeth

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for not being a native amongst them.’ In the large book which Richard Hakluyt called The Principal Navigations of the English Nation (1589) a book, like Foxe, which expanded in successive editions, Hakluyt and his continuator Samuel Purchas explored an empire that had yet to exist.

III By now it will be apparent that the scope of ‘history’ in the literature and culture of the English Renaissance was very wide indeed. But in what remains of this essay I shall restrict the term to the history of Britain and its constituent parts. And I shall not attempt to venture beyond the generation of the so-called ‘politic’ historians of the late Elizabethan and early Stuart years, the likes of Camden and Bacon. Clarendon and his late seventeenth-century successors would call for another chapter, and another kind of expertise. John Pocock has written that there have been as many English pasts as there were social and professional groups with an interest in recalling it. The lawyer’s past was not the same thing as the cleric’s past, or the herald’s, who all owned different pasts, nor, we might add, the past of the Derbyshire lead miner, whose knowledge of his past and its laws, which he had by heart, was essential for his livelihood (Pocock 1975; Wood 1999). This leads Pocock to ask whether we can speak of a national past in the early modem period. The answer has to be given by the writers who presumed to purvey various versions of English history, national and local. We may begin with the chronicles. Archbishop Parker feared that Queen Elizabeth would be ‘strangely chronicled’,3 implying that there would be, or ought to be, only one, more or less authoritative, account of her reign (the spirit in which Camden put pen to paper); rather like the practice in imperial China, where the original archives were routinely shredded to leave only a single, official history.4 It was said that chronicles ‘do carry credit’ (Holinshed 1587: 766). Chronicles were also, in principle, universal histories, covering the whole of time. Sir Walter Ralegh’s History of the World (1614) was such a work, in the tradition of the chronicles, but also the introduction and groundwork for an intended history of England that never got written – although its preface ran through the history of the Tudors into the reign of James I. In practice, sixteenth-century English chronicles multiplied and jostled for space in a competitive market. Daniel Woolf has counted 220 editions of seventy-nine different chronicles between 1475 and 1699 (Woolf 1988: 346). This tells us something important about the devolved diversity of early modern English society and culture. Nothing could be more remote from imperial China. None of these chronicles was authorised by the government, although the most ambitious, Holinshed’s Chronicles, invited official interest – and interference. The sixteenth-century chronicles derived, in part, from town chronicles that were organised on the principle of the local civic year, consisting, as Thomas Nashe complained, of nothing but lists of ‘mayors and sheriffs, and the dear year [year of dearth] and the great frost’ (Grosart 1884: II, 62). As with monastic chronicles, which were focused on the affairs of a particular community and yet aspired to a kind of universality, these chronicles were a curious

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combination of the minuscule with the greater whole to which it belonged. And increasingly the chronicles were shaped by the centralising tendencies of Tudor England. Even before 1485 they were becoming national in vision and scope, as in Ranulph Higden’s Polychronicon, first printed by Caxton in 1482. Although provincial towns such as Worcester and Shrewsbury continued to be served by their own selfappointed chroniclers, their books were not printed and were peripheral to a culture centred in London.5 It is also significant that, with the chronicle of Edward Halle, entitled The Union of the Two Noble and Illustrate Families of Lancaster and York (1548), the great theme (hitherto chronicles had had no discernible theme) was political and royal: the coming of unity and peace through the union of the red and white roses in the Tudor dynasty. It might be thought that this was a piece of ‘official’ propaganda. But there is no evidence that it was. But if the chronicles were in competition, they also ingested material from each other and from more literary sources, so that the story is one of complex agglomeration. There were three books coming from outside the tradition that fed into the mid-Tudor chronicles. Polydore Vergil was an erudite Italian who was engaged by Henry VII to compose an ambitious Anglia historia. His work was completed in manuscript up to 1513 in that year, but not printed until successive editions appeared in Basle in 1534 (covering events up to 1509) and 1546 (now reaching as far as 1538). Polydore introduced a critical and dispassionate standard to English history writing (which perhaps only a foreigner could have achieved), as well as the formal organizing principle of devoting a chapter to each reign; and the fact that he was incorporated into the chronicles was to their advantage (Hay 1952). There was an interactive relationship between Polydore’s enterprise and Sir Thomas More’s The History of King Richard III, completed in about 1518. More’s searching and ironical interrogation of his subject has aroused almost as much discussion as his Utopia, written concurrently. It has even been suggested that part of his intention was to parody the historical search for ‘truth’, much play with what Sidney would call ‘the notable foundation of hearsay’, a sceptical interrogation of history itself (Fox 1982: 75–107; Fox 1989: 108–27; Hanham 1975: 188–219). Nevertheless, the transcendent merits of the neo-Tacitean Richard III were widely acknowledged, one Elizabethan considering it ‘the only story worthy of reading’,6 while it was left to Shakespeare to pay it the most enduring of compliments. Another book that deserves more respect than it has ever received was The Life and Death of Cardinal Wolsey by his gentleman usher, George Cavendish (written 1554–8), which, because of its Marian associations, remained unprinted until 1641 (when the imminent downfall of Archbishop William Laud gave it some exemplary topicality). Cavendish was used extensively in several of the chronicles, while Shakespeare and Fletcher could not have contrived the brilliant masques that light up the stage in Henry VIII (and which actually succeeded in burning it down) without Cavendish (Sylvester 1959). The 1560s witnessed a climax in the war of the chronicles. Edward Halle had died, leaving his friend Richard Grafton to complete his work. Grafton published in his own right An Abridgement of the Chronicles of England (1562), which ran into several editions. But his far more ambitious Chronicles at Large … of the Affairs of England

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from the Creation of the World unto the First year of Queen Elizabeth (1568) was a flop, seen off the turf by John Stow, who published a more successful Summary of English Chronicles (nineteen editions in two different versions between 1565 and 1618); and his bumper Chronicles (1580) which, unlike Grafton, achieved several editions and was continued into the next century by Edmund Howes. Stow, a self-made and autodidactic London tradesman, derided Grafton as one who ‘hath but picked feathers from other birds next in his reach’ (Kingsford 1908: 1, x–xii; Gadd and Gillespie 2004). But then, in 1577, the trump card was played with the publication of the Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, which would always be known after the leading figure in the syndicate that planned it as ‘Holinshed’, Raphael Holinshed; but perhaps unfairly, since the original idea belonged to the immigrant printer Reginald Wolfe, and Holinshed was dead before the second enlarged edition appeared in 1587. ‘Holinshed’, the main source for Shakespeare’s history plays, was a vast and unwieldy agglomeration, much castrated by official censorship in 1587. But it included a number of virtually self-contained works of considerable merit, among them the ‘Description of England’, written against ever-pressing deadlines by a rather odd cleric called William Harrison, whose real interest lay in a vast and unpublishable chronology of the whole of human history (Edelen 1968, 1994; Parry, 1984, 1987). Chronicles have been disparaged for their somewhat mindless inconsequentiality. But Annabel Patterson has drawn attention to the ‘protocols’ that determined the shape and arrangement of Holinshed, which she calls ‘an important and inventive cultural history’, including a very deliberate ‘multivocality’ which allowed all interests, social and religious, to be heard. This was not ‘state history’ but history for the citizen, and Patterson has even risked a considerable anachronism by calling its values ‘liberal’ (Patterson 1994). The Oxford University Press and a new syndicate of appropriately expert scholars, headed by Ian Archer, Felicity Heal, and Paulina Kewes, are currently engaged in a critical edition of Holinshed, which, with attendant colloquia and publications, promises to rival the John Foxe industry now reaching its consummation. Were chronicles on their way out? It has been argued that they were becoming mere ‘artifacts’ (coffee-table books?), while their practical functions were taken over by several other genres, including history plays, better organised, more clearly directioned and more manageable histories, the new ‘politic’ histories, and cheap and expendable pamphlets, the early precursors of newsbooks (Woolf 1988: 346). Their massive size was perhaps self-defeating, and it made little sense continually to update their contents, always beginning with the creation of the world. But that is not to say that Holinshed and Stow were not still read, not to speak of John Speed’s History of Great Britain (1611), in various ways and for various purposes, throughout the seventeenth century and even beyond. That is something that the burgeoning Holinshed project will explore. There was a cyclical process whereby large books ingested smaller books, and in their turn spawned derivative and even ephemeral publications (Walsham 1999). So the chronicles fed into cheap ballads, but also into the more respectable historical and political poems known as A Mirror for Magistrates, first published by William

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Baldwin and other poets, including Thomas Sackville, in 1559, and kept in print in various versions until the 1620s. We are only beginning to appreciate the political impact in late Tudor and early Stuart England of these stories of corruption and evil counsel in the not-so-distant English past, conceived in the manner of the De Casibus tradition invented by Boccaccio and brought to England by John Lydgate in the fifteenth century as The Fall of Princes (Campbell 1938; Lucas 2006, 2009). And, not to be excessively Whiggish in our judgements, historians were becoming increasingly concerned with the critical evaluation of historical evidence, with their accounts of the past becoming more tightly structured and more focused. Foxe’s and Camden’s use of original documents became increasingly de rigueur. It is significant that the prolific poet Samuel Daniel moved from composing semi-fictional, semihistorical verses to a more prosaic and well-documented history, commencing with the Norman Conquest, when reliable sources became available (Levy 2006: 409, 411). How far a wide public maintained its interest in the kind of history the chronicles purveyed, and which the history plays conveyed to a wide audience, is a different and ultimately unanswerable question. The 1590s witnessed nothing short of a craze for history plays. Of the 266 known titles of plays performed in the London theatres in that decade, a good proportion were history plays, not all of which were written by Shakespeare. But it proved to be a somewhat transient fashion. Shakespeare’s contribution to the genre was once seen as patriotic and straightforwardly affirmative of the shared values of an Elizabethan age with its back to the wall. These were, after all, wartime plays. ‘Come the three corners of the world in arms / And we shall shake them.’ (King John 5.7.124–7). To what could that refer but to the war with the Spanish empire, on which, it was said, the sun never set? Recently, rather more has been made of Shakespeare’s critical interrogation of regal and martial pretensions, even in Henry V, maugre, we might say, Sir Laurence Olivier and the concerns of 1944. According to one reading, this play, and others, must be set in the uncertainties of the late Elizabethan succession crisis, the politics of a Europe, and of a British Isles, in unpredictable flux (Dutton 2006). Since those who impersonated kings on the stage were commoners of low social status, historical drama could even be said to have had a subversive potential; although, conversely, it has been argued that it was also a vehicle for the social aspirations of the theatrical profession, notably Shakespeare himself, lifting him and his art out of the world of base mechanicals into the gentry (Helgerson 1992: ch. 5, ‘Staging exclusion’).

IV But there is no mistaking the fervently expressed patriotism, which resounds in so much of the historical and topographical literature of Renaissance England. Shakespeare’s ‘This blessed plot, this realm, this England’ (Richard II 2.1.50) is a typical rather than exceptional sentiment. Holinshed had climaxed with a paean of praise for ‘the commonwealth of England, a corner of the world, O Lord, which thou hast singled

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out for the magnifying of thy majesty’, while Camden declared that ‘the glory of my country’ had been his motivation (Holinshed 1587: 1592; Camden 1610: ‘Preface: The Author to the Reader’). The glory of England, as of other emergent nations reaching for their identity in the Renaissance, was partly a matter of origins. The dominant origins myth (British rather than English) told of the foundation of civilised society in the islands by Brutus, the grandson of Aeneas, from whom the very name Britain was derived; and the legends of the British hero and all-conquering emperor Arthur (Ferguson 1993; Kendrick 1950). These stories had passed into the chronicles from a twelfth-century work of imaginative invention, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regium Britanniae, the value of which, as history, was doubted even in its own time. Polydore Vergil, as a detached foreigner, was in a good position to pour cold water: ‘Truly there is nothing more obscure, more uncertain or unknown than the affairs of the Britons from the beginning.’ Since it was possible to see the cliffs of Dover from France, it was likely that the island had always been inhabited. As for Arthur, it was conclusive for Polydore that the Roman historians knew nothing of his exploits. His tomb had been ‘discovered’ at Glastonbury Abbey, but Glastonbury had not been founded in Arthur’s day (Ellis 1846: 31–3, 121–2). A friend of Sir Thomas More, John Rastell, joined in the fun in a book with a delicious pun as its title, The Pastime of People (1529). Visitors to Westminster Abbey were shown Arthur’s seal. But Westminster, too, had not existed in those days, the wax of the seal would long since have decayed, and, in any case, charters before the Conquest were not sealed. These were the kinds of argument that Lorenzo Valla had deployed in the fifteenth century to expose the fraudulence of the Donation of Constantine, and they had an affinity with the development of perspective in painting (Woolf 2003: 3). According to conventional ideas of what the Renaissance was about, the ‘British history’ should now have evaporated like morning dew. Not so. Anthony Grafton has taught us that the not inconsiderable critical powers of the humanists could function in strange and counterintuitive ways. The best critics made the best forgers. Even great scholars were capable of believing what they wanted to believe, and their ‘truths’ were not quite the same thing as ours. Valla had had his reasons, which were not those of disinterested scholarship, to expose the fraudulence of papal claims. Annius of Viterbo made up a wholly fictitious pseudo-history, which he attributed to the ancient Babylonian writer Berosus (who really did exist), in order to ‘prove’ that his native Viterbo was the true cradle of Roman civilisation. Another writer who exposed the pseudo-Berosus proceeded to make equally implausible claims on behalf of his native Frisia, while in Scotland Hector Boece, the product of a Parisian higher education, composed a largely imaginary history of his own nation (Chapter 81, Writing the Nation) (Grafton 1990a, 1990b). So it was that John Leland, who was far more learned than John Rastell, firmly believed in the historicity of Arthur and his deeds, invoking the same evidence that Rastell had rubbished (Leland 1582). It became a matter of national, and soon of Protestant, honour to defend these old stories, which were now actually supplemented from the highly dubious pseudo-Berosus by Foxe’s learned friend, John Bale, author

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of the first English bibliography, lllustrium maioris Britanniae scriptorum (1548). The Welsh, or ‘Cambro-Britons’, were particularly defensive of traditions that still flourished in their bardic culture. Humfrey Lluyd affirmed in his Breviary of Britain (published, posthumously, in translation, 1575): ‘I do believe that Brutus came into Britain with his train of Trojans.’ When Camden came to write Britannia he reduced the wonderful world of Geoffrey of Monmouth to a pile of rubble, but still declined to pronounce absolutely on the issue. Let Brutus be taken for the father and founder of the nation: ‘I will not be of a contrary mind’ (Camden 1610: 8, 10, 22). The old legends now had a future as ‘poetical histories’, as in Michael Drayton’s epic poem Poly-Olbion (1612, 1622), which devoted 236 lines to the British history. John Selden wagged a pedantically reproving finger in his marginal notes to the text, but this was little more than a friendly flyting between scholar and poet. Meanwhile, Camden had discovered the true ancestors of the English and their language, ‘a warlike, stiff, stout and vigorous nation’, the Germanic Saxons (Camden 1974: 24–5). Local and regional patriotisms were at least as powerful as national sentiment in an England, which functioned as a kind of federation of partly self-governing communities, counties, towns, and parishes. The relation between the whole and its parts is demonstrated in one of the major cultural achievements of the age, the great Atlas associated with the name of Christopher Saxton (1579) which, it has been said, gave Englishmen ‘visual and conceptual possession of the physical kingdom in which they lived’ (Helgerson 1992: 107; Harley 1983; Morgan 1979). For Saxton’s Atlas depicted England, for the first time, as a collection of coloured counties, and included separate maps of individual counties and groups of counties. This was the climax to a cartographical enterprise that accompanied the application to the English landscape and its history of ‘chorography’. This was a now forgotten art located somewhere between geography and history, invented in Renaissance Italy by Flavio Biondo in his Italia Illustrata, and taken up by German humanists, Conrad Celtis and others, whose ambition was to produce a Germania Illustrata. The pioneer of English chorography was John Leland, a philologist and Latin poet, whose boundless ambition was to travel the length and breadth of England, on foot, first to survey and rescue its threatened monastic libraries, and then to take stock of the country itself, in all its rich physical and historical detail. He told Henry VIII in what became known as his ‘New Year’s Gift’ that he would present him with a survey of ‘your whole world and empire of England’ (Toulmin Smith 1907: 1, xxxvii–xliii). But Leland bit off more than he could chew, became insane, and left to John Stow and other successors the vast accumulation of paper which we know as Leland’s ‘Itineraries’, the foundation for a flourishing chorographical industry. Leland’s legacy was delivered piecemeal, in a number of regional studies, which together amounted to what A. L. Rowse called ‘the Elizabethan discovery of England’. William Lambarde led the way in his Perambulation of Kent (1576), to be followed by John Stow’s Survey of London, Richard Carew’s Survey of Cornwall (1602), and the ambitious plan of John Norden to complete an entire Speculum Britanniae, which got little further than some of the counties closest to London. Whereas Stow’s book was

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suffused with backward-looking nostalgia for the lost world of merry and Catholic England, Lambarde wrote as a fierce Protestant, while Carew lived entirely and optimistically in the present tense (Collinson 2001), The consummation came with Camden’s Britannia, which began (1586) as a stubby little book in Latin, intended to introduce a learned and cosmopolitan audience to a neglected province of the Roman empire, but became, in Philemon Holland’s translation (1610) a sumptuous, illustrated folio for English gentlemen, the foundation for generations to come of topographical and antiquarian history in the same tradition, culminating in modern times in the Victoria County Histories. Just as Shakespeare put Holinshed into verse, so Michael Drayton versified Camden in the 12,000 lines of Poly-Olbion, a deification, almost, of ‘Albion’s glorious isle’. When he reached the last frontier of Cumberland, Drayton wrote: ‘My England doth conclude, for which I undertook this strange Herculean toil.’ And here we too must conclude, only noting the sad, and perhaps significant, fact that Poly-Olbion proved to be a flop. Notes 1

2

Vickers 1998; Chrimes 1972; G. R. Elton, ‘Henry VII: rapacity and remorse’, ‘Henry VII: a restatement’, both in Elton 1974; response by Cooper 1959. Collinson 1988: ch. 1 (‘The Protestant Nation’); Collinson 1997a; Walsham 1999: ch. 6 (‘ “England’s warning by Israel”: Paul’s Cross prophecy’).

3 4

British Library, MS Lansdowne 15, fo. 66. Information imparted by Professor John M. Wong of the University of Sydney. 5 See the essays on Worcester and Shrewsbury in Collinson and Craig 1998. 6 Francis Alford to F[rancis] W[alsingham], Inner Temple Library, Petyt MS 538.10, fo. llv.

References and Further Reading Archer, Ian (2006). ‘Discourses of history in Elizabethan and early Stuart London’. In Paulina Kewes (ed.), The Uses of History in Early Modem England (pp. 201–22). San Marino, CA: Huntington Library. Aston, Margaret (1984). ‘English ruins and English history: the Dissolution and the sense of the past’. In Aston, Lollards and Reformers: Images and Literacy in Late Medieval Religion (pp. 313–37). London: Hambledon Press. Camden, William (1610). Britannia. tr. P. Holland. London. Camden, William (1974). Remains concerning Britain, ed. Leslie Dunkling. Wakefield: EP Publishing. Campagnac, E. T. (ed.) (1925). Mulcaster’s Elementarie. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Campbell, Lily B. (ed.) (1938). The Mirror for Magistrates. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chrimes, S. B. (1972). Henry VII. Berkeley: University of California Press Chynoweth, John, Nicholas Orme, and Alexandra Walsham (eds.) (2004). The Survey of Cornwall by Richard Carew. Devon and Cornwall Record Society, ns 47. Exeter. Collinson, Patrick (1988). The Birthpangs of Protestant England: Religious and Cultural Change in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Collinson, Patrick (1997a). ‘Biblical rhetoric: the English nation and national sentiment in the prophetic mode’. In Claire McEachern and Deborah Shuger (eds.), Religion and Culture in the

History English Renaissance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Collinson, Patrick (1997b). ‘Truth, lies, and fiction in sixteenth-century Protestant historiography’. In Donald R. Kelley and David Harris Sacks (eds.), The Historical Imagination in Early Modem Britain: History, Rhetoric and Fiction, 1500–1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Collinson, Patrick (1998). ‘One of us? William Camden and the making of history: The Camden Society Centenary Lecture’. Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., 8, 139–63. Collinson, Patrick (2001). ‘John Stow and nostalgic antiquarianism’. In J. F. Merritt (ed.), Imagining Early Modem London: Perceptions and Portrayals of the City from Stow to Strype 1598– 1720 (pp. 27–51). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Collinson, Patrick (2003). ‘William Camden and the anti-myth of Elizabeth: setting the mould?’ In Susan Doran and Thomas S. Freeman (eds.), The Myth of Elizabeth. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Collinson, Patrick (2009). ‘John Foxe as historian’. . Collinson, Patrick and J. Craig (eds.) (1998). The Reformation in English Towns 1500–1640. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Cooper, J. P. (1959). ‘Henry VII’s last years reconsidered’. Historical Journal, 2, 103–29. Dillon, Anne (2002). The Construction of Martyrdom in the English Catholic Community 1535–1603. Aldershot: Ashgate. Dutton, Richard (2006). ‘ “Methinks the truth should live from age to age”: the dating and contexts of Henry V’. In Paulina Kewes (ed.), The Uses of History in Early Modem England (pp. 169– 99). San Marino, CA: Huntington Library. Earle, John (1966). The Autograph Manuscript of Microcosmographie. Leeds: Scolar Press. Edelen, George (ed.) (1968, 1994). The Description of England: The Classic Contemporary Account by William Harrison. Washington, DC: Folger Shakespeare Library. Ellis, Sir Henry (ed.) (1846). Polydore Vergil’s English History. London: Camden Society. Elton, G. R. (ed.) (1974). Studies in Tudor and Stuart Politics and Government: Papers and Reviews 1946–72. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

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Ferguson, Arthur B. (1979). Clio Unbound: Perceptions of the Social and Cultural Past in Renaissance England. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ferguson, Arthur B. (1993). Utter Antiquity: Perceptions of Prehistory in Renaissance England. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Fox, Adam (1999). ‘Remembering the past in early modern England’. Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., 9, 233–56. Fox, Alastair (1982). Thomas More. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fox, Alastair (1989). Politics and Literature in the Reigns of Henry VII and Henry VIII. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Foxe, John. (1583) Actes and Monuments of matters most speciall and memorable, happenyng in the Church, with an vniversall history of the same. Wherein is set forth at large the whole race and course of the Church, from the primitive age to these latter tymes of ours … especialy in this realme of England and Scotland. This, the title of the 1583 edition (cited hereafter), is included in the variorum online edition of 1563, 1570, 1576 and 1583. British Academy and Oxford University Press 2009. . Freeman, Thomas F. (1999). ‘Texts, lies and microfilm: reading and misreading Foxe’s “Book of Martyrs” ’. Sixteenth Century Journal, 30, 42–5. Fussner, F. Smith (1962). The Historical Revolution: English Historical Writing and Thought; 1580– 1640. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Gadd, Ian and Alexander Gillespie (eds.) (2004). John Stow (1525–1605) and the Making of the English Past: Studies in Early Modem Culture and the History of the Book. London: British Library. Grafton, Anthony (1990a). Forgers and Critics: Creativity and Duplicity in Western Scholarship. Princeton: Princeton University Press Grafton, Anthony (1990b). ‘Invention of traditions and traditions of invention in Renaissance Europe: the strange case of Annius of Viterbo’. In Anthony Grafton and Ann Blair (eds.), The Transmission of Culture in Early Modern Europe (pp. 8–38). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Grafton, Anthony (2007). What Was History? The Art of History in Early Modem Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Grosart, A. B. (ed.) (1884). The Complete Works of Thomas Nashe, 6 vols. London. Haller, William (1964). Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and the Elect Nation. London: Jonathan Cape. Hanham, Alison (1975). Richard III and his Early Historians, 1483–1535. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Harley, J. B. (1983). ‘Meaning and ambiguity in Tudor cartography’. In Sarah Tyacke (ed.), English Map-Making, 1500–1650 (pp. 22–45). London: British Library. Hay, Denys (1952). Polydore Vergil: Renaissance Historian and Man of Letters. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Heal, Felicity (2006). ‘Appropriating history: Catholic and Protestant polemics and the national past’. In Paulina Kewes (ed.), The Uses of History in Early Modem England (pp. 105–28). San Marino, CA: Huntington Library. Helgerson, Richard (1992). Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Herendeen, Wyman H. (2007). William Camden: A Life in Context. Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer. Highley, Christopher (2006). “ ‘A pestilent and seditious book”: Nicholas Sander’s Schismatis Anglicani and Catholic histories of the Reformation’. In Paulina Kewes (ed.), The Uses of History in Early Modem England (pp. 147–67). San Marino, CA: Huntington Library. Highley, Christopher and King, John N. (eds.) (2002). John Foxe and his World. Aldershot: Ashgate. Holinshed, Raphael (1587). The First and Second Volumes of Chronicles. London. Jardine, Lisa and Anthony Grafton (1990). ‘ “Studied for action”: how Gabriel Harvey read his Livy’. Past and Present, 129, 30–78. Jones, H. Stuart (1943–4). ‘The foundation and history of the Camden Chair’. Oxoniensa, viii, ix, 175. Kelley, Donald R. and David Harris Sacks (eds.) (1997). The Historical Imagination in Early Modem Britain: History, Rhetoric and Fiction, 1500–1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kendrick, T. D. (1950). British Antiquity. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Kewes, Paulina (ed.) (2006). The Uses of History in Early Modem England. San Marino, CA: Huntington Library.

King, John N. (2006). ‘Guides to reading Foxe’s Book of Martyrs’. In Paulina Kewes (ed.), The Uses of History in Early Modem England (pp. 129–45). San Marino, CA: Huntington Library. Kingsford, C. L. (ed.) (1908). A Survey of London by John Stow Reprinted From the Text of 1603, 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Lambarde, William (1970). A Perambulation of Kent: Containing the Description, History and Customs of that Shire. London: edn. of 1826, repr. Bath. Leland, John (1582). A Learned and true Assertion of the Original Life, Acts and Death of … Arthur, King of Great Britain, trans. R. Robinson; repr., ed. W. E. Mead, 1925. Early English Text Society, no. 165. Levy, F. J. (1967). Tudor Historical Thought. San Marino, CA: Huntington Library. Levy, F. J. (2006). ‘Afterword’. In Paulina Kewes (ed.), The Uses of History in Early Modem England (pp. 407–20). San Marino, CA: Huntington Library. Loades, David (ed.) (1997). John Foxe and the English Reformation. Aldershot: Ashgate. Loades, David (ed.) (1999). John Foxe: An Historical Perspective. Aldershot: Ashgate. Lucas, Scott (2006). ‘Let none such office take, save he that can for right his prince forsake: A Mirror for Magistrates, resistance theory and the Elizabethan monarchical republic’. In John F. McDiarmid (ed.), The Monarchical Republic of Early Modern England: Essays in Response to Patrick Collinson. Aldershot: Ashgate Lucas, Scott (2009). ‘A Mirror for Magistrates’ and the Politics of the English Reformation. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. MacCaffrey, Wallace T. (ed.) (1970). William Camden, The History of the Most Renowned and Victorious Princess Elizabeth Late Queen of England: Selected Chapters. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Manning, John J. (ed.) (1991). The First and Second Parts of John Hayward’s The Life and Reigne of King Henrie IIII. Camden 4th ser., 42. London: Royal Historical Society. Merritt, J. F. (ed.) (2001). Imagining Early Modem London: Perceptions and Portrayals of the City from Stow to Strype 1598–1720. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Morgan, V. (1979). ‘The cartographic image of “The Country” in early modern England’.

History Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., 29, 129–54. Oliver, Leslie M. (1943). ‘The seventh edition of John Foxe’s “Acts and Monuments” ’. Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 37, 243–60. Parry, Glyn (1999). ‘Elect church or elect nation? The reception of The Acts and Monuments’. In David Loades (ed.), John Foxe: An Historical Perspective (pp. 167–81). Aldershot: Ashgate. Parry, Graham (1995). The Trophies of Time: English Antiquarians of the Seventeenth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Parry, G. J. R. (1984). ‘William Harrison and Holinshed’s Chronicles’. Historical Journal, 27, 789–810. Parry, G. J. R. (1987). A Protestant Vision: William Harrison and the Reformation of Elizabethan England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Patterson, Annabel (1994). Reading Holinshed’s Chronicles. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Pocock, John (1967). The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pocock, John (1975). ‘England’. In Orest A. Ranum (ed.), National Consciousness, History and Political Culture in Early-modem Europe (pp. 95– 116). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Richardson, Lisa (1999). ‘Sir John Hayward and early Stuart historiography’. Unpublished Cambridge Ph.D. thesis. Salmon, J. H. M. (1991). ‘Seneca and Tacitus in Jacobean England’. In Linda Levy Peck (ed.), The Mental World of the Jacobean Court (pp. 169– 88). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sidney, Sir Philip (1973). An Apology for Poetry, ed. G. Shepherd. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Stow, John (1908). A Survey of London, ed. C. L. Kingsford, 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Sylvester, Richard S. (ed.) (1959). The Life and Death of Cardinal Wolsey by George Cavendish. Early English Text Society, no. 243. Thomas, Keith (1983). The Perception of the Past in Early Modem England. The Creighton Trust Lecture 1983. London: University of London. Toulmin Smith, Lucy (ed.) (1907). The Itinerary of John Leland, 5 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Vickers, Brian (ed.) (1998). Francis Bacon: The History of the Reign of King Henry VII. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Vickers, Brian (ed.) (1999). English Literary Renaissance Criticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Walsham, Alexandra (1999). Providence in Early Modem England. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Walsham, Alexandra (forthcoming). The Reformation of the Landscape: Religion, Identity and Memory in Early Modern Britain and Ireland. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wood, Andy (1999). The Politics of Social Conflict: The Peak Country 1520–1770. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Woolf, D. R. (1988). ‘Genre into artifact: the decline of the English chronicle in the sixteenth century’. Sixteenth Century Journal, 19, 321–54. Woolf, D. R. (1990). The Idea of History in Early Stuart England: Evolution, Ideology, and “The Light of Truth’ from the Accession of James I to the Civil War. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Woolf, D. R. (2000). Reading History in Early Modem England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Woolf, D. R. (2003). The Social Circulation of the Past. English Historical Culture 1500–1710. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Worden, Blair (1994). ‘Ben Jonson among the historians’. In K. Sharpe and P. Lake (eds.), Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England (pp. 67–89). Basingstoke: Macmillan. Worden, Blair (2006). ‘Historians and poets’. In Paulina Kewes (ed.), The Uses of History in Early Modem England (pp. 69–90). San Marino, CA: Huntington Library.

6

Metaphor and Culture in Renaissance England Judith H. Anderson

The words ‘metaphor’ and ‘translation’, the one Greek in origin (metaphora), the other Latin (translatio), both enter English as synonymous rhetorical terms in the sixteenth century, together with the publication of numerous handbooks of rhetoric in the vernacular. ‘Translation’ and its cognate forms, notably the verb ‘translate’, afford the more telling history of these two words, insofar as ‘translation’ indicates both the basic figurality of language and the embedding of metaphor, as well as of rhetorical tropes more generally, in cultural traditions and social institutions (Ricoeur 1984: I, 196). The specific figure of speech called ‘translation’, or metaphor, shares its name in classical Latin rhetoric with the term for all tropes, namely translatio, and is therefore commonly regarded as the arch-trope. This is to say that figures other than metaphor, such as metonymy, synecdoche, simile, hyperbole, catachresis, and even irony, historically have been found to share ground with metaphor, as is strikingly evident in the devotional writing of John Donne. Addressing a metaphor-making God, Donne realises that ‘Thou art a figurative, a metaphorical God too; a God in whose words there is such a height of figures, such voyages, such peregrinations to fetch remote and precious metaphors, such extensions, such spreadings, such curtains of allegories, such third heavens of hyperboles … as all profane authors seem of the seed of the serpent that creeps; thou art the dove that flies’ (Donne 1987: 99). Metaphor underwrites all the figures Donne names, including extensions and spreadings, or metonymies, in the hands of the divine maker. If the boundaries between figures are often appropriately fuzzy in application, such shared tropicality, or translation, cuts two ways, at once enabling juncture and inviting dispute or suspicion. In early modern England, the expression and application of figures were focal in such crucial debates as those about vestments, the Eucharist, and the workings of economic exchange, for example.1 However inclusive translation may be as arch-trope, definitions remain useful as starting points, necessarily accompanied with the recognition that whole libraries have been written about the nature and working of metaphor. Nowadays definitions

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of translation/metaphor generally exclude explicit comparison, which earlier was usually assumed to be a defining characteristic. For representative modern examples, the philosopher Paul Ricoeur’s definition of metaphor and the psychological linguist Jean Aitchison’s definition are both based on unconventionality: Ricoeur’s might be encapsulated as ‘a deviant predication’, and Aitchison’s is expressed as ‘the use of a word with one or more of the “typicality conditions” attached to it broken’ (Ricoeur 1977: 143, Aitchison: 1994: 148). Notably, Ricoeur’s definition is sentence-based, and Aitchison’s word-based. The cognitive scientists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, linguist and philosopher respectively, and the literary critic M. H. Abrams base their definitions on transference: on the one hand, metaphor is ‘a way of conceiving of one thing in terms of another … [whose] primary function is understanding’; on the other, a metaphor is ‘a word or expression which in literal usage denotes one kind of thing or action [that] is applied to a distinctly different kind of thing or action, without asserting a comparison’ (Lakoff and Johnson 1980: 36; Abrams 1988: 65). Notably the latter, Abrams’s definition, which is aimed at an undergraduate audience, excludes comparison explicitly but appears to accept a fallacy of transference unimpeded by the deviation or difference it posits. The definition in the enlarged first edition of The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics focuses wholly on the positive value of enhancement: here metaphor is ‘A condensed verbal relation in which an idea, image, or symbol may, by the presence of one or more other ideas, images, or symbols, be enhanced in vividness, complexity, or breadth of implication’ (Whalley 1974: 490). Variant definitions seem, like metaphorical potency, unending. The English word ‘translation’ derives from Latin trans, ‘across’, and ferre (supine: latum), ‘to carry’, and signifies the carrying of something (anything) from one place (location or situation) to another. As the trope translatio, it indicates a partial transfer of signification and a likely transformation of meaning: metaphorical transfer simultaneously is and is not – my love is and is not a rose. Early modern English applications and extensions of translation include, in addition to the trope, both the familiar turning of the words of one language into those of another and a broad range of uses that are not definitively linguistic and are now less familiar – indeed, archaic – such as the transfer of an official from one ecclesiastical jurisdiction to another, the transmigration of a soul to heaven, the transformation or refashioning of apparel, the transfer (or alienation) of money or property from one person to another, and the movement of a tradesman from one company to another (e.g. baker to draper).2 Again, an example from Donne’s Devotions serves to illustrate the extension of translation from metaphorical writing to religious reality: ‘when one man dies’, Donne observes in his celebrated meditation on those for whom the passingbell tolls, ‘one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated; God employs several translators … [but His] hand is in every translation’ (Donne 1987: 86). The remarkable use of the ecclesiastical vestments of the old Catholic religion on the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage is yet another instance of translation, complete with the specific complexities

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of metaphorical implication (Jones and Stallybrass 2000: 192–3; Greenblatt 1988, 1990). Any expression of one thing in terms of another, whether relatively neutral explication or more intrusive interpretation, might also be termed ‘translation’. What is constant in all these significations is some degree of modification or change: a transfer, a transposition, a transformation occurs. Historically, linguistic and tropic translations are – to borrow a term from Lakoff – ‘radial’ instances of such changes, that is, motivated and conceptual, rather than haphazard, and potentially metaphorical in extension.3 This constant, namely change, suggests more than the mere substitution of meaning that even so knowledgeable and influential a theorist of metaphor as Ricoeur has found characteristic of rhetorical definitions of metaphor like those of the early modern period. Ricoeur considers such definitions erroneous because they identify metaphor with mere naming rather than with the construction of new knowledge that is otherwise unavailable (Ricoeur 1978: ch. 2). Herein lies another difference between the early modern period and our own, and it fundamentally involves language, the verbal material of metaphorical thinking and conceptualisation. It relates not only to the theory of metaphor then and now, but also to the radial implications of the word ‘translation’. In Tudor and Stuart times the linguistic ‘situation’, a word by which I would encompass both cultural context and medium of expression, was in important ways different from our own. In Renaissance England, grammar, the fundamental ordering (ratio) of words and the very basis of rational argument, was word-based rather than sentence-based in the way modern grammar is.4 Renaissance rhetorics, which deal with tropes and schemes, or figures of thought and speech, also prioritise words and figures rather than sentences (‘sentences’ in the structural sense, not the sententious one – i.e., séntence, not senténce). In addition, Renaissance culture was both more in touch with the Latin origins and etymological or ‘literal’ (litteralis, ‘of letters’, or component parts) meanings of English words than is ours and likely for any number of reasons to have had the heightened awareness of them that is evident in the multiple applications and extensions of the word ‘translation’ already noted. Monolingual vernacular dictionaries that comprehensively collect and define the entire word-stock of English simply did not exist in the Renaissance.5 Their absence disqualifies appeals to lexical norms and synchronic stability in modern theories of language and rhetoric, although it need not eliminate a powerful theory of metaphor based on the sentence, such as Ricoeur’s, rather than modify it. In the absence of such dictionaries, even a degree of etymological awareness that is virtually immediate and reflexive in the presence of neology and word-play would be plausible among those with a grammar-school education, which was basically concerned with Latin. The common practice of double translation in Renaissance grammar schools – from Latin to English and then back to Latin – would further have encouraged bilingual habits of mind, and these would have extended to other languages, such as French, which was deeply embedded in English law, and Greek, at once the earliest extant language of the

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New Testament and of traditional medicine. The same point holds for the pedagogical emphasis on Latin morphology in the teaching of Renaissance grammar – for example, the compounding of words such as prepositions and verbs and the derivation of cognate terms – both as a mnemonic device and as an indication of linguistic rationality or ‘cause’. If Latin, the language of grammar, is conceived to be rational, it would make sense to conceive of English in a related way, especially when English words flaunted their relation to Latin ones, as they do for anyone with even small Latin. In the Renaissance those with an awareness of Latin roots would have included not only the highly educated and otherwise elite, but also merchants and others connected with trade and finance and even apprentices in a number of trades (Anderson 2005: 10, 220 n.11). Certainly up to and including the time of John Milton, Secretary for the Foreign Tongues under the Commonwealth (and into the Protectorate), Latin also remained the common language of correspondence and diplomacy. A particularly telling example at once of the awareness of Latin roots and of the pertinence of this awareness to cultural metaphor can be found in Robert Estienne’s Thesaurus linguae Latinae, a Latin dictionary influential in England throughout the Renaissance.6 Tracing the English noun ‘gravity’ to its adjectival antecedent ‘grave’ and thence to its immediate Latin origin, we find the following entry under Latin gravis/-e, ‘heavy’ or ‘weighty’: In its own nature [suapte natura] … [gravis] signifies heavy: as a heavy stone, a heavy bundle, weighty arms, a weighty shield, clearly because it burdens us [gravat nos] in bearing it and because it is carried with difficulty and vexation [cum molestia]. Thence we transfer it through catachresis [per abusionem transfferimus] to age, illness, labour, grief: because these who feel the vexation of age, illness, and other things are oppressed, as it were, by an intolerable burden, which, even as a heavy weight, they ardently wish to put from them. And this transference [translatio] is applied not only to bodily vexations but also to those of the mind … which oppress the spirit with a certain kind of weight … And for the same reason molestia, ‘vexation’, has been named from moles, that is, from a huge mass, heavy in weight. Another sense is that, just as heavy rocks and huge tree trunks are not easily moved from a place but stand fixed in all changing times, so constant persons endowed with wisdom are justly and figuratively called grave [graves], because neither by entreaties, nor bribes, nor vainglory, nor promises are they budged from fairness and justice – as are these whom we call light [leves], who, in likeness of dust and straws, are stirred by every breeze.

As this entry indicates, lexical meaning in Estienne’s Thesaurus is simultaneously rooted in objective phenomena and fundamentally tropic: a reproach is heavy because it is like a stone; judgements have weight because they are fixed and constant like rocks or tree trunks. Language is thus translational and transformative; its constant is change.7 Another telling example in this period of the transformative presence and metaphorical effect of etymological roots can be seen in the word ‘invest/-ment’. Like

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translation, this word-concept is a multiple pun that enters into the areas of theatre, economics, law, politics, and religion, all of which I have treated in Translating Investments (Anderson 2005: 22–35). ‘Invest’ derives, via Latin investire, from Latin in and vestis, ‘in clothes’. Its various forms occur with a broad range of meanings in early modern English: for example, ‘to clothe … envelop’, or ‘surround’; ‘to clothe or endue with attributes, qualities, or a character’; ‘to clothe with or in the insignia of an office’ and hence ‘with the dignity itself ’; ‘to endow with the dignity itself ’; ‘to endow or furnish with power’; ‘To settle, secure, or vest (a right or power)’; ‘to enclose or hem in … to lay siege to’; ‘to occupy or engage’; and ‘to lay out or employ one’s money upon any bargain for advantage’.8 The last of these meanings is found in John Florio’s Italian–English dictionary of 1598. It evidently expresses the idea that invested capital is given another cover or form – clothed otherwise or vested elsewhere – and appears to have ‘passed from the Levant or Turkey Company to the East India Company’, in whose transactions the OED records its first English use in 1613.9 Although this meaning in English likely originated earlier in Italian methods of bookkeeping, which were also imported into England, the idea of a capital investment (or reinvestment) in cloth and wool would seem ready-made for England, where these were the major exports.10 The origin and various meanings of ‘invest/-ment’, all of which derive from the idea of clothing (or enclosing – punningly, en-clothing?), thus indicate metaphorical associations at once within the cultural lexicon and between it and the larger culture. The idea of investment as the bestowal, possession, or acquisition of rights and powers easily becomes the idea of investment as dressing for status (whether elite, bourgeois, or artisanal) and thence the idea of financial investment. Dress as symbolic capital also invites an obvious connection with the increased interest in sumptuary laws under the Tudors.11 The association of clothing with rights and powers, with defining a space or enclosure, and specifically with financial transactions afforded a figurative (officially metonymic) code that affected still other cultural applications – the comparison of rhetoric to clothing, for instance.12 In A View of the Present State of Ireland, Edmund Spenser observes that ‘there is not a little in the garment to the fashioning of the mind and conditions’: thus clothing shapes – ‘in-forms’ – mental and social status rather than merely reflecting it (Spenser 1966: X, 121). The renewed interest in the legislation of dress under Henry VIII became even more pronounced under Elizabeth, who was herself the conspicuously symbolic sartorial politician of the portraits (and the 2,000 dresses). The legislation of dress merely highlighted a fundamental category of social perception that was (and still is) translative to its verbal core.13 In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, a remarkably complex context in which the word ‘investment’ occurs comes when Polonius warns Ophelia about Hamlet’s intentions, and it goes far to illustrate the interweaving of investment in the sense of clothing with social relations, which specifically include commerce and religion. Polonius’ warning is laced with the diction of finance, sex, and piety:

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Be something scanter of your maiden presence, Set your entreatments at a higher rate … In few, Ophelia, Do not believe his vows, for they are brokers, Not of that dye which their investments show, But mere implorators of unholy suits, Breathing like sanctified and pious bonds, The better to beguile. (1.3.121–31)

This controversial passage has been much emended by editors; for some, their copytext’s financial ‘bonds’ becomes Theobald’s sexual ‘bawds’.14 ‘Vows’ in the passage are pledges, whether of lovers (secular or religious) or borrowers, and ‘brokers’ are (dishonest) middle-men or mediators, with ‘broke’, the past tense of ‘break’, offering a homonymic echo to ‘brokers’ – broken vows. ‘Dye’, a hue or shade, suggests also the stamp for a coin, and ‘investments’ are either garments or commercial transactions, the whole line suggesting related controversies about clerical morality, the coinage, the cloth trade, and financial exchange that are endemic in the period. Conceivably, if distractingly, ‘investments’ could also glance at the meaning ‘sieges’, this time in the proper translative sense of ‘hemming in’ for which the clothing metaphor calls.15 ‘Unholy suits’ are duplicitous pleas or else misleading clothes, hence deceptive appearances; ‘breathing’ could modify ‘vows’, ‘brokers’, or even ‘suits’, the first and last of these semi-personified; and ‘bonds’ (or bands) are conceivably clerical bands (collars) or marriage banns/bands/bonds, but are more clearly financial commitments or legal agreements, again semi-personified – unless, of course, we emend them to ‘bawds’, or brokers of passion, as earlier mentioned.16 As elsewhere in Hamlet, words, the clothes or vestments of thought, clothe and hide, express and obscure, whatever ‘passes show’ or claims to (Shakespeare 1997: Hamlet 1.2.85). The unsettled state of the English language itself in the Renaissance also bears on the theory and practice of metaphor. ‘An analysis of 40 pages of the Shorter Oxford Dictionary’, for example, shows ‘that of every 100 [English] words in use in 1600, 39 were introduced between 1500 and 1600’ (Bateson 1961: 31 n.2). Shakespeare alone is thought to have introduced 1,700 Latinate neologisms, including compounds, of which two-thirds have survived (Lass 1992: III, 341). In this enriching linguistic ferment, a recourse to etymology for coinage and comprehension must have been a habit of mind – spontaneous, immediate, often tentative in conversation, but available for scrutiny, sustained argument, and further reflection in written or printed forms. In the Latin rhetorics of Cicero and Quintilian, whose influence on Renaissance rhetorics can hardly be overstated, metaphor is typically based in a single word, with anything more extensive classified either as allegory or as some other figure. This word-based conception of metaphor further focuses attention on the roots and other components of words. Language itself thus exhibits a translational/transferential character, which is seen at once to enrich, complicate, and potentially destabilise the

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meanings it conveys, a perception realised at once in the pleasures of puns and in distrust of linguistic reliability. The very word ‘translation’ – the phonically close English translation of a phonically less obvious Latin translation of Greek metaphora – is not merely a linguistic ‘carry-over’ from Greek to Latin to English, but also a spatial metaphor itself, one of movement and, more exactly, of displacement, deriving, as previously noted, from trans and ferre (latum), ‘across’, ‘beyond’ and ‘carry’, ‘bear’ (Ricoeur 1977: 142–3; Derrida 1975: 55). Understandably, religious or political doctrine built on such displacement could begin to look at once like the biblical foundation of sand and, conversely, like an exciting medium of invention and everextending experiment in poetry and plays. Little wonder that puritanical plain speech and the poetic imagination found themselves at loggerheads. The distrust of rhetoric and, inseparably, of language is evident in a representative English handbook of rhetoric such as Henry Peacham’s Garden of Eloquence (1577, 1593). Peacham’s Garden follows Cicero in basing the origin and rationale of tropes on a lack – a want of ‘words to express the nature and property of diverse things’ – and on the consequent borrowing of ‘the name of one thing, to signify another’ that resembles it in some way. Peacham explains that language-users, seeing matters well expressed by this means, began to refuse ‘such words as were proper’ and to substitute their own inventions for the nature of things. Embellishment now exceeded need, but where we might expect Peacham next to decry human errancy, he adds instead that ‘proper’ words either ‘had little sweetness, or could not declare the nature of the thing so well’. His conclusion reinforces the superiority of such artfully ‘translated speech’, observing that men borrowed words ‘from like things, both for the grace sake of the similitude, and also for the cause of perspicuity of the thing [subject matter or existent thing] expressed’. Metaphorical art, at once more pleasing and more accurate, now compensates in Peacham’s view for – a deconstructionist might say now supplements – the shortcomings of natural language (Peacham 1593: 1–2). Although no handbook of rhetoric can account for the complex practices and splendid achievements of Tudor and Stuart writers, two other rhetorics of the period, by George Puttenham and John Hoskins, serve to illustrate the cultural implications and effects of metaphor more sensitively than does the more pedestrian Peacham. Although Puttenham has little substantively new to say about metaphor, the language he uses to describe it is significant. Metaphor for him is decidedly forceful: ‘a kind of wresting [emphasis added] of a single word from his own right signification, to another not so natural, but yet of some affinity or conveniency with it, as to say, ‘I cannot digest your unkind [i.e. ‘unnatural’] words’ (Puttenham 1988: 189). Puttenham enumerates three motivating ‘causes’ of metaphor: first, ‘necessity or want of a better word’ that is ‘apter and more natural’; second, ‘pleasure and ornament’, and third, ‘to enforce a sense and make the word more significative’ – Quintilian’s vim significandi, ‘significative power’ (Puttenham 1988: 189–90, Quintilian 1920: 8.2.6). Puttenham has his eye on a courtly audience for whom ‘wresting’ and enforcing are likely to be more appealing than the verecundia, ‘modesty’, that Cicero’s spokesman recommends to the metaphorist (Cicero 1988: 3.41.165). Reading Puttenham’s translation of

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metaphora, namely, ‘the figure of transport’, with the flippancy it invites, we might retranslate it ‘the figure of ambition’, or more literally, ‘of carriage from one “place” to another’ – ‘place’ heard not simply in a linguistic or rhetorical sense but also in that Donne intends in his poem ‘The Canonization’, namely, ‘get you a place’, or, in Puttenham’s treatise, a higher place, in the court (Donne 1970: 73). Clothing in the rhetorical sense, not simply in the sartorial one, reflected and affected a successful career in Renaissance society. Whereas Puttenham emphasises force, Hoskins seems to favour community. He explains that A metaphor, or translation, is the friendly and neighbourly borrowing of one word to express a thing with more light and better note, though not so directly and properly as the natural name of the thing would signify … The rule of a metaphor is that it be not too bold nor too far-fetched. And though all metaphors go beyond the signification of things, yet are they requisite to match the compassing sweetness of men’s minds, that are not content to fix themselves upon one thing but they must wander into the confines; like the eye, that cannot choose but view the whole knot when it beholds but one flower in a garden of purpose; or like an archer that, knowing his bow will overcast or carry too short, takes an aim on this side or beyond his mark. (Hoskins 1935: 8, emphases added)

Puttenham’s ‘wresting’ is now ‘a friendly and neighbourly borrowing’ as if of a cup of flour (not to say a flower of rhetoric). The greater light and better memorability (‘note’, cf. Latin nota) recall the special light – proprium lumen – that Quintilian attributes to metaphor, and the restraint of extravagance and over-boldness recalls Cicero, as momentarily does Hoskins’s recognition of the mind’s need to wander, which Cicero’s spokesman described as ‘maxima … delectatio (a very great pleasure)’ (Cicero 1988: 3.40.160). Yet even with all these derivatives, there is value added in Hoskins’s characterisation of the creativity of metaphor – of its ‘go[ing] beyond’, or exceeding, the proper and natural ‘signification of things’. This is an excess required to match the comprehension of the human mind. It suggests Sidney’s (or Shakespeare’s) well-known characterisation of the poetic imagination and goes beyond Hoskins’s Roman sources (Sidney 1973: 100–1; Shakespeare 1997: MND 5.1.12–17). The similes Hoskins uses to convey the work of metaphor are themselves suggestive: the hungry, associative eye or the archer who shoots fictively in order to get at a truth. As Hoskins explains, ‘a metaphor … enricheth our knowledge with two things at once, with the truth and with similitude’ (Hoskins 1935: 8). This is a doubling whose parts have seemingly equal thingness, and it is also cognitive, for it ‘enricheth’, or adds to, ‘our knowledge’. * Renaissance ideas about tropology – translation – crucially inform debates about the Eucharist that define Reformation beliefs in England. As Diarmaid MacCulloch has

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observed, the basic problem of Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, chief architect of religious reform under Henry VIII and Edward VI and fundamental shaper of the Tudor church, ‘was best how to convey a metaphorical notion of presence’ in the Eucharist, i.e. the Communion or Supper (MacCulloch 1996: 379). Language and rhetoric were at the heart of this problem, as more specifically was the charged biblical statement ‘This is my body’ (e.g. Matt. 26:26). Does ‘is’ indicate a real and present existence or a figurative and spiritual one? Underlying English debates about the Eucharist, notably between Cranmer and Bishop Stephen Gardiner, his chief antagonist, is the still vexed question of what the word ‘is’, known as the copula, itself historically is, and how it signifies. Gardiner, having accepted King Henry as head of the English church, nonetheless clung, much as Henry himself did, to Roman Catholic doctrines – in Gardiner’s case, especially as these pertained to the doctrine of the Eucharist. Within the crucial early years of the Protestant Reformation, the Swiss reformer Huldrych Zwingli was seminally responsible for a denial of real presence in the Eucharist, which is the belief of Catholicism, because he understands the copula ‘is’ tropically, taking it to mean ‘represents’ or ‘figures’ (Zwingli 1984: II, 356–7). Zwingli’s associate Johannes Oecolampadius subsequently transfers Zwingli’s tropic copula to the predicate nominative, ‘my body’, and considers this phrase a ‘representation – or figure – of my body’.17 Whichever reformed translation of the New Testament Greek, and behind it, of Christ’s Aramaic, obtains, real presence is thus displaced by figuration, as Gardiner will assert in England about three decades later. Although Martin Luther, another formative influence on the English Reformation, had grave differences with the old Catholic religion, he believed fundamentally in the substantive (not merely figurative) presence of Christ in the Eucharist. Cranmer’s own belief, broadly representative of his associates in the reformed English church, changed in the course of his life from a Roman Catholic to a Lutheran position and then to one sufficiently Zwinglian for him to have declared, ‘we make no sacrifice of him [Christ], but only a commemoration and remembrance of that sacrifice’.18 Whereas Catholics like Gardiner asserted that the reformers were blind to the real, substantive force of the verb ‘is’, the reformers counter-charged that the Catholics do much abuse the Latin verb substantive, est [is], and much contrary to the proper signification that [est] should have caused it ‘to signify transubstantiatur[,] is changed in substance, or to stand for convertitur … or for transmutatur …. [If] they should take est, in his true and proper signification: they should speak that thing, which is false and not true.19

In this view, it is the Catholics’ est, or ‘is,’ that is fundamentally metaphorical, a translatio or carrying of one thing across to another. The crucial difference is that, for the Catholics, the translation is objective and real, whereas for the reformers, transubstantiation occurs merely in language – in a figure or trope. Their charge is the inverse of Gardiner’s charge that the allegories of the reformers will subvert truth, ‘and all our religion [will be] reduced to significations’, to mere language, or tropology.20

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If Gardiner charges that Cranmer’s Eucharist has no basis in objective reality, Cranmer’s response bases eucharistic change in subject and psyche – in faith. Cranmer’s clearest answer comes in a memorable phrase describing Christ’s words at the Last Supper as having ‘effectual signification’. The reason he gives unambiguously indicates what he means by the phrase: ‘For he is effectually present … in the godly receivers’ of the bread and wine (Cranmer 1844: 34–5, emphasis added).21 Soon after, he adds, ‘to the godly eater’, the words of the supper ‘be effectuous and operatory’, and ‘so to the wicked eater, the effect is damnation and everlasting woe’ (Cranmer 1844: 36). The object is subject to the condition of its recipient. Christ is not absent but ‘present in his sacraments, as … in his word, when he worketh mightily by the same in the hearts of the hearers’ (Cranmer 1844: 11). This presence looks more dynamic than instrumental and appears also to be radically interiorised. In substance, the bread remains bread, however. Cranmer was a major player in another crucial controversy that erupted in the mid-sixteenth century and involved the perception of symbolism and the control of meaning. This controversy concerned religious vestments, most abidingly the surplice, and, like the eucharistic controversy, its rippling effects lasted well into the seventeenth century. Such vestments had a long, accretive history in the church that had made them symbolic foci of the role and virtues – spiritual and institutional – of the priesthood. In medieval Catholicism, the chasuble became the priestly garment bestowed at ordination that was distinctively associated with a sacrificial conception of the Mass and, more precisely, of its central event, the Eucharist. The development of liturgical dress and that of eucharistic doctrine in the Middle Ages were remarkably coincident, although explanation of this coincidence remains controversial. In Desiderius Erasmus’ Praise of Folly, first published in 1511, a scant six years before Martin Luther pinned his reformation theses to the church door, Erasmus’ character Folly, observing the symbolism of the vestments worn by prelates, wonders aloud what would happen if any of them ‘were to reflect on the meaning of his linen vestment, snow-white in colour to indicate a pure and spotless life, or of his twohorned mitre, both peaks held together by a single knot, signifying perfect knowledge of both Old and New Testaments; of his hands, protected by gloves, symbolic of purity, untainted by any contact with human affairs, for administering the sacrament; of his crosier, a reminder of his watchful care of the flock entrusted to his keeping, or the cross carried before him as a symbol of his victory over all human passions?’ (Erasmus 1986: XXXVII, 137). Folly’s openly ironic question registers the gap between spiritual symbolism and worldly practice that later led radical Protestant reformers to accuse the vestment-clad priesthood of corruption, hypocrisy, and empty pageantry. The radical Protestants’ accusations align with their iconoclasm – their hostility to imagery of any sort, whether painted, sculpted, or rhetorical. Reformation doctrines of the priesthood, radically encapsulated in the motto ‘the priesthood of every believer’, necessarily entailed some degree of opposition to the

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tradition-laden vestments of Catholicism, along with rejection of a sacerdotal priesthood set above and apart from the laity. Archbishop Cranmer’s official directions between 1549 and 1552 regarding the use of vestments at once reflect his revisions of doctrine and his effort to control the words, actions, and visual symbols that express it.22 When Cranmer offers an explanation as to why certain ceremonies and practices, including a number that involve liturgical vesting, have been ‘abolished and some retained’, his reasons emphasise neither their inherent sanctity nor that of the priesthood, but the need to maintain ‘decent order’ and ‘quiet discipline’ and lawful calling and authorisation, although they also include ‘edification’ and ‘reverence unto’ the practices maintained ‘for their antiquity’ (PB 1999: 286–9; cf. 324–6). Cranmer typically retains a traditional symbol or practice while radically altering – reforming – what it means. Little wonder that issues of seeming and being, of appearance and reality, issues not only of symbolism and representation but also of religious authority and power, were intensely debated throughout the Tudor and Stuart period. In the seventeenth century, Donne’s sartorial imagery to characterise competing religious faiths in ‘Satire III’ and in his Holy Sonnet ‘Show me, dear Christ, thy spouse’ testify to the life of the vestiary symbol, as does Herbert’s poem ‘Aaron’ to its transformative, translative interiorisation (Herbert 2007: 601). Gerrard de Malynes affords a final example of the metaphorical shaping of perception and institution in the longue durée of the English Renaissance. Malynes, who is on record both in the final decades of the Elizabethan period and throughout the reign of King James, claimed numerous careers and occupations but identified himself first and foremost as a merchant. His magnum opus is Consuetudo, vel Lex Mercatoria, or The Ancient Law-Merchant (1622); in addition, he also wrote relatively short economic tracts.23 Lex Mercatoria focuses primarily on mercantile custom, especially including the financial mechanisms of international trade, but, almanac-like, it engages Malynes’ entire culture and society: government, religion, science, mining, minting, apiculture, usury, the coinage, poverty, alchemy, law, double-entry bookkeeping, banking and insurance, and a good deal more. According to a modern economic historian, Malynes’ extant petitions and memoranda to the English Privy Council suggest that he is ‘the most likely candidate’ among mercantile/bullionist writers to have ‘influenced policy during the Jacobean years’ (Muchmore 1969: 337). The central metaphor by means of which Malynes conceives the economy of England is not only corporeal but more exactly physiological, and it is much influenced by his considerable medical reading. Malynes expounds three ‘Essential parts of traffic [trade]: namely commodities, money, and exchange for money by bills of exchanges’; respectively, these are ‘the body, soul, and spirit of commerce’ and function accordingly (Malynes 1629: 58–9). Malynes develops his analogy (traditionally a form of metaphor) elaborately. For a single example, his understanding of ‘spirit’ resembles that of the contemporary physician Helkiah Crooke, for whom spirit is an ‘exhalation’ of the blood that ties the divine soul to the earthly body, ‘as it were by a strong though not indissoluble bond’.24 It is corporeal: ‘A subtle and thin body always movable … and the vehicle or carriage of the faculties of the soul’, both ideas

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Malynes echoes. Subtlest of all substances, ‘as the wind’ the spirit described by Crooke ‘passeth and repasseth at his pleasure, unseen, but not unfelt; for the force and incursion thereof is not without a kind of violence’ – a biblically resonant description suggestive in relation to Malynes’ sense of the insidious yet forceful effect of the contemporary currency exchanges.25 The description that follows is further suggestive in light of Malynes’ economic knowledge – his grasp of the impact of supply and demand, the quantity of money, and the balance of payments – yet his insistence on the ultimately controlling impact of exchange: spirit is ‘always in motion, for the spirits [like the exchanges] are continually moved, not by another only … but also by themselves, that is, by an inbred principle of their own’, either ‘upward’ or ‘down-ward’.26 Malynes’ tropes are at times merely illustrative but, examined more closely, his central metaphor of body, soul, and spirit, in particular this independent principle of movement up or down, appears to have had a shaping influence on his thought about currency exchange, which lies at the very core of his economic theory. In short, what we have here is an actual example of metaphor’s working to inform Renaissance conceptions and to fashion Renaissance institutions. Thomas Milles, a customs officer and a contemporary of Malynes, makes a connection among rhetorical figuration, eucharistic sacrament, and economic exchange through trade that concludes the present essay by coming full circle. Milles’s figuration is as ironically charged as the accusations traded by Renaissance churchmen and almost as layered as the lines I earlier cited from Hamlet. In The Customers’ Alphabet, Milles equates merchants’ valuation in exchange with counterfeiting the king’s coin and excoriates certain ‘undertakers’, who are variously characterised as farmers of customs (crown patentees) and ‘merchants, that (tradeless themselves) live by buying and selling[,] … raising all their profits from others trades and pains’ (sigs. F2v, K2r): If exchange of goods by gold and silver, the body and blood of kings and kingdoms (represented to us in current coin) be the spirit of traffic and mystical cement that glues so fast together the mutual conjunction between sovereigns and subjects by law and grace, as religious justice hath taught us to believe, then draw these undertakers their methods all from ROME, where first was taught the doctrine that enchants and transubstantiates our Eucharistic sacraments (representing to us the body and blood of CHRIST, by bread and wine) to idolatrous masses, and our Christian exchange into Jewish usury. (Milles 1608: sig. K2v)27

In Milles’s accusations, translation and the surplus that accrues to it belong to Rome, defender of the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, rather than to the Reformers, the actual metaphorisers and interiorisers of such presence, whose ‘mystical cement’ Milles considers truly real. His own extravagant use of eucharistic metaphor to characterise the reality binding trade, currency, law, grace, and fealty emphatically reasserts the perceptual, constitutive force of translation in this period.

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1 See Anderson 2005. Throughout this essay I draw directly and indirectly on discussions in this book and in Anderson 1996. 2 OED, s.v. translate, translation; Hans Kurath and Sherman Kuhn, eds., completed by Robert E. Lewis, ed., Middle English Dictionary (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1954–2007), s.v. translation, notes meanings that are in most cases still available at least to the sixteenth century: e.g. the glorious transformation of a person into a constellation, the transfer of power or prerogatives from one person to another, the alienation of a kingdom from its ruler, the capture or exile of a people. On translation among companies, see Rappaport 1989:110 3 Lakoff 1987: 12–14, 334, 378, 534–40; cf. Lakoff and Johnson 1980: chs. 1–3, 12; Johnson 1987: chs. 2–3. Lakoff ’s radial category is essentially synchronic, a restriction I reject. 4 Padley 1985: I, 298–300, and chs. 4–5, sees a shift from a word-basis to a sentence-basis in the mid-seventeenth-century grammar of Port Royal. He insists that the word-basis of grammar is endemic to the Renaissance. See also Anderson 1996: prologue and 235–6 nn. 1–3. 5 So-called hard-word dictionaries, which become available in the vernacular around the turn of the sixteenth century, do not count in this sense. 6 Citation of Estienne 1543, cited here, is referred to as his Thesaurus; its translation is mine; I have also modernised medial ‘v’ to ‘u’. According to Starnes 1963: 99–100 (cf. 10– 11, 104), Estienne’s Thesaurus was ‘part of the standard equipment of school libraries and individual libraries’ in the Renaissance; Watson 1908: 387 describes Estienne’s (i.e. Stephanus’) Thesaurus as ‘the great general dictionary’ of the period. 7 Discussion derived from Anderson 2005: 11–12 and 1996: 75–7. Cf. Johnson 1987: 80–4 on the metaphorical projection from a physical realm to a figurative and perceptual one that best illustrates his theory regarding the embodied basis of human understanding.

8 9

10

11

12 13

14

OED, s.v. invest v., I.1.a–b, 2.a; 3.a, 4–8; II and II.9.a; investment, 1, 5. Quotation from Onions 1966, s.v. invest. See also OED, s.v. invest, II and II.9; see Florio 1598 for his citation. On the exporting of cloth and wool, Scott 1912 remains basic, esp. vol. 1. De Roover 1974: 362 reports that double-entry bookkeeping ‘was spreading fast among the English merchants [c.1600], although it had been practised assiduously by the Italian banking houses in Lombard Street [central London] ever since the fifteenth century, if not earlier’. Finkelstein 2000: 20 adds that Luca Pacioli’s instructions for double-entry bookkeeping (1494) had been translated into English, Dutch, and French manuals by 1543. See Baldwin 1926: 131, 140–9, 152, 220, 248; Hooper 1915: 433–49, esp. 437–46 (Elizabeth’s reign). Finkelstein 2000: 23 cites contemporary instances in which the tailor’s measure becomes a metaphor for ‘the need to keep each rank in its place’. On the distinction between metonymy and metaphor, see Anderson 2005: 4–5 and ch. 4. On such categories, see Lakoff 1987 and Lakoff and Johnson 1980. Also Baldwin 1926: 194 (Elizabeth’s dresses), 36, 162 (clothing and the symbolism of national identity), 81 (clothing and the symbolism of power), 33–4 (nobility and wealth), 167 (extravagance); and the classic treatments of Elizabeth’s use of symbolic dress by Yates 1975: 29–87, 215–19; Strong 1977: 46–54. See Clayton 1966, to which what follows is indebted; also Mahood 1957: 119–20; Thompson and Thompson 1987: 115–16; Fischer 1985, s.v. investment, 88. My subsequent comments necessarily overlap with these descriptions and particularly with Clayton’s. Unlike Clayton, I regard the images of beggary as simply a subset to that of clothing, and take the three major images in the passage to be clothes, commerce, and religion: cf. Clayton 1966: 77. Also cf. Tobin 1982: 94–5 to support ‘bawds’ not ‘bonds’ on the basis of echoes of Apuleius’ Golden Ass in

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15

16

17

18

19

20 21

22

Hamlet. Commenting on this passage, I draw on Anderson 2005: 31–4. The sense ‘sieges’ has been assumed for investments in this passage, for example, by Mahood 1957: 119–20, and Shakespeare 1982. The first record of the verb invest in this sense that the OED cites is in 1600. See my earlier speculation about en-clothing/enclosing. On bonds/bands as clerical collars, again see Clayton 1966: 80–1; Mahood 1957: 119–20. Rupp 1969: 25–7; Oecolampadius 1927: I, 337 (no. 235); see also Luther 1961: III, 176; and ‘Marburg Colloquy, 1529’ 1969: 71–107. Cranmer 1965: 227, emphasis added. Cranmer, by his own testimony, had read ‘almost everything that has been written and published either by Oecolampadius or Zwingli’ (MacCulloch 1996: 180); on Cranmer’s various views, see MacCulloch 1996: 181–3 and ch. 9; also Brooks 1992: 37, 43–4 and passim. My use of the term Zwinglian is meant to signal a kind of influence through other, more mixed and moderate, channels such as Martin Bucer, Peter Martyr, and at a greater distance, Johann Heinrich Bullinger and Philipp Melanchthon. Vermigli, generally known as Peter Martyr (1550?): fo. 15r. On Martyr’s influence on Cranmer, see Anderson 1988: 451–69; also Hall 1993: 227–34. Gardiner 1551: sig. G6v; Gardiner cites Melanchthon’s warning to Oecolampadius. Although Cranmer’s Answer was first published in 1551, he revised and thereby reauthorised the text while in prison. The First and Second Prayer Books of Edward VI 1999: 291 n.: the ‘Ordinal was not printed as part of the first issues of the Prayer-Book of 1549, but as the colophons of some copies

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show, it was intended to be bound up with copies of the Prayer-Book’. The 1552 Prayer Book contained a re-revised Ordinal from the start. References to both prayer books are to this edition, abbreviated PB. 23 Malynes 1629; pagination in the 1622 edition appears to be the same as in 1629, with differences limited to accidentals and the rare addition or omission of a single word. Malynes dropped ‘de’ from his name in his later publications; in the interest of consistency, I have retained ‘de’ for bibliographical reference, although I otherwise refer to him simply as ‘Malynes’. Like Malynes’ surname, his first name is variously spelled in the secondary literature: ‘Gerard’ or ‘Gerrard’. 24 Crook[e] 1616: 173. For a much-expanded discussion of Malynes’ conception of his central metaphor, see Anderson 2005: ch. 8, on which I draw here. 25 Anderson 2005: 174. The coincidence of this description of the spirit’s movement with that of a more familiar, non-corporeal spirit in John 3:8 of the King James version of the Bible is remarkable: ‘The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is everyone that is born of the Spirit.’ 26 Anderson 2005: 174. I have used the phrase ‘balance of payments’ rather than ‘balance of trade’ because, as Gould 1955: 127 observes, Malynes saw trade in terms of prices and money rather than volume. Malynes’ emphasis is always on the prices of imports versus exports. 27 Ordinarily I have not attempted to approximate graphic features, but those of Milles’s text are significant enough to require approximation. They shout.

References and Further Reading Abrams, M. H. (1988). A Glossary of Literary Terms, 5th edn. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston. Aitchison, Jean (1994). Words in the Mind: An Introduction to the Mental Lexicon, 2nd edn. Oxford: Blackwell.

Anderson, Judith H. (1996). Words That Matter: Linguistic Perception in Renaissance English. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Anderson, Judith H. (2005). Translating Investments: Metaphor and the Dynamic of Cultural

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Change in Tudor–Stuart England. New York: Fordham University Press. Anderson, Marvin (1988). ‘Rhetoric and reality: Peter Martyr and the English Reformation’. Sixteenth Century Journal, 19, 451–69. Baldwin, Frances Elizabeth (1926). Sumptuary Legislation and Personal Regulation in England. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Bateson, F. W. (1934; repr. 1961). English Poetry and the English Language. New York: Russell & Russell. Brooks, Peter Newman (1992). Thomas Cranmer’s Doctrine of the Eucharist: An Essay in Historical Development, 2nd edn. London: Macmillan. Cicero (1942; repr. 1988). De Oratore, ed. G. P. Goold, trans. E. W. Sutton, completed by H. Rackham, 2 vols. London: Heinemann. Clayton, Thomas (1966). ‘Quibbling Polonii and the pious bonds: the rhetoric of Hamlet I.iii’. Shakespeare Studies, 2, 59–94. Cranmer, Thomas (1844). An Answer unto a Crafty and Sophistical Cavillation Devised by Stephen Gardiner. In Writings and Disputations, ed. John Edmund Cox. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cranmer, Thomas (1965). A Defence of the True and Catholic Doctrine of the Sacrament of the Body and Blood of Our Saviour Christ, ed. G. E. Duffield. Philadelphia: Fortress. Crook[e], Helkiah (1616). Mικρoκoσμoγραϕια [Mikrokosmographia]: A Description of the Body of Man, together with the Controversies and Figures thereto belonging, Collected and Translated out of the Best Authors of Anatomy, especially out of Gasper Bauhinus and Andreas Laurentius. [London]. De Roover, Raymond (1974). ‘Gerard de Malynes as an economic writer: from scholasticism to mercantilism’. In Julius Kirshner (ed.), Business, Banking, and Economic Thought in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Selected Studies of Raymond de Roover (pp. 346–66). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Derrida, Jacques (1975). ‘White mythology: metaphor in the text of philosophy’, trans. F. C. T. Moore. New Literary History, 6, 5–74. Donne, John (1975; repr. 1987). Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, ed. Anthony Raspa. New York: Oxford University Press. Donne, John (1965; repr. 1970). The Elegies and the Songs and Sonnets of John Donne, ed. Helen Gardner. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Erasmus, Desiderius (1986). The Praise of Folly, trans. Betty Radice. In A. H. T. Levi (ed.), Collected Works of Erasmus: Literary and Educational Writings (vol. 27, pp. 77–153). Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Estienne, Robert (1543). Dictionarium, seu Latinae linguae thesaurus. Paris: Robert Estienne. Finkelstein, Andrea (2000). Harmony and the Balance: An Intellectual History of SeventeenthCentury English Economic Thought. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. The First and Second Prayer Books of Edward VI (1549, 1552; repr. 1999) [PB]. London: Prayer Book Society. Fischer, Sandra K. (1985). Econolingua: A Glossary of Coins and Economic Language in Renaissance Drama. Newark, NJ: University of Delaware Press. Florio, John (1598). A World of Words, or Most Copious Dictionary in Italian and English. London. Gardiner, Stephen (1551). An Explication and assertion of the true Catholic faith, touching the most blessed Sacrament of the altar. Rouen. Greenblatt, Stephen (1988). Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England. Berkeley: University of California Press. Greenblatt, Stephen (1990). Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture. New York: Routledge. Gould, J. D. (1955). ‘The trade crisis of the early 1620s and English economic thought’. Journal of Economic History, 15, 121–33. Hall, Basil (1993). ‘Cranmer, the Eucharist and the foreign divines in the reign of Edward VI’. In Paul Ayris and David Selwyn (eds.), Thomas Cranmer: Churchman and Scholar (pp. 217–58). Woodbridge: Boydell. Herbert, George (2007). The English Poems of George Herbert, ed. Helen Wilcox. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hooper, Wilfred (1915). ‘The Tudor sumptuary laws’. English Historical Review, 30, 433–49. Hoskins, John (1935). Directions for Speech and Style, ed. Hoyt H. Hudson. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Johnson, Mark (1987). The Body in the Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Jones, Ann Rosalind and Peter Stallybrass (2000). Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Metaphor and Culture Lakoff, George (1987). Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson (1980). Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lass, Roger (ed.) (1992). The Cambridge History of the English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Luther, Martin (1961). Confession Concerning Christ’s Supper 1528. In Robert H. Fischer (ed. and trans.), Word and Sacrament, III (pp. 151– 372), vol. 37 of Luther’s Works, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan and Helmut T. Lehmann, 55 vols. Philadelphia: Concordia Publishing and Muhlenberg Press. MacCulloch, Diarmaid (1996). Thomas Cranmer: A Life. New Haven: Yale University Press. Mahood, M. M. (1957). Shakespeare’s Wordplay. London: Methuen. Malynes, Gerard (1629). Consuetudo, vel Lex Mercatoria, or The Ancient Law-Merchant. London. ‘Marburg Colloquy, 1529’ (1969). In Donald J. Ziegler (ed.), Great Debates of the Reformation (pp. 71–107). New York: Random House. Milles, Thomas (1608). The Customers’ Alphabet and Primer. London. Muchmore, Lynn (1969). ‘Gerrard de Malynes and mercantile economics’. History of Political Economy, 1, 336–58. Oecolampadius, Johannes (1927). Briefe und Akten zum Leben Oekolampads, 1, ed. Ernst Staehelin. Leipzig: M. Heinsius Nachfolger, Eger & Sievers. Onions, C. T. (Ed) (1966). The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Padley, G. A. (1985). Grammatical Theory in Western Europe 1500–1700: Trends in Vernacular Grammar, 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. PB, see The First and Second Prayer Books of Edward VI. Peacham, Henry (1577, 1593; repr. 1954). The Garden of Eloquence. New York: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints. Puttenham, George (1589; repr. 1906, 1988). The Arte of English Poesie. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press.

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Quintilian (1920; repr. 1980). The Institutio Oratoria of Quintilian, ed. and trans. H. E. Butler, 4 vols. London: William Heinemann. Rappaport, Steve (1989). Worlds within Worlds: Structures of Life in Sixteenth-Century London. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ricoeur, Paul (1977; repr. 1979). The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-Disciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language, trans. Robert Czerny. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Ricoeur, Paul (1978; repr. 1979). ‘The metaphorical process as cognition, imagination, and feeling’. In Sheldon Sacks (ed.), On Metaphor (pp. 141–57). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ricoeur, Paul (1984). Time and Narrative, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer, 3 vols. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rupp, Gordon (1969). Patterns of Reformation. Philadelphia: Fortress. Scott, William Robert (1912). The Constitution and Finance of English, Scottish and Irish Joint-Stock Companies to 1720, 3 vols. Repr. New York: Peter Smith, 1951. Shakespeare, William (1982). Hamlet, ed. Harold Jenkins. London: Methuen. Shakespeare, William (1997). The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans et al., 2nd edn. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Sidney, Sir Philip (1973). An Apology for Poetry or The Defence of Poesy, ed. Geoffrey Shepherd. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Spenser, Edmund (1932–57; repr. 1966). A View of the Present State of Ireland, ed. Rudolf Gottfried. In Edwin Greenlaw et al. (eds.), The Works of Edmund Spenser: A Variorum Edition (vol 10, pp. 43–231). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Starnes, DeWitt T. (1963). Robert Estienne’s Influence on Lexicography. Austin: University of Texas Press. Strong, Roy (1977). The Cult of Elizabeth: Elizabethan Portraiture and Pageantry. London: Thames & Hudson. Tobin, J. J. M.. (1982). ‘ “Bawds” not “bonds” ’. Hamlet Studies, 4/1–2, 94–5. Thompson, Ann and John O. Thompson (1987). Shakespeare: Meaning and Metaphor. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Vermigli, Peter Martyr (1550?) A Discourse or treatise of Peter Martyr Vermilla Florentine, the public

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reader of Divinity in the University of Oxford wherein he openly declared his whole and determinate judgement concerning the Sacrament of the Lord’s supper, trans. Nicholas Udall. London, Watson, Foster (1908). The English Grammar Schools to 1660: Their Curriculum and Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Whalley, George (1974). ‘Metaphor’. In Alex Preminger et al. (eds.), The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, enlarged edn. (pp. 490–5). Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Yates, Frances (1975). Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Zwingli, Huldrich [Huldrych] (1984). Friendly Exegesis, that is, Exposition of the Matter of the Eucharist to Martin Luther, trans. Henry Preble. In H. Wayne Pipkin (ed.), Writings of Huldrich Zwingli (vol. 2, pp. 239–385). Allison Park, PA: Pickwick Publications.

7

Early Tudor Humanism Mary Thomas Crane

There are so many problems with ‘humanism’ both as a term and a concept that one hesitates to use it. For one thing, the noun ‘humanism’ actually dates from the nineteenth century (although ‘humanist’ – umanista in Latin – occurs in the fifteenth century). In the Renaissance various Latin phrases – bonae litterae, litterae humaniores, etc. – were used to describe the scholarly and educational field that we now call humanism. There has been much scholarly debate over many years about how ‘humanism’ in general is to be defined, and about its nature and scope in Tudor England and elsewhere. Central questions in these debates include: what was the relationship between Italian humanism and its northern European versions? Is the Protestant Reformation in northern Europe an outgrowth and close associate of humanism, as James McConica (1965) and Douglas Bush (1939) suggested, or did it destroy humanism proper, as argued by Frederic Seebohm (1867)? Was English humanism essentially politically conservative (as suggested in different ways by Fritz Caspari (1954) and Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine (1986)), or did it lead to political reform and eventually to republicanism (as Arthur B. Ferguson (1965) and McConica (1965) have argued), or was it essentially irrelevant outside the classroom (as Daniel Javitch (1978) holds)? Was humanism mainly a philosophical, literary, or pedagogical movement? Was it truly innovative, an outgrowth of medieval tendencies and practices, or merely a product of its own public relations efforts? Was it enabling for women, or, with a few extraordinary exceptions, implicated in the structures and institutions that excluded them from public life? Did it contribute to the development of the ‘new science’ in the seventeenth century (as Henry Turner (2006) has argued)? Debate continues on all of these topics. More recent writers like Grafton and Jardine point out our own implication in ideologies of humanism, as students, scholars, and teachers who work within institutions derived, even indirectly, from humanist ideals and practices and would therefore question the self-interestedness of any of our investigations of it.

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In general, earlier scholars tended to take humanism seriously as a successful reform movement, to take it on its own terms and to believe the claims of its early champions (although these earlier scholars were not, perhaps, quite as naive as some revisionist scholars suggest). More recently, there has been a tendency to emphasise early humanists’ lack of sophistication, their political conservatism or even political irrelevance, and to point out the gap between, on the one hand, their claims that a humanist education could create virtuous and effective leaders and reform human society and, on the other, the often brutal and dangerous actuality of political life during the period. In this essay I want to accord with Rebecca Bushnell (1996) in making a modest claim for the usefulness, sophistication, and significance, both intellectually and socially, of early Tudor humanism in England. I believe that humanism in sixteenth-century England effectively shaped practices of reading, writing, and thought as well as the ways in which subjects imagined themselves and their social and political roles. Some scholars have also argued that, although humanism bore few immediate political fruits in England, we can nevertheless trace tenuous links between earlier humanism and the emerging republicanism of the seventeenth century. As is well known, the humanist reform movement began in Italy, appearing there in the late thirteenth century, much earlier than its first beginnings in England. Scholars have charted a number of basic differences between Italian humanism and its later northern European versions. Italian humanism emerged out of opposition to the technical philosophical and logical programmes of late medieval scholasticism, which humanists accused of narrowness and sterility. Humanism sought to replace a scholastic curriculum focused on complex and highly specialised systems of philosophy, theology, and logic with a broader, more ‘humane’ training in literature and rhetoric. According to Grafton and Jardine, Italian humanism was largely propagated by charismatic and influential writers and teachers rather than through widespread curricular change. It introduced two intertwined programmes: an interest in the recovery, restoration, and translation of classical texts from Greek and Latin antiquity, and a focus on training in writing and speaking elegant Ciceronian Latin (rather than the ‘debased’ medieval Latin of the schoolmen). Scholars have suggested that Italian humanism differed from its northern European manifestations in several important ways. The Italian movement is often characterised as ‘pagan’ in contrast to the Christian humanism of the northern Renaissance, because it grew out of opposition to the logical, exegetical, and stylistic practices of the late medieval church and because it advocated a return to classical texts without sharing to the same extent northern concerns to make them compatible with Christianity. Italian humanism also seemed ‘pagan’ in its emphasis on the virtuous secular life in the context of the political controversies of Italian cities rather than (as in the north) on reform of the church. Italian civic humanism was meant to be of use not only to specialists but also to all citizens. Humanism has thus been linked by some scholars to the civic ideals of city states such as the Venetian and Florentine republics, although humanism continued as an influential pursuit under other regimes (such as the Medici in Florence).

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In Italy, the humanist movement was fuelled in part by a patriotic and quasi-nationalist desire to reclaim and re-establish a link between contemporary Italy and ancient Rome. Although training in Latin was predominant, the study of Greek also had a role in Italian humanism, and some have argued that the conquest of Constantinople by the Turks in 1453, which caused many Greek scholars to flee to Italy, was a formative event. The role of Greek learning was especially significant in the revival of interest in Plato (countering the medieval tradition of Aristotelianism). However, it remained true in Italy as well as in England that claims about the importance of Greek learning often exceeded actual knowledge of the Greek language and its literature. One of the earliest important Italian humanists was Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch), a classical scholar who revived interest in Cicero as a model for prose style, and who was also the author of important works in both Latin and Italian. Petrarch’s Florentine follower, Giovanni Boccacio, and later such scholars as Collucio Salutati, Leonardo Bruni, Poggio Bracciolini (who visited England), and Lorenzo Valla, continued to produce translations of important classical works and to recover lost manuscripts from classical antiquity, searching monastery libraries for these neglected treasures. Angelo Poliziano and Pietro Bembo continued the work of the previous generation of humanist scholars. Other Italian humanists turned to the works of Plato to provide an alternative to medieval Aristotelianism. Nicholas of Cusa, Marsilio Ficino, and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola were especially known for their development of Neoplatonic thought. Most important for the development of humanism in England were the famous Italian teachers who spread humanist learning to rest of Europe. Guarino Guarini in Verona and Ferarra (1374–1460) was an especially important figure in this regard. Finally, the writings of Niccolò Machiavelli exerted a profound influence on historical and political thought, and it is through his writings that humanism can be tied most explicitly to republicanism. Humanism spread north from Italy in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries but did not have widespread influence in England until the sixteenth. As humanism reached northern Europe, influencing scholars and teachers in France, Germany, the Low Countries, England, and elsewhere, its outlines were altered by new and inextricable connections with religious reform movements and, as scholars such as Elizabeth Eisenstein (1979), Walter Ong (1958), and Lisa Jardine (1993) have recently stressed, by the invention of the printing press with moveable type in Germany (around 1450). The printing press made possible a wider and more accurate dissemination of texts and thus was an important tool for furthering humanism, across geographical space and also across class lines (as printed books made texts available not only to wealthy patrons, who could afford hand-copied manuscripts, but also, increasingly, to ordinary people). But the printing press also shaped the forms through which humanism was expressed, advocated, and dispersed. Erasmus gained international stature as a humanist not, like Guarini and other Italians, as a charismatic teacher who attracted students from all over Europe, but through the strategic publication of widely read texts. In her biography of Erasmus, Jardine points out how much time he spent carefully seeing his manuscripts through humanist presses (such as Froben in Basel or the Aldine in

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Venice). A volume like Thomas More’s Utopia (seen through yet another humanist press in Louvain by Erasmus himself) represents a case in point, since its elaborate front matter – including letters from More to Peter Giles, from Giles to Jerome Busleiden, from Erasmus to John Froben, and commendatory verses in Latin by other European humanists – works to establish the prominence of the whole More–Erasmus circle of humanists. In general this group used publication quite effectively to create themselves as a pan-European intellectual movement. Although England was not home to any learned humanist press to rival Froben or the Aldine, the publication of vernacular humanist works (such as Sir Thomas Elyot’s The Book Named the Governor and Roger Ascham’s Schoolmaster) gained a wider audience for the movement. However, the humanist reliance on print publication in England contrasted sharply with an aristocratic disdain for the stigma of print, which lingered in England into the seventeenth century. Thus, courtly writers in England eschewed publication in favour of circulation of their works in manuscript among a small elite audience, a practice quite at odds with humanists’ enthusiastic embrace of publication. Some scholars have argued that the very form of a printed book, and the possibilities that it offered for organising and indexing its contents, led to an increasing emphasis on rational ‘method’ in humanist theories of composition and education. The French rhetorician Petrus Ramus, who popularised an organisational ‘method’ of dichotomy, can be said to have emerged from humanism and to have been strongly influenced by the book as a material object, as Walter Ong has shown (Ong 1958). Different countries in northern Europe developed different versions of humanism. France became a centre for serious textual scholarship. Its most influential figures, Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples and Guillaume Budé, were important scholars of classical and religious texts. Lefèvre was, like Erasmus, interested in religious reform, and produced a French version of the New Testament. The reformer Jean Calvin began his career, like many Protestants in the period, with strong interests in classical scholarship, but, like others, eventually turned away from humanism to focus more exclusively on religious matters. Budé was one of the best Greek scholars of the period and also contributed important work on Justinian’s Digest, the central legal work of Roman antiquity. In the next generation, essayist Michel de Montaigne was greatly influenced by humanist ideas but, as became increasingly common among later generations of humanist-trained writers, wrote in the vernacular rather than in Latin. In Germany and the Netherlands, Desiderius Erasmus emerged as the central figure of the northern Renaissance and exerted a profound influence over the forms that humanism was to take, through publication and the foundation of schools, in those countries and in England. Scholarly arguments have been waged over whether there is a definable Erasmian humanism, and, if so, how it might be defined. Erasmian humanism was basically centred on the reform of school curricula and methods of teaching, and also on ideals for the reform of church and state. Unlike Italian and French humanism, which was based in the writing and teaching of a few influential scholars, Erasmian humanism had a broad impact on the education of many (eventually most) young men who were educated in the countries, and England was one,

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where it became a dominant force. Erasmian humanism has been especially associated with values such as pacifism (most famously expressed in Erasmus’ critique of the warrior Pope Julius II in his Julius Exclusus and in Thomas More’s Utopia), and with the idea of a return to the original and unadorned text of the Scriptures, eschewing the complex apparatus of specialised scholastic commentary. Erasmian humanism can thus be linked to the reformist idea of making Christianity more directly available to ordinary people in a vernacular translation based on a biblical text understood in more literary (rather than specialised theological) ways. Like most humanists at the time, Erasmus did not hold a position in a university, but instead gained his reputation through his correspondence and publications. Although he was a member of a Roman Catholic religious order, Erasmus never lived in one place for very long. His ideas about reformed religion were at least initially similar in some ways to those espoused by the Protestant Reformation, and it is often said that ‘Erasmus laid the egg that Luther hatched’. Certainly Erasmus’ controversial 1516 translation of the New Testament shared such reformist ideas as the need to return to ‘original’ Greek texts and interpret them literally, without recourse to the tradition of scholastic commentary. But when Martin Luther (also deeply influenced by humanist ideas) broke with the Catholic Church, Erasmus, like Thomas More in England, refused to join him, ultimately disagreeing with Luther on his more pessimistic Protestant ideas about lack of free will and the innate sinfulness and imperfectibility of human nature. As an itinerant scholar without any permanent teaching position, Erasmus, as Lisa Jardine has shown (Jardine 1993), made a career out of networking, strategic publication, and friendships with other prominent humanists all over Europe (including John Colet and Thomas More in England). The effectiveness of Erasmus’ self-promotion – as Jardine argues, he even constructed a retrospective career for his own mentor Rodolphus Agricola – does not negate his real and lasting influence on education and on the concept of the publishing public intellectual. Erasmus’ published works range from the translation of the New Testament, the life and letters of St Jerome, the Enchiridion militis christiani (Handbook of a Christian Soldier), Institutio principis christiani (Education of a Christian Prince), as well as educational works such as the Adagia (Adages), Colloquia (Colloquies), De Copia (On Copious Expression), De ratione studii (On the Method of Study, written for John Colet’s new humanist school), and his famous Encomium moriae (The Praise of Folly). Erasmus championed the work of Rodolphus Agricola, who provided a ‘logic’ to form the basis for the Erasmian ideal of copious expression (see Chapter 4, Rhetoric). Agricola’s dialectic offers ways to generate and organise ideas for composition rather than a rigorous method of logical proof. We can sense behind Agricola’s work an underlying anxiety about, first, the difficulty of thinking of things to say, especially in Latin, but also anxiety about an uncontrolled proliferation and profusion of language, especially if it was based on promiscuous reading of pagan authors. Agricola’s logic offers rules and aids for generating commonplace ideas, and also offers a systematic way to classify both the rules and the ideas that they produce. Thus, Agricolan

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dialectic provided the ideal basis for a school curriculum designed to provide matter for invention, as well as ways to keep it under control. English humanism first began to emerge, in tentative and piecemeal ways, in the fifteenth century. It did not really take root until the Tudor monarchy discovered the usefulness of humanist-educated men in meeting two crucial needs: for propaganda to legitimise a rather tenuous claim to the throne, and for educated personnel to staff the centralised bureaucracy forged to strengthen its position in relation to the feudal aristocracy. English humanism was, at least at the beginning, closely linked to Italy, with travel occurring in both directions: English men went to study in Italy, and Italian scholars came to teach and write in England. Roberto Weiss, in his important study of Humanism in England During the Fifteenth Century (Weiss 1957), traces the earliest beginnings of humanist influence in England before the accession of Henry VII in 1485, although he notes that, at first, humanist learning was simply assimilated to existing scholastic methods and only very gradually brought about a transformation of attitudes and approaches to education. When the noted Italian humanist Poggio Bracciolini joined the household of Henry Beaufort, bishop of Winchester, in 1418, he was disheartened to find that England was, from a humanist’s point of view, a cultural backwater. There was virtually no interest in humanist education, no adequate libraries to be found, nor did English monasteries contain interesting manuscripts. Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, son of King Henry IV, first brought serious enthusiasm for humanism to England. He came to know a number of prominent Italian scholars and began, with their help, to build a library of classical and humanist works, much of which he donated to Oxford University. Although he did not read Greek himself, he commissioned translations of important works from that language into Latin, thus planting the first seeds of interest in Greek learning at Oxford. During the fifteenth century some graduates of Oxford and Cambridge began to undertake postgraduate studies in Italy (rather than, as was formerly common, in France), and as a result came under the influence of humanist teachers like Vittorino da Feltre, and, especially, Guarino da Verona. Returning to England, they were then able to transmit humanist learning to a new generation of English students, who were soon able to gain adequate training in bonae litterae without leaving the country. Henry VII took a greater interest in humanism and humanist scholars than had any previous English monarch. He discovered, as noted above, the value of humanist writers as propagandists for his regime. It was important to shore up the somewhat shaky Tudor claim to the throne by careful retelling of the history of the Wars of the Roses, emphasising the providential accession of Henry in bringing an end to a long period of violence and unrest. The Italian scholar Polydore Vergil, for example, came to England as part of a papal delegation and stayed on to write a history of England, the Anglia historia, which Henry commissioned. Henry also provided a humanist education for his children, hiring John Skelton and Bernard André, among others, to tutor them. Thus, when Henry VIII became king in 1509, humanists, with some justification looked forward to increased patronage and support from someone who

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had himself been educated in humane letters. Thomas More, for instance, greeted the accession of Henry VIII with several Latin epigrams, praising his humanist education: Quid enim non principe fiat ab illo, / Cui cultum ingenuis artibus ingenium est, / Castalio quem fonte novem lavere sorores, / Imbuit et monitis Philosophiae suis? (‘What could lie beyond the powers of a prince whose natural gifts have been enhanced by a liberal education, a prince bathed by the nine sisters in the Castalian fount and steeped in philosophy’s own precepts?’) More offers proleptic praise of Henry for providing jobs for humanists: Ille magistratus et munera publica, vendi / Quae sueuere malis, donat habenda bonis. / Et versis rerum vicibus feliciter, ante / Quae tulit indoctus praemia, doctus habet (‘He now gives to good men the honours and public offices that used to be sold to evil men. By a happy reversal of circumstances, learned men now have the prerogatives which ignoramuses carried off in the past’) (More 1963: III, 106–7). Doctus was the word used by English humanists to describe those who had received a humanist education, while indoctus could designate either those who had been educated according to late medieval scholastic principals or the relatively uneducated feudal aristocracy. More, of course, would be one of the docti or learned men preferred by Henry, and would come to learn that such appointments did not always end feliciter (happily). While the patronage of important figures at court helped encourage interest in humanism, it could not gain a real foothold until curricula at both universities and the schools in England were altered to incorporate humanist approaches. The earliest institutional changes came at Oxford, and especially New College, where, by the second half of the fifteenth century, the teaching of grammar began to follow the newer methods of Lorenzo Valla, and Greek was beginning to be taught as well. William Grocyn (c.1446–1519), one of the so-called ‘Oxford reformers’ studied by Seebohm (1867) and perhaps the first true English humanist, had, according to Weiss, begun to learn Greek before he went to study in Italy around 1488. Grocyn, along with Thomas Linacre (1460–1524; a fellow of All Souls, court physician, and tutor to Prince Arthur) and John Colet (1466–1519) brought the fruits of study in Italy back to England, where they influenced a new generation of humanists, including Thomas More. Humanist learning was further encouraged by the foundation of new colleges expressly dedicated to its principles: St John’s College, founded in Cambridge (where interest in humanism also began to appear) in 1511 and Corpus Christi College, Oxford, founded in 1516. Regius professorships in Greek and Hebrew came into being at both universities in 1542. John Colet was the most important of the early humanists, advocating an influential blend of religious and educational reform. He exercised his influence primarily through his sermons, his friendship with Erasmus, and most especially in founding St Paul’s School, which became the model for humanist grammar schools in England. His lectures on the New Testament, delivered at Oxford in 1496, advocated the application to the Bible of scholarly methods which humanists had applied to establishing and re-editing classical texts, eschewing the medieval practice of elaborate glosses and commentaries for more direct attention to the immediate contexts for, and language and style of, the text itself. Erasmus, who visited England at least six

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times, living there at one point for almost five years (1509–14), heard some of Colet’s lectures on the Pauline letters and was strongly influenced by his ability to combine classical learning with a reformed Christian faith. Colet’s greatest influence probably came through the founding of St Paul’s School in 1510 in London. Colet, Erasmus, and the school’s first headmaster William Lily collaborated in establishing the curriculum of the school and in writing a new Latin grammar (Lily’s Grammar). The Magdalen College School also adopted a humanist curriculum, as, soon, did many other schools throughout England. Northern European (Erasmian) humanism, as exemplified in English grammar schools, took further a technique already present in Italian educational practice. This technique involved teaching students to excerpt aphorisms, commonplaces, and striking sententiae from all classical works read, to collect them in a notebook, and to use them as the raw material for ‘invention’ (in the literal Latin sense of ‘finding’) of their own compositions. In its reaction against medieval scholasticism, Italian humanism had shifted its focus from logic (with its goal of epistemological certainty) to rhetoric (with more modest goals of plausibility and persuasion). Rodolphus Agricola’s humanist ‘dialectic’ offered a method for classifying gathered fragments so that they could be ‘framed’ into original compositions. Erasmus, in his De copia and other works, furthered this method, and Colet’s school codified it as the basis of the humanist grammar-school curriculum in England. This pedagogical method was especially appealing to Christian humanists like Erasmus and Colet because it provided a way to make classical literature more compatible with Christianity. Students were instructed to fly over the fields of classical literature like bees, selecting only the most wholesome and moral flowers from which to collect their nectar of learning. This ‘notebook method’ of collecting and recycling moral fragments also provided a way, at least in theory, to bridge the gap between humanist claims that education made people morally better and the realities of grammatical education. Latin was taught in the late Middle Ages in England through a method that emphasised the memorisation of rules (found in the grammar) and of examples of the rules (found in a Vulgaria). These examples were coined by the writer of the text and consisted of useful phrases for daily life (since students were usually required to speak Latin at certain parts of the day). Lily, on the other hand, deemphasised, to some extent, the memorisation of rules (though this was still a large part of learning Latin), stressing instead the assimilation of exemplary sentences taken from classical authors (found in a new Vulgaria written by William Horman). Horman’s examples tend to be moralising sententiae, and they reflect humanist ideals of hard work, diligence, and sober moral probity. The ‘Grammarians’ War’ of 1520, over the attempt to replace Richard Whittington’s traditional Vulgaria with Horman’s new one as an accompaniment to Lily’s Grammar, marked an important victory for the humanist curriculum at the grammar-school level. Lily’s Grammar was officially recognised as the standard textbook in 1542. As a humanist education gained ascendancy over older scholastic methods and was established as a valid credential for preferment at court, many writers began to

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contrast humanist education in bonae litterae, with its emphasis on such modest virtues as prudence and using time wisely, with an aristocratic training in fencing, dancing, hunting, and other pastimes designed to reveal the aristocrat’s graceful indulgence in the leisure that was his right. Before long, virtually all grammar schools in England used some version of St Paul’s curriculum, and private tutors (to Edward VI and Elizabeth) used it too. Humanist education manifested itself through a copious style (in Latin, or, increasingly, English) larded with moralising quotations from classical authors. Writing in this manner became a way to reveal possession of the ‘cultural capital’ (to use Pierre Bourdieu’s phrase) afforded by a humanist education, as aristocrats revealed their own ‘capital’ by dancing, fencing, hunting, hawking, and other such pursuits. It succeeded in part because it also created an alternative stance for upwardly mobile seekers of position at court. As Tudor monarchs, beginning with Henry VII, and especially Henry VIII, sought to protect their position by reducing the power (and numbers) of the powerful aristocratic families, ‘new men’ were needed to fill positions at court that nobles had previously filled. Although some scholars have argued that the Protestant Reformation, with its more pessimistic view of human nature and distrust of secular art, effectively ended humanism in England, others have suggested that there were significant continuities between the religious humanism of Colet, Erasmus, and More and later English Protestants. Certainly Henry’s break with the Roman church in the 1530s intensified the ascendancy of humanist-educated men at court, since it necessarily removed some previously influential clergy from power (and also provided lands formerly owned by the church to establish new men as landed gentry). Humanist education appeared at just the right time to provide an alternative set of credentials for preferment: rigorous rhetorical training and discipline in hard work, organisation, and diligence. Men trained in this way provided ideal bureaucrats, and many were preferred by Henry VIII and by his advisers More, Thomas Wolsey, and Thomas Cromwell. However, the idealistic rhetoric of educational theory, which argued that humanist education produced virtuous citizens who could improve society by advising the prince, yielded to reality: the need to ingratiate, to compromise, and to sway with the prevailing winds. Sir Thomas More was, perhaps, the most prominent humanist at the court of Henry VIII, although some have questioned whether he is to be considered a humanist in the purest sense of the term, since his strongly Catholic religious faith eventually led away from his position as adviser to Henry VIII towards martyrdom and sainthood, and from writing elegant humanist works to vehement religious polemic. His education was mixed, involving a strong humanist influence, but he also followed the aristocratic custom of spending time serving at table in the home of an important and wealthy figure, Cardinal John Morton. In addition, More was strongly attracted to Catholic ideals of a cloistered and celibate life, spending time at Charterhouse in London, and he seriously considered entering the order of Franciscan friars. Deciding instead on marriage and public life, he practised law and entered into friendships with Erasmus and his circle of continental humanists.

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More’s most important published works were his The History of King Richard III (with versions in both Latin and English) and Utopia. His study of Richard III follows the trend of Tudor historiography in depicting Richard (whose defeat by Henry VII marked the beginning of the Tudor regime) as a figure of monstrous evil. More follows English humanist principles not only in the strongly moralistic tenor of the work – which represents and criticises the evils of tyranny and pride – but also in its strong narrative sense. However, More’s brand of humanist historical writing differs greatly from that of an Italian humanist historian such as Machiavelli, who emphasised the realities of political life rather than its relation to moral ideals. More’s Utopia, written in Latin and published in 1516, continues to be a very controversial work. Critics have been unable to agree on such basic questions as whether Utopia, as More describes it, is intended to be a truly ideal society or an example of the opposite of an ideal (a dystopia). If it is meant to be a true utopia, critics have wondered why the Utopians are not Christian, and why the narrator, Hytholodaeus (whose name means ‘speaker of nonsense’) is such a questionable figure. On the other hand, if it is dystopic, why does it advocate so many reforms dear to both Erasmus and More? Critics have also questioned the relationship between the so-called dialogue of counsel in Book 1 and the description of Utopia in Book 2. Hytholodaeus’ praise of Utopian communism has also been much questioned and discussed. It seems clear that the answers to these questions lie both in More’s deeply humanist nature and also in those aspects of his character and background that led him to depart from humanism in important ways. Utopia’s dialogue form and playful use of rhetoric are important, and deeply humanist, features. In accordance with the humanist practice of argument in utramque partem, the work does not advocate a single view but explores multiple possibilities. It is thus not intended to be read as a straightforward political treatise, but, like Erasmus’s Praise of Folly, is inflected with multiple ironies. On the other hand, those ironies both reflect and question, humanist beliefs. Stephen Greenblatt’s influential reading of the work has emphasised the way in which it reveals More’s belief in humanist programmes of public service and reform, but also his equally strong distrust of human nature and the imperfections that make successful reform virtually impossible in the real world. The first book joins with the elaborate prefatory matter to place the work clearly in relation to Erasmus’ humanist circle. The ‘dialogue,’ in which a character named More urges a reluctant Raphael Hythlodaeus to serve as an adviser to some prince so that his humanist learning will lead to reform, offers both a humanist critique of contemporary social ills and a critique of humanist optimism that educated men can find a way to solve them. The description of Utopia in Book 2 presents a society that is superior in many ways to contemporary European states (offering freedom from poverty and avoidance of war), but ultimately buying those benefits at the cost of a system of constant surveillance and public shame. Written when More was considering whether to accept a position at the court of Henry VIII, Utopia directly confronts the gap between humanist hopes and ideals and the realities of human nature, especially when it is in close proximity to absolute

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power. Although the character ‘Morus’ argues that some good can be done by a humanist adviser who is able to compromise and bend with prevailing winds, More, who rose to the position of Lord Chancellor, found himself unable to accept Henry’s divorce, marriage to Anne Boleyn, and break with Rome. He was executed for treason on 6 July 1535. Thomas More is not the only sixteenth-century Englishman whose credentials as a humanist can be questioned, for along with arguments over how to define humanism are arguments over who in early Tudor England is to be considered a humanist. Scholars generally agree that Sir Thomas Elyot, Roger Ascham, and Sir John Cheke can be placed in the humanist camp. Elyot was about ten years younger than More and wrote in English rather than Latin, as later generations of English humanists were increasingly to do. He was the author of The Book Named the Governor, published in 1531, which offered an account in the vernacular of a humanist educational programme for prospective ‘governors’ or public officials, similar to Erasmus’ Institutio principis christiani. Elyot’s writing also transfers from Latin to English the humanist ‘copious’ style of writing interspersed with frequent citation of fragments from classical authors. Although Elyot did not have a successful political career, he was important as a populariser of the humanist educational programme. Sir John Cheke and Roger Ascham were both products of St John’s, Cambridge, and both were tutors to the children of Henry VIII. Cheke (along with Richard Cox) was tutor to Edward VI, and supervised Edward in a curriculum involving such rigorous (and tedious) instruction in Latin and Greek, both reading and composition, that scholars have wondered whether it contributed to his early death. Some of the boy king’s compositions survive, preserving his dutiful application of humanist methods to such topics as Amor maior causa obedientiae timor (‘love is a greater source of obedience than fear’). Accounts of Edward’s rigorous education can be found (Baldwin 1944; Grafton and Jardine 1986). Roger Ascham, in turn, supervised the education of the future Elizabeth I, and his programme of ‘double translation’ from Latin into English, and English back into Latin, is set forth in an influential educational treatise, The Schoolmaster (1570). Other figures from the courts of Henry VII and VIII are more tenuously connected with mainstream humanism. John Skelton served as tutor to Henry VIII and produced some typically humanist works, writing poems in Latin and translating classical works into English. However, his English poems, for which he is mostly known today, imitate native medieval rather than classical models. More tellingly, in the so-called ‘Grammarians’ War’, Skelton sided with the anti-humanist faction and expressed these sentiments in his poem ‘Speke Parrott’. The poet Thomas Wyatt presents a similarly mixed allegiance, translating both classical and Italian humanist authors, yet his translations of Petrarch and other lyric poems are steeped in the aristocratic milieu of Henry’s court. Many of Wyatt’s poems express the speaker’s anxious engagement with aristocratic and humanist systems that seem equally attractive but finally incompatible.

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Humanists also wrote in genres other than lyric poetry during the Henrician period. William West (2002) has traced a humanist tradition linking encyclopaedic writing and theatre, leading to humanist interludes such as John Rastell’s Nature of the Four Elements or John Heywood’s The Play of the Weather. Once humanist education became widespread, and once it offered a widely accepted source of cultural capital for preferment at court and in other areas, most prominent figures were influenced by it in some way, even when they were opposing some aspect of it. Whether or not humanist ideas about political reform had much practical effect, by the end of the sixteenth century almost every educated man in England was shaped to some extent by humanist practices, if not principles. Thus, rather than attempting to decide whether Skelton, Wyatt, Christopher St German, Reginald Pole, or Thomas Lupset are true humanists in the Erasmian mould, it might be more fruitful to trace the place of humanism in the complex mix of religious, educational, and political ideologies that shaped them. Readers may have noticed that all of the humanists discussed in this essay so far have been men. The question whether humanism was beneficial to women in the early modern period has been much debated. Joan Kelly famously argued (Kelly 1976) that women did not really experience a ‘renaissance’ in the early modern period because they had more social and economic freedom under the social structures that predominated in the late Middle Ages. Whether or not humanist educational reforms were a positive force for women is a slightly different question. Certainly, only a very few women were able to benefit from this new kind of education; the newly founded schools and universities were not open to women, so only those whose families could provide private tutors were exposed to the new learning. With a very few exceptions, women were educated with the expectation that they would used their learning in an exclusively private sphere – to train and influence their children, to serve as companions and aides to their husbands, to read the Scriptures and engage in devotional writing. Careers of public service or teaching were completely unavailable to women who were not queen of England. Nevertheless, there were women in this period who received a humanist training and became famous for their learning. Thomas More made his household into a school of sorts, where his daughters were educated in Latin along with his son. More’s eldest daughter Margaret was especially known for her learning, and Jaime Goodrich has traced the central role of Margaret’s translations in publicly promulgating her father’s ideas (Goodrich 2008). However, More’s serious attention to his daughters’ education coexisted with his belief in the intellectual inferiority of women and an assumption that they could have no role in public life. The daughters of Sir Anthony Cooke, Margaret, Elizabeth, Katharine, Anne, and Mildred, were also afforded a humanist education and, although they were also barred from public life, two of them in particular came to exercise considerable influence through their marriages to influential men and in the course of their efforts on behalf of their son’s careers. Mildred Cooke married William Cecil, later Lord Burghley, and was the mother of Robert Cecil; Anne married Nicholas Bacon, who reportedly owed

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some of his success at court to her position and connections. She later worked tirelessly to advance the careers of her sons Anthony and Francis. Only women who were in the possible line of succession to the throne were educated with the goal of developing the eloquence and prudence necessary for successful public leadership. Lady Jane Grey, who was executed in 1554 because of Protestant support for her claim to the throne, was praised by Ascham as a model student. Elizabeth I was also taught by Ascham and received a full humanist education with the idea that it might lead to public service. Although she is mostly known for her assumption of roles such as that of the Petrarchan mistress, Gloriana, or Astraea, she also did sometimes lay claim to the authority of her humanist education, as when she delivered addresses in Latin, continued to translate classical works throughout her life, or assumed a stance of moral authority in her speeches (Sharpe 2000). Although Elizabeth is also perhaps most commonly associated with aristocratic courtly favourites such as Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester, and Robert Devereux, earl of Essex, she relied on men with a humanist training such as William Cecil and Sir Nicholas Bacon for advice throughout her reign. Although self-conscious devotion to the humanist programme of educational, religious, and social reform did not survive the generation of More and Erasmus in its purest form (if, indeed, it ever existed in a pure form), its influence extended through the reign of Elizabeth and beyond. An education based on the study of classical literature remained an important credential for a public service career in England well into the twentieth century. More importantly, the rhetorical training and the habits of recycling bits of commonplace wisdom from classical authors instilled by humanist education mark the writing of British authors from Shakespeare through Milton and into the eighteenth century. Sir Philip Sidney, educated at the Shrewsbury School and Christ Church, Oxford; Edmund Spenser, of the Merchant Taylors’ School, and ‘Sizar’ or poor scholar at Pembroke Hall, Cambridge; Christopher Marlowe, a ‘poor boy’ at King’s School at Canterbury and holder of a scholarship at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, all represent examples of the widespread influence of humanism throughout England and across class lines. All three, in different ways, produced literary works shaped by humanism. Shakespeare, indeed, may have learned ‘smalle Latine & lesse Greeke’ in the grammar school at Stratford, but his writings are strongly marked by the rhetorical methods that would have been taught there. There is no question that humanist education, however limited its direct effect on political reform, had a crucial formative influence on English literature, in the early Tudor period and for many years to come.

References and Further Reading Baldwin, Thomas Whitfield (1944). William Shakespeare’s Small Latine & Lesse Greeke, 2 vols. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Bourdieu, Pierre (1977). Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Bush, Douglas (1939). The Renaissance and English Humanism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bushnell, Rebecca (1996). A Culture of Teaching: Early Modern Humanism in Theory and Practice. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Carlson, David (1993). English Humanist Books: Writers and Patrons, Manuscript and Print, 1475– 1525. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Caspari, Fritz (1954). Humanism and the Social Order in Tudor England. New York: Columbia University Press. Crane, Mary Thomas (1993). Framing Authority: Sayings, Self, and Society in Sixteenth-Century England. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Eisenstein, Elizabeth (1979). The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ferguson, Arthur B. (1965). The Articulate Citizen and the English Renaissance. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ferguson, Wallace K. (1948). The Renaissance in Historical Thought: Five Centuries of Interpretation. Cambridge, MA: Riverside. Fox, Alistair and John Guy (1986). Reassessing the Henrician Age: Humanism, Politics, and Reform, 1500–1550. Oxford: Blackwell. Goodman, Anthony and Angus MacKay (eds.) (1990). The Impact of Humanism on Western Europe. London: Longman. Goodrich, Jaime (2008). ‘Thomas More and Margaret More Roper: a case for rethinking women’s participation in the early modern public sphere’. Sixteenth Century Journal, 39/4 (Winter), 1021–40. Grafton, Anthony and Lisa Jardine (1986). From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Europe. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Halpern, Richard (1991). The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation: English Renaissance Capital and the Genealogy of Culture. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Jardine, Lisa (1993). Erasmus, Man of Letters: The Construction of Charisma in Print. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Javitch, Daniel (1978). Poetry and Courtliness in Renaissance England. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Jordan, Constance (1986). ‘Feminism and the humanists: the case for Sir Thomas Elyot’s

Defense of Good Women’. In Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers (eds.), Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourse of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe (pp. 242–58). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kahn, Victoria (1985). Rhetoric, Prudence, and Skepticism in the Renaissance. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Kelly, Joan (1976). ‘Did women have a Renaissance?’ In Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz (eds.), Becoming Visible: Women in European History (pp. 139–64). Boston: Houghton Mifflin. McConica, James (1965). English Humanists and Reformation Politics under Henry VIII and Edward VI. Oxford: Oxford University Press. More, Thomas (1963). The Yale Edition of the Complete Works of St Thomas More, 21 vols. Yale University Press: New Haven. Ong, Walter (1958). Ramus, Rhetoric, and the Decay of Dialogue. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Pocock, J. G. A. (1975). The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought at the Atlantic Republican Tradition. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Rabil, Albert (ed.) (1988). Renaissance Humanism: Foundations, Forms and Legacy, vol. 2: Humanism Beyond Italy. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Seebohm, Frederic (1867). The Oxford Reformers of 1498: Being a History of the Fellow-Work of John Colet, Erasmus, and Thomas More. London: Longman, Green. Sharpe, Kevin (2000). ‘The king’s writ: royal authors and royal authority in early modern England’. In Kevin Sharpe, Remapping Modern England (pp. 127–50). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stewart, Alan (1997). Close Readers: Humanism and Sodomy in Early Modern England. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Turner, Henry (2006) The English Renaissance Stage: Drama, Poetics, and the Practical, Spatial Arts 1580–1630. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wakelin, Daniel (2007). Humanism, Reading, and English Literature, 1430–1530. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Walker, Greg (2007). Writing under Tyranny: English Literature and the Henrician Reformation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Early Tudor Humanism Weiss, Roberto (1957). Humanism in England During the Fifteenth Century. Oxford: Blackwell. Wells, Robin Headlam (2005). Shakespeare’s Humanism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. West, William (2002). Theatres and Encyclopedias in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Wolfe, Jessica (2004). Humanism, Machinery, and Renaissance Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wynne-Davies, Marion (2007). Women Writers and Familial Discourse in the English Renaissance : Relative Values. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Platonism, Stoicism, Scepticism, and Classical Imitation Sarah Hutton

The Renaissance owes its name to the so-called ‘revival of letters’, the new valuation of classical culture, which originated with humanist scholars of the fifteenth century and developed into the programme of recovery and rediscovery of the textual sources of Latin and Greek culture that has come to be known as the humanist movement. Although ‘humanism’ originally entailed proficiency in those languages, the secular emphasis of the discipline, its central concern with literary, linguistic, and historical issues, ensured that humanism had enormous impact on vernacular cultures across Europe. Scholarly focus on humanist rhetoric has obscured its important impact on philosophy, where the refreshed discovery of classical texts resulted in a wider knowledge of ancient philosophy than ever before in post-classical times: in particular, the expanded knowledge of the corpus of Platonic and Stoic writings and the new access to the sources of scepticism significantly widened philosophical horizons still dominated by Aristotelianism (Copenhaver and Schmitt 1992; Kraye 1996). In the longer term, the philosophical pluralism which to which these writings contributed resulted in the displacement of Aristotelianism as the backbone of European philosophy. The impact of the recovered corpus of ancient philosophy was not confined to professional philosophy but extended well beyond into all aspects of vernacular literary culture. Humanism played a key part in this process. First of all, humanism made these new aspects of philosophy available to a wider audience than the professional philosophy of the ‘schools’ (i.e. the medieval scholastic philosophers and theologians), with the result that part of the lasting contribution of humanism to philosophy was the development of secular philosophy. This shift from technical to lay philosophy exposed humanists to the jibe that they were ignorant of philosophy. An inevitable, longer-term, consequence of the process of laicisation, which they initiated, was the assimilation of classical thought as the stock-in-trade of Renaissance secular culture. These developments are as true of the English Renaissance as of the rest of Europe – the main difference being that England was, if anything, a latecomer to the cultural developments that define the Renaissance as a period.

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When singling out individual philosophies for discussion, we should bear in mind that they were received and studied in a pluralistic setting. For this, the Renaissance had both classical precedent and humanist example. Among the most important sources for ancient philosophy were the writings of Cicero, the Roman author most admired by Petrarch and other humanists. In the Renaissance, Cicero was admired not just as a master of eloquence, but also as a philosopher in his own right. Just as Cicero had mediated Greek philosophy to the Romans, so also his writings were of incalculable importance as a conduit of ancient philosophy to the Renaissance. Cicero was not a mere doxographer, or mere retailer of the ideas of others, but his writings record the interaction of philosophical positions with one another, including his own. In philosophy he may be described as an eclectic, since he drew on the Stoics, Plato, and Aristotle. Furthermore, he was an example of a philosophical amateur, not a professional. An eminent lawyer and man of public affairs, his was a philosophy for the active life, not a life of meditation. The appeal of his philosophy to the thinking layman was increased by its generic accessibility in the dialogue or private letter. In his introductory letter to his edition of Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations, Erasmus recommends Cicero for his moral philosophy, and for making philosophy relevant to everyday life, by adopting a style ‘that even an uneducated audience could applaud’ (letter to John Vlatten, in Martindale 1985: 127). Although Platonism, Stoicism, and scepticism were recognised by the humanists as distinct branches of philosophy, they were not treated as self-contained, mutually exclusive philosophical alternatives, as they are today. Accommodation is the hallmark of their assimilation into Renaissance culture. As with other areas of the Renaissance classical revival, the newcomers to the philosophical corpus were adopted and adapted to the needs and expectations of a different culture. To make an obvious point, part of the appeal of Stoicism and Platonism to the Renaissance was the moral emphasis of these philosophies, which struck a chord with humanism’s own preference for moral philosophy. Plato’s concern with the nature of true eloquence likewise echoed humanist interest in rhetoric. One of the most significant ways in which the receiving culture of the Renaissance transformed the classical past was its accommodation of pagan philosophy to the requirements of Christianity: the most striking example of reinvention of this kind is the transformation of Plato into a proto-Christian sage, the divine Plato, the seer of the soul most famously celebrated in Milton’s ‘Il Penseroso’. By seeking an accommodation between philosophy and faith, humanist thinkers were continuing an established tradition: Seneca, for example, had been revered as the acceptable face of Stoicism in the Middle Ages, on account of his piety, sobriety, and moral fortitude. The Renaissance interpretation of Seneca continued in this vein, following the lead given by Petrarch’s immensely popular De remediis utriusque fortunae. Even Francis Bacon acknowledged that Seneca ‘seemeth … to have some approach to the state of a Christian’ (Essays: ‘Of Adversity’). What was new was the expanded vista on Stoic thought, which made it less easy to ignore those aspects of Stoicism that did not fit this proto-Christian model. Scepticism had long been known through the writings of Cicero, but the recovery of Pyrrhonism through the writings of the

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rediscovered Sextus Empiricus opened the way for new applications for scepticism as a weapon against dogmatism in the religious crises of the Reformation. The recovery and dissemination of classical philosophy would not, of course, have been possible without the humanist linguistic skills that gave access to original sources. Most obviously, humanist knowledge of Greek made possible the rediscovery of Plato, early Stoicism, and Greek scepticism. Furthermore, humanist educational programmes ensured that readers had the linguistic skills to read both Latin and Greek philosophy. Moreover, humanist translations brought classical texts a wide public. In the case of classical philosophy, vernacular translation was less significant than translation into Latin, but this did not mean that philosophy was accessible only to the university elite. As the lingua franca of Europe in this period, Latin was the language of educated lay readers, as well as clerics, even if, at its most basic, a grammar-school education equipped Elizabethans with only ‘smale Latine and lesse Greeke’ (Baldwin 1944). The evidence of Elizabethan library collections is that bilingualism in Latin and the vernacular was fairly standard. Latin texts were therefore relatively accessible: Cicero and Seneca, for example, were normally read in Latin. There were a number of Latin editions of their works printed in England in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Since Greek was less widely known, Latin translations of Greek texts were the key to their dissemination across Europe. Ficino’s Latin translation of Plato is perhaps the best example of this. Far from being an indicator of narrow readership, the fact of a text’s being printed in Latin gave it a wide audience Among the key texts of Renaissance intellectual culture, the popularity of More’s Utopia (1516) owes much to the language in which it was written, namely Latin. And Baldassare Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano was more widely read in England in Bartholomew Clerke’s Latin translation De curiali (1571) than in Sir Thomas Hoby’s English The Courtier (1561). The use of Latin as medium of intellectual discussion means that translation into the vernacular (e.g. English) is not the best indicator of diffusion. But to recognise this is not to belittle the importance of vernacular translation. Rather, it is to put it in perspective. The overall trend of the period was towards the full development of the vernacular as the chief medium of written expression. Latin permitted an international readership, though, in a national context, vernacular writing reached a wider social spectrum than Latin. Promotion of the vernacular was a dimension of the humanist enterprise. One of the best known English translations of classical texts – North’s translation of Plutarch – was actually made from another vernacular translation – Jean Amyot’s French translation of Plutarch, La vie des homes illustres Grecs et Romans. The first printed English translation of Epictetus’ Enchiridion, John Stanford’s The Manual of Epictetus (1567), was translated from French, not Greek. Part of the appeal to the humanists of classical philosophy outside the Aristotelian tradition was its philosophical style and the diversity of genres used for philosophising. Erasmus admired Plato as the ‘most eloquent of philosophers’ and Plutarch for combining learning with eloquence. For Petrarch, Cicero was unrivalled for his eloquence. In contrast to Cicero, the brevity of Seneca’s written style was part of his appeal, though it did not become fashionable until the late sixteenth century. The

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philosophers commended by Sidney in his Apology for Poetry are those who employed ‘poetical helps’ to express their thoughts, namely Plato and Cicero. As Francis Bacon notes, the ability to communicate is an asset in a philosopher, and he commends the Stoics and Plato in this regard: ‘it is a thing not hastily to be condemned, to clothe and adorn the obscurity even of philosophy itself with sensible and plausible elocution. For hereof we have great examples in Xenophon, Cicero, Seneca, Plutarch, and of Plato also in some degree’ (Advancement of Learning, 1.4.4). Indeed, according to Thomas Elyot, the philosophers who most aptly exemplified Horace’s judgement that the best writing combines instruction with pleasure were Plato and Cicero: ‘what incomparable sweetness of words and matter shall he [the student] find in the said works of Plato and Cicero; wherein is joined gravity with delectation, excellent wisdom with divine eloquence, absolute virtue with pleasure incredible’ (Elyot, The Governor 1.12, in Smith 1967). The genres preferred by the Stoics, Platonists, sceptics, and their spokesmen contrasted with the formal treatises in which medieval philosophers had expounded their theories. Cicero, Plato, Seneca, and Plutarch made use of the dialogue, the personal letter, and the essay as the preferred media of intellectual discussion, and they were widely imitated by humanists themselves. The choice of such genres was undoubtedly a recommendation to lay readers. For example, Plutarch’s collection of ethical reflections known as the Moralia, printed in Greek in 1509, and translated into English by Philemon Holland in 1603, was not just a conduit of Stoic and Platonic moral philosophy, but helped to popularise the loose philosophical essay as a form for private philosophical reflection which was imitated by, among others, Montaigne and, after him, Bacon. Humanist aesthetics and literary theory actively encouraged the practice of using classical models. This was enshrined in the doctrine of ‘imitation’, which consisted not of slavish copying, but the emulation of classical models (see Chapter 4, Rhetoric). As a teaching technique for inculcating classical standards in the writing of Latin and Greek, imitation entailed following the style of recommended authors. Ben Jonson was echoing classical precedent and humanist opinion when, in his Discoveries, he defined imitation as a kind of creative adaptation, and cautions against mere servile reproduction. To imitate, he writes, is to be able to convert the substance or riches of another poet to his own use. To make choice of one excellent man above the rest and so to follow him as the copy may be mistaken for the principal. Not, as a creature that swallows, what it takes in, crude, raw or undigested, but, that feeds with an appetite and hath a stomach to concoct, divide and turn all unto nourishment. (Discoveries: ‘Of Imitation’)

Erasmus’ satire Ciceronianus (1528) was famously directed against imitation of the first type – the self-conscious reproduction of Ciceronian Latin. As exemplified by Erasmus’ De copia, imitation was a method for acquiring a richer, more expressive written style, by a process of selection and recombination of examples drawn from a variety of clas-

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sical sources. It was a method which encouraged eclecticism, in philosophy no less than in other fields: in The Schoolmaster (1570) Roger Ascham cites as a commendable example of imitation his friend Sturm’s recommendation that ‘examples out of Plato and other good authors’ should be used to illustrate the precepts of Aristotle (Schoolmaster, 1.21, cit. Smith 1967). Perhaps the most striking English example of such eclecticism in practice is Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), where ancient philosophy is treated as a repository of sententiae and the discussion of melancholy takes the form of a patchwork of quotations. The object of classical imitation, according to Renaissance theory, was not mere faithful reproduction of the original, but the transformation of the models imitated to present use. A prime example of such imitation resulting in creative adaptation is More’s Utopia: the book owes much to his reading of Plato’s Republic and the satires of Lucian. The result is neither Platonist nor Lucianic, but an entirely new genre, one that raises serious political issues in a light-hearted way. The book was, furthermore, directed at a non-academic audience, and its success in reaching that audience may be explained in terms of the way it is written. And indeed, the extra-mural diffusion of classical philosophy in vernacular culture that was initiated by the humanists owed much to mediation in non-philosophical formats. Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano, for example, functioned as a compendium of Platonic wisdom. Another source of philosophical doctrine were discursive works like Du Plessis Mornay’s De la vérité de la religion chrestienne (translated by Sir Philip Sidney and Arthur Golding as A Work Concerning the Trueness of the Christian Religion, 1587) or compendia like La Primaudaye’s L’Academie Françoise (translated into English by Thomas Barnes in 1586). Drama contributed to popular familiarity with Stoicism through the plays of Seneca, which enjoyed wide popularity in the Elizabethan period.

Platonism In the Middle Ages, Plato’s philosophy had been known in imperfect translation, via only a handful of dialogues. Knowledge of the works of other Platonists was partial. The works of Plotinus were unknown. In the fifteenth century one man changed all that: the Florentine, Marsilio Ficino (1433–99). Ficino’s Latin translation of the thirty-six extant dialogues of Plato (commissioned by Cosimo de’ Medici and published in 1484) ensured that the philosophy of Plato was more widely known in the Renaissance than at any time since classical antiquity. Ficino also translated other important thinkers in the Platonic tradition, the most important of whom was Plotinus, whose Enneads Ficino translated and published in 1492. As part of the same programme of translation, Ficino also translated the writings of Hermes Trismegistus, the supposed Greek sage whose writings were believed to be a key interface between pagan philosophy and biblical religion. Ficino’s legacy was not just access to hitherto ‘lost’ philosophical works, but an interpretative approach to reading them. He regarded the Platonic tradition as a continuous one, and interpreted Plato through his later

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followers, notably Plotinus. He also presented Plato’s dialogues as a unified system of philosophy. In recommending Platonism to his Renaissance readers, he stressed compatibilities between Platonism and Christianity, as well as parallels between Platonism and other philosophy in the European tradition. For Ficino, Plato stood as first among philosophical equals, with special insight into religious truth. One of Ficino’s most enduring contributions to Renaissance literature was his virtual invention of the concept of ‘Platonic love’ in his commentary on Plato’s Symposium. By reinterpreting the implicit pederasty of Plato’s dialogue as amatory idealism, Ficino obliterated the unacceptable face of Greek social practices, opening the way to the creative adaptations of Platonic love popularised by dialoghi de’ amore, and central to the vocabulary of subjectivity in Renaissance love poetry. Ficino’s translation of Plato retained its currency well into the eighteenth century. Aldus Manutius published the first Greek edition of Plato’s dialogues in 1513. In 1578 the Huguenots Henri Estienne and Jean de Serres dedicated their edition of Plato to Queen Elizabeth I. However, none of Plato’s dialogues was translated into English, though there was an English translation of the pseudo-Platonic dialogue Axiochus (London, 1592). Moreover, the only dialogue to be printed in Greek in England was the Menexenus (Cambridge, 1587). This was in striking contrast to contemporary France, where there were numerous editions and translations. Indirect knowledge of Platonism in Tudor England was, of course, available through Latin sources, such as Cicero, and popular manuals of contemporary culture, such as Castiglione’s The Courtier. An interest in Platonism was nevertheless fostered in England in a number of ways. Early on, in the mid-fifteenth century, Leonardo Bruni and Pier Candido Decembrio dedicated their translations of Plato to Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, benefactor of the present Bodleian Library. By the early sixteenth century, interest in Platonism is evident at Tudor universities. The new colleges founded along humanistic lines, notably Corpus Christi College Oxford and St John’s College Cambridge, acquired Plato’s works. Indeed, Cardinal Wolsey’s unachieved plans to found Cardinal College at Oxford included the making of transcriptions of all of Cardinal Bessarion’s Greek manuscripts. Visiting humanists such as Erasmus and Juan Luis Vives helped to promote the study of Plato. Indeed, Erasmus’ own Christian humanist Platonism owed much to his English friend, the humanist John Colet, who had in his turn corresponded with Ficino. Tudor humanists such as John Cheke, Nicholas Carr, Roger Ascham, and John Aylmer were among the first to encourage the study of Plato. Aylmer’s pupils included Jane Grey, who studied Plato’s Phaedo. Ascham’s reading of the Phaedrus is evident in his Toxophilos. Elyot’s The Boke Named the Governour (1531) is in many ways a reflection on Plato’s Republic, and More’s translation of the life of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1510) is testimony of his interest in the Platonist humanists of Italy. The influence of Platonism on English literature was pervasive, but diffuse. There are many writers, among them Shakespeare, where Platonism is a presence, even though it is difficult to pinpoint specific sources and doctrines. In most cases literary

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Platonism is mediated by other literary sources in Italian and French literature: notably Petrarch, Tasso, Du Bellay, and the poets of the Pléiade. A central theme of the literary Platonism of the Renaissance was the idealisation of secular love through the doctrine of spiritual beauty and what has come to be called Platonic love. Subsumed within Petrarchism, Platonic love was celebrated in lyric poetry, especially in sonnet sequences like Spenser’s Amoretti and Drayton’s Idea, and given more critical treatment in Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella. It was also incorporated into pastoral romance made popular by Honoré d’Urfé’s Astrée. Underlying these literary manifestations of Platonism was courtly Platonism of the kind expounded in Castiglione’s The Courtier. When Sidney opens Sonnet 71 of Astrophil and Stella with the question ‘Who will in fairest book of nature know / How virtue may best lodged in beauty be’, and answers it by declaring Stella to be the outward manifestation of inward beauty, he is enunciating Platonic doctrine as expounded by Bembo in the fourth book of Castiglione’s Courtier. There Bembo declares ‘outward beauty’ to be ‘a true sign of the inward goodness, and in bodies this comeliness is imprinted more and less, as it were, for a mark of the soul, whereby she is outwardly known’ (The Courtier, trans. Hoby, book 4). The writer whose Platonism is best documented and most complex is Edmund Spenser, who drew on wide variety of sources including Macrobius, Boethius, Alain de Lille, and Dionysius the Areopagite as well as Ficino’s De Amore (especially important for his Fowre Hymnes). One writer who turned directly to Plato’s text was Ben Jonson, who owned Jean de Serres’ translation and probably drew directly on Ficino in his treatment of Platonic love in his masques The Masque of Beauty (1608) and Love’s Triumph through Callipolis (1630), and in his play The New Inn (1629). By the end of the sixteenth century we have the first examples of indigenous English Platonic thought in the work of Everard Digby (c.1550–92) and Thomas Jackson (1579–1640). Both exhibit the syncretic tendencies of Ficinian Platonism. Digby’s Theoria analytica ad monarchiam scientiarum demonstrans (1579) was the first serious philosophical work to be published in post-Reformation England. Digby attempts an accommodation between Platonism and Aristotelianism by combining Aristotelian syllogistics with Platonic dialectic. This is subsumed within a Platonist system of metaphysics according to which all things, including the human mind, derive from the divine ideas in the mind of God. Jackson’s Platonism, too, was syncretic, but more overtly theological in its application. A younger contemporary of Richard Hooker, at Corpus Christi College, Jackson wrote twelve books of commentaries on the Apostles’ Creed, published singly from 1613. Like Ficino, he treats Platonism as an ancient theological Platonism. In this respect he anticipates the socalled Cambridge Platonists who flourished at University of Cambridge in the midseventeenth century (Patrides 1980). Although not a close-knit school of thinkers, Cambridge Platonism is the most important example of Platonist philosophy produced in the English language. Philosophically, the most prominent members of this group were Henry More (1614–87) and Ralph Cudworth (1617–88). Other members of the group were Benjamin Whichcote (1609–83), Nathaniel Culverwell (1619–33), John Smith (1618–52), and Peter

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Sterry (1613–33). They all studied at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, except for Henry More, who studied at Christ’s College, where he was a younger contemporary of Milton. They were exponents of a syncretic, Christianised Platonism, reminiscent of, but distinct from, the Florentine Platonism. But they were also receptive to other currents of thought, both ancient (e.g. Stoicism) and contemporary (e.g. Cartesianism). With the exception of More and Cudworth, most of their writings were published posthumously: Smith’s Select Discourses in 1659, and Sterry’s Discourse of the Freedom of the Will in 1675, Culverwell’s An Elegant and Learned Discourse of the Light of Nature in 1652, and Whichcote’s Moral and Religious Aphorisms in 1703. They were masters of poetic prose, who, while valuing reason, acknowledged the communicative power of metaphor. In this they followed the example of Plato, who used allegory to convey metaphysical truth. Like Ficino, they believed Plato to have had special insight into matters divine. Their Christian Platonism has literary analogues in the poetry of Thomas Traherne, Thomas Vaughan, and Andrew Marvell. The only poet of their number, Henry More, was an admirer of Spenser, whose stanzaic pattern he adopted for Psychodia platonica (1642) and other allegorical poems on the soul.

Scepticism The form of scepticism best known in the early Renaissance was the academic scepticism of Cicero, which denies that it is possible to know anything with absolute certainty. All knowledge-claims, therefore, being at best provisional, this form of scepticism is also known as mitigated scepticism. The name, ‘academic’ derives from its origins in the Platonic Academy of the third century BC, where scepticism was taught by Arcesilas and Carneades. Since Greek sources were unknown in the Middle Ages, Cicero was the main source for academic scepticism in medieval times, and, following Petrarch’s commendation, remained an important source throughout the Renaissance. Knowledge of Ciceronian scepticism was enlarged first by Petrarch’s commendation of Cicero’s Academica, the first printed edition of which appeared in 1548, edited by Omer Talon and his friend Pierre de la Ramée (Ramus). This manifested a fuller knowledge of Cicero’s Greek sources, acquired from doxographies such as Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of the Philosophers and the writings of Sextus Empiricus. Of even greater impact than these additions to the corpus of academic scepticism was the recovery of the second school of Greek scepticism, Pyrrhonism, obtained from Diogenes Laertius’ Life of Pyrrho and Sextus Empiricus’ Outlines of Pyrrhonism. Pyrrhonian scepticism, which originates with Pyrrho of Elis (c.360–352 BC), is a more radical form of scepticism since it doubts even sceptical judgement. Pyrrhonists hold that there is insufficient and inadequate evidence to determine or even deny whether any knowledge is possible. The only way to obtain tranquillity of mind, or ataraxia, is to suspend judgement on all questions of knowledge. Although Greek manuscripts of Sextus Empiricus circulated in the fifteenth century, the first printing of a work by Sextus was Henri Estienne’s Latin translation of the Outlines of Pyrrhonism in 1562.

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This was followed in 1569 by the edition of Gentian Hervet, which included both the Outlines and Against the Mathematicians. There was no Greek printing of Sextus’ works until 1621. Although academic scepticism was available to the Renaissance largely through the writings of Cicero, it does not appear to have made much impact beyond supplying exempla for humanist discussion. For example, in The Praise of Folly (translated by Sir Thomas Chaloner in 1569), Erasmus light-heartedly commends the academicians as the least assuming of the philosophers who have correctly recognised that nothing is certain. An early instance of the use of Pyrrhonism is Henry Cornelius Agrippa’s De incertitudine et vanitate scientiarum (1526), a popular work which was translated into English in 1569 as Of the Vanity and Uncertainty of Arts and Sciences. Agrippa’s position is more fideistic and anti-intellectual than sceptical, but he draws on Pyrrhonism, for which he was ridiculed by Rabelais in Le Tiers Livre (1542), the third book of Gargantua et Pantagruel. In fact it was not until the mid-sixteenth century, when Pyrrhonian scepticism was applied as a weapon against philosophical and religious dogmatism, that scepticism became a current of thought to be reckoned with. Scepticism was first invoked as a polemical weapon during the controversies generated by the attack of Pierre de la Ramée (Petrus Ramus) on Aristotelian dogmatism. Ramus himself had little more than stylistic comments to make about academic scepticism. But his ally, Omer Talon, noted the anti-dogmatic application of the arguments of Cicero’s Academica in his own work of that name (1547). In the ensuing controversy the Ramists were branded academic sceptics by Pierre Galland and Guy de Brués. Shortly afterwards, scepticism was employed in the more dangerous arena of confessional controversy. This time it was the more devastating scepticism of Pyrrho that was deployed, recently made available in the Latin translations of Sextus Empiricus by Henri Estienne (Outlines of Pyrrhonism, 1562) and Gentian Hervet (Against the Mathematicians). Hervet undertook his translation of Sextus specifically in the service of the Counter-Reformation. Quite how extensively these Reformation applications of scepticism made an impact in England is difficult to tell. But Elizabethans were undoubtedly aware of them on account of the Ramist controversies at Cambridge (Gilbert 1960: ch. 9). The writings of Sextus Empiricus do not appear to have been well known in Tudor England, though there are known cases of people who owned them – for example John Dee and Viscount Conway. There was a manuscript of the English translation of Sextus attributed to Sir Walter Ralegh. Pyrrhonism was probably known through secondary sources, such as Henry Cornelius Agrippa’s aforementioned De incertitudine et vanitate scientiarum. The most important source for Pyrrhonian scepticism was Michel de Montaigne (1533–92), for whom sceptical doubt was encapsulated by the question he took for his motto: ‘Que sçays-je?’ (‘What do I know?’). In his Apology of Raymond Sebond, contained in the second book of his Essays, Montaigne undertakes an exercise in Pyrrhonism in order to demolish the truth-claims of human reason and philosophy. The dogmatisms that he attacks include that of the ‘prince of dogmatists’, Aristotle, but also Stoicism and Platonism. His purpose is not, as with Hervet or

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Talon, polemical, but is closer to the original aim of Pyrrhonism: to use doubt (epoche) as a means to achieve tranquillity of mind. As Montaigne explains in his Apology, ‘the profession of the Pyrrhonians is ever to waver, to doubt, and to enquire; never to be assured of anything, nor to take any warrant of himself ’, with the result that they are led ‘unto their ataraxie, which is the condition of a quiet and settled life, exempted from the agitations which we receive by the impression of the opinion and knowledge we imagine to have of things’ (Essays, trans. Florio, book 2, no. 12). Originally published between 1580 and 1588, Montaigne’s three books of essays were translated into English by John Florio in 1603. Although Florio’s translation does not do justice to Montaigne’s style, the relaxed combination of urbanity and sardonicism of the essays ensures that they wear their extensive erudition lightly. The same combination of learning, scepticism, and religious faith as that exhibited by Montaigne is found in the writings of John Donne, for whom, as for Montaigne, the bewildering variety of philosophy – exacerbated by the appearance of novel theories – ‘calls all in doubt’ (Anatomy of the World. The First Anniversary, 205). Unlike Montaigne, however, Donne found the weakness of human reason unsettling: we are ‘oppressed with ignorance’ (The Progress of the Soul. The Second Anniversary, 254). Montaigne’s sceptical question is posed as an interrogation of the soul – ‘what dost thou know?’: Poor soul, in this thy flesh, what dost thou know? Thou know’st thyself so little, as thou know’st not How thou didst die, nor how thou wast begot. (The Progress of the Soul. The Second Anniversary, 254–6)

Stoicism The availability of the writings of Cicero and Seneca in the Middle Ages meant that Stoicism was not unknown before the Renaissance. Through Seneca’s dialogues (e.g. De constantia) and letters (Epistulae morales) and writings such as Cicero’s De officiis, De finibus, and Tusculan Disputations, the Stoics were known largely chiefly as moral philosophers, admired for the parallels with Christian ideals that they appeared to exhibit – their moral seriousness and apparent piety, their recommendation of forbearance in the face of adversity, their contempt of worldly goods, their asceticism, and their subscription to the doctrine of four cardinal virtues, Prudence, Temperance, Justice, and Fortitude. Other, less comfortable, aspects of Stoicism – for example their advocacy of suicide, their ideal of the suppression of the emotions (apathy), or their belief in determinism – were conveniently ignored or glossed over. The early humanists enriched the corpus of Stoic writings, and established the Stoic canon. The partial knowledge of earlier Greek Stoicism available via Cicero and Plutarch was increased by the publication of doxographies such as Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of the Philosophers. Epictetus’ manual of Stoic moral philosophy, his Enchiridion, was translated into Latin and printed in 1547. The medieval view that Stoicism was

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congruent with Christian piety did not substantially change until the late sixteenth century. Ironically, perhaps, it was the humanist Petrarch who perpetuated the medieval view of Seneca in imitation of a work misattributed to the classical author: Petrarch’s De remediis utriusque fortunae of 1366 was a Renaissance best-seller, the most frequently reprinted of all his writings. (An English translation by Thomas Twyne, Physic Against Fortune, as Well Prosperous as Adverse, was printed in 1579). The work is a set of consolatory dialogues in which stoical reason debates with the emotions in order to find remedies for the ill effects of fortune, whether good or bad. Petrarch’s work did much to recommend Stoicism as a repository of moral sententiae and Seneca as a lay moralist fit for Christian consumption. Stoicism had other powerful advocates among leading humanists, notably Erasmus, who admired and edited Seneca. Although his Praise of Folly mocks the Stoics, it nonetheless retains the ‘Stoic definition’ of wisdom as the rule of reason. By virtue of having a place in the humanist school curriculum, Stoicism remained familiar throughout the Renaissance: Cicero’s richly Stoic De officiis and De senectute were widely used as introductory texts in moral philosophy. Epictetus’ Enchiridion was used as a school textbook of Greek. Seneca’s writings were widely available in numerous editions. Another source of Greek Stoicism was Plutarch’s Moralia (translated into English and published in 1603 by Philemon Holland) which drew on Stoic moral philosophy, illustrations of which might be found in some of the biographies, such as that of Cato the Younger, contained in Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans (English translation, 1579). In the latter half of the sixteenth century this positive image of Stoicism was redrawn thanks to the scholarly study of the Flemish humanist historian, Justus Lipsius (Joest Lips; 1547–1606), which resulted in a revised view of Stoic philosophy. Lipsius’ main contribution to Renaissance Stoicism is his influential treatise, De constantia in publicis malis (On Constancy, 1584). Presented as a dialogue in time of civil war, this enunciates a practical moral philosophy for the man of public affairs. Seneca is held up as a model of conduct in the face of despotism and corruption. The only remedy in such a situation is to accept fate unswervingly, through steadfastness or fortitude (constantia), that is, by applying the Stoic principle of indifference to adversity through subordination of the passions to reason. Lipsius’ concept of fortitude is more positive than the ancient Stoic prescription of ‘apathy’ (emotionlessness). Lipsius sought to redraw the boundary with Christianity in order to render Stoicism acceptable within a Christian context. The new reading of Stoicism which he initiated entailed fuller acknowledgement of some of the aspects of Stoicism that were difficult to reconcile with Christian piety. For example, he subordinated Stoic fate to God and interpreted the Stoic concept of destiny as the decree of divine providence. The resulting accommodation of Stoicism and Christianity has come to be known as Neo-Stoicism. In his Politicorum sive civilis doctrinae libri sex (1590), translated into English by William James as Six Books of Politics or Civil Doctrine (1594), Lipsius’ political philosophy combines Stoicism with his interest in the Roman historian Tacitus. Lipsius also edited Seneca (1605) and was one of the first to emphasise the importance of Stoic

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natural philosophy as the basis of Stoic ethics, in his Physiologia stoicorum (Physics of the Stoics, 1604). His French admirers, Guillaume du Vair and Pierre Charron, took up Lipsius’ view of Stoicism. The translation of their writings into English is one measure of English interest in Stoicism. Sir John Stradling’s translation of Lipsius’ De constantia as Two Books of Constancy in 1594 was followed in 1598 by Thomas James’s translation of Du Vair’s 1594 Philosophie morale des Stoiques as The Moral Philosophy of the Stoics. Charron’s De la Sagesse was printed in Samson Lennard’s English translation, The Moral Philosophy of the Stoics, in 1606, which saw five editions by 1640. It was in the wake of Lipsius that Thomas Lodge made his English translation of Seneca, which was published as The Works of Lucius Annaeus Seneca, both Moral and Natural (1614). Among Stoic writers, Seneca had of course always been popular as a dramatist, and was imitated by English dramatists writing in both Latin and English. Thomas Newton’s Seneca his Ten Tragedies (1581) is testimony to the vernacular interest in Seneca’s plays. The formative impact of Senecan drama on English Renaissance tragedy is well attested (Salmon 1991). But the prominence of Stoic models in the subject matter of the plays may be attributed in large measure to the reinvigorated Stoicism of Lipsius. In the drama of the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean period Stoicism furnishes the model of the virtuous ‘antique Roman’, be he Brutus in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar or Horatio, ‘that man who is not passion’s slave’ in Hamlet. Likewise, Pandulpho in Antonio’s Revenge (performed in 1599) is a mouthpiece of Stoicism, and Rusticus in Massinger’s Roman Actor (performed in 1626) is a model of Senecan fortitude. It is in the plays of George Chapman that the paradigm of Stoicism is most fully drawn: Bussy d’Ambois (performed in 1604), Clermont d’Ambois in Revenge of Bussy d’Ambois (performed c.1610), or Cato in The Wars of Caesar and Pompey (performed c.1613), the righteous statesman who commits suicide to preserve his liberty. Among English playwrights, Ben Jonson owned and annotated Lipsius’ Politicorum … libri, drawing on it in his tragedies, Catiline (performed in 1603) and Sejanus (performed in 1611). Another important mediation of Stoicism in England was provided by the publication of Montaigne’s Essays. Montaigne was an admirer of Lipsius, and he cites Seneca frequently. Many of his essays are devoted to Stoic themes, for example, ‘That to philosophise is to learn how to die’ (Essays, 1.20, which opens with a quotation from Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations). Montaigne was nevertheless, as we have already noted, a stringent critic of Stoicism: in his Apology for Raymond Sebond, it is one of the dogmatisms that he attacks in his Pyrrhonist refutation of philosophy. In this attack, Montaigne rejected the Stoic equation of passion with vice, and argued that the ideal of impassivity is unattainable and the exaltation of virtue presumptuous. His critique of Stoicism was, however, neither doctrinaire nor total. Nor does it undermine the evident Stoicism of his other essays. For example, his essay ‘Of Experience’, written after the Apology, returns to Stoic themes, enunciating the Stoic principle of fortitude in the face of adversity, ‘A man must endure that patiently which he cannot avoid conveniently’ (Essays, 3.13). Montaigne’s Pyrrhonist refutation of Stoicism certainly did not discourage other essayists from turning to it. Among Francis Bacon’s Essays,

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‘On Death’ and ‘Of Adversity’ draw extensively on Seneca. The value of Stoicism as a moral propaedeutic to Christianity continued to be recognised. Pre-eminent among Stoicising devotional writers, Joseph Hall (1547–1656), was dubbed ‘our English Seneca’ for his Heaven upon Earth or of True Peace and Tranquillity of Mind (1606). The sobriquet is echoed by the Latin translator of Heaven upon Earth, who calls him ‘Seneca Christianus’ and, in the title of the French translation of the same work, Le Seneque Chrestien (1610). As we have already seen in the example of Montaigne, Stoic moral philosophy was not without its critics. In fact two of the main sources of Stoicism, Cicero and Plutarch, were also sources for anti-Stoic arguments. In his Praise of Folly Erasmus derides the Stoics for denigrating the emotions, thereby reducing the human subject to a mere marble statue. The Stoics are, moreover, guilty of pride for making themselves equal to the gods. An influential critic of Stoicism was John Calvin, whose edition of Seneca’s De clementia (1532), while acknowledging some parallels between Stoicism and Christianity, attacks the Stoic doctrine of virtuous apathy and fatalism. These criticisms are echoed in Milton’s Paradise Regained, where Christ scorns as mere human pride the Stoic concept of virtue as equal to God, and the Stoic ideal of self-sufficiency, asceticism, and trust in suicide as liberation. The Stoic last in philosophic pride, By him called virtue; and his virtuous man, Wise, perfect in himself, and all possessing, Equal to God, oft shames not to prefer, As fearing God nor man, contemning all Wealth, pleasure, pain or torment, death and life, Which when he lists, he leaves, or boasts he can, For all his tedious talk is but vain boast, Or subtle shifts conviction to evade. (Paradise Regained 4.297–321)

As the culmination of the humanist synthesis of antiquity with contemporary culture, Milton stands at the point of intersection between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. The critique of Stoicism which Milton here puts into the mouth of Christ echoes traditional Christian antipathy towards Stoicism. At the same time, in so far as they acknowledge the inassimilable alterity of Stoicism, these words presage change. By the time Paradise Regained was published in 1671, humanism was in the process of radical transformation, with profound implications for the status of the philosophies it had fostered. On the one hand, Bacon had challenged the authority of the ancients in matters of wisdom. On the other hand, Pyrrhonism had dissolved the old certainties of philosophy. The new philosophies of the seventeenth century declared their modernity by rejecting the past. With the success of Cartesianism, the laicisation of philosophy was complete, Descartes, in his answer to scepticism, having explicitly appealed to ‘common sense’ rather than tradition. The old currents of thought brought into view by humanism had become the province of history and imagination. It is

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perhaps no coincidence that the first English history of philosophy was written at this time, albeit one greatly indebted to classical sources – Thomas Stanley’s History of Philosophy (1655–62). The scene was now being set for the so-called ‘battle of the books’, in the course of which humanism was revised as neoclassicism according to standards laid down by the likes of Bentley and Boileau (Grafton 1991; Highet 1949).

References and Further Reading Allen, D. C. (1964). Doubt’s Boundless Sea: Skepticism and Faith in the Renaissance. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Baldwin, A. and S. Hutton (eds.) (1994). Platonism and the English Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Baldwin, Thomas Whitfield (1944). William Shakespeare’s Small Latine & Lesse Greeke, 2 vols. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Binns, J. W. (1990). Intellectual Culture in Elizabethan England. Leeds: Francis Cairns. Bolgar, R. R. (1954). The Classical Heritage and its Beneficiaries. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Copenhaver, B. P. and C. B. Schmitt (1992). Renaissance Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ellrodt, R. (1960). Neoplatonism in the Poetry of Spenser. Geneva: Droz. Evans, R. C. (1992). Jonson, Lipsius and the Politics of Renaissance Stoicism. Durango, CO: Longwood Academic. Gilbert, N. W. (1960). Renaissance Concepts of Method. New York: Columbia University Press. Grafton, A. (1991). Defenders of the Text. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hankins, J. (1990). Plato and the Italian Renaissance, 2 vols. Leiden: Brill. Hedley, Douglas and Sarah Hutton (eds.) (2007). Platonism at the Origins of Modernity. Dordrecht: Springer.

Highet, Gilbert (1949). The Classical Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jayne, S. (1995). Plato in Renaissance England. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic. Kraye, J. (1996). The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Martindale, J. (1985). English Humanism, Wyatt to Cowley. London: Croom Helm. Monsarat, G. D. (1984). Light from the Porch. Stoicism and English Renaissance Literature. Paris: Didier. Nelson, J. C. (1958). Renaissance Theory of Love. New York: Columbia University Press. Patrides, C. A. (ed.) (1980). The Cambridge Platonists. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Popkin, R. H. (2003). The History of Scepticism from Svonarola to Bayle. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Salmon, J. H. M. (1991). ‘Seneca and Tacitus in Jacobean England’. In L. L. Peck (ed.), The Mental World of the Jacobean Court (pp. 169–88). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schmitt, C. B. (1972). Cicero Scepticus: A Study of the Influence of the Academica in the Renaissance. The Hague: Nijhoff. Smith, G. G. (ed.) (1967). Elizabethan Critical Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

9

Translation Liz Oakley-Brown

The Patriarchal Landscape of Renaissance Translation In his dedication to the ‘best-best benefactors, and most-most honoured ladies, Lucy, Countess of Bedford, and her best-most-loved-loving mother, Lady Anne Harrington’, the Italo-Englishman John Florio refers to his 1603 translation of the first book of Michel de Montaigne’s Essays as a ‘defective edition (since all translations are reputed females, delivered at second hand …’ (A2r). Some four hundred years later, and largely as a result of theses such as ‘Des Tours de Babel’ (1985) by the Algerian-born French philosopher Jacques Derrida, the kind of gendered, hierarchical binary opposition between original and translation that is inscribed in Florio’s dedication, and perpetuated in the Romantic and post-Romantic eras, has been challenged (Simon 1996: 1, 10; Venuti 1995). Consequently, twentieth- and twenty-first-century scholarly and critical perspectives on the significance of this specific form of Renaissance textual practice have shifted from principally aesthetic evaluations of the ways in which translators turn one language into another towards the consideration of translation as a dynamic, ideological process inextricably linked with the construction, and contestation, of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century identities. As Inga-Stina Ewbank succinctly notes, ‘In questions of translation, poetics readily slides into politics’ (cit. Chew and Stead 1999: 8). In very general terms, the impetus in the early modern period to produce secular literary translations – the main focus of the ensuing essay – comes out of growing concerns to inaugurate a distinctively English sensibility. Of course, the idea that translations are a part of material culture is not a recent one. As Marta Straznicky points out, Renaissance England itself perceived translation to be ‘work in service of the state, providing broad access to the foundations of humanist learning, fostering public morality and civic virtue, and augmenting the capacity of the English tongue’ (2002: 423). This patriotic mode is evident in Alexander Barclay’s satirical verse the Ship of Fools (1509), which is possibly ‘the first of the significantly humanist-influenced Tudor translations to be published’ (Boutcher 2000: 51).

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As a rendition of Sebastian Brant’s Narrenschiff (1494) by way of Jacob Locher’s Latin version (1497) and Paul Rivière’s French edition (1497) (Lewis 1954: 130), Barclay’s Prologue states that his translation is designed ‘to redress the errors and vices of this our realm of England, as the foresaid composer and translators have done in their countries’ (1570: ¶¶iv). According to Nicholas Orme, Barclay’s Ship of Fools aligns itself ‘with humanist Latin, and criticises those attached to the medieval grammar of Alexander of Ville-Dieu rather than to the works of Priscian and the Renaissance grammarian Giovanni Sulpizio’ (2008). Even so, and as with sixteenth- and seventeenth-century translations as a whole, Barclay’s textual ambitions are not governed by strictly methodological means. Renaissance translators are unfettered by the systemic approach that would typify the practice in later periods. Though the familiar debates about whether to translate word-for-word (literally) or sense-for-sense (paraphastically) are ongoing (Burke 2005: 25), there is no Tudor or early Stuart equivalent of John Dryden’s tripartite division of metaphrase, paraphrase, and imitation as delineated in the Preface to Ovid’s Epistles (1680). A word commonly employed in the Renaissance, however, is translatio. Fundamentally, this is a figure of displacement. A useful sixteenth-century explanation of the rhetorical process may be found in Richard Sherry’s A Treatise of Schemes [and] Tropes (1550). Sherry claimed that this was an innovative English publication on the topic. Notably, the author thought that the title of his work might seem so ‘strange unto our English ears’ that prospective readers might ignore it, or if they happen to ‘vouchsafe to read it … yet perceiving nothing to be therein that pleaseth their fancy, will count it but a trifle, [and] a tale of Robin Hood’ (Aiv–Aiir). The Treatise characterised translatio thus: translation, that is a word translated from the thing that it properly signifieth, unto another which may agree with it by a similitude. And among all virtues of speech, this is the chief. None persuadeth more effect[ively], none showeth the thing before our eyes more evidently, none moveth more mightily the affections, none maketh the oratio[n] more goodly, pleasant, nor copious. (C.iiiiv)

Yet translatio can also be used to define an ‘activity of appropriation’ referring to ‘the transfer of … a tradition or a right from one society or culture to another’ (Russell 2001: 29). These translative endeavours compel developments in sixteenth-century pedagogical practices, which place translation at the heart of grammar-school education (Boutcher 2000: 47). Allied with the acquisition of rhetorical skills, the second book of Roger Ascham’s The Schoolmaster (1570), ‘The ready way to the Latin tongue’, established influential guidelines, which the pedagogue called ‘double translation’ (see Chapter 3, Literacy and Education). Ascham’s students are advised to render classical script into the vernacular. The English translation should then be transposed back into the source language. Drawing attention to his former role as tutor to the Princess Elizabeth, Ascham declares that ‘a better, and nearer example herein, may be, our most noble Queen … who never took yet, Greek nor Latin grammar in her

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hand, after the first declining of a noun and a verb, but only by this double translating of Demosthenes and Isocrates daily …’ (Wright 1904: 245–6). While Ascham sets out ‘six ways appointed by the best learned men, for the learning of tongues, and increase of eloquence ‘as 1. Translatio linguarum. 2. Paraphrasis. 3. Metaphrasis. 4. Epitome. 5. Imitatio. 6. Declamatio’ (1904: 242), these rules are not routinely followed in the numerous translations that were subsequently published in Renaissance England. In the words of Massimiliano Morini, ‘In point of fact, there is hardly any theory at all: one has got to extrapolate a theory, or the evidence for the existence of a theory, from a few prefaces and from the reverberations of theory into practice’ (2006: 18–19). Beyond the dictates of the classroom, which elicit translations of the aforementioned oratorical works and classical poems such as Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Renaissance writings are coerced into English by societal demands. In the first half of the sixteenth century, as the prefatory material to Ascham’s Toxophilus (1545) illustrates, there is an anxiety about the status of the vernacular language. ‘If any man would blame me’, Ascham implores, either for taking such a matter in hand or else for writing it in the English tongue, this answer I may make him, that when the best of the realm think it honest for them to use, I one of the meanest sort, ought not to suppose it vile for me to write: (Wright 1904: xiii–xiv)

In deference to the perceived inferiority of the target language, and often, it should be noted, in reverence to their patron, translators’ prefaces are regularly characterised by a particular type of humility topos. Arthur Golding’s dedicatory epistle to Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester, at the head of his four-book translation of the Metamorphoses (1565) is representative of this prefatory style: If this work were fully performed with like eloquence and cunning of inditing [composing] by me in English as it was written by th’author thereof in his mother tongue, it might perchance delight your Honour to bestow some vacant time in the reading of it … to countervail my default, I request most humbly the benefit of your L[ordship’s] favour, whereby you are wont not only to bear with the want of skill and rudeness of such as commit their doings to your protection, but also are wont to encourage them to proceed in their painful exercises attempted of a zeal and desire to enrich their native language with things not heretofore published in the same. (Forey 2002: 3)

Though he adheres to the central tenets of humanist translation, Golding rightly promotes the novelty of his project. William Caxton’s prose version of the Metamorphoses (1480) was the first complete vernacular Ovid. The fifteenth-century translation came into being via the French Ovide moralisé rather than a Latin source and, given its English provenance, it is somewhat intriguing that it was never printed. Throughout the 1560s, the translation and publication of individual Ovidian myths, such as The fable of … Narcissus (1560) by T.H., and Thomas Peend’s The pleasant fable of Hermaphroditus and Salmacis (1565), provided textual areas in which burgeoning

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Elizabethan Protestant subjectivities could be rehearsed (Oakley-Brown 2001). Golding’s The xv. Books of P. Ovidius Naso, entitled Metamorphosis, translated out of Latin into English metre (1567) also domesticates its classical material in distinctive ways. The translator ‘uses a language of heightened Englishness in his translation’, Raphael Lyne argues, ‘and his versions of Ovidian myths are often filled with highly English scenery, characters, and ideas’ (2001: 53–4). Furthermore, Golding’s Ovid famously paved the way for what Dympna Callaghan has labelled a ‘secular-aesthetic in the 1590s’. This period, she claims, witnessed the advent of a new articulation of the aesthetic that came about through an absorption and iteration of the Roman poet Ovid that was to be found neither in the decades that preceded it nor in those that were to follow … Marked primarily by its distinctive tone – ebullient, racy, urbane and yet by turns sombre and even tragic – the new secularaesthetic is far closer to Ovid’s subtle modulations of voice in the Latin original than its precursors. (Callaghan 2003: 27)

Golding’s Metamorphosis is just one example of the manner in which Renaissance translation provides a foundation for ‘original’ forms of literature, such as the epyllia of Marlowe and Shakespeare, the erotic genre embedded in Callaghan’s discussion of the ‘secular-aesthetic’. Similarly, the translations of Virgil’s Aeneid by Gavin Douglas (1513), the earl of Surrey (c.1554), and Thomas Phaer (c.1562), as well as George Chapman’s complete versions of Homer (c.1616, c.1634), underpin Spenserian and Miltonic epics (Ellis and Oakley-Brown 1998: 339). The decades which followed the publication of Golding’s Ovid, namely those between 1570 and 1630, have been branded a ‘great age of translation’ (Burke 2007: 36). In a slightly more nuanced observation, Willis Barnstone comments that ‘The number of translations in the first decade of Elizabeth’s rule, after 1558, was four times that of the Henry and Mary years (1993: 203, cit. Ellis and Oakley-Brown 1998: 337). This upward trajectory of literary production corresponds with the period in which ‘the English vocabulary expanded most rapidly’ (Burke 2007: 36). Yet unease about the English vernacular remained. As part of a letter written to Gabriel Harvey in 1580, for instance, Edmond Spenser demands, ‘Why a God’s name may not we, as else the Greeks, have the kingdom of our own language?’ (cit. Helgerson 1992: 1). As Barnstone’s enumeration suggests, aided by advances in printing and the dissemination of texts, the era’s seeming response to these pervasive anxieties was to produce more translations. A catalogue of noteworthy classical translations of the English Renaissance might incorporate those by Philemon Holland, the so-called ‘translator general’. His published translations include Livy’s The Roman History (1600), Pliny’s History of the World (1601), Plutarch’s Morals (1603), Suetonius’ The History of the Twelve Caesars (1606), Ammianus Marcellinus’ The Roman History (1609), and Xenophon’s Cyrupaedia, or the Institution and Life of Cyrus, King of Persians (1632) (Matthiesson, 1931/1965: 174). George Chapman’s legacy features The Divine Poem

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of Musaeus (1616). Thomas May brought forth Lucan’s Pharsalia into English in 1627. Two years later, Thomas Hobbes published his English version of Thucydides’ Eight Books of the Peloponnesian War (1629). Not all writings were rendered into the vernacular directly from the source language. Defined as ‘the earliest great masterpiece in English prose’ (Matthiesson 1931/1965: 58), for instance, Thomas North’s influential Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans (1579) was based on Jacques Amyot’s French version. In the case of his translation of The Moral Philosophy of Doni (1570), a more complex set of sources may possibly emerge as, according to North, it was ‘A work first compiled in the Indian tongue, and afterwards transferred into divers and sundry other languages: as the Persian, Arabian, Hebrew, Latin, Spanish, and Italian: and now reduced into our vulgar speech’ (Bir). European vernacular texts were also transposed into English. C. S. Lewis remarked that ‘The thudding verbiage of [Thomas Wyatt’s] “These new kinds of pleasures wherein most men rejoice …” raises a wonder why the man who thought Petrarch could be translated so, also though Petrarch worth translating’ (1954: 224–5). This scathing critique, however, did not prevent the Henrician ambassador/poet (together with the soldier/poet Henry Howard, earl of Surrey, and Henry Parker, Lord Morley) from being credited with ‘remak[ing] the English lyric tradition’ (Taylor 2008: 397). Thomas Hoby’s prominent version of Castiglione’s The Courtier (1561) and Thomas Shelton’s rendition of Cervantes’ Don Quixote (1612–20) should also be added to this brief survey. The publication dates for Shelton’s translation show that it was progressively distributed. Likewise, the Spanish epic Amadis de Gaule arrived in England in piecemeal form. In European circulation since the fifteenth century, the first English translation of Book 1 of this popular romance was published in 1590, followed by Book 2 in 1593 and Book 5 in 1598 (Pettegree 2007: 119). Monolingual, and thus most likely ‘bourgeois and plebeian’, Renaissance readers had to wait two decades for the complete narrative to appear: ‘A full sequence of the first four books was finally published only in 1618 and 1619’ (Pettegree 2007: 119; see also Chapter 57, Romance). Amidst this foregoing genealogy, however, it is possible to neglect the ways in which the Renaissance body is marked by the translation enterprise. Walter J. Ong’s well-known essay ‘Latin language study as a Renaissance puberty rite’ discusses the punishments that young boys suffered at the hands of their schoolmasters: In the long dialogue on the pro’s and con’s of corporal punishment with which Roger Ascham opens his famous educational treatise, The Schoolmaster, he provides glimpses of issues … which he never really fully exposes. Some pupils have recently run away from Eton, we are told in the course of this dialogue, ‘for fear of beating’ … (Ong 1959: 119)

In the context of religious reform, William Tyndale, the Lutheran translator of the Bible, was strangled and then burnt at the stake in Antwerp in 1536 for heresy and, as John Foxe recounts in the 1570 edition of Acts and Monuments, Jane Grey’s martyrdom is underscored by the oration of ‘the Psalm of Miserere mei Deus in English, in

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most devout manner throughout to the end’ (1584). At other executionary events the ability to recite Psalm 51 in Latin might permit convicted criminals to plead ‘benefit of clergy’, thereby releasing them from the death penalty (see Chapter 3, Literacy and Education). Corporeal violence accompanies Renaissance translation in other guises. Patricia Palmer observes that The fact that so many leading translators of the age – [Lodowick] Bryskett, [Geoffrey] Fenton, [Barnabe] Googe, [John] Harrington – were also players in the conquest of Ireland confirms the uncanny incongruity between pushing back the frontiers of English and expanding the geopolitical boundaries in which it operated. (cit. Cronin 2006: 97)

An examination of the circumstances surrounding George Sandys’ rendition of the Metamorphoses exposes further aspects of the relationship between English Renaissance translation and colonial expansion. Having already published the first five books of Ovid’s poem in 1621, Sandys completed the translation of another two books as he sailed to Virginia to take up his appointment as treasurer to the Jamestown colony. He disembarked at Jamestown in October 1621, just five months before the Indian uprising on 22 March 1622 (Ellison 2004). Sandys’ Ovidian translation was finished in Virginia, and the dedication to Prince Charles in the 1626 edition acknowledges the text’s liminal, and troubled, inception: It needed more than a single denization [act of being made a denizen or native], being a double stranger: sprung from the stock of the ancient Romans; but bred in the new world, of the rudeness whereof it cannot but participate; especially having wars and tumults to bring it to light instead of the Muses. (cit. Lyne 2001: 221)

While it may true to say that ‘there are intriguingly few points of contact between’ the translation and its colonial context (Lyne 2001: 248), the extract above bears traces of both the Stuart desire for territorial acquisition and the place that translation occupies in that specific expansionist project. Indeed, translators’ prefaces often proffer glimpses into the wider socio-political climate of the English Renaissance. Sandys’ dichotomous depiction of Rome and the New World obliquely chimes with the patronal address with which this essay began. Florio’s anxiety about his ‘defective edition’ is oddly echoed in Sandys’ concerns for the ‘rudeness’ of his displaced translation. Though their translations are products of distinctive cultural environments, both translators are engaged in the pursuit of a flawless text, unsullied by traces of an imperfect other. Translation’s role in identity politics may be located in different areas of sixteenthand seventeenth-century English culture. In common with other vernacular genres, as many source-studies demonstrate, Renaissance drama benefited from translated materials. Rather differently, research by Michael Neill (1994, 1996), Margaret Tudeau-Clayton (1998, 2002), Dirk Delabastita (2004), and Michael Cronin (2006)

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has variously shown how translation functions as a discursive set of practices in Shakespeare and Jonson. As part of a wide-ranging critical and theoretical analysis of Translation and Identity, for instance, Cronin has track[ed] an intra-textual translation presence to show how Shakespearean drama through the conduit of translation articulates English and more broadly European concerns with language, power, identity, metamorphosis, proximity and control in the context of intercultural contact. (Cronin 2006: 94)

In what follows, I take up and develop these interests in language, power, and identity to consider the ‘intra-textual presence’ of translation in this celebrated episode from John Webster’s Jacobean tragedy The White Devil (first performed in 1611; first published 1612): [lawyer]:

Domine judex converte oculos in hanc pestem mulierum corruptissimam.

vittoria: francisco: vittoria:

What’s he?

franciso: vittoria:

monticelso: vittoria:

franciso: monticelso: lawyer: vittoria: lawyer:

vittoria: lawyer:

A lawyer that pleads against you. Pray my lord, let him speak his usual tongue – I’ll make no answer else. Why, you understand Latin. I do sir, but amongst this auditory Which come to hear my cause, the half or more May be ignorant in’t. Go on sir. By your favour, I will not have my accusation clouded In a strange tongue: all this assembly Shall hear what you can charge me with. Signior, You need not stand on’t much; pray change your language. O for God sake: gentlewoman, your credit Shall be more famous by it. Well then have at you. I am at the mark, sir, I’ll give aim to you, And tell you how near you shoot. Most literated judges, please your lordships, So to connive your judgements to the view Of this debauched and diversivolent [desiring strife] woman Who such a black concatenation Of mischief hath effected, that to extirp The memory of ’t must be the consummation Of her and her projections – What’s all this – Hold your peace. Exorbitant sins must have exulceration.

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Surely my lords this lawyer here hath swallowed Some pothecary’s bills, or proclamations. And now the hard and undigestible words Come up like stones we use give hawks for physic. Why this is Welsh to Latin. (The White Devil, 3.2.10–39)1

Contemporaneous with the 1613 edition of Robert Cawdrey’s A Table Alphabetical Containing and Teaching the True Writing and Understanding of Hard Usual English Words, Borrowed from the Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Or French … with the Interpretation thereof by Plain English Words, Gathered for the Benefit [and] Help of All Unskilful Persons – a book that clearly makes much of the linguistic deficiencies of its monolingual readers – Webster’s portrayal of the ways ‘in which [Vittoria] defends herself against charges of immorality’ (Gunby 2004) dramatises key aspects of the cultural politics of translation in Renaissance England.

Women and Translation From classroom to court, the predominantly homosocial histories of Tudor and Stuart secular translation practices depict a social milieu in which men engage with the writings of other men – living and dead – in order to foster a sense of orthodox English selfhood. Markedly, the engraving showing the textual transmission between the classical poet and the translator that appears on the title page of Chapman’s The Crown of All Homer’s Works (1624) – see Figure 35 – represents the common patriarchal line of descent. As it is routinely stated, humanist educators such as Juan Luis Vives censure women’s encounters with secular writing. These pronouncements influence the kinds of translation undertaken by women. Originally produced in Latin at the request of Catherine of Aragon and translated into English by Richard Hyrde, a member of Thomas More’s household (Wayne 1985: 15), Vives’ The Instruction of a Christian Woman (Latin 1524; English 1529) sets out ‘What books ought to be read, and what not’: Plato casteth out of the commonwealth of wise men, which he made, Homer and Hesiodus, the poets: and yet have they none ill thing in comparison unto Ovid’s books of love which we read, and carry them in our hands, and learn them by heart, yea and some school masters teach them to their scholars and some make expositions and expound the vices. Augustus banished Ovid himself and think you then that he would have kept these expositors in the country? … Therefore a woman should beware of all these books, likewise as of serpents or snakes. (1540; cit. Aughterson 1995: 170)

For women to read, let alone translate the works of a classical author such as Ovid – chiefly the Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love), but a more wide-ranging list is implicitly denounced – is a contravention of the sexual codes of conduct which deem that they should be chaste, silent, and obedient. Later conduct books, such as Thomas Salter’s

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The Mirror of Modesty (1578), extend Vives’ strictures by condemning the ‘lascivious books’ of poets such as Ovid, Catullus, Propertius, Tibullus, Virgil, and Homer (cit. Aughterson 1995: 178). Thus, authors such as Mary Sidney can complete her brother’s translation of the Psalter, render Petrarch’s Trionfo della Morte (The Triumph of Death) into English, and even produce a vernacular version of Robert Garnier’s Marc Antoine (1592). However, she may be aligned with Ovid’s Metamorphoses only as the patron and dedicatee of a selection of myths that appear in Abraham Fraunce’s The Third Part of the Countess of Pembroke’s Ivychurch (1592) (Lamb 1990: 40–5). There are other extant secular translations. Lady Jane Lumley’s translation of Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis (c.1553–4?) is ‘the first play in English by a woman, and the first play translated from Greek into English’ (Medcalf 2008: 385), and yet it exists only in manuscript form. In the light of humanist edicts upon education, it is not altogether surprising that women’s most visible intervention in the history of Renaissance translation is by way of devotional literature. Margaret More Roper and the Cooke sisters, Mildred, Anne, Elizabeth, and Katherine, for instance, ‘participate … on the pious fringes of translation activity’ (Ellis and Oakley-Brown 1998: 339; Lamb 1985). For obvious reasons, Elizabeth I’s translations attract attention, but, as Georgia E. Brown points out, they ‘are usually dismissed as bad and / or excessively literal’ (2004: 95). By comparison, Brown’s own reading of Princess Elizabeth’s ‘The Mirror or Glass of the Sinful Soul’ (1544) – a rendition of Queen Marguerite of Navarre’s verse – suggests that the resultant translation engenders a sovereign identity that is ‘not purely English, or purely Protestant, as the text moves across national and linguistic borders as well as epistemologies of gender’ (2004: 103). In this way, Brown’s detailed examination of the princess’s engagement with her French source sheds new light on translation and the formation of Elizabethan queenship and, perhaps, Renaissance self-fashioning at large. All of the aforesaid women are connected by their gentle status and domestic tutelage. In terms of social order, the outstanding name in the limited catalogue of Renaissance women translators is that of the former waiting woman Margaret Tyler (Schleiner 1992), known for her translation of D. Ortuñez de Calahorra’s Spanish romance, The Mirror of Princely Deeds and Knighthood (1578). Challenging generic and gendered boundaries (Krontiris 1988), Tyler’s much-studied preface directly confronts the patriarchal nature of Renaissance translation: ‘Such delivery as I have made I hope thou wilt friendly accept, the rather for that it is a woman’s work, though in a story profane, and a matter more manlike than becometh my sex’ (cit. Krontiris 1992: 46). With this particular socio-historical terrain of women’s translation practices in mind, Webster’s Vittoria might be viewed as embodying Renaissance tensions that circumscribe this form of textual production. Given that Vittoria ‘pointedly uses [Latin] at l. 200’ (Luckyj 2008: 57n.), it seems reasonable to think that the drama’s female protagonist understands the Lawyer’s Latinate declamation at the outset of the scene: ‘Lord Judge, turn your eyes upon this plague, the most corrupted of women’ (Luckyj 2008: 57n.). The audience, though, may not have been able to translate the Lawyer’s words. The White Devil had its inau-

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gural, and famously unpopular, performance at the Red Bull in Clerkenwell, a venue with a theatre-going public who may have been used to less sophisticated material (Gunby 2004). Accordingly, Vittoria’s lines that ‘amongst this auditory / Which come to hear my cause, the half or more / May be ignorant in it’ seem a blatant metatheatrical gesture which acknowledges the intellectual demographic of the audience (Luckyj 1999: 220). We do not hear Vittoria translating the Lawyer’s Latin. The extract’s intricate dramaturgy, however, may encourage the audience to believe that her transposition would be far superior to the verbose rendition that she procures from the trained, if comic, legal professional. Peter Burke has discussed the ways in which the ‘Renaissance translator’ functions ‘as go-between’ (2005). While she may not actually translate the Latin language into the vernacular, Vittoria acts as a go-between between the play-text and the audience. Like the Renaissance literary translators who keep in mind their learned courtly patron and their vernacular reader, Webster has his female character address a similarly bifurcated audience: the one on the stage and the one in front of the performance. Critics often comment on the paradoxical nature of this scene (Luckyj 1999: 218). As an adulterer, Vittoria is culpable. However, her rhetorical tour de force elicits audience support. Still, it is her audacious propensity to move between two languages that marks Vittoria out as ‘other’. And though the correlation between women’s garrulity and rampant sexuality is a common one, Webster refines this motif by dramatising Renaissance women’s problematic relationship to language through translation.

Translation and the Body Politic There are yet further ways in which The White Devil engages with the cultural politics of translation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Vittoria’s condemnation of the Lawyer’s speech culminates in the exclamation, ‘Why this is Welsh to Latin’. In a dramatic episode that is thoroughly entrenched in gender politics, Vittoria’s seemingly marginal quip actually establishes another hierarchical paradigm in which the English vernacular is superior to that of the Celtic nation. As the play’s editor clarifies, ‘Renaissance dramatists often used Welsh as the prototype of an unintelligible language’ (Luckyj 2008: 59n.). In a discussion of Cymbeline (also performed in 1611), Terence Hawkes states that ‘two-thirds of [Shakespeare’s] play are set in Wales’, yet the audience ‘meet no native-born Welsh people there – unless we count the ‘two beggars’ of whom Innogen asks directions (3.6.8–9). Their status may be significant’ (Hawkes 2002: 58). To be sure, Cymbeline interrogates ‘what the series of Acts of Union between England and Wales finally involved’ (Hawkes 2002: 59). It would be unreasonable to claim that Vittoria’s brief and almost clichéd defamation of the Welsh language deals with the issue in a similar manner. All the same, her remark resonates with the English Acts that prevented ‘Welsh speakers from pursuing justice in their native tongue, or from holding municipal office of any kind’ (Blank 1996: 131). A

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telling tract on the subject is John Brinsley’s A Consolation for Our Grammar Schools (1622), which ‘declared Wales to have remained an “ignorant country” [C3v] … because of the people’s inability to read English’ (Blank 1996: 134). Translation is thus a way of merging England’s Celtic other into itself. While scholars are often reminded that ‘A study of Elizabethan translations is a study of the means by which the Renaissance came to England’ (Matthiesson 1931/1965: 3; cit. Boutcher 2000: 45), a different sense of England’s intellectual adroitness – or rather lack of it – might be discerned by studying the ‘balance of trade’ between vernaculars (Burke 2007: 22). Burke explains: As for Renaissance England, imports from Italian, Spanish, and French were quite high (from the period 1550–1660 about 450 published translations from Italian have been identified). On the other hand, exports were extremely low before the 1660s. The few cases include the travels of Francis Drake, Martin Frobisher and Walter Ralegh, as well as texts by Francis Bacon, Philip Sidney, James I, William Perkins and Joseph Hall. These translations were often made by Englishmen, since most continental Europeans did not know English. (2007: 23)

The observations above support Boutcher’s point that ‘virtually nobody outside the British Isles ever dreamt of needing to learn English’ (2000: 50). Nonetheless, as we have seen throughout this essay, the interplay between English translators and their patrons, translations and their readers, and ‘intra-textual’ episodes of translation foreground complex representations of selfhood and otherness. In this respect, studies of English Renaissance literature and culture are just beginning to unravel the ways in which translation has shaped the contours of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England and its subjects. Notes 1

Quotations are from John Webster: The White Devil, ed. Christina Luckyj, New Mermaids, 3rd edn. (London: Methuen Drama, 2008).

References and Further Reading Amos, Flora Ross (1920; repr. 1983). Early Theories of Translation. New York: Octagon Books. Aughterson, Kate (ed.) (1995). Renaissance Woman: A Sourcebook. London: Routledge. Barclay, Alexander (trans.) (1570). The Ship of Fools. London. Barnstone, Willis (1993). The Poetics of Translation: History, Theory, Practice. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Bassnett, Susan (1991). Translation Studies, rev. edn. London: Routledge. Bate, Jonathan (1993). Shakespeare and Ovid. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Bate, Jonathan (1999). ‘Elizabethan translation: the art of the hermaphrodite’. In Shirley Chew and Alistair Stead (eds.), Translating Life: Studies in Transpositional Aesthetics (pp. 33–51). Liverpool English Texts and Studies. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.

Translation Benktert, Lysbeth (2001). ‘Translation as imagemaking: Elizabeth I’s translation of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy’. Early Modern Literary Studies, 6/3, 2.1–20. , accessed 30 Oct. 2008. Blank, Paula (1996). Broken English: Dialects and the Politics of Language in Renaissance Writings. London: Routledge. Boutcher, Warren (2000). ‘The Renaissance’. In Peter France (ed.), The Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation (pp. 45–55). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Braden, Gordon (1978). The Classics and English Renaissance Poetry. New Haven: Yale University Press. Brown, Georgia E. (2004). ‘Translation and the definition of sovereignty: the case of Elizabeth Tudor’. In Mike Pincombe (ed.), Travels and Translations in the Sixteenth Century (pp. 88–103). Aldershot: Ashgate. Burke, Peter (2005).‘The Renaissance translator as go-between’. In Andreas Höfele and Werner von Koppenfels (eds.), Renaissance Go-Betweens: Cultural Exchange in Early Modern Europe (pp. 17–31). Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Burke, Peter (2007). ‘Cultures of translation in early modern Europe’. In Peter Burke and R. Po-chia Hsia (eds.), Cultural Translation in Early Modern Europe (pp. 7–38). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Callaghan, Dympna (2003). ‘The Book of Changes in a time of change: Ovid’s Metamorphoses in post-Reformation England and Venus and Adonis’. In Richard Dutton and Jean E. Howard (eds.), A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works: The Poems, Problem Comedies, Late Plays (pp. 27–45). Oxford: Blackwell. Chamberlain, Lori (1992). ‘Gender and the metaphorics of translation’. In Lawrence Venuti (ed.), Rethinking Translation: Discourse, Subjectivity, Ideology (pp. 57–74). London: Routledge. Chew, Shirley and Alistair Stead (1999). Introduction. In Chew and Stead (eds.), Translating Life: Studies in Transpositional Aesthetics (pp. 1–14). Liverpool English Texts and Studies. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Clarke, Danielle (2001). The Politics of Early Modern Women’s Writing. London: Longman. Cronin, Michael (2006). Translation and Identity. London: Routledge.

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Delabastita, Dirk (2004). ‘ “If I know the letters and the language”: translation as a dramatic device in Shakespeare’s plays’. In Ton Hoenselaars (ed.), Shakespeare and the Language of Translation (pp. 31–52). Arden Shakespeare. London: Thomson Learning. Derrida, Jacques (1985). ‘Des Tours de Babel’, trans. Joseph F. Graham. In Joseph F. Graham (ed.), Difference in Translation (pp. 165–207). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Ellis, Roger and Liz Oakley-Brown (1998). ‘The British tradition’. In Mona Baker (ed.), The Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies (pp. 333–47). London: Routledge. Ellison, James (2004). ‘Sandys, George (1578– 1644)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, Sept. Online edn., , accessed 13 Dec. 2008. Fleming, Juliet (1994). ‘Dictionary English and the female tongue’. In Richard Burt and John Michael Archer (eds.), Enclosure Acts: Sexuality, Property, and Culture in Early Modern England (pp. 290–325). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Florio, John (trans.) (1603). The Essays or Moral, Politic and Military Discourses of Lord Michael de Montaigne. London. Forey, Madeleine (ed.) (2002). Ovid’s Metamorphoses: Translated by Arthur Golding. London: Penguin. Foxe, John (1570). Acts and Monuments. … The Variorum Edition, online (hriOnline, Sheffield 2004). , accessed 10 Dec. 2008. Gunby, David (2004). ‘Webster, John (1578x80 – 1638?)’. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, Sept. 2004. Online edn., , accessed 3 Sept. 2008. Hawkes, Terence (2002). Shakespeare in the Present. London: Routledge. Helgerson, Richard (1992). Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Howard, Jean. E. (2008). ‘Cymbeline’. In Stephen Greenblatt et al. (eds.), The Norton Shakespeare, 2nd edn. (pp. 2963–73). New York: W. W. Norton. Krontiris, Tina (1988). ‘Breaking barriers of genre and gender: Margaret Tyler’s translation of The

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Mirrour of Knighthood’. In Arthur F. Kinney et al. (eds.), Women in the Renaissance (pp. 19–39). Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Krontiris, Tina (1992). Oppositional Voices: Women as Writers and Translators of Literature in the English Renaissance. London: Routledge. Lamb, Mary Ellen (1985). ‘The Cooke sisters: attitudes toward learned women in the Renaissance’. In Margaret P. Hannay (ed.), Silent but for the Word: Tudor Women as Patrons, Translators and Writers of Religious Works (pp. 107–25). Ohio: Kent State University Press. Lamb, Mary Ellen (1990). Gender and Authorship in the Sidney Circle. Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press. Lewis, C. S. (1954). English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Luckyj, Christina (ed.) (1999). ‘Gender, rhetoric, and performance in John Webster’s The White Devil’. In Viviana Comensoli and Anne Russell (eds.), Enacting Gender on the English Renaissance Stage (pp. 218–32). Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Luckyj, Christina (2008). John Webster: The White Devil, 3rd edn. New Mermaids. London: Methuen Drama. Lyne, Raphael (2001). Ovid’s Changing Worlds: English Metamorphoses 1567–1632. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lyne, Raphael (2002). ‘Ovid in English translation’. In Philip Hardie (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Ovid (pp. 249–63). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Martindale, Charles and A. B. Taylor (eds.) (2004). Shakespeare and the Classics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Matthiesson, F. O. (1931; repr. 1965). Translation: An Elizabethan Art. New York: Octagon Books. Medcalf, Stephen (2008). ‘Classical authors’. In Roger Ellis (ed.), The Oxford History of Literary Translation into English, vol. 1: To 1550 (pp. 364–89). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Morini, Massimiliano (2006). Tudor Translation in Theory and Practice. Aldershot: Ashgate. Mueller, Janel and Joshua Scodel (eds.) (2009). Elizabeth I: Translations, 1544–1589. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mueller, Janel and Joshua Scodel (eds.) (forthcoming). Elizabeth I: Translations, 1592–1598. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Neill, Michael (1994). ‘Broken English and broken Irish: nation, language, and the optic of power in Shakespeare’s histories’. Shakespeare Quarterly, 45, 1–32. Neill, Michael (1996). ‘The world beyond: Shakespeare and the tropes of translation’. In R. B. Parker and S. P. Zitner (eds.), Elizabethan Theater: Essays in Honor of S. Schoenbaum (pp. 290–308). Newark: University of Delaware Press. North, Thomas (1570). The Moral Philosophy of Doni. London. Oakley-Brown, Liz (2001). ‘Translating the subject: Ovid’s Metamorphoses in England, 1560– 67’. In Roger Ellis and Liz Oakley-Brown (eds.), Translation and Nation: Towards a Cultural Politics of Englishness (pp. 48–84). Topics in Translation. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Ong, Walter J. (1959). ‘Latin language study as a Renaissance puberty rite’. Studies in Philology, 56, 103–24. Orme, Nicholas (2008).‘Barclay, Alexander (c.1484–1552)’. In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, Sept. 2004. Online edn., , accessed 27 Oct. 2008. Pettegree, Andrew (2007). ‘Translation and the migration of texts’. In Thomas Betteridge (ed.), Borders and Travellers in Early Modern Europe (pp. 113–25). Aldershot: Ashgate. Pincombe, Mike (2001). Elizabethan Humanism: Literature and Learning in the Later Sixteenth Century. London: Longman. Russell, Daniel (2001). ‘Introduction: the Renaissance’. In Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski et al. (eds.), The Politics of Translation in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (pp. 29–35). Perspectives on Translation. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press. Schleiner, Louise (1992). ‘Margaret Tyler: translator and waiting woman’. English Language Notes, 29, 1–8. Schleiner, Louise (1994). Tudor and Stuart Women Writers. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Sherry, Richard (1550). Treatise of Schemes and Tropes Gathered out of the Best Grammarians and Orators. London. Simon, Sherry (1996). Gender in Translation: Cultural Identity and the Politics of Transmission. London: Routledge.

Translation Steiner, George (1992). After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation, 2nd edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Straznicky, Marta (2002). ‘Closet drama’. In Arthur F. Kinney (ed.), A Companion to Renaissance Drama (pp. 416–30). Oxford: Blackwell. Taylor, Karla (2008). ‘Writers of the Italian Renaissance’. In Roger Ellis (ed.), The Oxford History of Literary Translation into English, vol. 1: To 1550 (pp. 390–406). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tudeau-Clayton, Margaret (1998). Jonson, Shakespeare and Early Modern Virgil. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tudeau-Clayton, Margaret (2002). ‘Scenes of translation in Jonson and Shakespeare: Poetaster, Hamlet, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream’. Translation and Literature, 11, 1–23. Uman, Deborah and Belén Bistué (2007). ‘Translation as collaborative authorship: Margaret

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Tyler’s The Mirrour of Princely Deedes and Knighthood’. Comparative Literature, 44, 298–323. Venuti, Lawrence (1995). The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation. London: Routledge. Wayne, Valerie (1985). ‘Some sad sentence: Vives’ Instruction of a Christian Woman’. In Margaret P. Hannay (ed.), Silent but for the Word: Tudor Women as Patrons. Translators as Writers of Religious Works (pp. 15–29). Ohio: Kent State University Press. Winny, James (1960). Elizabethan Prose Translation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Woodbridge, Linda (1984). Women and the English Renaissance: Literature and the Nature of Womankind, 1550–1620. Sussex: The Harvester Press. Wright, William Aldis (ed.) (1904). Roger Ascham: English Works. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wyatt, Michael (2005). The Italian Encounter with Tudor England: A Cultural Politics of Translation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

10

Mythology Jane Kingsley-Smith

The encounter between a literary protagonist and a figure from classical myth recurs frequently in early modern poetry and drama, and the moment is always highly charged with a desire for assimilation and a sharp sense of difference and of loss. In Shakespeare, this polarity is most evident in the reactions prompted by Hecuba, the widowed queen of Troy. Lucrece loses herself in gazing on the Troy painting and its depiction of Hecuba’s grief (The Rape of Lucrece, 1366–1568). Where the narrator implies a kind of paragone between the arts of painting and of dramatic monologue, she sees her identification with Hecuba as mutually enabling: ‘So Lucrece, set-a-work, sad tales doth tell / To pencil’d pensiveness and colour’d sorrow; / She lends them words, and she their looks doth borrow’ (1496–8). In Hamlet, however, a speech describing the ‘moblèd queen’ (3.1.505–21) fails to move the prince to anything but self-disgust, signalling not only that widowed queens no longer know how to mourn but that the sons of murdered fathers have lost the capacity for revenge. Alienated from epic mythology and revenge tragedy, Hamlet is ‘[less] an antique Roman than a Dane’ (5.2.293). This need to make comparisons between present and ancient culture was an obvious legacy of Renaissance humanism. As it related to classical mythology, it was a practice hard-wired into the early modern English subject from his or her earliest education. In the grammar schools, sections of Ovid’s Metamorphoses were learned by heart as a stylistic model, but the boys were also encouraged to write letters based on Ovid’s Heroides and ‘to find a rhetoric appropriate to a [mythological] character’s circumstances and passions’ (Bate 1993: 19–22). In the public theatre, audiences were expected to be able to draw inferences from the briefest mythological allusion and to mock those (invariably lower-class) characters who could not (see Titus Andronicus 4.3.80). The mythological self-images produced by England’s ruling class in portraits, costumes, interior design, civic entertainments, and masques further demonstrate the prestige that such allusions might confer. And yet, there were also manifest dangers – not only Hamlet’s despair at the way in which the qualities of

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the ‘antique Roman’ have been lost but the possibility that they might be revivified. The popularity of Italian novelle and mythological fables, in printed form and on the stage in England from the early 1560s, coincided with political and religious uncertainty about the direction of the Protestant Reformation.1 Classical culture was overtly antithetical to the reform agenda. Not only were its sexual mores profoundly different, it represented a polytheistic religion based on anthropomorphised gods. Moreover, the ‘fictional’ nature of its forms of worship and their emphasis on visual seduction were viewed as idolatrous from a Protestant perspective. On the one hand, this meant that paganism could be usefully deployed to castigate (and to create a greater cultural distance from) Catholicism. In the Homily Against Peril of Idolatry (appointed to be read in churches throughout England and Wales), the speaker observes that Catholic rites such as kneeling before images, lighting candles, burning incense, and venerating relics can all be traced back to pagan practices (Rickey and Stroup 1968: 48–54). Like the heathen, Catholic trades and professions have their own particular saint: ‘Scholars have Saint Nicholas and Saint Gregory; Painters, Saint Luke; neither lack soldiers their Mars, nor lovers their Venus, amongst Christians’ (Homily, 47). But whilst this pagan ancestry was used to demystify the Catholic faith, it also implied that too great an identification with or pleasure from mythology might equate to a kind of Catholic seduction. In the early 1580s, ministers in Kent complained that parish churches might easily be reconverted to Catholicism, becoming ‘like a Diana’s shrine for a future hope and daily comfort of old popish beldams and young perking papists’ (Duffy 1992: 583). In the Homily, an Elizabethan audience may have found the speaker’s use of the present tense disturbing when he laments: ‘Alas, wee seem in thus thinking and doing to have learned our religion, not out of GODS word, but out of the Pagan Poets’ (Homily, 47). The following discussion explores further the attraction and repulsion inspired by mythology in early modern England, focusing on the classical but with reference also to the nation-building myths and faerie mythology that often operated alongside it. Having considered the literary and visual resources to which poets and dramatists might turn, we will examine in more detail the function of classical mythology in early modern English literature and the liberties that were taken in its name.

Sources: Literary and Visual As Jean Seznec has shown in his magisterial study The Survival of the Pagan Gods, not only many of the arguments justifying the continued use of pagan mythology but the texts by which those myths were disseminated remained consistent between the medieval and early modern periods. Boccaccio’s Genealogia deorum gentilium (Genealogy of the Gentile Gods) began to circulate in manuscript form in the 1370s, but its publication in 1472 and subsequent reprinting ensured that it remained the standard reference work on mythology for two centuries. Since many of its sources were medi-

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eval commentaries rather than classical texts, Renaissance mythography remained embedded in a medieval perception of the pagan gods, largely defined by a tradition of moral and Christian allegory. For example, Fulgentius’ sixth-century commentary on Virgil’s Aeneid reads that text as a journey towards spiritual enlightenment: ‘it is by the urgings of the intellect that youth quits the straits of passion’ (cit. Brumble 2007: 417). The anonymous fourteenth-century Ovide moralisé perpetrated numerous moral and Christian readings of pagan myths, including that the Judgment of Paris was an allegory of God’s gift of free will to man. It was not until the mid-sixteenth century that the spectacular triumvirate of Lilio Gregorio Giraldi (De deis gentium varia et multiplex historia (The History of the Gods), Basel, 1548); Natale Conti (Mythologiae sive explicationis fabularum libri decem (Mythology), Venice, 1551); and Vincenzo Cartari (Sposizione degli dei degli antichi (The Images of the Gods), Venice, 1556) stole Boccaccio’s limelight.2 These texts represented a more ‘Renaissance’ attempt to engage with the classical sources in their original languages (Conti cites Greek tragedy from the original). They also recognised the use being made of mythology by poets and artists, with Cartari, and later Cesare Ripa, foregrounding iconographical descriptions of the gods (the Iconologia (1593) would be published in an illustrated edition ten years later). That these continental resources remained important to English writers is testified to by John Marston, who satirises his own reliance upon them in order to decipher contemporary verse: Reach me some Poets’ Index … Imagines Deorum. Book of Epithets, Natalis Comes, thou I know recites, And mak’st Anatomy of Poesie, Help to unmaske the Satyr’s secrecy. (Certain Satires, no. 2 (1598), 26–30)

However, classical mythology was also being made accessible to a wider public through English translations of seminal texts, most notably Arthur Golding’s The xv. Books of P. Ovidius Naso, entitled Metamorphosis (1567). English mythographies had also started to appear, if somewhat shamefacedly. For example, Stephen Batman’s ambivalence is registered in his title, The Golden Book of the Leaden Gods (London, 1577), and in a prologue which insists on the superiority of his readers, ‘now living in the clear light of the Gospel’ to the myths’ original audience, plunged into ‘apostasy, atheism, blasphemy, idolatry, and heresy’ by these same fictions. The Metamorphoses found a rather more sympathetic reception in Abraham Fraunce’s The Countess of Pembroke’s Ivychurch (1591) where the fictional, pastoral setting allows the eroticism of the myths greater liberty. Yet none of these texts explains why knowledge of classical mythology had become necessary for a mass English readership by the end of the sixteenth century. To explain the desire to interpret Jupiter, Venus, and Hercules aright, we need to look back to the Italian Renaissance and to engage with a specifically visual tradition.

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In the mid-fourteenth century, Pierre Bersuire had had to apologise for relying on written sources for his Reductorium morale ‘since … I could nowhere find … paintings of the gods themselves’ (cit. Seznec 1953: 175 n.5). But more than a century and a half later, archaeologists in Rome had uncovered ancient statues, reliefs, and coins, whilst the rediscovery and translation of classical texts including Philostratus’ Imagines, the Greek Anthology, and Anacreontea had uncovered an array of new ekphrastic descriptions (Bull 2005: 14). These visual representations of mythological themes, real and imagined, inspired an immediate response in some of Italy’s most gifted artists. For example, Michelangelo would sculpt a Sleeping Cupid (1496, now lost), in imitation of an antique statue that he had seen in the Medici garden. Botticelli’s Calumny of Apelles (1494–5, Uffizi, Florence) was based on a description by Lucian, newly translated and disseminated. The Cupids that frolic across the canvas of Titian’s Worship of Venus (1518–19, Prado, Madrid) were conceived in response to a painting described in Philostratus. The subsequent vogue for mythological themes across a range of Italian arts was promoted by two distinct movements (Bull 2005: 83–5). However, before considering the influence of Italian Renaissance art on the dissemination of Cupid any further we need to acknowledge important trends. The first movement of ‘Cupid art’ was primarily domestic: in fifteenth-century Tuscany and the Veneto, bridal couples were traditionally given wedding chests (cassoni) painted with scenes from the Old Testament but increasingly from erotic mythology, such as the Judgment of Paris, Dido and Aeneas, or Petrarch’s Trionfo dell’Amore. The mythological images in particular were extended to other domestic objects such as deschi da parto (birth trays), pastiglia boxes (receptacles for trinkets), and maiolica (tin-glazed earthenware). Nevertheless, this fashion remained local and had largely declined by the mid-sixteenth century (Bull 2005: 37–41). The more famous wave of Renaissance mythological art, represented by frescos, tapestries, paintings, statuettes, fountains, coins, gems, intermezzi, and processions originated in Rome but became concentrated in the courts of Genoa, Mantua, and Florence. Here, wealthy patrons were found, eager to create an impression of wealth and magnificence through the elaborate decoration of their pleasure palaces and gardens, and the exorbitant festivities celebrating their marriages, civic entries, and so on (Bull 2005: 41–79). The dissemination of mythological themes beyond Italy relied partly upon the rivalry between European nobles who lured renowned artists from one court to another. For example, François I brought Leonardo da Vinci to France, and commissioned Francesco Primaticcio to transform Fontainebleau until it became ‘a kind of new Rome’.3 In the north, the court of Rudolf II in Prague became a second Fontainebleau in its commitment to mythological art, whilst important workshops were established in Augsburg, Nuremberg, and Antwerp (Bull 2005: 84). Nevertheless, the northern Renaissance remained largely indebted to the willingness of its artists to travel: Albrecht Dürer, Lucas Cranach, and Peter Paul Rubens all studied in Italy, before returning to the north to reproduce what they had seen (Harbison 1995: 161–7). At the same time, designs increasingly came to them through the invention

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of the printing press, which revolutionised the transmission of images in the sixteenth century. Many influential mythological artists also worked in this medium. For example, Raphael collaborated with Marcantonio Raimondi to replicate images from his fresco cycle as well as original designs; Primaticcio and his collaborators produced a number of prints based on Fontainebleau; German and Italian artists, including Marcantonio, repeatedly copied Dürer’s prints. In England, it was through northern Renaissance prints that England would be mainly indebted for its encounter with mythological art (see Landau and Parshall 1994: 308–15), though the European emblem tradition would provide another valuable resource. Andrea Alciati’s Emblemata (1531), in which pagan gods and heroes embody a variety of moral lessons, inspired imitations across Europe, including Geffrey Whitney’s A Choice of Emblems (Leiden, 1586). These visual expressions of classical mythology were crucial to its success in the Renaissance, not least because, as Seznec suggests, ‘A myth is primarily made of images rather than ideas; and the image itself possesses an autonomous power of evocation and proliferation’ (Seznec 1973: 286). The extent to which the visual image captured the imagination of English writers, despite their more limited access to mythological art, is suggested by the ‘love-in-idleness’ flower of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (2.1.155–74). In a strongly ekphrastic passage that suspends the play’s action, Oberon describes how the diverted arrow of Cupid fell upon ‘a little western flower – / Before milkwhite; now, purple with love’s wound’ (MND 2.1.166–7). The powerful visual appeal of this image (later materialised on stage) encourages the audience to make the connection with other Ovidian flowers, including the pansy that sprang from Adonis’ blood and the hyacinth that commemorates Hyacinthus. Its transfiguration from white to purple also recalls the mulberry of Pyramus and Thisbe (curiously absent from the mechanicals’ play). But if ‘love-in-idleness’ thus invokes the tragic consequences of frustrated eros it does so only to avoid them (endorsing Oberon’s imposition of desire upon Titania and Demetrius, and Theseus’ sexual possession of Hippolyta). For it is displaced to the beginning of the play and redefined as an agent of passion rather than a symbol of love’s loss. At the same time, the flower’s meaning is informed by a more contemporary visual tradition which identified the pansy with Elizabeth I (it appeared not only in her embroidery, but on the dress she wears in the ‘Rainbow Portrait’ (c.1600, Hatfield House, Herts. – see Figure 4), and was used as a verbal cipher for the queen in the April Eclogue of Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender (1579); see Klein, 1997: 477–8; McLane 1961: 13–26). Thus, the flower’s penetration by Cupid’s arrow may have suggested a witty pun on the ‘defloration’ that is itself displaced from Shakespeare’s ‘imperial votaress’, another figure for Elizabeth herself (Montrose 1983: 82). This metamorphosed / metamorphic flower thus suggests not only the syncretic nature of Shakespeare’s approach to mythology, and the liberties he took in redistributing and reinterpreting its tropes, but also the power of a single visual image to summon a range of mythological narratives, to conflicting and often ironic effect. Nevertheless, it is also important to recognise the more systematic approaches to

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Image not available in the electronic edition

Figure 4 ‘Rainbow Portrait’ of Queen Elizabeth I, c.1600. Hatfield House, Hertfordshire

mythology characteristic of early modern literature. In the rest of this chapter, I want to focus on the value of mythology as a basis for historical and moral allegory, before considering how early modern England used it to expand its own thinking on questions of sex and of religion.

Historical Allegory According to Euhemerus (a Sicilian from the fourth century BC, whose work became known in part through the Latin translation of Ennius), the pagan gods had originally been great men: either rulers or those with some particular skill. These men came to be regarded as gods, and were worshipped as such, ‘for it was thought that whatever confers utility on the human race must be due to the operation of divine benevolence towards men’ (Cicero, De natura deorum, cit. Seznec 1973: 287). Whilst early Christians used this revelation to explode the pagan faith as a man-made fiction, in the Renaissance it actually enhanced its status, providing a pattern for contemporary eulogy. For example, the Emperor Charles V was encouraged to see himself as Jupiter

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crushing the giants in his attempt to re-establish imperial power in Italy (Seznec 1973: 291). Louis XIV of France favoured images of himself as Apollo, the Sun God, as is evident from the Salon d’Apollon at Versailles (Bull 2005: 341). One of the many classical alter egos of Elizabeth I was Diana, the armed goddess of chastity (see Frye 1996). In each case, the deity chosen exemplified a particular aspect of the monarch’s public image whilst also defending their divine right to rule (in a reversal of the Christian argument). Yet this was only one aspect of the historical application of mythology. Through the use of ‘ethnogenic fables’ a ruler might celebrate not only his or her own legitimacy but also the prestigious origins and destiny of the kingdom (Ruthven 1976: 9). The most popular source was Virgil’s Aeneid. Not only was its protagonist a prince of Troy who went on to found Rome, his descendants were said to have founded the great nations of sixteenth-century Europe. For example, Aeneas’ great-grandson, Brutus, had founded Britain (an argument popularised by Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae, c.1136), the Trojan Francus, France, and so on. Such derivations not only endorsed the reign of the current monarch, they also provided the materials for nation-building at a time when England was in particular need of a mythical justification for its political and religious isolation in Catholic Europe. In Spenser’s remarkable piece of myth-making, The Faerie Queene, Rome’s claim to embody Troy must cede place to Elizabethan England. As Britomart foretells: a third kingdom yet is to arise, Out of the Troians scattered ofspring, That in all glory and great enterprise, Both first and second Troy shall dare to equalise. (3.9.44.6–9)

Thus a foundation myth becomes a prophecy of further empire-building that is also a kind of political intervention, engaging with contemporary Elizabethan policy by rendering its decisions a foregone conclusion. Moreover, The Faerie Queene demonstrates how other kinds of mythology could be used to similar effect. Not only was King Arthur (erroneously) assumed to be part of Trojan history through his descent from Brutus, he was also renowned as one of the great Briton kings who had defended the realm from the Saxons. Arthurian legend had already proved a crucial subtext for the Tudor monarchy: Henry VII traced his Welsh ancestry to the last British king, Cadwallader, and named his heir Arthur. Within The Faerie Queene, Arthur is not only the ideal partner for Gloriana (Elizabeth herself), he is also the mythical king from whom she claims her legitimacy: Thy name, O soveraine Queene, thy realme and race From this renowned Prince derived are, Who mightily upheld that royall mace, Which now thou bear’st (2.10.4.1–4)

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The poem’s use of faerie mythology further supports its historical ambitions. In Book 2, Arthur gains his first glimpse of the Faerie Queene when she appears to him in a dream, thereby reinforcing his claim to greatness since the attentions of a beautiful faery are a mark of exemplary merit. At the same time, Elizabeth’s figuration as a faery idealises her own rule. In the popular romance Huon of Bordeaux, translated by John Bourchier, Lord Berners (c.1540), the kingdom of Oberon is described in terms of unparalleled wealth, and the faery king himself possesses fantastical powers to bend it to his will. Thus, the land of faerie potentially provided ‘a wish-fulfilment of supreme sovereign power operative outside the boundaries of economic and political structures’ (Woodcock 2004: 38). Moreover, the fact that Gloriana remains largely absent from the poem strengthens her mythical status; even Arthur is directed by an unseen power beyond his perception or control. Part of the fascination of mythological allusion, however, was its inherent ambiguity, the sense that it was always shadowed by alternative (often disruptive) meanings, accrued from other mythographical studies, contemporary fictions, and polemical texts. As Matthew Woodcock has shown, there are bad fairies in all of Spenser’s major Italian sources, including Boiardo, Ariosto, and Tasso, and in The Faerie Queene other female characters associated with the faerie or fay include Acrasia, Phaedria, Agape, and even Duessa (Woodcock 2004: 102). Though the former has often been taken as a dark double for Gloriana, onto which are projected the negative aspects of faerie, the Elizabethan reader might still have read Arthur’s night-time encounter with the seductive queen in terms of the succubus, the Devil disguised as a beautiful woman, familiar from tracts on witchcraft and demonology (Woodcock 2004: 106). The danger of emasculation is also a real one, consistent with the effect of Elizabeth’s other incarnations on male heroes in the poem, not least Belphoebe over Timias, Radigund over Artegall. Moreover, faerie mythology also allows the poem to expose the constructedness of Elizabeth’s identity. We mainly encounter Gloriana through other characters’ narratives about her and through visual representations, such as the image on the shields of Guyon and Satyrane, and the carved gem worn by Arthur. The effect is to make Gloriana (and therefore Elizabeth) appear ‘only as a story or a text, only as something put together or “made” ’ (Woodcock 2004: 112). The questions of truth and fictionality that are intrinsic to faerie mythology potentially undermine its ability to celebrate the true virtues of its sovereign, and expose the dubious authority of Spenser’s epic itself.

Moral Allegory An apparently more secure justification for the use of mythology is the belief that it enshrines fundamental moral truths. The fact that they are shrouded in elaborate allegories is partly a reflection of the heathen’s unfortunate ignorance of the one true God, but also a deliberate feint in order to protect the truth. As Clement of Alexandria observes in his Stromata (5.9):

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all things that shine through a veil show the truth grander and more imposing … those who instituted the mysteries, being philosophers, buried their doctrines in myths, so as not to be obvious to all. Did they then, by veiling human opinions, prevent the ignorant from handling them; and was it not more beneficial for the holy and blessed contemplation of realities to be concealed?

It was the responsibility of the mythographer to unveil these truths for the careful (which often means elite) reader who is capable of recognising their meaning. His endeavour was all the more precarious when he undertook to make the whole text accessible through vernacular translation. Thus, Golding defends Ovid’s Metamorphoses by arguing that the same truths might be found in Scripture (which could even have been Ovid’s source, he suggests). Nevertheless, there is no harm in finding them in this pagan guise, provided we read them aright: If poets then with leesings and with fables shadowed so The certeine truth, what letteth [prevents] us to pluck those visors fro Their doings, and to bring again the darkened truth to light, That all men may behold thereof the clearness shining bright? (Epistle, 537–40)

The morals that Golding finds in the Metamorphoses do battle with its eroticism. Rather than incite the reader to lust, Ovid reveals the tragic consequences of that passion. Thus, the narrative of Hermaphrodite and Salmacis in Book 4 ‘declares that idleness / Is chiefest nurse and cherisher of all voluptuousness, / And that voluptuous life breeds sin: which linking all together / Make men to bee effeminate, unwieldy, weak and lither’ (Epistle, 113–16; ed. Nims, p. 408). The entirety of Book 10 (one of the most popular with Elizabethan poets) ‘chiefly doth contain one kind of argument / Reproving most prodigious lusts of such as have been bent / To incest most unnatural …’ (213–15). Yet part of the appeal of Golding’s moralisation is its refusal to be confined by any one interpretation, enabling him to adapt the fables to a range of different readers. Thus, the tragedy of Phaeton in Book 2 is read in multiple ways: In Phaetons fable unto sight the Poet doth express The natures of ambition blind, and youthful wilfulness. The end whereof is misery and bringeth at the last Repentance when it is too late that all redress is past. And how the weakness and the want of wit in magistrate Confoundeth both his common weal and eke his own estate. This fable also doth advise all parents and all such As bring up youth to take good heed of cockering them too much … (71–8; ed. Nims, p. 407)

Early modern poets who engaged with the moral aspect of mythography inherited a tradition that was simultaneously stable and in a state of considerable flux. That

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they were able to assume some familiarity with a particular moral reading is suggested by how often mythological allusions are used as a kind of moral shorthand. For example, Marlowe often begins his tragedies with a reference that both defines the trajectory of the plot and implies its hamartia or cause. In Edward II, Gaveston chooses to have Actaeon appear in a masque, a blatantly erotic performance by the beautiful, naked boy who will ‘seem to die’ (1.67–70) before the king. However, Actaeon’s fate in being ripped apart by his own hounds was often understood as a symbol of the way in which erotic desire proves self-destructive (in Twelfth Night, Orsino describes himself ‘turned into a hart / And my desires, like fell and cruel hounds / E’er since pursue me’, 1.1.20–2), and it was also a symbol for the dangers of transgressing on royal prerogative. In Dr Faustus, the Chorus establishes a parallel with Icarus (Pro. 20–2) that not only locates Faustus’ crime in his pride, his intellectual ambition, and his use of prohibited arts including astrology, but hints at divine malevolence: ‘And melting heavens conspired his overthrow’. As the example from Dr Faustus suggests, there was considerable room for ambiguity within the moralisation of any mythological figure or action. Indeed, such a tension is often evident between Golding’s Epistle and the narratives he translates. In the former, we are told that ‘The death of Orphey showeth God’s just vengeance on the vile / And wicked sort which horribly with incest them defile’ (224–5; ed. Nims, p. 411), but Orpheus was not incestuous; what the commentary blanks out is his preference for sex with boys and his explicit defence of it within the fable. Furthermore, if one of Golding’s overarching Ovidian morals is that submission to lust brings about its own punishment, this is clearly contradicted by the tragedies of Adonis and Hippolytus, both of whom refuse desire but cannot thereby escape destruction. Whilst mythography often suggests a certain disquiet at, or struggle with, its own moral contradictions, however, it also anticipates the way in which these would prove inspiring to the ambitious, secular-minded author, for example, those neo-Ovidian poets of the 1590s in England who produced the erotic, largely amoral poems now known as epyllia (see Keach 1977). Golding does not give one moral when he can provide five or six, and by this means the text releases a kind of hermeneutic pleasure that potentially militates against the act of moralisation itself since it opens the text up to a range of perspectives, valuing inventiveness over respect for authority. The epyllion’s interpretative enthusiasm is often channelled into aetiologies: fictional explanations for why things are the way they are. For example, love will always prove tragic because Venus was disappointed in her passion for Adonis (Venus and Adonis, 1135–6); at any time half the world is in darkness (or its population is dark-skinned) as a sign of Nature’s grief at Hero’s beauty (Hero and Leander, 1.49–50) and so on. We might see the aetiology as evidence of the drift towards secularism and a more unabashed pleasure in sensuality that is a feature of early modern mythology (Bate 1993: 25), but it also reflects a tradition established by the very moralisation it displaces.

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Finally, the experience of both reading and writing mythography may be intrinsically erotic. As we have seen, one of its major tropes is the unveiling of pagan allegory to reveal the Christian truth, but as Charlotte Coffin (2008: 6) has shown, this translates into a kind of exegetical striptease, ‘whose slow and difficult process makes for increased satisfaction’: The travail ta’en in that behalf, although it have some pain, Yet makes it double recompense with pleasure and with pain. (Epistle, 543–4; ed. Nims, p. 420)

In a comparison of the different techniques of Batman, Golding, and Fraunce (the first banishes much of the erotic material, the second controls it through the paratext, the last locates it within an elite, aristocratic setting), Coffin concludes that although ‘mythographers have different ways of dressing and undressing the gods … what transpires in all texts, even the most aggressively moralizing ones, is the intense pleasure of the writer who narrates and interprets the fables, handling them over and over again in never-ending intercourse’ (Coffin 2008: 17).

Erotic Licence For all the emphasis on its moral and historical functions, perhaps the abiding fascination of classical mythology for early modern England lay in its representation of untrammelled libidinal energy. It was the texts’ capacity to invoke erotic desire through a combination of lascivious narrative and seductively witty narration that was repeatedly attested to, not least by mythology’s detractors. For example, in February 1585, a bill was put forward ‘for repressing of printing of certain books’. In a speech given in Parliament to defend this legislation, the speaker located Ovid’s De arte amandi among the texts he condemned as unprofitable and idle pamphlets, lewd and wanton discourses of love, profane ballads, lying histories, which all tend to the corruption of manners and expense of time which otherwise men would bestow in reading of the scripture and other good treatises of morality or wit. (Hartley 1995: II, 40)

The reference to ‘idleness’ alludes to the fear of the profane and erotic replacing the divine (just as theatre-going was a potential rival to church attendance), with a pun on idolatry. Reading erotic texts is also implicitly onanistic when one might be reading something more improving (and metaphorically procreative). The danger of mythology in its visual form, as a painting or in the theatre, is also repeatedly witnessed. In 1583 Philip Stubbes condemns not just the eroticism of the play-going experience, but the plays’ subject matter: the ‘Heathenical pamphlets of toys and babbleries … [which] corrupt men’s minds, pervert good wits, allure to

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Bawdry, induce to whoredom, suppress virtue and erect vice’ (The Anatomy of Abuses, 139–40). Of these dangers, the incitement to rape and to adultery seems to have been most acute. In Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, the guilt of Ovid’s Metamorphoses as the source text for Lavinia’s rape is made explicit when that book is brought on stage (Titus 4.1). Though the story of Philomel and Tereus allows Lavinia to express her mind, it is repeatedly made clear that the rape would not have happened without that text. Not only did Chiron and Demetrius know to cut off Lavinia’s hands because they had seen what ensued when Philomel retained this means of self-expression, but the location of the rape was ‘Patterned by that the poet here describes / By nature made for murders and for rapes’ (4.1.56–7). In Middleton’s Women Beware Women (c.1621), the Duke possesses an extensive collection of mythological art that is used not only as a pretext for obtaining a private audience with Bianca, but as an incitement to desire: Guardiano explains how, ‘to prepare her stomach by degrees / To Cupid’s feast, because I saw ’twas queasy, / I showed her naked pictures’ (2.2.404–6). The critical debate over whether or not Bianca is raped or submits willingly would have been partly informed for an early modern audience by the strong association between mythological art and female adultery. In A Mirror Meet for all Mothers, Matrons and Maidens, Intituled the Mirror of Modesty (London, 1579), Thomas Salter condemns the fact that if you teach a woman to read she will inevitably consume ‘the Lascivious books of Ovid, Catullus, Propertius, Tibullus, and in Virgil of Aeneas, and Dido’, thereby becoming familiar with ‘the filthy love (if I may term it love) of the Gods themselves, and of their wicked adulteries and abominable Fornications’ (B8v). The obvious conclusion for Harebrain in Middleton’s A Mad World My Masters (1604) is that if you want your wife to remain chaste she must be prohibited from reading mythological material (1.2.44). However, rape and adultery were only the most visible kinds of sexual transgression identified with mythology. More subtle is the way in which it allowed for a reader’s imaginative engagement with a range of ‘perverse’ sexual desires and practices, including incest and bestialism. The Ovidian account of Venus’ passion for Adonis is prefaced by her being kissed by her son, Cupid, who accidentally pierces her with his arrow. This potentially incestuous frame is reinforced by the fact that Adonis is the child of incest (specifically the coupling of Myrrha with her own father) and by the fact that the whole is placed within Book 10, which, as we have seen, is explicitly concerned with incestuous love. In Shakespeare’s retelling, this subtext is reinforced by Venus’ confusion of heteroerotic and maternal desire: she is ‘Like a milch doe whose swelling dugs do ache / Hasting to feed her fawn hid in some brake’ (875–6). When Adonis is transformed into a flower, she places it in her bosom, as the ‘Sweet issue of a more sweet-smelling sire’ (1178). Thus, Adonis becomes the child of his own union with Venus. Bestialism is another form of lust that classical allusions overlay onto heteroerotic romance. The image of the boar ‘sheath[ing]’ its tusk in Adonis’ ‘soft groin’ (1116) defines the former as the dominant partner in a bestial coupling, even as the overlap

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between the discourses of sodomy and bestiality make this a ‘homosexual’ act.4 A similar layering effect has been found in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in which not only the allusions to Apuleius’ Golden Ass but those to the myth of Pasiphae and the bull (Metamorphoses, Book 8; Ars amatoria, 1.295–326) appear to reinforce the physical consummation of the relationship between Titania and Bottom. As a consequence, ‘the unproblematical distinction between human and bestial nature … ultimately emerges from the play as neither unproblematical nor particularly distinct’ (Boehrer 1994: 126). In this respect, the play might echo Golding’s insistence that the Ovidian metamorphosis of men into beasts is profoundly moral: those who do not follow virtue’s law ‘do differ nought from beasts, but rather be / Much worse’ (61–2; ed. Nims, p. 406). A Midsummer Night’s Dream also insists that the same kind of desire may be produced by a husband, a changeling boy, or an ass, a theory it might also have derived from Ovid. The effect of these ‘perverse’ loves mingling with the more orthodox is to suggest a more fluid and diverse perception of sexual desire in early modern England, that ‘sexual love is always at some level transgressive’ (Bate 1993: 60). But one of the most important functions of classical mythology seems to have been the possibility it offered to imagine same-sex passions, intimacies, even relationships. In his study of male homosexual desire, Bruce R. Smith identifies ‘six separate myths of homosexual behaviour’ in early modern England, each of them aligned with a particular classical narrative (Smith 1991: 20). Jupiter and Ganymede is not only the most famous, ‘display[ing] homoeroticism’s public face’ (Smith 1991: 190), it also gives expression to (and provides a model for) the vertical power relations that often pertained to homosexual desire: ‘Ganymede’ became a term commonly used to identify the passive partner (Smith 1991: 191–6). To explain the ‘renaissance of representations of female homoerotic desire’ in early modern England (Smith 1991: 7, italics mine), Valerie Traub also has recourse to particular classical myths, such as Diana and Callisto, Iphis and Ianthe. The retelling of the Iphis and Ianthe legend in particular, from Golding through to Sandys via contemporary romance, increasingly challenges the contemporary assumption that female–female desire is impossible and / or unnatural (Traub 2002: 276–88).

Religious Licence Finally, this notion of mythology as allowing for imaginative freedoms brings us back to the religious aspect of classical allusion. At the beginning of the chapter, I acknowledged the opprobrious use of paganism as an origin for the Catholic faith, its invented deities mimicking the worship of the saints, its invented rituals reflected in the Catholic love of spectacle. Yet this is not the only way in which pagan mythology might be used to comment on contemporary religion. One argument is that the increased fascination with paganism was reflective of an increasingly secular world-view. In particular, the epyllion’s shocking eschewal of moral

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and Christian exegesis reveals how ‘the pagan past permits a new and specifically literary orientation towards religious discourse, ideology, and practice’ (Callaghan 2003a: 28). Yet paganism can also be seen as re-producing feelings of religious affect, particularly in the theatre. Since God had been banished as a figure from the early modern stage, pagan deities had sometimes been required to substitute for him, as they did in the case of religious oaths. Where this substitution becomes potentially transgressive is in a context of worship specifically imagined in Catholic terms (see Taylor 2001). In Jonson’s Sejanus (1603) and Shakespeare’s The Two Noble Kinsmen (1613), for example, scenes of pagan worship become an opportunity for the representation of Catholic rituals, such as kneeling before an altar, burning incense, and the use of instrumental music (the last two having been banned in parish churches as part of the Reformation). Moreover, both dramatists insist on the value of the divine response incurred by these acts (and therefore the power of intercession): Fortune turns her face away from Sejanus; Diana endorses Emilia’s matrimonial future through the fall of a rose. When we consider further that Shakespeare’s scenes of pagan worship in Cymbeline and The Two Noble Kinsmen were all performed in the Blackfriars theatre, the site of a former monastery, in a district of London still associated with Catholicism (Wilson 2004: 5), the resonance of this pagan worship becomes even stronger. To conclude, the signifying power of mythological allusion in early modern literature is often deadened to us (its conceits turned to stone), not only through our relative ignorance of mythology, but through the contemporary success that transformed it into cliché, and the pretentiousness we perceive behind its use. This was a common reaction in the early modern period. For example, in The Return to Parnassus, Part Two, Will Kemp complains that ‘Few of the university men pen plays well, they smell too much of that writer Ovid and that writer Metamorphosis, and talk too much of Proserpina and Jupiter’ (1766ff., cit. Bate 1993: 43). Nevertheless, whilst references to it were sometimes desultory, mythology provided an undeniably rich source of creative inspiration for early modern writers, and a means of challenging the increasingly restrictive sexual and religious orthodoxies of the Reformation. If there was one thing that Ovidian mythology seemed to assert it was that men were naturally made of flesh and not marble.

Notes 1

See Alistair Fox’s account of the appropriation of Italian Renaissance genres, themes, and imagery ‘as a response to a need felt by English men and women to come to terms with the awesome cultural separation from a Continental Latinate system of values – religious, moral, aesthetic and political – that was being enforced upon them by the successive political

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and evangelical reformations of the sixteenth century’ (Fox 1997: 3). For further discussion of their printing history and influence, see Seznec 1953: 229–56, 279–323. Vasari, Lives of the Artists, vol. 7, 408, in Knecht 1982: 268. For further discussion, see Callaghan 2003b.

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Jane Kingsley-Smith References and Further Reading

Barkan, Leonard (1986). The Gods Made Flesh: Metamorphosis and the Pursuit of Paganism. New Haven: Yale University Press. Bate, Jonathan (1993). Shakespeare and Ovid. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Berry, Philippa (2003). ‘Renewing the concept of Renaissance: the cultural influence of paganism reconsidered’. In Philippa Berry and Margaret Tudeau-Clayton (eds.), Textures of Renaissance Knowledge (pp. 17–34). Manchester: Manchester University Press. Boehrer, Bruce (1994). ‘Bestial buggery in A Midsummer Night’s Dream’. In David Lee Miller, Sharon O’Dair, and Harold Weber (eds.), The Production of English Renaissance Culture (pp. 123–50). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Brumble, H. David (2007). ‘Let us make Gods in our own image: Greek myth in medieval and Renaissance literature’. In Roger D. Woodard (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Greek Mythology (pp. 407–24). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bull, Malcolm (2005). The Mirror of the Gods: Classical Mythology in Renaissance Art. London: Allen Lane. Bush, Douglas (1932). Mythology and the Renaissance Tradition in English Poetry. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Callaghan, Dympna (2003a). ‘Comedy and epyllion in post-Reformation England’. Shakespeare Survey, 56, 27–38. Callaghan, Dympna (2003b). ‘(Un)natural loving: swine, pets and lowers in Venus and Adonis’. In P. Berry and M. Tudeau-Clayton (eds.), Textures of Renaissance Knowledge (pp. 58–80). Manchester: Manchester University Press. Coffin, Charlotte (2008). ‘The Gods’ lasciviousness, or how to deal with it? The plight of early modern mythographers’. Paper given at ‘Interactions with Eros’ conference at Université PaulValéry, Montpellier. Duffy, Eamon (1992). The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England c.1400–1580. New Haven: Yale University Press. Fox, Alistair (1997). The English Renaissance: Identity and Representation in Elizabethan England. Oxford: Blackwell.

Frye, Susan (1996). Elizabeth I: The Competition for Representation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Golding, Arthur (1567; repr. 1965). Ovid’s Metamorphoses: The Arthur Golding Translation (1567), ed. John Frederick Nims. New York: Macmillan. Harbison, Craig (1995). The Art of the Northern Renaissance. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Hartley, T. E. (1995). Proceedings in the Parliaments of Elizabeth I, 2 vols. Leicester: Leicester University Press. Keach, William (1977). Elizabethan Erotic Narratives: Irony and Pathos in the Ovidian Poetry of Shakespeare, Marlowe and their Contemporaries. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Klein, Lisa M. (1997). ‘Your humble handmaid: Elizabethan gifts of needlework’. Renaissance Quarterly, 50 (Summer), 459–93. Knecht, R. J. (1982). Francis I. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Landau, David and Peter Parshall (eds.) (1994). The Renaissance Print, 1470–1550. New Haven: Yale University Press. McLane, Paul E. (1961). Spenser’s Shepheardes Calendar: A Study in Elizabethan Allegory. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. Montrose, Louis Adrian (1983). ‘Shaping fantasies: figurations of gender and power in Elizabethan culture’. Representations, 1 / 2, 61–94. Rickey, Mary Ellen and Thomas B. Stroup (eds.) (1968). Certaine Sermons or Homilies Appointed to be Read in Churches In the Time of Queen Elizabeth I (1547–1571). Gainesville, FL: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints. Ruthven, K. K. (1976). Myth. London: Methuen. Seznec, Jean (1953). The Survival of the Pagan Gods, trans. Barbara F. Sessions. New York: Pantheon. Seznec, Jean (1973), ‘Myth in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance’. In Philip P. Weiner (ed.). Dictionary of the History of Ideas (vol. 3, pp. 287–94). New York: Charles Scribner & Sons. Smith, Bruce R. (1991). Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare’s England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Taylor, Gary (2001). ‘Divine []Sences’. Shakespeare Survey, 54, 13–30.

Mythology Thomas, Keith (1995), ‘English Protestantism and classical art’. In Lucy Gent (ed.). Albion’s Classicism: The Visual Arts in Britain, 1550–1660 (pp. 221–38). New Haven: Yale University Press. Traub, Valerie (2002). The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Wilson, Richard (2004). Secret Shakespeare: Studies in Theatre, Religion and Resistance. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Woodcock, Matthew (2004). Fairy in The Faerie Queene: Renaissance Elf-Fashioning and Elizabethan Myth-Making. Aldershot: Ashgate.

11

Scientific Writing David Colclough

It is perhaps best to begin with a warning. No one in the Renaissance would have recognised the term ‘scientific writing’, and no one would have known what kind of strange creature a ‘scientist’ might be. The field of enquiry we now know as ‘science’ (with all the implications concerning the separation of cultures that implies) was a branch of knowledge (Latin scientia) that investigated the phenomena of the natural world (Johns 1998: 42–4; Rossi 1996). Hence the term a Renaissance writer would have used to describe his or her pursuit in this field was ‘natural philosophy’, and the distinction between its scope and aims and those of, say, moral philosophy, political philosophy, or theology was not as clear as it might seem to us.1 Natural philosophy was, after all, the study of the created world, in which God (the great artificer) and the Christian message were held to be revealed. The Book of Nature was one of the texts (the other usually being identified as the Book of Scripture) through which the individual Christian could know God; in the Renaissance the metaphor shifted from one of clarity and intelligibility (everyone, even if they are illiterate, can read this book) to one of obscurity (this book is written in an especially difficult language or character) (Curtius 1953: 319–26). At the same time, the privileging of the literal sense of Scripture corresponded with an increasing focus on the literal – observational and experimental – interpretation of nature (Harrison 1998). The ways in which the natural philosopher’s claims were made, disseminated, verified, or disputed, as well as his or her place in society, were also in many ways unrecognisably different. While many still locate the birth of modern science in Renaissance England, it is important to appreciate the gulf that separates us from the practice and the writing of natural philosophy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Only comparatively recently have historians of science begun to take seriously the varieties of natural-philosophical enquiry pursued by those we have been taught to regard as the fathers of science. Newton’s lifelong interest in alchemy need no longer be dismissed as an embarrassing hobby, but may rather be recognised as a part of his understanding of the ends of knowledge. Similarly, the wider life of the natural

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philosopher has begun to be acknowledged as a crucial factor in understanding his or her work. Serious attention must be paid to Galileo’s struggles for favour from the Medici or the Pope when we know how far the desire for advancement may have influenced the presentation or the trajectory of his work (Johns 1998: 20–8). Francis Bacon’s relentless pursuit of high office is of as much relevance to our understanding of his natural philosophy as to our reading of his Essays – even if it simply serves to remind us that Bacon could only be a philosopher in his spare time (Jardine and Stewart 1998; Peltonen 1996: 10). This is to emphasise that the study of context has come to be a key component in our understanding of the natural philosophy (and much else) of the Renaissance. The Renaissance scientist is best seen not as an isolated thinker (or inventor) at work in the privacy of his or her study or laboratory, but as a social and political animal whose attempts to make sense are inescapably conditioned by social and historical conditions. We need in turn, when trying to make sense of scientific writing of the time, to take into account what kind of function the writer imagined for his or her text. No less than other kinds of writing, scientific texts need to be read as interventions in specific debates: far from only being building blocks in the history of ideas, they were written for particular audiences with both local and wider concerns. Even when they appear to be concerned with abstract concepts, these abstractions are themselves often used as a way of conceptualising localised differences and as weapons for assuming argumentative authority (Sherman 1995). However much these caveats might undermine the notion of the ‘scientific revolution’ as a monolithic and sudden shift in thought, it is important that we do not lose sight of the real innovations that occurred in natural philosophy during the Renaissance. New cosmologies were proposed – although it is important to remember that Copernicus’ theory was presented in the form of an hypothesis (Koestler 1959) – ‘new’ lands, and the human body, were mapped, in the earlier part of the period. The work of Robert Boyle, Robert Hooke, and Isaac Newton, published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society and elsewhere from the early 1660s, was profoundly significant in terms of experimental and mathematical practice and theory. Copernicus’ De revolutionibus (1543), Gilbert’s De magnete (1600), Harvey’s De motu cordis (1628) and Galileo’s Dialogo … sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo (1632) were all immensely important works, sometimes (as in the case of Galileo) achieving an effect well beyond that envisaged by their authors. In several of these cases innovation is strangely yoked to conservatism, something that could be seen as a hallmark of most scientific writing in the English Renaissance. Gilbert’s work on the magnet is, for its time, an impeccable example of experimental writing, but based on a traditionally Aristotelian search for a necessary (or efficient) cause, while Harvey’s treatise on the circulation of the blood is, similarly, thoroughly Aristotelian and yet ground-breaking (Wallace 1988: 224–5).2 This apparent contradiction might suggest that the transition from medieval to Renaissance should best be envisaged as a continuum, rather than a fissure: pace Foucault, it is hard to support the claim that an entirely new way of knowing appears in this period (Foucault 1970).

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Continuity is especially evident in the canon of scientific writing.3 In the Middle Ages the basic framework of natural philosophy in the Renaissance was provided by Aristotle’s scientific works, especially the Physics, De caelo, De generatione et corruptione, Meteorologica, De anima, and Parva naturalia. The questions being asked by natural philosophers were also of the same kind: the object of enquiry was sensible matter and, ultimately, necessary causes. But the classification and valorisation of different forms of knowledge was in transition. Here again, Aristotle – or a Christianised version of Aristotle – had been dominant in medieval thought from the thirteenth century, the main texts being the Posterior Analytics and the Metaphysics (Kusukawa 1996: 48–51). With the rise of the humanities in the fourteenth century and the new emphasis on the importance of grammar, rhetoric, history, poetics, and moral philosophy, the scope of natural philosophy was re-examined. The concomitant return to classical sources, which resulted in increased knowledge of the Greek text of Aristotle and of commentaries on his works, meant that the central texts of scientific enquiry could be subjected to sceptical critical analysis; but it could also lead to a certain conservatism. The authority of Aristotle could be shored up by the attentions of the philologists, with critical attention concentrating on textual matters rather than scrutinising basic claims and assumptions.4 Nonetheless, the boundaries of natural philosophy were expanding, with other schools of thought and areas of enquiry being incorporated. Mechanics, optics, astronomy, and medicine (which are, to us, obviously parts of ‘science’) were newly accepted as part of natural philosophy. Similarly, Platonic, Hermetic, Neopythagorean, Stoic, and Atomist ideas were making their presence felt. The alchemical theories of Cornelius Agrippa and the natural chemistry of Paracelsus spread to England, where the varieties of writing and activity were very extensive. This is evident in the productions of writers such as the natural magician Robert Fludd, John Dee, who cast horoscopes for major political figures as well as writing on navigation and conversing with angels, the mathematicians Leonard and Thomas Digges, the chemist Kenelm Digby, the astrologer and medic Simon Forman, and, of course, Francis Bacon.5 Many of these discourses in turn influenced other forms of thought and writing: Margaret Cavendish’s poetry, prose fiction, and political thought are informed by her vitalist natural philosophy, while Hobbes’s model of the state in Leviathan (and his philosophy as a whole) owes a great deal to his knowledge of the work of Galileo, Descartes, Mersenne, and Gassendi. Along with changes in the methods of doing natural philosophy, the growing place given to mathematics (especially important to Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo), observation, and mechanics (instrument-makers are central to scientific work in this period), and the impact of travel and new imports (Cook 2007; Ogilvie 2006), there were important changes in the way this work was presented. Turning from the medieval form of the disputation, where a proposition would be formally argued out in sequential sections pro and contra (a written form of an oral university exercise), natural-philosophical writing adopted more discursive, literary strategies. Much scientific writing in the Renaissance is itself concerned with the struggle to find a proper, truthful, and persuasive means of communicating scientific argument. Can there be

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such a thing as a transparent discourse of natural philosophy, where presentation does not affect argument; and if so, would one want it? How far can rhetoric be used in the course of natural philosophy; and how far is it possible to avoid it? How does one’s imagined readership affect the way in which one frames one’s arguments? Is Latin (the lingua franca of the republic of letters) or the vernacular the proper vehicle for natural philosophy? All of these questions are at the heart of the attempt by early modern natural philosophers to gain credit and legitimacy for their work, and, often, polemically to describe what the task of natural philosophy might be. I want to turn for the remainder of this chapter to a figure who was perhaps above all preoccupied with these questions about the nature of scientific writing, and who also remains for many the incarnation of English science in the Renaissance: Francis Bacon. The latter picture is certainly one to which Bacon himself contributed the original outline; others have subsequently filled in the gaps, often somewhat colourfully. Writing around 1592 to William Cecil, Lord Burghley – Bacon’s uncle and Elizabeth I’s Lord Treasurer – he described the scale of his ambitions: ‘I confess that I have as vast contemplative ends, as I have moderate civil ends: for I have taken all knowledge to be my province’ (Bacon 1996: 20). The famous frontispiece to the 1620 Novum Organum shows a ship returning through the pillars of Hercules, symbolising the limits of the known world: Bacon is rejecting the limits set by the ancients, while associating his natural philosophy with the achievements of geographical discovery – and the ambitions of empire. This is emphasised by his use of the motto plus ultra: the Emperor Charles V’s ne plus ultra given a positive gloss. Bacon had copies of this beautifully produced folio volume bound in purple velvet and embossed with his arms in order to donate them to the Bodleian Library in Oxford and Cambridge University Library, placing himself alongside (and perhaps hoping to supplant) the authorities already shelved there.6 Always concerned to establish his textual legacy, he also asked in his will that ‘books fair bound’ of all his printed works should be placed in the King’s library, and in the library of the University of Cambridge, and in the library of Trinity College [where he was an undergraduate] … and in the library of Benet College [now Corpus Christi, Cambridge] … and in the library of the University of Oxenford, and in the library of my Lord of Canterbury, and in the library of Eton. (Bacon 1857–74: XIV, 539)

Many have taken Bacon at his word, and after his death he was invoked as a kind of scientific prophet by a startling variety of groups and individuals, ranging from the providentialist George Hakewill in the 1620s, through Samuel Hartlib and the Comenian reformers during the republic, to the founders of the Royal Society: witness Bacon’s presence on the engraved title page of Sprat’s History of the Royal Society (1667) and in Abraham Cowley’s prefatory poem to the volume.7 In the nineteenth century he was regarded by Whewell, among others, as the leader of a revolution in scientific thought that led to the modern perception of the world, while his status has been, if anything, reinforced by more recent debates over his legacy. Benjamin Farrington

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praised Bacon as a forward-looking ‘philosopher of industrial science’ (Farrington 1951), while Karl Popper condemned him as the prophet of a misguided objectivity, and Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer pictured him as the arch-representative of instrumental science’s attempt to dominate nature and mankind (Horkheimer and Adorno 1973: 3–7). In his vigorous engagement with, and polemical rejection of, the ‘ancients’, most of all Aristotle; in his attempts to redesign the scope and ends of learning; in his experiments with different forms of text; in his use of experiment; in his advocacy of collaborative research and his requests for state funding, Bacon appears a thoroughly modern scientist. Yet it is as easy to locate significant flaws in this depiction. Bacon relied heavily upon the ancients at the same time as he rejected them (Pliny is a major contributor to the supposedly observational Sylva Sylvarum (1627)); his experimental life remains very obscure; his advocacy of collaboration seems only infrequently to have been translated into practice, and his requests for state funding were uniformly unsuccessful. Most of all, his grand six-part plan for the transformation of natural philosophy, the Instauratio magna, was never completed: at his death he had treated the first part and contributed to the second. Yet it is possible to argue that Bacon’s projects were precisely dependent upon this anticipative or proleptic quality, and that it is his texts’ attempts to provoke their readers into imagining and creating a future with a new form of knowledge that is their greatest quality. I shall try to demonstrate what I mean by looking at two of Bacon’s most important works: The Advancement of Learning (1605) and New Atlantis (published posthumously with the Sylva in 1627). Bacon presents The Advancement of Learning as a preparatory work, suggesting in the hyperbolic dedication to James I that it will ‘excite your princely cogitations to visit the excellent treasury of your own mind’ (Bacon 1996: 122). He is at pains to emphasise that the book is primarily intended to provoke thought (and action) in others, rather than to impose his own thoughts on his readers. Such a rhetorical sidestepping of personal, authorial authority is characteristic of this text, in which Bacon says he is clearing the way for others, and it becomes increasingly important to Bacon’s natural philosophical writing more generally. Near the end of the Advancement, he reflects that looking back into that I have passed through, this writing seemeth to me … not much better than that noise or sound which musicians make while they are tuning their instruments; which is nothing pleasant to hear, but yet is a cause why the music is sweeter afterwards. So have I been content to tune the instruments of the muses, that they may play that have better hands. (Bacon 1996: 288)

The preparatory tasks Bacon sets himself in the Advancement are to defend learning from its detractors, describe its current state, define its aims, and urge their pursuit. He divides the text into two books, corresponding to two rhetorical strategies; the first epideictic – designed to praise or blame – and the second deliberative – designed to persuade.8 In both books Bacon is concerned with the establishment of a proper

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attitude to the past and to the authoritative canon of natural philosophical writings. The defence that he offers in the first book has a place in a long tradition, as does his description of the field of learning in Book 2; and one of his main aims is to establish a proper relationship to such traditions (see Bacon 1996: 577–8). In the letter to Burghley quoted above, Bacon had spoken of ‘purging’ the province of knowledge of two sorts of rovers, whereof the one with frivolous disputations, confutations, and verbosities, the other with blind experiments and auricular traditions and impostures, hath committed so many spoils, I hope I should bring in industrious observations, grounded conclusions, and profitable inventions and discoveries; the best state of that province. (Bacon 1996: 20)

The Advancement is, to a great extent, this programme writ large. His ‘purging’ in Book 1 corresponds to the ‘destructive part’ of the Instauratio, necessary before the ‘constructive part’ could begin (Bacon 1857–74: X, 364–5, IV, 27). In order to praise learning as he defines it, Bacon requires an initial refutation of ‘tacit objections’, or ‘discredits and disgraces’. All of these ‘distempers’ of learning arise from a particular, unsatisfactory way of reading; a misguided attitude towards textual authority. As he writes in Book 1, as for the overmuch credit that hath been given unto authors in sciences, in making them dictators, that their words should stand, and not consuls to give advice; the damage is infinite that sciences have received thereby. (Bacon 1996: 143–4)

It is the voluntary relinquishing of their own ability to go beyond the texts of the past, laments Bacon, that has led readers and philosophers to the state of degenerate learning where they now languish, producing ever more depraved versions of ancient notions rather than attempting to build upon them. In the sphere of philosophy, ‘disciples do owe unto masters only a temporary belief and a suspension of their own judgement till they be fully instructed, and not an absolute resignation or perpetual captivity’ (Bacon 1996: 144). The only way that knowledge can accumulate and progress, Bacon declares, is if writers engage with their predecessors, since the belief that only the best has survived of past thought is entirely fallacious. He explains that even the wisest will choose superficiality over profundity for the sake of the multitude: ‘for the truth is, that time seemeth to be of the nature of a river or stream, which carrieth down to us that which is light and blown up, and sinketh and drowneth that which is weighty and solid’ (Bacon 1996: 145). However, the path of progress via such an engagement will be a difficult one ‘while antiquity envieth there should be any new additions, and novelty cannot be content to add but it must deface’ (Bacon 1996: 144). Reversing the traditional view of history and employing a topos common to Vives, Bruno, Gilbert, and Galileo, Bacon declares that ‘Antiquitas sæculi juventus mundi’ (‘What we call antiquity is the youth of the world’: Bacon 1996: 145), transferring the authority of antiquity to the present, the world’s true ‘old age’. In order to move forward from the present state of learning, it is necessary to clamber above

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the confusion of disputation on the piled volumes of the textual archive; to find his way in the ‘perambulation’ of Book 2, Bacon needs to stand atop the accumulated trophies of learning and survey the landscape. In order to revive learning, Bacon argues, both the manner of presenting knowledge and the intellectual and institutional means by which it is arrived at must be reformed. In Book 1 he criticises current ways of presenting knowledge as ‘magistral and peremptory, and not ingenuous and faithful; in a sort as may be soonest believed, and not easiliest examined’ (Bacon 1996: 147); in Book 2 he praises aphorisms (used in the Novum Organum), which, ‘representing a knowledge broken, do invite men to inquire further; whereas methods, carrying the show of a total, do secure men, as if they were at furthest’ (Bacon 1996: 235). Also in Book 2, he suggests institutional reforms that would be necessary to the reform of learning; he describes the necessary rectification as ‘opera basilica’, works for a king (Bacon 1996: 174). They are concerned with ‘the places of learning, the books of learning, and the persons of the learned’, and include the foundation and endowment of seats of learning; the proper remuneration of scholars and lecturers; the dedication of colleges exclusively to the study of ‘arts and sciences at large’; the ‘allowance for expenses about experiments’; ‘more intelligence mutual between the universities of Europe’; and the ‘public designation of writers and enquirers, concerning such parts of knowledge as may appear not to have been already sufficiently laboured or undertaken’ (Bacon 1996: 169–75). At the end of the Advancement, Bacon declares, ‘I have made as it were a small globe of the intellectual world … with a note and description of those parts which seem to me not constantly occupate, or not well converted by the labour of man’ (Bacon 1996: 299). Although his request for monarchical involvement in the reform of knowledge bore no fruit, in his writing Bacon continued to promote collaborative research and to experiment with ways of presenting knowledge for different groups of readers, especially after his prosecution for corruption, and his fall from public office in 1621. De Sapientia veterum (1609) discovered messages of contemporary relevance in ancient fables; the Latin Novum Organum (1620) presented an inductive logic in the form of aphorisms; the Advancement was expanded and translated into Latin in 1623; the History of the Reign of King Henry VII was published in 1621, and all the while Bacon was writing works of speculative philosophy and scientific polemic to be distributed in manuscript among a select group of readers. He also continued to work with geographical metaphors for the pursuit of natural philosophy; these are combined with his institutional ambitions for the new science in the quasi-utopian New Atlantis. The book is written in the form of a travel narrative; the narrator is one of nineteen sailors, whose nationality we never learn, and who arrive providentially at an unknown island called Bensalem after having been put off their course by bad weather (the island’s name means ‘son of peace’). Allowed by the generous and kindly inhabitants to remain and recover, they discover that the island is immensely technologically and philosophically advanced, and that it harbours an important research institution called Salomon’s House. The description of this institution was later to prove influential for both the republican Hartlib circle and the

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monarchist founders of the Royal Society. The utopian framework soon proves something of a red herring, however. The note attached to the work by Bacon’s chaplain and posthumous editor, William Rawley, emphasises its failure to fulfil its apparent promise, asserting that his Lordship thought also in this present fable to have composed a frame of laws, or the best state or mould of a commonwealth; but foreseeing that it would be a long work, his desire of collecting the natural history diverted him. (Bacon 1996: 785)

Similarly, while More’s Utopia offers a detailed description of the island and its constitution, readers of the New Atlantis remain ignorant of most of these aspects of Bensalem. Rather than being a political work about the ‘best state of a commonwealth’, the New Atlantis is instead a text that describes the ideal conditions for the reform of knowledge and offers a fable about the proper relationship of the present to the past. Its peacefulness is unrivalled; the island itself is Christian, but free of the confessional division that rent contemporary Europe, while freedom of worship is extended to the Jews, who were expelled from England in 1290. It is Salomon’s House that above all demonstrates that the island of Bensalem is the ideal scientific state. This is exactly the sort of research institution whose establishment Bacon had pressed for in the Advancement. Founded by a king and a central part of the state, it provides the results of the new philosophy and proceeds according to impeccably Baconian methods. The New Atlantis is markedly free of personal identity and the knowing subject (Le Doeuff 1995: 62). It is partly this feature that invites a reading of the text as a work about the nature of the Baconian mind in its relation to the past. Bensalem sends out spies (called ‘Merchants of Light’), who visit other countries and study ‘the sciences, arts, manufactures, and inventions of all the world’, bringing back ‘books, instruments, and patterns’ (Bacon 1996: 471; cf. 486). These figures have often been interpreted as disturbing colonialists, but could better be seen as representing the kind of commerce (an exploitative one, to be sure) that the natural philosopher should have with the past. Similarly the texts, instruments, or materials bought by Bensalem’s merchants are valuable, despite being under-used or not even recognised for what they are by its vendors. Although the methods and even the conclusions of the ancients may be inadequate or inaccurate, much can still be gleaned from their works through an eclectic approach such as that displayed by Bacon throughout his writings. The inhabitants of Bensalem thus show the reader how to negotiate between useful and useless knowledge, between the needs of the present and the materials of the past. The reader, on the other hand, is in the position of the sailors: able for the moment only to wonder at the proximity of this unknown land, and at their own position ‘between death and life … beyond both the old world and the new’ (Bacon 1996: 461), yet handed the ability to put what they have seen into practice in their own land. At the end of the work as we have it, the Father of Salomon’s House tells the narrator: ‘I give thee leave to publish [this relation] for the good of other nations’

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(Bacon 1996: 488). Bacon felt that the time was ripe for his reform of knowledge, even if he was unable to complete it himself. He sought out a wide range of audiences for his message, and when imagining the likely success of his natural philosophy he combined almost millenarian hope with despairing cynicism – his will bequeathed his ‘name and memory’ to ‘men’s charitable speeches, and to foreign nations, and the next ages’ (Bacon 1857–74: XIV, 539). But his extraordinary range of interests; his continual search for the right textual form; his skilful deployment of persuasive prose; his vexed relationship with the ancients and his contemporaries; and the totemic status he achieved for such a motley group of followers all demonstrate his central place in any consideration of the scientific writing of the English Renaissance. I will end with a passage from the Advancement of Learning that could as well stand as a gloss on the New Atlantis, or a general comment on Bacon’s idea of the nature of reason and the very purpose of scientific rhetoric: ‘the affection beholdeth merely the present; reason beholdeth the future and sum of time’; and therefore the present filling the imagination more, reason is commonly vanquished; but after that force of eloquence and persuasion hath made things future and remote appear as present, then upon the revolt of the imagination reason prevaileth. (Bacon 1996: 239)

Notes 1

I refer throughout to the Renaissance scientist as ‘he or she’, since although very few naturalphilosophical works were authored by women in the period, it is becoming clear that many more women were closely involved in the production of natural-philosophical knowledge than has hitherto been assumed. See Hunter and Hutton 1997; Jardine 1999: 334–7; Johns 1998: 613–14. 2 The search for necessary causes is described in Aristotle 1975. 3 This paragraph is indebted to Wallace 1988. 4 The legacy of Aristotle in the Renaissance is a highly complex one, and Aristotelianism was

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a continuing and strong influence on the ‘new science’; it is important to avoid facile narratives of its outright rejection. See especially Mercer 1993: 54; Schmitt 1983. On the traditions of natural magic, alchemy and astrology, see Thomas 1971. The title is also a competitive gesture, suggesting that the book will be a replacement for Aristotle’s Organon. On the contexts of Hartlib’s works, see further the invaluable CD-ROM of the Hartlib papers, Greengrass and Leslie 1995. On the complex printing history of the two books of the Advancement, see Bacon 1996: 576.

References and Further Reading Aristotle (1975). Posterior Analytics, ed. Jonathan Barnes. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Bacon, Francis (1857–74). Works, ed. James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denon Heath, 14 vols. London: Longman.

Bacon, Francis (1996). A Critical Edition of the Major Works, ed. Brian Vickers. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Clucas, Stephen (2006). John Dee. Dordrecht: Springer.

Scientific Writing Cook, Harold J. (2007). Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and Science in the Dutch Golden Age. New Haven: Yale University Press. Curtius, Ernst Robert (1953). European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul (original work published 1948). Farrington, Benjamin (1951). Francis Bacon: Philosopher of Industrial Science. London: Lawrence & Wishart. Foucault, Michel (1970). The Order of Things, trans. Anon. London: Routledge (original work published 1966). Greengrass, M. and P. Leslie (eds.) (1995). Samuel Hartlib: The Complete Edition. Ann Arbor: UMI. Harrison, Peter (1998). The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Horkheimer, Max and Theodor W. Adorno (1973). Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming. London: Allen Lane (original work published 1947). Hunter, Lynette and Sarah Hutton (1997). Women, Science and Medicine, 1500–1700: Mothers and Sisters of the Royal Society. Stroud: Sutton. Jardine, Lisa (1999). Ingenious Pursuits: Building the Scientific Revolution. London: Little, Brown. Jardine, Lisa and Alan Stewart (1998). Hostage to Fortune: The Troubled Life of Francis Bacon 1561– 1626. London: Victor Gollancz. Johns, Adrian (1998). The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Johns, Adrian (2002). ‘Science and the book’. In J. Barnard, and D. F. McKenzie (eds.), The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain (vol. 4, pp. 274–303). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Koestler, Arthur (1959). The Sleep Walkers. London: Hutchinson. Kusukawa, Sachiko (1996). ‘Bacon’s classification of knowledge’. In Markku Peltonen (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Bacon (pp. 47–74). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Le Doeuff, Michèle (1995). ‘Introduction’. In Francis Bacon. La Nouvelle Atlantide, trans. Michèle le Doeuff and Margaret Llasera (pp. 7–71). Paris: GF Flammarion. Mercer, Christia (1993). ‘The vitality and importance of early modern Aristotelianism’. In Tom Sorell (ed.), The Rise of Modern Philosophy: The Tension Between the New and Traditional Philosophies from Machiavelli to Leibniz (pp. 33–67). Oxford: Clarendon Press. Ogilvie, Brian W. (2006). The Science of Describing: Natural History in Renaissance Europe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Park, Katharine and Lorraine Daston (eds.) (2006). The Cambridge History of Science, vol. 3: Early Modern Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Peltonen, Markku (1996). ‘Introduction’. In Markku Peltonen (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Bacon (pp. 1–24). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rees, Graham et al. (1996– ). The Oxford Francis Bacon. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Rossi, Paolo (1996). ‘Bacon’s idea of science’. In Markku Peltonen (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Bacon (pp. 25–46). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schmitt, Charles B. (1983). Aristotle and the Renaissance. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sherman, W. H. (1995). John Dee: The Politics of Reading and Writing in the English Renaissance. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Thomas, Keith (1971). Religion and the Decline of Magic. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Wallace, William A. (1988). ‘Traditional natural philosophy’. In Charles B. Schmitt, Quentin Skinner, et al. (eds.), The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy (pp. 201–35). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Webster, Charles (1975). The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine and Reform 1626–1660. London: Duckworth.

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The story often told about print is that the invention of moveable type and the printing press by Gutenberg in mid-fifteenth-century Mainz is one of the defining moments in the history of the West, a ‘communications revolution’ in the words of Elizabeth Eisenstein’s magisterial study, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, ‘that radically altered the shape of early modern societies’ (1979: I, 44). The assumptions behind this story of print have been challenged. Adrian Johns, in particular, rejects the ‘concept of a revolutionary shift to a unitary print culture’ (2002: 109). For Johns, the revolutionary attributes that Eisenstein found in print technology – the characteristics of standardisation, dissemination, and fixity – are not inherent in the medium, but are a function of how printed texts were used, negotiated, and understood by their makers and users. The meanings of print, therefore, are made not given, and these meanings are plural not singular. There is not a unified early modern print culture, but diverse print cultures (Johns 1998). While Johns’s insistence on the cultural construction of print is valuable, his particular approach is potentially limiting in that it dismisses the role played by the technology of the printing press in making print culture. The physical properties of print and the printing press did influence how its products could be used and understood. The model of a unitary print culture is oversimplifying, but the alternative argument for heterogeneity is not without its difficulties, and prompts further historical and conceptual questions: how can we account for and comprehend shared uses and discourses of print across diverse communities and cultures? The story of print is thus complex and contested. That said, few would disagree that print played an important part in transforming social relations and systems of ideas and facilitated the religious, social, and economic changes that characterise the early modern period. As Johns says, ‘the making and communication of knowledge of all kinds depended increasingly on print’ (1998: 60). Print was a ‘precipitant’ of the Reformation. Protestant reformers were quick to realise the potential of print in the propaganda war with the established church and, in doing so, shaped the meaning

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of print. The press was claimed as their own instrument, a sign of God’s grace. John Foxe spoke in Protestant and humanist terms of ‘the excellent art of printing most happily of late found out … to the singular benefit of Christ’s Church’ which would restore ‘the lost light of knowledge to these blind times’ and renew those ‘wholesome and ancient writers whose doings and teachings otherwise had lain in oblivion’ (Eisenstein 1979: I, 304; Lander 2006: 6–7). Print transformed the way that people thought about knowledge and engaged in social and cultural practices. It gave rise to new models of authority and authorship and practices of reading, which, in turn, were shaped by the uses that books were put to. Print culture is thus a product of this dialectic between the book’s physical and technical properties and its social and cultural uses. Print was introduced to England over a decade after it reached the major European cities. On 30 September 1476 the merchant William Caxton, who had already been trading in manuscript books and possibly early printed books in Bruges, opened a shop in the precincts of Westminster Abbey. His press in England was at work by 13 December 1476 and the next year he published Dicts or Sayings, the first known English printed book (Feather 1988: 8–11). Print is a different medium to manuscript: ‘Different kinds and quantities of labour were invested in manufacturing these different kinds of books’, and hence different meanings were produced (Hackel 2005: 32). That said, print did not signal the demise of a manuscript culture – in this sense, there was no printing revolution, given that manuscript cultures continued to flourish until at least the end of the seventeenth century. Throughout the early modern period, there was a great deal of continuity between manuscript and print publication. Printed books were prepared according the same hierarchy of formats that had governed manuscript production: the folio, the quarto, and the octavo (Chartier 1989: 2). Early printed books used the technology of manuscript production and imitated the forms of the manuscript so that the printed book in many cases looked physically similar to a manuscript book (Blake 1989). It even seems to have been a common practice in the fifteenth century to produce manuscript copies of printed books; it is appropriate that there is a manuscript presentation copy of the first English book in print, Dicts or Sayings, that seems to have been made from the printed copy (Blake 1989: 413). Manuscript and print hybrids continued to be produced throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Ornamental letters were sometimes supplied by hand, particularly in the early printed texts. The printed presentation copy of Coryats Crudities (1611) that Thomas Coryate had made for Prince Henry was beautifully finished, and the elaborate frontispiece and other engravings coloured by hand. Books were ‘printed with blank spaces specifically to be completed by hand’, often so the author or publisher could include dedicatory verses or epistles – this meant that the one work could be addressed to a number of different patrons or friends (Woudhuysen 1996: 23–4). Print and manuscript books were sold alongside each other in bookshops, as well as books of blank pages waiting to be written in (Hackel 2005: 28). Readers made a wide variety of manuscript additions to their printed books: they penned marginal notes, corrected errors, added texts, or replaced missing leaves by hand

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(Sherman 2008; Woudhuysen 1996: 20–5). These acts suggest that for early modern readers the book was not fixed and complete in itself, but open to amendment and addition. Critical attention has turned increasingly to the uses to which books were put by early modern readers (Andersen and Sauer 2002; Hackel 2005; Sharpe 2000; Sherman 2008). Different readers and reading communities took part in the making of books by adapting them to their own uses. The marks readers made in books neatly encapsulate the fluid relationship between manuscript and print. The development of a print industry in England did not result in the demise of a manuscript culture. Nor should manuscript publication be regarded as the residue of an older marginal scribal culture that doggedly persisted alongside a new dominant print culture. In fact, the majority of literature written during the English Renaissance was produced for manuscript circulation rather than for printed publication. Rather than print superseding manuscript, these two modes of publication ‘not only competed but also influenced each other, and to a great extent, coexisted by performing different cultural functions’ (Marotti 1995: xii, 1). The dialogue between the two media is aptly illustrated by the range of meanings the words ‘print’ and ‘publish’ carried in this period: whereas these words are restricted to the printed text in contemporary usage, in the early modern period they were used to describe texts produced by the printing press or pen, and even, in the case of ‘publish’, texts circulated orally, by word of mouth (Hackel 2005: 25–7). And yet this is perhaps not surprising, since this ‘was a society’, as Adam Fox has shown, ‘in which the three media of speech, script, and print infused and interacted with each other in myriad ways’ (2000: 5).

Manuscript Publication The production and circulation of literary manuscripts in the Renaissance was part of the social life of the elite (see Chapter 14, The Manuscript Transmission of Poetry; Chapter 20, Court and Coterie Culture). A folio manuscript book might be presented to a social superior to attract patronage, or a single sheet or small booklet of poems could be exchanged with a peer to reinforce a friendship. Harold Love has identified three distinct modes of publication within the manuscript economy: author publication, referring to texts written in the author’s hand; entrepreneurial publication, designating works copied by a professional scribe; and user publication, those texts copied for the owner’s use (Love 1993: 46, 51–83). A representative case of author publication is that of John Donne. Aside from a brief period from 1610 to 1611, when he printed his prose works Pseudo-Martyr, dedicated to James I, and Conclave Ignati, and his two poems written on the death of his patron’s daughter, Elizabeth Drury, The First Anniversary and The Second Anniversary, both published anonymously, Donne kept his verse out of print and even expressed anxieties in his letters over his ‘descent into printing’ in these instances (MacColl 1972: 32–3). By choosing scribal publication, he tried to keep his verse close and limit its

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circulation to a relatively restricted social circle. The coterie exchange of verses bonded individuals according to shared interests, be they literary or political, or within the patron-client relationship (see Chapter 15, Poets, Friends, and Patrons: Donne and his Circle; Ben and his Tribe). Entrepreneurial publication had a different social value and function. Professional scribes worked either for patrons or for the book trade, and they tended to produce specialist texts. Authors could commission copies of their poems for presentation to a patron, and the high quality of the transcription would give the work the status of a work of art. Professional scribes also produced manuscript texts on a commercial basis: parliamentary speeches and proclamations, for example, were copied and sold at stationers’ shops alongside printed legal texts. Manuscript offered authors a variety of modes of publication. User publication would seem to indicate that the text was intended primarily for personal use and not for circulation outside the writer’s intimate social circle. At the other end of the spectrum are the elaborate manuscript books, which shared the form of the printed book, often including title pages, dedications, page numbers, tag words, and so on, and produced either by professional scribes or authors. These books were typically presented as gifts to patrons and were often intended for circulation in the wider public domain. ‘They were “private” ’, as Margaret Ezell has argued, ‘only in the sense that the author, not the bookseller, had control of the manuscript’ (Ezell 1987: 66–8). The characteristic ‘privacy’ that is attributed to scribal publication has particular implications for our understanding of the woman writer’s participation in a manuscript culture. Women ‘were much more active in the system of manuscript transmission than in print’ publication (Marotti 1995: 49; see Chapter 72, Diaries and Journals). Why is this the case? One argument put forward is that women’s gender acted as a constraint on their entry into the public domain of print, hence their choice of the ‘private’ mode of scribal publication. Women, by making their writings public, transgressed the dictum of ‘chaste, silent, and obedient’, which rests on an analogy between women’s speech and female sexuality, and so were left open to accusations of promiscuity. This negative view of women who printed their writings was discernible in the Renaissance; however, we perhaps should see it as the ‘extreme end of an ideological spectrum’ rather than accepting it as the norm (Ferguson 1996: 145; Krontiris 1992: 17–19). The relationship between gender and publication is more complex than this type of repressive hypothesis suggests. The preference of women writers for manuscript arose out of attitudes towards print that were as much class-based as determined by gender. The majority of women who published their verses scribally belonged to the elite and therefore shared the prejudices of male members of their social class towards print. Women’s choice of manuscript, Margaret Ezell has argued, was not due to a gender bar on print, but because of ‘conservatism, the preference for an older form of literary transmission which left control of the text in the author’s hand rather than signing it over to the bookseller’ (Ezell 1987: 65, 100). Manuscript publication did not aim at a commercial reader-

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ship, except perhaps in the case of the class of professionally produced scribal texts. Instead it projects a reading public that is controlled either in terms of physical access to the texts, and the shared meanings that inform them, or in terms of censorship, as was the case with political verses. ‘Private’, as a characteristic of scribal publication, is not necessarily a synonym for personal or secret. Rather, as Ezell explains, it ‘is a “private” mode that, by its very nature, is permeated by “public” moments of readership, when the text is circulated and copied’. When women published their verses scribally and ‘privately’ these texts were ‘not universally available to any purchasing reader’, but they were also not necessarily hidden from public view (Ezell 1999: 38–9). Manuscript could be used to gain and pass on information that was particularly sensitive or privileged and so, for safety, restricted to a selected readership or its origin kept anonymous (Love 1993: 177). Scribal publication and its networks of transmission was an effective means of getting material into the public domain that would have been censored if printed, such as verse libels which viciously attacked public figures. One distinction between satire and verse libels is that while writers printed and put their name to the satires they wrote, libels were only published scribally and were anonymous and unowned, largely because their scurrility imperilled their authors. Verse libels are therefore an example of a manuscript genre (McRae 2004: 32–4). Libels were often more suited to circulation in manuscript in a practical sense in that they tended to be short and pithy, like this epitaph on Henry Howard, earl of Northampton – ‘Here lies my Lord of Northampton, his Majesty’s earwig, / With a Papistical bald crown, and a Protestant periwig’ – and therefore easier and quicker to copy by hand than to commit to the printing press. Libels had a wide circulation, crossing social boundaries and levels of literacy with a facility that argues against any oversimplifying distinction between popular and elite culture (Fox 2000: 302–10). They frequently employed a generalised language of sexual or political corruption that did not require a sophisticated grasp of politics to comprehend the general tenor of the libel, although others did require an insider’s knowledge of court politics (Bellany 1994: 289–92). For Pauline Croft, the ‘multitude of spontaneous political libels’, circulating amongst a socially diverse audience, demonstrates the existence of a public that was becoming increasingly interested in current affairs to the extent that one can begin to talk about an active public opinion that could be mobilised at particular historical moments (Croft 1991: 63, 68; see also Cogswell 1995). It is not possible to talk of a unified, socially homogeneous manuscript culture in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. As the circulation of verse libels attests, individuals and communities drawn from different social classes were able to participate in this type of manuscript culture. Literacy was not necessarily a barrier to access to either a manuscript or a print culture since texts could be read aloud to a non-literate audience or repeated from memory and transmitted by word of mouth. There were more socially exclusive scribal communities, such as those that flourished at the court and in aristocratic households. But, just as importantly, there were forms

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of manuscript publication that were orientated outwards, towards a wider public, and participated alongside printed texts in early modern arenas of public debate.

Print Publication The centre of the early modern English book trade by the early sixteenth century was St Paul’s churchyard in the City of London. There were other areas in London where bookshops could be found, but St Paul’s churchyard was the hub (Blayney 2000: 326). Booksellers had their shops in the churchyard and these were known by their device: Wynkyn de Worde’s shop, for example, was to be found at the sign of the Sun in Fleet Street. A distinctive feature of early modern title pages is the often extensive description of what can be found in the text. One reason for this is that title pages were used in the printing trade for marketing and fixed to the wall or the post outside the bookseller’s shop to advertise what was on sale inside. The woodcut illustrations often incorporated into title pages were similarly an effective form of visual marketing (Bennett 1965: 260–1; Voss 1998: 737–9). Books were sold unbound, in loose sheets, and taken to the bookbinders and clasp-makers who had their shops nearby in the churchyard. The book trade was not confined to London: books were sold at provincial markets and fairs, at shops established in the major provincial towns, and cheap pamphlets were sold by travelling pedlars along with other wares. The availability of books encouraged literacy, which in turn increased the demand for books. There was a rapid increase in the number of books published from the mid to the end of the sixteenth century: in the period from 1558 to 1579, 3,850 titles were published, which rose to 7,430 titles in the next two decades. This figure steadily increased to 9,740 titles in the years from 1605 to 1624, and declined slightly in the period from 1625 to 1640 to 9,680 (Wheale 1999: 6). Early modern books came in a range of shapes and sizes that involved different types of labour and investment to produce and were put to different uses. The great folio volume, or ‘shelf-book’, tended to be used for serious study within a library or read from the church pulpit; the humanist book was a mid-size quarto, manageable, and comparatively portable, and the format in which new humanist works often appeared; and the small and highly portable duodecimo and octavo volumes were the form often taken by texts to be carried in pockets and consulted regularly, such as devotional works (Chartier 1989: 2; Febvre and Martin 1997: 88–90). Folio books – the great bibles and commentaries and scholarly editions of classical works – required substantial investments in time, labour, paper, and type, including expensive ornamental letters (Febvre and Martin 1997: 110–15). Short pamphlets and single- or double-sheet texts, such as ballads, were much cheaper to produce, and this influenced the uses these texts were put to and shaped the emergence of a cultural category of ‘cheap print’ (Halasz 1997: 15). The early modern period, as the work of Tessa Watts demonstrates, ‘first saw the development of a specialist trade in books which were purposefully small, in order to reach a market of potential readers who had been

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hitherto unlikely to purchase the printed word, except in the form of a broadside ballad’ (1991: 258; see Chapter 66, ‘Such pretty things would soon be gone’: The Neglected Genres of Popular Verse, 1480–1650). The print marketplace and a literary patronage culture coexisted in this period, sometimes in competition, and sometimes in co-operation. Both these cultures can be seen in dialogue in the paratext to the printed book (Tribble 1993: 7–8). ‘Paratext’, a term that derives from the work of Gérard Genette, denotes anything in a book outside the main body of the text, including preliminary material and marginal notes. The preliminaries consist of a range of prefatory verse and prose epistles: the dedicatory verses or epistles to patrons, either current or prospective, epistles to the general reader, as well as commendatory verses in praise of the author, penned by acquaintances. Commendatory verses derive from a manuscript culture, and import into print the protective and validating force of this community of friends, who mediate between writer and reader, and construct an idealised readership (Tribble 1993: 8). Prefatory material frequently foregrounds acts of reading, prescriptively setting out how the reader should comprehend and use the book. This physical and textual space, typically at the front of the book, was used for authorial promotion, to establish and protect scholarly reputations, or the ‘credit’ of the author, which ensures the profitability of the reader’s investment in the book (Saenger 2006; Voss 1998). The book is offered both as a private gift, mimicking the exchanges within the patron–client relationship, and as a commodity for sale. ‘[T]he authority of the subject to speak’, Evelyn Tribble argues, ‘has yet to be invented; the writer is not self-authorized but authorized by others, by plural, external, potentially competing guarantors of the text’ (Tribble 1993: 57; see also Dunn 1994). Ben Jonson used the margins of the printed books of his royal masques to provide extensive intertextual commentary on his text. In doing so, he was imitating the glosses to be found in the humanist book, and so importing the authority usually reserved for classical authors to his own text. Jonson’s act of self-authorisation was thus made through the authority of others (Tribble 1993: 140–6). The humility topos frequently employed by writers in prefatory epistles could be used as a stylised form of deference to the dedicatee or to negotiate the entrance into the print marketplace (Saengar 2006: 55–8). This act of self-abasement paradoxically functioned as a mode of self-authorisation. The humility topos is closely related to the so-called ‘stigma of print’. Since manuscript rather than print was deemed to be the proper channel of publication for gentlemen, writers frequently supplied a publishing history in the epistle that related how they were forced to commit their writings to print against their better judgment (Saunders 1951). Like the humility topos, the ‘stigma of print’ provided a recognised trope that identified the writer as a civil, modest, and honest gentleman or woman and enabled them to negotiate their entry into the literary marketplace by displaying their cultural capital. The paratext to the printed book was a space in which early modern author functions were fashioned and writers’ relationship to the published sphere constructed (Dunn 1994). Yet it was also available for parody. Thomas Nashe prefaced his Strange

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News, of the Interception of Certain Letters (1592) with a mock-dedication ‘To the most copious Carminist of our time, and famous persecutor of Priscian, his very friend Master Apis Lapis’. Nashe’s Lenten Stuff (1599) similarly has a mock-dedication, and a parodic address ‘To his readers, he cares not what they be’. Nashe destabilises the humanist paratext, the way it was used to provide ‘social and literary guarantors’ and to make claims to cultural authority (Tribble 1993: 129). John Taylor, a devotee of Nashe, adopted the mock-dedication and parodic address to the reader as one of his authorial signatures. The pamphlet with which Taylor launched his career, The Sculler, Rowing from Tiber to Thames (1612), was dedicated ‘To neither monarch, nor miser, kaiser, or caitiff, Palatine or plebeian, but to the great Monsieur Multitude, alias, All, or everyone’. Coryats Crudities was famed for its paratext. The extensive preliminary matter took up around 160 pages, and consists of an engraved frontispiece and verses explicating its emblems, dedicatory epistles to Prince Henry and to the reader, Jonson’s verses on the author, and over fifty ‘Panegyric Verses’. The paratext has become a book in itself, and was, in fact, republished in the same year in an unauthorised edition, The Odcombian Banquet, without Coryate’s travel narratives. The front matter to the Crudities is an elaborate parody of the humanist conventions of the book, in which the commemorative function of the preliminary texts is flipped over into mockencomiastic laughter at Coryate’s expense (O’Callaghan 2007: 102–27). Print generated new models of authorship. The Renaissance, Michel Foucault has argued, was ‘the privileged moment of individualization’ when the modern ‘author’ came into being (Foucault 1979: 141). Notions of authorship in the early modern period, however, are complicated and qualified by the status of early modern copyright. Modern authors are understood to be the originators of their texts, and this translates into a concept of their ownership or ‘proprietorship’ of their intellectual property. Yet this definition of the author in terms of ownership of intellectual labour was given an institutional and legal status only in modern copyright laws, which date from the 1710 Statute of Anne (Rose 1993). Early modern copyright took a different form that had more to do with the business interests of the book trade than the author. The Worshipful Company of Stationers was granted a monopoly over the print trade by royal charter in 1557, a monopoly that it vigorously policed over the next 200 years (Feather 1988: 15–16, 29). Printing was an expensive business, and stationers needed to protect themselves against competition. From the mid-sixteenth century, the copyright to individual texts was established through entry of the text or copy in the Stationers’ Register. The author owned the physical manuscript of his or her work, but once it was sold to a printer-bookseller he or she had no further rights in the text. The printer-bookseller would then have the text or copy entered in the Stationers’ Register, which conferred exclusive rights of publication. It was usual in England in the sixteenth century to pay authors in kind rather than money, in other words, to give authors a number of copies of the printed work, which they could then sell on or use as presentation copies to attract patronage (Plant 1994: 217–18). The historical emergence of a concept of authorship, which posits a unifying and possessive relationship between an author and a body of works, is bound up with the

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economic conditions of the early modern printing trade. This is the thesis of two key studies of the ‘author’ and the print trade, Douglas Brooks’s From Playhouse to Printing House: Drama and Authorship in Early Modern England (2000) and Joseph Lowenstein’s companion volumes, The Author’s Due: Printing and The Prehistory of Copyright (2002a) and Ben Jonson and Possessive Authorship (2002b). While Brooks insists that it was the printing house, rather than the evolution of copyright, that created authors, Loewenstein focuses on the industrial development of copyright, which is itself a legal and economic aspect of the printing trade. In either case, the emergence of the proprietary author is understood to be the product of negotiations between writers, stationers, theatre companies, and others involved in the printing trade. The proprietary author, according to Loewenstein, started to emerge through the acts of ‘authors who found ways to perform functions normally performed by stationers exclusively’. Ben Jonson, the archetypal possessive author, was able to invest the printed book and its author with such cultural prestige precisely because he intervened in the publication of his texts, frequently wresting possession of his plays from acting companies and overseeing their passage through the press (Loewenstein 2002b: 6). George Wither was another such author, who began to formulate a concept of authorial intellectual property very early in his literary career (Loewenstein 2002a: 142). In the decade before his publication of his attack on the Stationers’ Company, The Scholler’s Purgatory (1625), Wither gave an account of a professional, working relationship between the author and the print trade that was crucially dependent on the recognition of the author’s own intellectual labour. Wither makes innovative use of the preliminary epistles before the 1615 and 1617 editions of his Fidelia and his Fair Virtue (1621). ‘The Occasion of the private impression of this elegy’, prefacing the first edition of Fidelia, describes a form of subscription publishing that is financed by friends (Lindenbaum 1991: 135). If a bookseller was unwilling to cover the cost of having a book printed then the writer could look to friends and acquaintances to finance the publication. The venture seemingly was not successful, and the second edition of 1617 was put out by the bookseller George Norton, who placed a new preface before the work explaining how Wither had sold him Fidelia on the strict condition that in the printing of the text he ‘carefully respect his credit’. ‘Credit’ is a word that recurs throughout Wither’s ‘stationers’ epistles and other prefatory epistles of the period. Johns, in The Nature of the Book, understands ‘credit’ in terms of trust in the authority and authenticity of the book itself, hence ‘credibility’ is a synonym for veracity (Johns 1998: 30–3). Yet in this period credit was as much an attribute of the author as it was of the text. Credit as trust or honesty was the basis of personal reputation. An insistence on one’s credit was a means of communicating trust, and assured its audience of the profit to be made from investing in those who possess it (Muldrew 1998: 1–8). Credit is thus part of a discourse of authorial propriety. John Marriot’s epistle, ‘The Stationer to the Reader’, prefacing Wither’s Fair Virtue, can be read as an informal contract between author and stationer – it was, in fact, ghost-written by Wither. Marriot explains how he entered the copy in the Stationers’ Register and intended ‘to publish it, without further inquiry’; however the

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book bore ‘so much resemblance of the maker’, and when he discovered ‘to whom it most properly belonged’ he felt obliged to get the author’s permission to publish his book. These ‘stationer’ epistles are not accurate reflections of the publishing process; instead they construct an idealised professional relationship between the author and the stationer as a model for future practice. In 1623 Wither was offered the opportunity to make a substantial income from the print trade when he was granted a royal patent by James I that gave him the rights to his Hymns and Songs of the Church for fifty years and required that it be bound with every copy of the English psalter (Creigh 1980). The granting of the patent was an act of royal patronage, yet Wither’s vigorous defence of it was an expression of his own professional interest in the printing trade. Stationers refused to comply with the patent since it added considerably to the psalter’s cost. Wither’s subsequent battle with the Stationers’ Company was a battle over competing monopolies – Wither’s and the Stationers’. The Scholar’s Purgatory (1625) formulated an account of the author’s right to his intellectual labour based on a biblical model of property inheritance – the rights to the book should first go to the elder brother, the author, then to the younger brothers, the printer, bookbinder, and bookseller (Scholar’s Purgatory, p. 31). ‘Wither asserts a natural authorial property’, as Loewenstein has also noted, that has a legal basis in early modern property rights, and thus ‘dances on the brink of authorial property’ (Loewenstein 2002a: 149). The early modern period sees the emergence of the cultural figure of the professional writer who laboured with his or her pen. This author function has a particular affinity with the genres of ‘cheap print’, especially pamphlet literature. Literary texts typically metaphorise the material conditions of their own production and reception, and this process is, in turn, mediated by genre. Thomas Nashe’s pamphlets, for example, often situate writers, books, and readers within realms of St Paul’s churchyard, the centre of the printing trade. His pamphlets participate in the commodification of literary languages, a process to which his texts draw attention through their production of vibrant imaginary constructs of writers, readers, and the ‘public’, and their transactions within marketplace of print. Nashe’s self-appointed literary heir, John Taylor, turned manual labour (he worked as a boatman on the Thames) into a figure for his own literary labour, thus fashioning an artisanal and entrepreneurial discourse of authorship (Halasz 1997). Such an array of ‘authors’ illustrates the diversity of authorial types in this period. The first professional woman literary writer, Isabella Whitney, published two poetry collections, The Copy of a Letter Lately Written in Meter, by a Young Gentlewoman: to her Unconstant Lover (1567) and A Sweet Nosegay: or Pleasant Posy: Containing a Hundred and Ten Philosophical Flowers (1573). Although biographical details are patchy, Whitney appears to have been particularly well placed socially and geographically to take advantage of the burgeoning print marketplace. She seems to have come from a lower gentry family, and moved from Cheshire to London to work as a lady’s maid, a position that she later lost. Like other early modern writers, she uses the epistles and verses prefacing the book to fashion an author function and negotiate her entrance

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into the print marketplace. This is particularly the case in A Sweet Nosegay, which opens with a dedicatory epistle addressed to her friend and neighbour George Mainwaring, which asks not just for protection from the spiteful, but also for the dedicatee (and reader) ‘to respect my labour and regard my good will’. Throughout the verses and epistles included in the volume, like the later male professional authors, she makes her ‘labour’ and her ‘credit’ constitutive elements of ‘literary ownership’ (Clarke 2001: 200–1). Whitney’s use of the paratext is extremely sophisticated. The print community that she gathers maps on to household and kinship networks. Once again, we can see the proximity between print and manuscript, as Whitney transposes the faceto-face exchanges of manuscript culture into the forms of print. Yet, unlike the print communities assembled before male-authored texts, this print community is thoroughly domesticated. There are epistles addressed to friends, yet the dominance of close kinship relationships – sisters and brothers – brings the friend within the domain of kin and family. Friends are fellow-poets. A Sweet Nosegay incorporates verse replies from ‘T.B.’, possibly Thomas Berry, ‘C.B.’, and her ‘cousin G.W.’, and so establishes this woman poet’s place within a literary circle. Her brother, Geoffrey Whitney, followed in her footsteps, publishing his A Choice of Emblems over a decade later in 1586. Isabella Whitney appears to have had a very good working relationship with her printer, Richard Jones, who published both her collections. Unusually for an author of this period, she declared her respect for those in the print trade, saluting ‘all the Bookbinders by Pauls / because I like their Art’, in her London poem, ‘Will and Testament’, which ends A Sweet Nosegay, although her greatest debt is to ‘my printer’ to whom ‘I will my friends their books to buy / of him, with other ware’ (see Chapter 23, The Literature of the Metropolis). Jones specialised in popular manuals and poetry miscellanies, genres that had a wide readership ranging from the gentry and merchant classes to the urban artisans. Whitney’s volumes were similarly designed to appeal to this broad audience; they were printed in cheap pamphlet form, and she tends to popularise formal literary genres by adopting a didactic, moralising tone, simple verse forms, and a plain, often colloquial style. It is possible that Jones may have commissioned Whitney to write her second collection A Sweet Nosegay, a versification of Hugh Plat’s collection of proverbs, The Flowers of Philosophy, published in the previous year. Plat’s volume may have attracted both Jones and Whitney since collections of moral commonplaces were popular with readers and so highly profitable. It should be said that Whitney is a relatively unusual figure for this period in that it was rare for women to publish original volumes of poetry. Male writers from a comparable social class, the lower or aspiring gentry, whose books of poetry filled the early modern bookshops, tend to advertise their membership of a wider community of learning in their preliminary epistles. They were entitled to do so because they had attended the grammar schools and universities, and often the Inns of Court. Whitney, in her verse epistle from ‘The Author to the Reader’, presents herself as largely selftaught, ‘though learning lacked’; nonetheless she applies herself to a programme of ‘study’, to ‘read such books, whereby I though my self to edify’. Arguably, one reason

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why there are so few professional women writers in the early modern period is the fact that women were excluded from these higher educational institutions. These institutions provided male poets with the educational capital and context necessary for launching a literary career. Aemilia Lanyer, whose volume of poetry, Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (1611), was published twenty-five years after A Sweet Nosegay, offers an instructive parallel to Whitney. Lanyer, the daughter of a court musician, had been educated within aristocratic households. A patronage economy underpins her volume and mediates its entry into print (see Chapter 25, ‘An Emblem of Themselves’: Early Renaissance Country House Poetry). Religious and devotional works make up the largest category of women’s printed texts, in keeping with their role as spiritual guides within the household. One of the growth areas in women’s publications in the seventeenth century was the advice and skills book, which included books on cookery, medicine, household management, and midwifery. Although before the mid-seventeenth century the vast majority of these books were written by men for a female readership, after 1640 they began to be written by women in increasing numbers. The seventeenth century saw a dramatic increase in the number of women in print. This was due to the rapid expansion of the public sphere during the English Revolution and, more generally, to improvements in literacy rates amongst women, which gave more women access to print both as producers and consumers as the century progressed (Ferguson 1996: 146–8; Tebeaux 1997; see Chapter 3, Literacy and Education).

Censorship As the number of presses increased and books became available to a wider audience, both the state and those involved in the print trade pushed for regulation of the new industry. The royal charter granted to the Stationers’ Company in 1557 formalised the company’s role in the censorship of ‘scandalous, malicious, schismatical and heretical’ books by involving the company in pre-publication licensing and by restricting the ownership of presses to members of the company, which effectively centralised the print trade in London, making it easier to control. The injunctions issued by Elizabeth I in 1559 required all new books to be approved by either six privy councillors or the archbishop of Canterbury and the bishop of London, or the vice chancellors of Oxford or Cambridge, if this was the place of publication (Feather 1988: 31–2). In theory, this meant that the stationer was required to take the manuscript to the official licenser to get it authorised before entering it in the Stationers’ Register to secure the copyright. The charter also granted the company the right of search and seizure of illegal books. This right, however, tended to be used not in the pursuit of seditious works, but in cases where copyrights or patents were being contravened or non-members were operating illegal presses. This has led Sheila Lambert to argue that regulation of press in this period had less to do with censorship than with the economics of the book trade, and she criticises the studies of Annabel Patterson and

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Christopher Hill for adopting a repressive model of censorship that assumes that there was ‘a government policy of all-pervasive censorship to prevent all expression of unorthodox opinion’ (Lambert 1987: 1). Cyndia Clegg similarly argues that press censorship should not be seen as the expression of a coherent Crown policy but as a fragmentary and ‘pragmatic situational response to an extraordinary variety of events’. There were mechanisms for the control of the press, but they were not used systematically. Stationers, for example, frequently violated licensing ordinances by not getting texts authorised or entering them in the Stationers’ Register, yet fines were rarely imposed (Clegg 1997: xii, 4–5, 7, 19). For Clegg, Elizabethan press censorship is characterised by its heterogeneity rather than its uniformity; she describes it as a ‘crazy quilt of proclamations, patents, trade regulations, judicial decrees, and privy council and parliamentary actions patched together by sometimes common and sometimes competing threads of religious, economic, political, and private interests’ (Clegg 1997: 5). This line of argument can be elaborated to suggest that censorship itself was multiform: there was not one censorship that served the whole state but rather multiple censorships that operated in the service of a range of interest groups including the Crown, the peerage, and the City of London, and extending to other individuals and communities operating at a local level (Dutton 2000). Censorship did not only operate through the regulation of the press, particularly since books tended to come to the attention of the authorities after they had been published rather than before. Rather, there were other mechanisms, including laws of defamation, which were intended to prevent or punish publication of illicit or scandalous material. The authorities were particularly concerned with open criticism of those in the public eye, such as privy councillors and other peers. Sir Edward Denny, for example, was able to get Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania withdrawn on the grounds of libel. Henry Howard, the earl of Northampton, was notoriously sensitive to criticism and brought a number of cases before the Star Chamber under the statute of scandalum magnatum, which enabled actions to be brought by peers who had been defamed. In these cases, censorship often operated at a local level, in the interests of an individual peer, rather than in the service of the crown, since Northampton was more concerned with his reputation than in protecting the state against subversion. Even so, Northampton saw his interests as a peer of the realm as closely allied with those of his sovereign, and scandalum magnatum was itself an extension of the royal prerogative. From a different angle, Debora Shuger has argued that although censorship was not monolithic, it did have a coherent ethical rationale, which derived from the concept of defamation as a form of verbal injury. Censorship was understood to be necessary in the early modern period because of the social damage caused by these forms of verbal injury (Shuger 2006). Censorship of the theatre, on the whole, operated through different mechanisms to that of the printed text. The main responsibility for the censorship of plays lay with the Master of the Revels. The office had been extended by Elizabeth I in 1581 to include the regulation of the new commercial theatres, and the Master of the Revels was given powers to license and suppress plays and to imprison offending players and

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playwrights. Censorship, in this case, was pre-production in that it was the playbook and not the play in performance that was examined by the Master of the Revels. This meant that there were opportunities for evasion. Plays could be performed in a quite different form than the play that went before the censor, or the text could be given topical inflections in performance through gesture, mimicry, and so forth (Clare 1990: 213). The Privy Council attempted to control the theatres by issuing proclamations prohibiting playing, and ordering playhouses to be closed or even demolished. Topics that would draw the attention of the Master of the Revels and the Privy Council were those that touched on the authority of the Crown, in ascending order: the reputation of the court and foreign dignitaries, foreign policy, and sedition and rebellion. Despite these areas of political sensitivity, theatrical censorship did not operate according to a coherent and consistently maintained ideological agenda: there were ‘no consistent political, moral, or cultural criteria to be discerned; instead, the historical moment determined the censor’s response in each case’ (Clare 1990: 211–12; see also Dutton 2000). There are dangers in completely rejecting a model of state censorship. As a result, censorship can become so anatomised and depoliticised, reduced to the micro-level of individual interests, that the wider picture is lost; or censorship is deemed to be so inefficient that one is left with the impression of a state that is, by default, capable of tolerating all dissenting viewpoints. The early modern state did act against treason and religious dissent, and Puritans and English Catholics were subject to constant policing. As we have seen, verse libels circulated anonymously in manuscript rather than print as a means of avoiding detection and prosecution. Radical political and religious texts during times of unrest, such as the 1620s, were printed in the Low Countries and then smuggled back into England. It is necessary to retain a sense of censorship as a repressive force, but we also need to recognise that it is a socially constructed concept that could be used strategically. The case of the Martin Marprelate pamphlets of 1588 to 1589 offers a vivid example of how writers and communities were not passive subjects of censorship but actively interpreted laws, in this case laws on libel, and formulated models of censorship in order to provoke public debate. A repressive model of censorship first began to appear in the texts of religious reformers and writers such as Spenser and Milton, who counterposed censorship to ideals of free expression and liberty of conscience (Clegg 1997: 170–97, 218). In doing so, these authors began to construct a model of a public sphere. It is in this sense, just as much as in terms of regulation, that censorship is central to the formation of a print culture. References and Further Reading Allen, Peter (1963). ‘Utopia and European humanism: the function of the prefatory letters and verses’. Studies in the Renaissance, 10, 91–107. Andersen, Jennifer and Elizabeth Sauer (eds.) (2002). Books and Readers in Early Modern

England: Material Studies. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Beal, Peter (1998), In Praise of Scribes: Manuscripts and their Makers in Seventeenth-Century England. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

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Bellany, Alastair (1994). ‘ “Raylinge rymes and vaunting verse”: libellous politics in early Stuart England, 1603–1628’. In Kevin Sharpe and Peter Lake (eds.), Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England (pp. 285–310). Basingstoke: Macmillan. Bennett, H.S. (1965). English Books and Readers, 1558 to 1603. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Blake, N. F. (1989). ‘Manuscript to print’. In Jeremy Griffiths and Derek Pearsall (eds.), Book Production and Publishing in Britain, 1375–1475 (pp. 403–32). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Blayney, Peter (1990). The Bookshops in Paul’s Cross Churchyard. London: Bibliographical Society. Blayney, Peter (2000). ‘John Day and the bookshop that never was’. In Lena Cowen Orlin (ed.), Material London ca. 1600 (pp. 323–43). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Brooks, Douglas (2000). From Playhouse to Printing House: Drama and Authorship in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bruster, Douglas (2000). ‘The structural transformation of print in late Elizabethan England’. In Arthur Marotti and Michael Bristol (eds.), Print, Manuscript and Performance (pp. 50–75). Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Burt, Richard (1993). Licensed by Authority: Ben Jonson and the Discourses of Censorship. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Carlson, David (1993). English Humanist Books: Writers and Patrons, Manuscript and Print, 1475– 1525. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Chartier, Roger (ed.) (1989). The Culture of Print: Power and the Uses of Print in Early Modern Europe. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Chartier, Roger (1994). The Order of Books: Readers, Authors and Libraries in Europe Between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries, trans. Lydia Cochrane. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Chartier, Roger (2005). Inscription and Erasure: Literature and Written Culture From the Eleventh to the Eighteenth Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Clare, Janet (1990). ‘Art Made Tongue-Tied by Authority’: Elizabethan and Jacobean Dramatic Censorship. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Clare, Janet (1997). ‘Historicism and the question of censorship in the Renaissance’. English Literary Renaissance, 27, 155–76. Clarke, Danielle (2001). The Politics of Early Modern Women’s Writing. New York: Longman. Clegg, Cyndia Susan (1997). Press Censorship in Elizabethan England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Clegg, Cyndia Susan (2001). Press Censorship in Jacobean England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cogswell, Thomas (1995). ‘Underground verse and the transformation of early Stuart political culture’. In Susan Amussen and Mark Kishlansky (eds.), Political Culture and Cultural Politics in Early Modern England. (pp. 277–300). Manchester: Manchester University Press. Corbett, Margery and Ronald Lightbrown (1979). The Comely Frontispiece: the Emblematic Title-Page in England, 1550–1660. London: Routledge. Creigh, Jocelyn (1980). ‘George Wither and the Stationers: fact and fiction’. Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 74, 49–57. Crick, Julia and Alexandra Walsham (eds.) (2004). The Uses of Script and Print, 1300–1700. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Croft, Pauline (1991). ‘The reputation of Robert Cecil: libels, political opinion and popular awareness in the early seventeenth century’. Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 1, 43–69. Dunn, Walter (1994). Pretexts of Authority: The Rhetoric of Authorship in the Renaissance Preface. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Dutton, Richard (2000). Licensing, Censorship and Authorship in Early Modern England: Buggeswords. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Eisenstein, Elizabeth (1979). The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformation in Early Modern Europe, 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Eisenstein, Elizabeth (2002). ‘An unacknowledged revolution revisited’. American Historical Review, 107, 87–105. Ellinghausen, Laurie (2005). ‘Literary property and the single woman in Isabella Whitney’s A Sweet Nosgay’. Studies in English Literature, 45, 1–22. Ezell, Margaret (1987). The Patriarch’s Wife: Literary Evidence and the History of the Family. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Publication: Print and Manuscript Ezell, Margaret (1999). Social Authorship and the Advent of Print. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Feather, John (1988). A History of Book Publishing. London: Croom Helm. Febvre, Lucien and Henri-Jean Martin (1997). The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing, 1450– 1800, new edn., trans. David Gerard. London: Verso. Ferguson, Margaret (1996). ‘Renaissance concepts of the “woman writer” ’. In Helen Wilcox (ed.), Women and Literature in Britain, 1500–1700 (pp. 143–68). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Foucault, Michel (1979). ‘What is an author?’ In Josué V. Harari (ed.), Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism (pp. 141–60). London: Methuen. Fox, Adam (2000). Oral and Literate Culture in England, 1500–1700. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hackel, Heidi Brayman (2005). Reading Material in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hadfield, Andrew (ed.) (2001). Literature and Censorship in Renaissance England. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Halasz, Alexandra (1997). The Marketplace of Print: Pamphlets and the Public Sphere in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Johns, Adrian (1998). The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Johns, Adrian (2002). ‘How to acknowledge a revolution’. American Historical Review, 107, 106–25. Kastan, David Scott (2001). Shakespeare and the Book. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kiefer, Frederick (1996). Writing on the Renaissance Stage: Written Words, Printed Pages, Metaphoric Books. Newark: University of Delaware Press. Krontiris, Tina (1992). Oppositional Voices: Women as Writers and Translators of Literature in the English Renaissance. London: Routledge. Lambert, Sheila (1987). ‘The printers and the government, 1604–1637’. In Robin Myers and Michael Harris (eds.), Aspects of Printing from 1600 (pp. 1–29). Oxford: Oxford Polytechnic Press.

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Lander, Jesse (2006). Inventing Polemic: Religion, Print, and Literary Culture in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lindenbaum, Peter (1991). ‘John Milton and the republican mode of literary production’. Yearbook of English Studies, 2, 121–36. Loewenstein, Joseph (2002a). The Author’s Due: Printing and the Prehistory of Copyright. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Loewenstein, Joseph (2002b) Ben Jonson and Possessive Authorship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Love, Harold (1993). Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England. Oxford: Clarendon Press. MacColl, Alan (1972). ‘The circulation of Donne’s poems in manuscript’. In MacColl, John Donne: Essays in Celebration (pp. 28–46). London: Methuen. McRae, Andrew (2004). Literature, Satire and the Early Stuart State. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marotti, Arthur (1995). Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Muldrew, Craig (1998). The Economy of Obligation: the Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Myers, Robin and Michael Harris (eds.) (1990). Spreading the Word: the Distribution Networks of Print, 1550–1850. Winchester: St Paul’s Bibliographies. Myers, Robin and Michael Harris (eds.) (1992) Censorship and the Control of Print in England and France 1600–1910. Winchester: St Paul’s Bibliographies. O’Callaghan, Michelle (2007). The English Wits: Literature and Sociability in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ong, Walter (2002). Orality and Literacy: the Technologizing of the Word, 2nd edn. London: Routledge. Pask, Kevin (1996). The Emergence of the English Author: Scripting the Life of the Poet in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Peters, Kate (2005). Print Culture and the Early Quakers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Plant, Marjorie (1994). The English Book Trade, 3rd edn. London: Allen & Unwin.

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Rose, Mark (1993). Authors and Owners: the Invention of Copyright. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Saenger, Michael (2006). The Commodification of Textual Engagements in the English Renaissance. Aldershot: Ashgate. Saunders, J. W. (1951). ‘The stigma of print: a note on the social bases of Tudor poetry’. Essays in Criticism, 1, 139–64. Shapiro, I. A. (1950). ‘ “The Mermaid Club” ’. Modern Language Review, 45, 7–10. Sharpe, Kevin (2000). Reading Revolutions: the Politics of Reading in Early Modern England. New Haven: Yale University Press. Sherman, William B. (2008). Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Shuger, Debora K. (2006). Censorship and Cultural Sensibility: The Regulation of Language in TudorStuart England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Tebeaux, Elizabeth (1997). ‘Women and technical writing, 1475–1700: technology, literacy, and development of a genre’. In Lynette Hunter and Sarah Hutton (eds.), Women, Science and Medicine 1500–1700 (pp. 29–59). Stroud: Sutton Publishing.

Tribble, Evelyn (1993). Margins and Marginality. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Tyson, Gerald and Sylvia Wagonheim (eds.) (1986). Print and Culture in the Renaissance: Essays on the Advent of Printing in Europe. Newark: University of Delaware Press. Voss, Paul (1998). ‘Books for sale: advertising and patronage in late Elizabethan England’. Sixteenth Century Journal, 29, 733–56. Voss, Paul (2003). ‘Printing conventions and the early modern play’. Medieval and Renaissance Drama, 15, 98–115. Wall, Wendy (1993). The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Watts, Tessa (1991). Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wheale, Nigel (1999). Writing and Society: Literacy, Print and Politics in Britain, 1590–1660. London: Routledge. Woudhuysen, H. R. (1996). Sir Philip Sidney and the Circulation of Manuscripts, 1558–1640. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

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Early Modern Handwriting Grace Ioppolo

Early Modern Hands Early modern writers used a wide variety of handwriting styles, dependent on the type of text they were writing or copying out. The basic ‘hand’ (or handwriting) was ‘secretary’, so named because it had been used in the early Tudor period by royal secretaries transcribing official documents and decrees. According to the writing master Martin Billingsley in The Pen’s Excellency (1618), there were three types of secretary hand: ‘set’, ‘facile’, and ‘fast’, as well as several other hands, including ‘bastard-secretary or text’, Roman, Italian (or italic), court (used in the courts of the Kings Bench and Common Pleas), and Chancery (used in the Chancery Court). Other hands used for specialised documents included those for the King’s Remembrancer and the Pipe Office. In addition, continental hands were also taught to the English, as noted by John de Beau Chesne and John Baildon in their handwriting manuals (1571 and later), including French secretary and simpler French, Spanish, high and low Dutch hands, and the more specialised ‘reversed hand’ (with letters written backwards), ‘letter entrelace’ (with intertwined letters), ‘letter coupée’ (with letters struck through in the middle) and the ‘small glossing hand’ (used for decoration). But as Billingsley explained, the ‘rounded’ facile secretary was the only ‘usual hand of England’, with the more ‘square’ set secretary reserved for formal documents, and bastard-secretary used for engrossments (text written out in large letters, as in the first lines of legal documents), epitaphs, tombs, and book titles. Given the ways in which each hand was supposed to be reserved for a particular kind of text, it is not unusual to find that, within one document, a single writer may have copied out text in two or more styles of hand. For example, in a play manuscript, the writer, by convention, would write act-scene notations, entrance and exit directions, and speech-prefixes in italic hand (often used in the period for some form of emphasis), with the dialogue in secretary hand. A muniment, deed, or other legal document setting out ownership or other rights could have bastard-secretary in the

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opening text, with set secretary, and italic as appropriate, in the rest of the document. By the beginning of the seventeenth century, however, many authors began to mix italic letter-forms, which were much easier to write, into their secretary hands, with the result that ‘mixed’ hands began to dominate. By the mid-seventeenth century, italic hands using only a few secretary letters predominate, so that a kind of rounded italic hand, from which modern handwriting developed, became the standard. This was not the case for professional scribes, who were paid to be exceptionally formal and neat, as they usually adhered to the types of rules and conventions noted by Billingsley and other writing instructors or ‘penmen’ as they were termed. In fact, in his manual The Pen’s Triumph (1658), Edward Cocker, a long-experienced ‘teacher of the art of writing’, decries the sloppiness that had entered into the teaching and use of handwriting and insists that ‘running’ or ‘coursary’ secretary, which is equivalent to Billingsley’s facile hand, could still be used properly. Cocker discusses the physical difficulty of writing any of the secretary styles, advising the writer not to affect ‘a conjunction of Letters in the writing of this hand, but rather that every Letter thereof be made distinctly by it self, unless they run naturally one to another’ (sigs. B1v–B4r). In this period, middle-class or aristocratic men, those most usually taught to read and write, were thought capable of mastering all the various hands, but in actual practice, unless they were scribes, men were at least taught to write at least a standard secretary and an italic hand. Yet women were most commonly taught, as Billingsley notes, Roman or Italian hand, suitable for the type of occasional writing that women were supposed to do, rather than the daily writing represented by secretary hand. However, given the number of women responding in italic or Roman hand to letters or documents written by men in secretary hand, middle-class and aristocratic women were certainly taught to read secretary hand if not to write it. Billingsley suggests that, due to its elaborate flourishes and embellished letterforms, secretary hand can shrewdly obscure the most artful and mysterious content. He claims that ‘whosoever doth practise it (according to the true nature of it) shall perceive therein many secret and subtill passages of the hand, which few, but those that have bin well grounded therein by a true Artist, are able to comprehend’, as it ‘imports some things in it that are not easily to be found out’ (sig. C3v). Indeed, in The Pen’s Triumph (1659), Edward Cocker notes of running secretary hand that ‘nothing is a greater Ornament to such hands, then a spacious field, as it were, wherein the wanton Meandrings and spreading plumes of each Letter may be fairly blazon’d’ (sig. C3r). That emblazoned, ornamental, and potentially subversive secretary hand is the province of men only becomes clear in Billingsley’s discussion in The Pen’s Excellency of Roman hand which is conceived to be the easiest hand that is written with Pen, and to be taught in the shortest time: Therefore it is usually taught to Women, forasmuch as they (having not the patience to take any great paines, besides Phantasticall and Humorsome) must be taught that which they may instantly learne; otherwise they are uncertaine of their

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proceedings, because their minds are (upon light occasion) easily drawne from the first revolution. (sig. C4r)

Without delving into issues of gender in The Pen’s Triumph, Cocker more fully discusses the characteristics of Roman hand, which is written ‘on the form of a Circle’: ‘All letters must carry with them a visible rotundity. It is not proper for the Letters to joyn, it being derived from a hand originally disjunctive’. More specifically, ‘The items should be thrice the length of their Bodies, and some shall matter more; the distance of lines for this hand must be so much as a stem in length, and about half the depth of the round letters’ (sig. D1v). Italic hand, according to both Billingsley and Cocker, only slightly differs from Roman in that, rather than using ‘rounded’ letters as in Roman hand, italic uses ‘squared’ letters; in practice the two hands are often indistinguishable in the early modern period. Noticeable in both penmen’s discussions of Roman and italic hands is the lack of subtlety, intrigue, and subversion that is inherent in secretary hand. The teaching of secretary hand was intended to create a uniform handwriting style that would be legible to all readers and writers. Inevitably, some authors wrote a careless or sloppy form of it, especially in the act of composing, or they failed strictly to conform to all the standard letter forms. This was not true for professional scribes, who were paid to transcribe a new or an existing document, as well as a spare copy of it. In fact scriptoria, that is, businesses employing scribes for short- or long-term hire, were available throughout London, and some scribes specialised in particular types of documents, such as muniments or legal depositions. At least two scribes, Edward Knight and Ralph Crane, were known to have worked with acting companies to produce theatrical ‘books’ (or prompt-books) or some other fair copy of a play-text, including presentation copies given to patrons. The company ‘book-holder’ would also probably be responsible for preparing not just the book but the ‘parts’ (actor’s scripts of their own lines) and ‘plots’ (summaries of entrance and exit directions for each play performed). Other scribes worked with poets or prose writers, and some scribes, such as Peter Bales and William Panke, were celebrated for their skill. Scribes were indeed considered professionals and they commanded fairly standard fees. In the diary he kept from 1617 to 1622, the great actor Edward Alleyn records all of his expenses for paying scribes to copy legal documents. For example, in 1618, he paid 2 shillings for two ‘fayer’ (or fair, as opposed to ‘foul’ or draft) copies of a ‘bill’ or official deed, with an extra fee for ‘engrossing’ it, that is, having the scribe prepare the final, official version. Alleyn also notes that he paid scribes between 8 and 12 pence a page for longer documents, and he apparently built up a number of relationships with particular scribes, even agreeing to bail one from debtor’s prison.

The Secretary Alphabet The top half of Figure 5 shows the ‘secretarie Alphabete’, with its elaborate majuscule letters, particularly A, E, H, R, S, and Y. The letters J and j do not appear as if they

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Image not available in the electronic edition

Figure 5 Woodcut engraving of ‘The secretarie Alphabet’ from A Book Containing Divers Sortes of Hands by John De Beau Chesne and John Baildon (1571). British Library, London

are usually interchangeable with I and i at this time, although i can be written as j, particularly at the end of Roman numerals, as in the number xiij (13). Some of the minuscule letters are so elaborate that they are illegible to modern readers. This is especially true for the first small a (called a ‘spurred’ a due to the diagonally slanted and extended line on its left side) and for d, f, g, h, k, m, n, r, s (including ‘long’ s), t, v, w, and z. While modern writers are taught to write their capital letters so that flourishes remain well above the line (as in modern italic R), many capital secretary letters descend below the line (as in secretary R). Even more noticeable is the number of secretary small letters with flourishes above or below the line (as in secretary h). These flourishes could partially or wholly obscure letters on lines above or below them or even letters on either side of them. Some of the small secretary letters are stylised and distinct, such as the h or d (especially if used at the beginning or end of a word), but other letters could easily be confused or misread. A small f is often indistinguishable from a long s, especially if the writer did not ensure that the horizontal bar on the long s protruded on the right side through the vertical one. As with modern hand-writers, many early modern writers were not particularly careful in forming letters. Both f and long s could be nearly identical to a t or l, especially if the writer gave his t or l a too short ‘ascender’ (or upward stroke). As Cocker notes, ‘sometimes in the making of a secretary f, t, or

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k, you must hold [the pen] as for a downright stroke [or ‘descender’], when you make the blot or right line through those letters. Let not your Breast lie on the Desk you write on, nor your Nose on the Paper, but sit in as majestical a posture as you can’ (The Pen’s Triumph, B3v). As the writing master who signs himself ‘E.B.’ recommends, Leaue between each word a small letters space, That faire and seemly your hand may be read, Keepe euen your letters at foote and at head, With distance alike between letter and letter, One out of others shewes much the better. (A2v)

Some writers appear not to have heeded this kind of advice, as their hands produce letter forms that were indistinct or illegible, probably even to a trained scribe. Some forms in this alphabet, by convention, are to be used in the initial or medial position in a word rather than in the final position, as in the case for s, with the long s (the uncrossed f ) used in initial or medial position and another s, which looks like an upside-down italic e, used at the end of the word. In addition, u was often not used in initial position but in the medial one, with v used mostly for the primary letter (although these particular distinctions began to drop out of seventeenth-century handwriting). Thus cup would be written as cup but up as vp, and very as very but every as euery. In addition, some secretary letter-forms signalled standard abbreviations, including a capital or small p with a bar or cross-stroke at its descender which served as an abbreviation for per or pro or par. Thus the word parish could be spelled pish. A tilde (∼) or macron (-), or some mark approximating either, placed over a letter signified that another letter, particularly m, had been omitted in the word. So, for example, common could be written as comon with a macron or tilde over the m, as with the, with one of the same marks over the e to signify them. In practice nearly any missing letter could be represented by a macron or tilde. However, this distinction also began to die out in the seventeenth century, probably because it took as much effort to lift the pen to write a macron or tilde as to keep the pen in place and write out the missing letter. There are a number of other common variants from the forms listed in Figure 5, including an elongated italic-looking e to represent es or is and ye and yt for the and that, with y carried from the Anglo-Saxon ‘thorn’ (þ) which represented th. Other abbreviations using superscript letters include Mr (for Master) and Mris (for Mistress), Sr (for Sir), wth and wt (for with), wch and wh (for which), and yr and yu (for your and you). Among numerous other abbreviations, etc. could be abbreviated as &c, with the ampersand also used alone in place of and, even in the most formal and important documents. The words Letter and letters were often abbreviated as lre and lres. Those keeping financial accounts used their own system of abbreviations, such as rd for received and pd for paid. Even memorandum could be abbreviated as

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md. Proper names could also be abbreviated, including Robert as Ro, William as Wm, and Thomas as Tho. These abbreviations are sometimes punctuated with a colon (:) after the last or below the superscript letter, as in yu:. In effect, any type of word could be abbreviated; for example yr LL: (or yr ll:) was a common abbreviation for your Lordships, also abbreviated as LLshps, and Ladyship, for example, as Lapp. An abbreviated word did not signal that it had carried less honour, status, or formality than non-abbreviated words, for even the monarch was addressed in standard abbreviated letter forms. For example, in his private letters, Robert Devereux, second earl of Essex, frequently addressed Queen Elizabeth as ‘yr matie’ (‘your Majestie’), as did other petitioners, even those with whom she did not have a personal relationship. Scribally written petitions to court figures such as privy councillors also contained abbreviations, and it goes without saying that personal letters between friends, relatives, and especially lovers contained non-standard abbreviations. Ciphers used to disguise names or identities also appear in personal letters and other manuscripts of the period, even from a subject such as Lady Penelope Rich when writing in the 1590s to King James VI of Scotland about his supporters in her social circle. But ciphers are more commonly found in official documents, particularly those concerning national security. All these variants in unusual letter forms, abbreviations, and superscript letters could perplex or confuse a contemporary reader of secretary hand. Also problematic are ‘minim’ letters – short vertical lines that were not connected with horizontal strokes. While some authors would formally write a letter like n or m using the secretary form in Figure 5, others would use a series of minims with no linkage between the vertical lines. Two minims in a row could signify an n or a u (or ii if the author did not dot them; in many cases the dot appears over the preceding or following letter and not over the i). Three minims in a row could signify an m, w, ni, in, iu, ui, or iii, among other combinations of letters. As Cocker points out, writing out as well as reading lines of text in secretary hand, with its elaborate flourishes and embellishments, particularly in capital letters, required a great deal more time and energy than italic hand. For this reason, writers began to adopt a mixed secretary hand, particularly using italic form for the letters that were the most elaborate or troublesome in secretary hand for majuscules such as C, S, T and minuscules such as c, h, f, r, s, and medial and final e. In fact, these latter minuscule letters are most frequently capitalised when they appear at the beginning of a word, simply because their majuscules are much easier to read. For this reason, capitalisation often seems arbitrary or haphazard in secretary hand, but in fact it usually has some relation to how much more difficult it would be to distinguish a c, for example, in the primary position in a word instead of C. As italic hand was used to imitate ancient Roman texts, the letters are unlinked and clear, and thus look neater and more regular on the page. These letter forms are also less inclined to carry over on to, and to obscure, a letter on the previous line with an ascender or the next line with a descender. Knowing that certain letters, such as f and long s or l and t, could be confused may explain particular cruxes in printed texts. For example, so spelled with a long s could be

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confused with to, and perhaps only the context of the sentence or passage could determine the correct word. But blaming the illegibility of secretary hand for a crux is not always possible, especially if the letters were too distinct to be mistaken for other letters.

Punctuation and Spelling In combination, unclear or imprecise letter forms, abbreviations, as well as punctuation and spelling could have a major impact on the ways in which an early modern text was transmitted from manuscript to print or even recopied and circulated in manuscript form. The use of punctuation was much different from the modern age, in which writers usually adhere to the same rules, such as a period at the end of a complete sentence, a comma to separate certain clauses or modifiers, and a colon to introduce a proposition. Early modern writers used much lighter punctuation, and when they did punctuate, they were often inconsistent. Judging from extant literary texts, authors often failed to use any punctuation to mark the end of a complete sentence, especially if it concluded at the end of a line of text. If writers do use punctuation at the end of a sentence or line it was often not a period (.) but a colon (:), semi-colon (;) or virgule (/). Question marks (?) are often used interchangeably with exclamation marks (!). A hyphen was sometimes represented by an equals sign (=), especially at the end of a line, rather than a short dash (-). However, when correcting, rather than composing, authors could insist on heavy punctuation. Thomas Middleton apparently used pencil to correct a partly scribal transcript of A Game at Chess by adding commas and other punctuation marks on nearly every line as well as to correct a few words in the portions of the text not in his own hand. However, he may not have been typical, as he was clearly correcting a scribal copy of his own work. Scribes often slavishly transcribed punctuation as they saw it (perhaps in anticipation of the author making corrections while proofreading), although more experienced scribes, particularly those like Ralph Crane, who appeared to specialise in literary transcripts, took great pains to regularise punctuation, as in Crane’s transcript of Measure for Measure, which seems to have served as printer’s copy for the 1623 Folio text of the play. However, in regularising such features, scribes do not appear to be working independently but are following the directions of those with whom they worked. For example, Crane appears to have collaborated with Middleton in making copies of A Game at Chess in the summer and autumn of 1624. Scribes generally do not tend to emend the text they are copying but to regularise its format and technical features. In addition, as spelling was not yet standardised, early modern authors had no single, indisputable reference guide by which to check spelling and from which they could not deviate. Writers may have been taught to use the spellings already available in texts they had studied but they frequently adopted idiosyncratic spellings, sometimes based on phonetic pronunciation. In the case of homonyms such as ‘there’, ‘their’, and ‘they’re’, all three words could be spelled in the same way, as ‘theere’,

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‘thier’, ‘theire’, or ‘theyre’, for example, or in any variety of ways at any given time. The meanings of such words could be distinguishable only by their context and not by spelling alone, and in some cases they would be entirely indistinguishable. R. B. McKerrow argued that a writer of this period chooses one particular spelling of a word and ‘sticks to it’, so that ‘the more a man writes the more would his spelling tend to become fixed’. However, there are numerous examples of precisely the opposite. In fact, inconsistent spelling is so common in literary and historical manuscripts that any spelling of any word is possible. For example, in his diary, Edward Alleyn, records his activities on ‘Easter daye’ 1620 in this way: ‘we Receued ye Comion wt mr Robinsone & his wife & all ye pore excepting aylec man whoe for incharitye wase put by by mr Harrisone this daye ye chapple wase furnished wt basone and candell sticks ye children wt surplices & ye fellowes allsoe’. In other words, Alleyn and his wife Joan received Communion with Mr Robinson and his wife and all the poor, excepting Alec’s(?) man, or servant, who for his lack of charity was put out by Mr Harrison. On the same day, the chapel at Dulwich College was furnished with a basin and candlesticks, and the children and fellows (i.e. college students and instructors) were given surplices for the ceremony. However, Alleyn does not ‘stick’ with these spellings, capitalisations, or the lack of clear punctuation, but varies them throughout his diary, memorandum-book and miscellaneous receipts, deeds and correspondence. Thus, not just spelling but syntax, punctuation and capitalisation could be highly idiosyncratic and inconsistent, so Alleyn’s writing is not symptomatic of an illiterate or uneducated man. Authors such as Heywood, Dekker, Munday, and Middleton show the same sorts of inconsistencies in their autograph manuscripts, and even in the spellings of their own names, with Dekker’s variously spelled ‘Dickers’, ‘Deckers’, ‘Deckkers’, and ‘Dyckers’, and Heywood’s as ‘Hawode’, ‘Hewod’, ‘Hewode’, and ‘Hewwod’ in entries in Henslowe’s papers that Dekker and Heywood witnessed. As the pronunciation of vowels was shifting during the early modern period, applying modern pronunciation to any vowel of this period may result in mispronunciation, so that any of these spellings may have effectively captured the sound of the names. That early modern women were less competent at spelling than men is a generalisation that does not always prove true. Frances Devereux, the daughter of Sir Francis Walsingham, and married to Sir Philip Sidney and later to Robert Devereux, second earl of Essex, does seem to have had no standard against which to check her spelling, telling Essex in a 1599 autograph letter, ‘I haue had the good fortune to reseue [receive] to lettars from you. the forst came when I wase so seke [sick] that I could not spake wth mr darei wch braft [brought] it’. Possibly her recent sickness has affected her ability to answer confidently the two letters she has received from her husband, although as she knew that this letter would be passed to her husband through Robert Cecil, she may have had her own reasons for appearing so unclear. However, Essex, a voracious reader of literature who patronised numerous poets and was a poet himself, was sometimes no more adept in his spelling, as in this remark to Queen Elizabeth in a 1592 autograph letter from the French battlefield: “Att my departure I had a restlesse desir honestly to disingage myself from this french action. in my absence I

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conceaue an absurd hope to do somthing thatt shall make me worthy of the name of yr seruant.’ In short, phonetic or inconsistent spelling in early modern handwriting is no indisputable marker of class, education, or gender. Many male authors used both a separate secretary and an italic hand, with secretary hand used for composing, that is, cursive or fluent writing, and italic for more formal copying. While it is usual to see this formal use of italic in scribal manuscripts, especially in copies of reading texts to be presented to patrons or clients, authors in the act of composing frequently use one standard hand throughout the text, as switching between two hands could easily disrupt the train of thought. Thus, composing authors might have been somewhat careless about their handwriting, punctuation, spelling, and the usual conventions of particular hands, especially if they made their own fair copy of foul papers, or if they knew that they would employ a scribe to do so. An author would be assumed to be making decisions and changes in the act of writing foul papers or fair copies, thereby introducing further errors or problems into the text during composition; a scribe would be paid to do the opposite. In practice, some writers like Essex and Ben Jonson used a single and predominantly italic hand, even in writing formal letters to monarchs or court officials or presentation or commissioned transcripts, as well as inscriptions in printed books. In a letter to Robert Cecil asking for release from jail for writing Eastward Ho, Jonson’s cursive hand is largely italic but with some secretary letters, and no example of a literary text written by Jonson entirely in secretary hand appears to survive. Most likely, Jonson, who seemed to be fastidious about the visual representation of his work, even proofreading his texts as they were printed, abandoned whatever secretary hand he had learned and concentrated on a more calligraphic italic hand. Each writer’s hand, whether secretary or italic, could change over time, as any complete archive, such as that of Henslowe and Alleyn at Dulwich College, demonstrates. Jonson’s hand altered somewhat after 1626, when he began to suffer from palsy. Some writers used a hand that was entirely or predominantly italic for all their writing, although such a hand did not guarantee legibility, as in the case of Middleton, whose failure to form completely many italic letters often renders his handwriting illegible. The legibility of a writer’s cursive hand may have had some bearing on whether he routinely copied his own drafts or foul papers. However, writers other than Jonson routinely used a neater version of their usual cursive hand, rather than a calligraphic italic, to copy their texts. Given the lack of standardised spelling and punctuation and the frequent deviation in handwriting from standard letter forms and conventional usage, early modern readers, including print compositors, could have been left bewildered in reading particular manuscript texts. Heywood’s revision of other dramatists’ plays, including The Book of Sir Thomas More, suggests that he must have been adept in reading others’ writing even while, ironically, writing a nearly illegible hand himself. If Chettle wrote Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit rather than merely copying it out, he may have been ironic in noting, ‘it was il written, as sometimes Greenes hand was none of the best: licensd it must be, ere it could be printed which could neuer be if it might not be read. To be brief, I writ it

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over, and as near as I could, followed the copy’ (A4r). As an apprentice and later as a master printer, Chettle would have learned how to read printer’s copy written in illegible hands. As McKerrow also notes, ‘it is unsafe to take the spelling of any ordinary printed book as representing that of its author’, because compositors could impose their own spelling on the texts they typeset, often depending on the pieces of type available to them at any given time, as well as their need to justify lines. It is important to recognise all the factors involved in reading and writing secretary and italic letter forms before attempting to trace the source of errors, confusions, variants, and/or revisions in manuscript texts, especially as they went into print or were recopied and then dispersed in variant manuscripts. For example, over 4,000 extant manuscript copies of individual works of Donne were made during the early modern period, so it should not be surprising that there were a wide number of variants, some of them deriving from a failure to read particular letters or words in preceding copies.

Early Modern Paper, Pen, and Ink In addition to teaching handwriting styles, writing instructors offered advice on how to make common ink, including ‘special black ink’ and ‘ink in haste’, and how to ‘keepe ink long’, as well as how to choose a quill, make a pen and a good penknife, and basically ‘how to sit writing’ and’ to write fair’. But writers began with a choice of paper. Although parchment (made from animal skin) and vellum (usually made from calfskin) were still used for some official and legal documents such as muniments, government records, or enrolments, by the fifteenth century paper was the common material used for writing. Rather than modern mass-produced and machine-made ‘wove’ paper, early modern ‘laid’ paper, usually imported from the continent, was handmade from linen rags which were reduced to pulp and laid in wooden frames, trays, or other moulds, strung with wires. When the paper dried, the wires across these moulds would leave a series of parallel indentations called ‘chain lines’. The mesh of wires in the mould could leave a watermark: a design such as a jug, a shield, a bunch of grapes, a fleur-de-lys, or a set of initials, used both as decoration and as a logo to identify the paper-maker. According to McKerrow and to Gaskell, an average sheet of paper, amounting to the size of a paper-making mould, less the trimming of edges, would be approximately 61 × 40.5 cm (24 × 16 inches). When folded vertically down the middle this would form a single bifolium, i.e. two conjugate leaves forming four pages. Each half-sheet would create two pages, for a total of four pages, with two recto (‘upright’ or ‘straight’ in Latin) or right-hand pages, and two verso (‘turned’ in Latin) or left-hand pages. Those writing letters found the bifolium format especially useful, as the first one or two pages could be used for writing, and the address of the recipient could be written on the last page. The letter was then folded into a small packet with the address on the outside, and sealed with wax (envelopes were not yet used in the early modern

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age). Although most bibliographers would argue that paper produced for print and for handwriting were the same, some recent research suggests that they were indeed different; at any rate paper had to take writing ink or printing ink in such a way that the ink did not run or soak in too much. According to contemporary accounts, the cost for ten sheets of paper was roughly 1 penny, thus paper was not inordinately expensive. Henslowe and Alleyn’s archive suggests that paper was not too precious to waste, as hundreds of short or incomplete pages were not reused, although some paper was recycled. Because scribes could calculate how much paper they would need in order to make another copy of the finished manuscript in front of them, they could begin by making up manuscript books containing several numbered pages. Binding the book would involve sewing thread through the gatherings of paper to make a spine. However, a composing author usually worked with one sheet of paper at a time. The sheet could be left unfolded and used to create two pages, one on each side. But it was perhaps more economical and convenient for the writer to use a bifolium; in fact, some paper may have been sold pre-folded in this way. Even more economically, the writer could fold the sheet once more (thus folded twice altogether) and turn it sideways to make eight pages, and so on. After being folded two or more times, the sheets would have to be slit across the top and/or sides so that they could be opened. If not folded, the paper could be trimmed to any size, although it was more economical to fold rather than trim paper so as to use as much of it as possible. How the paper was folded can still be determined by checking the placement of watermarks: for example, in the middle of a leaf of a bifolium, or in the top or bottom corners of a manuscript in quarto format. However, given that the paper may have been trimmed, or other single sheets inserted later into manuscripts, watermarks may appear in a variety of places. A full sheet appears to have been the appropriate size for playhouse plots, which were posted backstage on a peg to aid actors. Actors’ parts, rolled up as scrolls, could be made up of folio or smaller-sized sheets pasted, pinned, or stitched together head to foot. On the other hand, a writer who wanted to make up a manuscript book that would be small enough to carry around in his pocket would fold his sheets into octavo size if he had not already purchased a madeup blank book. Those who were writing for their own purposes could treat paper in a much more casual way. At some point, Henslowe turned his diary upside down and started writing again from the reverse end, that is, from the back page forward to the front. He also wrote in empty margins of already used pages, but his economy is probably not due to the cost of paper but the necessity of having all of his accounts in one single book, which was already bound by the time he began using it. Thus Henslowe could not readily add extra pages but had to make do with those already in the book. Many of his correspondents wrote on a portion of a larger, previously used sheet when writing to him, and in some cases their deletion of existing material is still legible. Even Alleyn wrote a 1597 contract for Henslowe and his covenant servant William Kendal on the verso of a portion of a larger piece of paper that listed some accounts

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which Alleyn had crossed out, but again, this may just happen to have been the only paper he had to hand. These writers probably recycled paper out of convenience and not because they were too poor to purchase more. As for the pen, Cocker recommends that writers ‘procure the first, second, or third Quill in the wing of a Goose or Raven’, then sharpen the point with a penknife. If ‘you intend to write Italian hand therewith, the nib must be small, and almost round, with a long slit: For secretary it must be broader; for large Italique, or that which we call Italian Text, it must be of a greater breadth’. The penknife could be used both to erase mistakes by carefully scraping off dried ink and to sharpen the pen point when necessary. Cocker also notes, ‘You may rule your paper with black-lead, and with white bread, or the paring-dust of white Leather, clearly fetch those lines out again.’ As the penman ‘E.B.’ advises, the scholar must Rule him two lines just of measure: Those two lines between to write verie just, Not aboue or below write that he must: The same to be done is best with blacke lead, Which written between, is cleansed with bread. (A2v)

In practice, such rulings were often made discreetly and faintly so they would not be easily visible after the text had been written out. If the paper was too rough, it could be polished with the penknife or a bookbinder’s folding stick. As de Beau Chesne and Baildon recommend, ‘white, smooth-grain’d, well-gumm’d Paper, is the best to write on; if it be not well-gumm’d and clear, you may draw it sheet after sheet through Allum-water’ or polish it with a penknife (A2r). Some literary manuscripts in this period show the use of red ink or red pencil used to rule off the upper, lower, and side margins, as well as regular plumbago (similar to graphite) pencil, but the bulk of the manuscript would be written in ink that would dry as brown or black. Ink was made from a variety of natural ingredients, as in Cocker’s recipe: Take three Ounces of [oak] Galls which are small and heavy and crisp, put them in a vessell of three pints of Wine, or of Rain-water, which is much better, letting it stand so infusing in the Sun for one or two dayes. After this has been done, the writer must take two Ounces of Coppris, or of Roman Vitrial, well colour’d and beaten small, stirring it well with a stick, which being put in, set it again in the Sun for one or two dayes more. Stir all together, adding two Ounces of Gum Arabique of the clearest and most shining, being well beaten.

To make it more lustrous, Cocker advises adding pomegranate or sugar and boiling it gently. Once armed with ink, a sharpened pen, a penknife, polished paper and a ‘pounce-pot’ or ‘sander’ to help blot or dry the ink on the written pages, the writer was ready to begin, probably following E.B.’s advice:

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he that will learn with speed for to write, To mark his example must have his delight, Letter and title to make as the same, And so shall the scholar be void of all blame. (A2v)

References and Further Reading Billingsley, Martin (1618). The Pen’s Excellency or the Secretary’s Delight. London. Billingsley, Martin (1637). A Copy Book containing a variety of examples of all the most curious hands. London. Cerasano, S. P. (2005). ‘Henslowe’s “Curious” Diary’. Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, 17, 72–85. Chettle, Henry (1592). ‘To the gentlemen readers’. In Chettle, Kind-Harts Dreame. London. Cocker, Edward (1657). The Pen’s Transcendency. London. Cocker, Edward (1658). The Pen’s Triumph. London. Dawson, Giles E. and Laetitia Kennedy-Skipton (1966). Elizabethan Handwriting 1500–1650: A Guide to the Reading of Documents and Manuscripts. London: Faber & Faber. De Beau Chesne, John and John Baildon (1571). A Book Containing Diveres Sorts of hands. London. ‘E.B.’ (1590). A New Book Containing all sorts of hands usually written at this day in Christendom. London.

Gaskell, Philip (1972). A New Introduction to Bibliography. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jenkinson, Sir Hilary (1927). The Later Court Hands in England from the Fifteenth to the Seventeenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McKerrow, R. B. (1927). An Introduction to Bibliography for Literary Students. Oxford: Clarendon Press. McKerrow, R. B. (2000). ‘The relationship of English printed books to authors’ manuscripts during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: The 1928 Sandars Lectures’, ed. Carlo M. Bajetta. Studies in Bibliography, 53, 1–65. Petti, Anthony G. (1977). English Literary Hands from Chaucer to Dryden. London: Edward Arnold. Preston, Jean F. and Laetitia Yeandle (formerly Kennedy-Skipton) (1992). English Handwriting 1400–1650: An Introductory Manual. Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies.

14

The Manuscript Transmission of Poetry Arthur F. Marotti

In early modern England most verse was written not for print publication but for manuscript transmission. Lyric poetry, for example, was a literary form that was regarded as basically occasional and ephemeral, designed to be passed in manuscript transmission first to known readers socially connected in some way to the authors, and then to a wider social world. A poet’s family, friends, and social contacts were the proper recipients of what he or she wrote, and many of the pieces that found their way into print in poetical miscellanies or individual editions were, actually or by pretence, diverted into that medium, having the character of intercepted texts. Sometimes publishers congratulated themselves on wresting such work out of a socially restricted environment to make it available to broader readership able to profit from it: Richard Tottel, for example, whose influential and much-reprinted miscellany (Songes and Sonnettes, Written by the Ryght Honorable Lorde Henry Haward Late Earle of Surrey, and Other (1557)) was precedent-setting, boasted to his readers that, in printing the manuscript-circulated verse of such authors as Sir Thomas Wyatt and the earl of Surrey, he was making available ‘those works which the ungentle hoarders up of such treasure have heretofore envied thee’ (Rollins 1965: 2). Despite the continental examples of printed poetical collections, such as the sonnet sequences of Italian and French poets from Petrarch through Ronsard, cultural expectations, at least in England, were that lyric poems were private and restricted, rather than public and accessible. Many years ago J. W. Saunders (1951b) coined the expression ‘the stigma of print’ to refer to the social disapproval incurred by well-born or educated writers if they allowed their verse to be published. But there was more than an issue of social degradation involved in the printing lyric poetry; it was that the form itself was unsuitable to broad exposure, a fact that someone such as Emily Dickinson later acknowledged by keeping her own lyrics in her possession. Although print culture, over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, finally incorporated lyric poetry as it did other literary genres, making it gradually seem more and more acceptable for writers to collect and publish their verse and for

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editors and publishers to produce single-author editions and anthologies of poems, the system of manuscript transmission of lyric poetry remained as vigorous as it had been in a pre-Gutenberg era. In fact, judging from the documentary remains, there was a resurgence in England of manuscript transcription and collection of verse in the seventeenth century, especially in the period from the early 1620s through the 1640s.1 Authors and compilers in particular environments such as the universities, the Inns of Court, the royal court, and the houses of the gentry and nobility, as well as in social networks such as those found in London and in the English Catholic subculture, produced a great many poetical collections that encompassed a range of texts broader than that of the body of canonical literature from the period. Since the processes of canonizing particular authors and works, as well as the writing of literary histories, were so reliant on the products of print culture, many of the pieces we find in surviving manuscript compilations – by either minor or anonymous writers – have been neglected. Composing, transmitting, collecting, and arranging poetic and prose texts were activities shared by most early modern literate individuals. Texts were transcribed and circulated on single sheets in or as letters, on bifolia, and in ‘quaternions’ (a ‘quire of four sheets of paper or parchment folded in two’, OED) and small quires,2 as well as in larger units ready to receive texts their owners deemed important (Saunders 1951a and Love 1993). Some manuscripts collected or bound later, such as those in the Conway papers (British Library MS Additional 23229), Edward Bannister’s thirteen folios at the start of British Library MS Additional 28253, Bodleian MS English Poetry c.53, and some of the sheets in Peter Le Neve’s manuscript (British Library MS Additional 27407) were folded loose sheets such as those used in correspondence. As examples of the circulation of verse in what Harold Love (1993: 13) called ‘separates’ or short manuscripts written and circulated as a unit, there are single sheets such as ‘A Poem put into my Lady Laitons Pocket by Sir W: Rawleigh’ (Rudick 1999: 16–17), Sir John Harington’s poem left behind the cushion of his godmother, Queen Elizabeth (Beal 1980–93: 1.2.122), Sir Walter Ralegh’s poem to Elizabeth and the queen’s recently discovered reply (May 1991: 318–19), and John Donne’s single surviving holograph poem, a verse letter sent to Lady Carey as a letter folded several times to make a small item for transport (Bodleian MS English Poetry d.197). Separates, including single sheets, were bound together in their own time or later to form manuscript collections. Poems were also sometimes copied into blank, bound codices, ‘paper books’ (Woudhuysen 1996: 47): Laurence Cummings (1960: 40) claims, for example, that Bodleian MS Rawlinson Poetry 85, an Elizabethan courtly and university collection, was ‘a bound and foliated book before [John] Finet began making entries’. Occasional poems originally sent to particular readers to celebrate births, mourn deaths, convey New Year’s greetings, maintain relationships with patrons and patronesses, express love or friendship, and for other purposes, were later gathered in collections along with other serious or recreational pieces. Sometimes the manuscripts themselves signal aspects of the process of literary transmission: poems were passed on by particular individuals, for example, or whole collections were lent

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for perusal or copying – some, as Henry Woudhuysen (1996: 50) claims, by booksellers and stationers. Donne’s 1614 request of his friend Sir Henry Goodyer to return to him a manuscript ‘book’ of his verse indicates that a collection of his poetry, at some stage in his life, was assembled by him in a single manuscript volume (Beal 1980–93: 1.1.245; Marotti 1986: ix–x). Stephen Powle wrote a note in his commonplace book anthology (Bodleian MS Tanner 169) regarding a Nicholas Breton poem entitled ‘A passionate Sonnet made by the Kinge of Scots uppon difficulties ariseing to crosse his proceeding in love & marriage with his most worthie to be esteemed Queene’ (‘In Sunny beames the skye doth shewe her sweete’): ‘Geaven me by Mr Britton who had been (as he sayed) in Scotland with the Kinges Majesty: but I rather thinke they weare made by him in the person of the kinge’ (fo. 43r).3 The Arundel Harington manuscript has a section beginning ‘Certayne verses made by uncertayne autors, wrytten out of Charleton his booke’ (fo. 43) (Hughey 1960: 1.179). Bodleian MS Rawlinson Poetry 26, which, before binding, was a collection of separates copied over a long period of time in many hands, has a late seventeenth-century note listing nine different people to whom the manuscript was lent (p. vi). In addition to transcribing poems from written exemplars, some manuscripts have texts that were recorded from memory. J. B. Leishman (1945) convincingly argues that memorial transcription accounts for some of the dramatic changes one finds in texts of some poems found in manuscript collections. This reminds us of the widespread practices of oral recitation or performance in a period in which there was a high degree of residual orality and, as scholars of the drama have recognised, people developed powerful memory skills that modern readers find hard to comprehend. Reading or singing literary texts aloud, often to small groups of friends or family members, was a very common practice, and we know that even some very long works, such as Sidney’s Arcadia, were given oral performance (Nelson 1976–7; Chartier 1989). The connection of script with orality and the individualistic characteristics of a particular person’s handwriting reinforce the aura of ‘presence’ in the manuscript text, which the printed text lacks (Love 1993: 141–8). Recording poetic texts was an activity related to traditional practices of commonplacing, the transcribing of passages from one’s reading, often in an alphabetical arrangement under familiar headings that facilitated retrieval and reuse in one’s own writing – ‘invention’ in the older rhetorical sense of the term (Beal 1993; Crane 1993; see Chapter 4, Rhetoric). In academic and post-academic environments, educated individuals kept commonplace books as a kind of prosthetic memory. In a less formal way, many people kept a looser sort of compilation, including a variety of items ranging from household accounts, to medical receipts, to historical and genealogical notes, to copies of letters, poems, and other important texts in circulation within restricted groups as well as within widening circles of transmission. Thus, some manuscript compilations in which we find poetry also contain a variety of miscellaneous materials: John Ramsey’s commonplace book (Bodleian MS Douce 280), for example, in addition to poetry, includes ‘A Rule to find the goulden or prime noumber’; discussion of Cambridge University organisation and admissions; a trans-

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lation of a book of Caesar’s Commentaries; medical receipts; lists of the offices of England and the post-Norman Conquest kings, lords, knights, bishoprics, and counties; theological, political, and historical comments; a partial autobiography and family genealogy; a personal will; a reading list; paternal instructions to his son; and a family coat of arms (Doughtie 1993; Marotti 1995: 21). Many ‘catch-all’ manuscript miscellanies, like this one, immerse poems in a varied textual environment. Other manuscripts, however, contain only or almost exclusively poems. If we look at numerous, but relatively few, surviving manuscript poetry anthologies or collections from the early modern period, we discover two kinds of documents: those kept by a single individual and those produced by two or more scribes – either within a family and social circle or within an institutional environment in which many individuals might have access to a manuscript volume being passed around in a group. The Devonshire manuscript of early Tudor verse (British Library MS Additional 17492), which circulated among several courtly women and their lovers, and the mid-seventeenth-century academic collection, Bodleian MS English Poetry c.50, in which four hands are represented, are examples of the latter. We might distinguish those documents in which the hands represented are those of amateurs and those that were done by professional scribes. In the latter case, we have personal collections done by commission for the individual wishing to have his or her own poetry anthology as well as those collections composed as presentation copies to friends or social superiors (Woudhuysen 1996: 88–103). British Library MS Additional 33998, which places each poem’s title in a box and draws lines between items, was professionally transcribed for Sir Walter Chute; Bodleian MS Rawlinson Poetry 31, which has verse by Donne, Jonson, Sir John Harington, Sir Henry Wotton, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, the earl of Pembroke, Sir Benjamin Rudyerd, Francis Beaumont, and others, was beautifully produced by the professional Peter Beal describes as the ‘Feathery Scribe’ (Beal 1998: 58–108). Bodleian MS Malone 23, a heavily political collection, presents the titles of its poems in a kind of boldface italic; Folger MS V.a.249 is a presentation manuscript of Sir John Harington’s epigrams the author sent in 1605 to the young Prince Henry. A number of the manuscripts containing large collections of Donne’s verse seem to have been designed for aristocrats: the Leconfield MS (Cambridge MS Additional 8467) for the earl of Northumberland; the Bridgewater MS (Huntington MS EL 6893) for John Egerton, later earl of Bridgewater; the Haslewood-Kingsborough MS (Huntington MS HM 198.1) for Edward Denny, earl of Norwich (Armitage 1966); British Library MS Harley 4955, which was probably compiled for the Cavendish family, if not particularly for Sir William Cavendish, first earl of Newcastle; and the two Dalhousie MSS (now owned by Texas Technological University) for the family of the third earl of Essex (Sullivan 1988; see Chapter 15, Poets, Friends, and Patrons). Some professionally transcribed manuscripts might have been prepared as fair copy from which printers could set the text of editions they were preparing. Rosenbach Library MS 1083/16 has a title page suitable for setting in print: ‘MISCELLANIES/ OR/ A Collection of Divers Witty and/ pleasant Epigrams, Adages, poems/ Epitaphes &c: for the recre/ation of the overtravel-/

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ed sences: / [ornament]/ 1630: / Robert Bishop’, followed by a dedicatory epistle on the verso of this page (see Redding 1960). In terms of their content, one might distinguish those manuscripts that are primarily comprised of the work of a single author from those (more typical) collections that contain the work of many writers. As examples of the first we have the Egerton manuscript (British Library MS Egerton 2711), comprising mainly the poetry of Sir Thomas Wyatt (including corrections entered in his own hand) (see Powell 2004 and Woudhuysen 1996: 104); Folger MS V.a.104, an autograph collection of Lady Mary Wroth’s poems; British Library MS Additional 58435, a holograph collection of Sir Robert Sidney’s verse; British Library MS Egerton 3165, the authorially controlled collection of Sir Arthur Gorges’s poetry; Leeds University Library Brotherton Collection MS Lt q 32, which contains the recently rediscovered work of Hester Pulter; British Library MS Additional 37157, Sir Edward Herbert’s collection of his verse included in his family papers (Beal 1980–93: 1.2.167); British Library MSS Additional 54566–71, which Peter Beal calls ‘the most substantial existing authorised manuscript text of any distinguished Elizabethan or Jacobean poet’ (Beal 1980–93: 1.2.103); Bodleian MS North Additional e.2, a professionally transcribed version of Dudley North’s sonnets (Crum 1979); Oxford MS Corpus Christi College 325, an autograph manuscript of William Strode’s verse; British Library MS Lansdowne 777, the collected verse of William Browne of Tavistock; the collection of John Donne’s elegies, satires, and divine poems (along with one of his lyrics and his prose paradoxes and problems) in the ‘Westmoreland manuscript’ (New York Public Library Berg Collection); and the Williams and Bodleian manuscripts of George Herbert’s poetry (Dr Williams Library MS Jones B 62 and Bodleian MS Tanner 307), the former containing the poet’s corrections and some pieces entered in his own hand (Woudhuysen 1996: 105). Some multi-author manuscript anthologies are very large collections. From the Elizabethan period there are such examples as the Arundel Harington manuscript of Tudor poetry (Hughey 1960), kept by Sir John Harington of Stepney and his son Sir John Harington of Exton (the author of a book of epigrams, of a translation of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, and of a satirical treatise on his invention, the flush toilet, The Metamorphosis of Ajax) – a manuscript from which many pages were removed in the late eighteenth century, but which still contains some 324 poems; Humphrey Coningsby’s collection (British Library MS Harley 7392), which has 158 poems (Marotti 2008; Woudhuysen 1996: 278–86); and Henry Stanford’s anthology, Cambridge MS Dd.5.75, which has around 300 items, a few of which are in prose (May 1988). From the early through mid-seventeenth century many large compilations have survived: for example, Nicholas Burghe’s collection (Bodleian Library MS Ashmole 38) has some 243 leaves of poems by at least sixty-eight writers; the Skipwith family collection (British Library MS Additional 25707) gathers some 280 poems by a wide range of Elizabethan and early Stuart poets (Hobbs 1992: 62–7); the two-part midseventeenth-century anthology compiled by Peter Calfe and his son of the same name (British Library MS Harley 6917–18) has 330 poems, most from the Caroline and

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Interregnum periods (Hobbs 1992: 67–71); an anonymous collection originating in Christ Church College, Oxford, Folger MS V.a.345, has over 500 poems in addition to a few prose pieces. All of these rival in size the largest of the Elizabethan printed poetical anthologies, A Poetical Rhapsody, which, in its 1602 edition, has 176 poems.

Manuscript Poetry in Different Environments Although the manuscript transcription and circulation of poetry took place largely in the middle and upper classes, across a broad geographical range, we can distinguish several particular social environments with which surviving collections were associated: in particular, though not exclusively, the universities, the Inns of Court, the houses of the aristocracy and gentry, and the royal court. Within each of these settings texts were composed, transmitted, and collected by individuals and by groups connected either by blood, friendship, or institutional affiliation. University collections include many Christ Church, Oxford manuscripts such as George Morley’s anthology, Westminster Abbey MS 41; Daniel Leare’s related collection, British Library MS Additional 30982; a collection by ‘J.A.’, British Library Sloane 1792; and Folger MS V.a.170. Cambridge University manuscripts include British Library MS Additional 44963, begun by Anthony Scattergood of Trinity College, and Bodleian MSS English Poetry f.25 and Tanner 465 and 466. Inns of Court manuscripts include the late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century collection, Rosenbach Library MSS 1083/15; two closely related manuscripts, British Library MSS Additional 21433 and 25303; the Farmer–Chetham MS (Manchester MS Mun. A.4.150); and the Welshman Richard Roberts’s collection, Bodleian MS Donation c.54.4 British Library MS Additional 25707, which is textually important for the study of Donne’s poetry, is a composite manuscript compiled in the family of William Skipwith and his son Henry; British Library MS Additional 27404 was assembled by two brothers, Oliver and Peter Le Neve; the gentleman Henry Champernoune of Dartington in Devon, who inscribed his name on the first page of the document in 1623, owned a large collection of poems by Donne, Jonson, Wotton, Ralegh, and others, Bodleian MS English Poetry f.9. Further down the social ladder, there were people who owned manuscript collections of verse: for example, the merchant tailor William Warner (Bodleian MS Rawlinson C.86), the family of the mercer Sir Thomas Frowyk (British Library MS Harley 541), the physician Nathaniel Highmore (British Library MS Sloane 542), the London pharmacist Richard Glover (British Library MS Egerton 2230), the antiquarians John Hopkinson (Bodleian MS Donation d.58) and Marmaduke Rawden (British Library MS Additional 18044), and the Warwickshire yeoman Thomas Fairfax (Bodleian MS English Poetry b.5).5 Sometimes compilers of verse moved from one environment to another and the collections they were compiling registered this fact in their contents. Thus, for example, Margaret Douglas, who was part of a late Henrician courtly circle of men and women represented in the Devonshire manuscript (British Library MS Additional

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17942), took that collection with her to Scotland, where a son from her second marriage, Lord Darnley (the father of the future king of England, James I), transcribed a poem in it in his own hand (Harrier 1975: 24). John Finet moved between St John’s College, Cambridge, and the Elizabethan court, his anthology of verse (Bodleian Library MS Rawlinson Poetry 85), showing a combination of verse from both environments (Cummings 1960). Several manuscript collections register the movement from Oxford or Cambridge to London and the Inns of Court: for example, Rosenbach MS 1083/16 and Bodleian MSS English Poetry e.14 and Additional B. 97. The seventeenth-century collection of Sir Walter Chute (British Library MS Additional 33998), who was active in Parliament and at the Inns of Court as well as socially rooted in his Berkshire estate, shows signs of both urban and country connections.

Sex, Death, and Politics in Manuscript Verse Compared to what we find in contemporary printed publications, the contents of manuscript collections contain a much larger percentage of poems dealing with death, sex, and politics. Perhaps because the manuscript system of transmission was usually tied to particular social networks, we find many more epitaphs and elegies in their contents. In fact, some collections contain a huge number of poems about the deaths of known individuals, including members of the upper aristocracy and royalty: for example, Nicholas Burghe’s collection (Bodleian MS Ashmole 38) has over 200 epitaphs and elegies in a separate section of the manuscript (pp. 167–207). Likewise, British Library MS Additional 21433, which shares almost all of its poems with another Inns of Court collection, British Library MS Additional 25303, also relegates funerary poetry to a separate section (fos. 167r–86v). Some collections have elegiac poetry obviously related to the environment shared by the compiler and the persons celebrated in them: Folger MS V.a.345, for example, has several poems expressing grief on the occasion of the loss of respected university figures at Oxford: for example, ‘Epitaph on Dr Johnson’ (‘Why should we feare to entertayne’. p. 18), ‘An Epitaph on Doctor Johnson Physitian’ (‘Wert thou but a single death! Or but on corse’, p. 78), and ‘On Mr Vaux, who dyed last lent 1626’ (‘Vaux dead ’tis strange’, pp. 2291– 2). A unique elegy for Francis Beaumont by ‘G: Lucy’, ‘I doe not Wonder Beaumont thou art dead’, (British Library MS Additional 33998, fo. 43v), appears in the manuscript collection of the Skipwiths, who were neighbours and friends of the Beaumonts. One of the most popular poems in manuscript collections was the beautiful elegy Henry King wrote on the occasion of his wife’s death, ‘An Exequy to his Matchless never to be forgotten Freind’ (‘Accept, thou Shrine of my Dead Saint’). Other muchcopied elegies and epitaphs include the epitaphs on the 1606 death of James I’s infant daughter Mary (‘Within this marble casket lies’ and ‘As carefull mothers to their beds doe lay’), James’s own poem on the 1619 death of Queen Anne (‘Thee to invite the great God sent a star’), and Richard Corbett’s own piece (‘No, not a quatch [word or

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sound] sad Poets, doubt you’), George Morley’s elegy for King James (‘All that have eyes now wake and weep’), William Juxon’s elegy for Prince Henry (‘Nature waxing old’), Sir Henry Wotton’s elegy for James I’s daughter, Princess Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia (‘You meaner beauties of the night’), and poems commemorating the deaths the countess of Pembroke (‘Underneath this sable hearse’ (William Browne of Tavistock)), the countess of Rutland (‘I may forget to eat, to drink, to sleep’ (Francis Beaumont)), and Lady Markham (‘As unthrifts groan in straw for their pawn’d beds’ (F. Beaumont)). Not all epitaphs and elegies, however, are respectfully commemorative (either of peers or social superiors). The epitaph form in particular was used for comic and satiric purposes – especially when the subject was a social inferior or a disliked social superior or dangerously powerful person. Thus the deaths of two different men named Pricke, one at Oxford, the other at Cambridge, occasioned comic verse exploiting the obvious opportunity for puns (Crum 1969: A 1362, O 1094, S 984, T 607, T 1445, and T 1481). Richard Corbett wrote a comic epitaph for an Oxford butler named Dawson (‘Dawson the Butler’s dead’). There is a nasty epitaph on the death of Lady Lake (‘Here lies the brief [epitome or summary] of badness, vice’s nurse’). The death of Penelope Devereux, first Lady Rich, then the countess of Devonshire, whose long affair with, then marriage to Charles Blount, the duke of Devonshire, produced five children, occasioned a nasty epitaph about her supposedly inordinate sexual appetite. In one manuscript it reads: On the Lady Rich Heer lyes the Lady Penelope Rich, Or the Countes of Devonshire, chuse ye which One stone contents her, loe what death can doe. That in her life was not content with two. (Folger MS V.a.345, p. 28)

The death of the most powerful late Elizabethan and early Jacobean minister, Robert Cecil, earl of Salisbury, produced some vicious verse mocking his morals and physical deformity (Croft 1991). It is not surprising, given the large number of manuscripts associated with such all-male environments as the universities and the Inns of Court, that so many of the ephemeral pieces recorded in such anthologies deal with sex, usually in joking and misogynistic ways (see also Chapter 66, ‘Such Pretty Things Would Soon Be Gone’: The Neglected Genres of Popular Verse, 1480–1650). In fact, obscenity was not the main target of censorship in the period – though Marlowe’s translation of Ovid’s Amores fell under the 1599 bishops’ ban of satiric and dangerously political literature, and some of Donne’s more obscene elegies were excluded from the 1633 printed edition of his poetry (‘To his Mistress Going to Bed’, ‘Love’s War’, and ‘Love’s Progress’). It is clear, however, that the manuscript medium was more receptive than was print to verse with bold sexual content (Marotti 1995: 76–82; Moulton 2000:

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35–69). And so we find a comic dialogue poem about a sexual encounter between a man and a woman who are conscious of guests engaged in more polite activities elsewhere in her the house (‘Nay pish, nay phew, nay faith and will you, fie’), a piece that appears in over twenty-eight manuscripts, and then was printed after mid-century in two printed anthologies, The Harmony of the Muses (1654) and Sportive Wit (1656). Folger MS V.a.399, a manuscript with a large number of obscene pieces, has a copy of the poem that probably inspired ‘Nay pish’, Thomas Nashe’s ‘Choice of Valentines’, here titled ‘Nashe’s Dilldo’ (fos. 53v–57r). It also has another piece about a farting contest between a lady and her maid (fo. 10v). Folger MS V.b.110 has a bawdy poem that poses a riddle to a mistress who then answers it: A Riddle Come on sweete love & let mee know What thing it is that takes delight And strives to stand yet cannot goe And feeds the mouth that cannot bite Answer It is a kind of loveing sting A pricking & a peircing thing Tis Venus wanton holy wand That hath no feete, & yet can stand It is a pen faire Helen tooke To write in her 2 leafed booke, Tis a true familier spright That mayds do conjure in the night It is a Truchion mayds do use A bedstaffe wanton women chuse. Yt is a graft borne on the head A staffe to make a Cuckolds bed, It is a thing both deafe & blinde. Yet narrow wayes in th’darke wil finde It seemes a dwarfe in breath & length But is a Gyant in his strength It is a shaft of Cupids Cut, To rove & shoot at pricks or but, Which every woman by her wil Would keepe within her quiver still, The bravest lasse that ere tooke life For love of this became a wife. (pp. 60–1)

This poem’s phallocentrism is not surprising, given the predominantly male readership of most manuscript collections.

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Folger MS V.a.96, a London collection, has a rare and unusual poem that offers serious advice about how to make love to a woman: I’st not in love the way to perfect blisse Tenderly to take what most desired is. When thou hast found the place and cann discover Where her content doth lye then as a Lover Should blush not to handle, touch, feele and finger Dalliance doth most delight when most wee linger Behold her eyes like sparkling fire they tremble Whose lightnes brightnes doth the sun resemble Daunceing upon the waves bow downe thy eare Those gentle murmeringes & complaint to heare These feigned sights and sweet wordes which shee Out of her panting brest shall breath to thee But oh, take heed least thou too fast do runn Least thy joyes end ere hers are scarse begun Both together strive and both endeavour Your kisses motions just in number ever Then are long sportes perform’d in perfect measure When both doe feele one paine & both one pleasure. (fos. 73v–74r)

What is interesting in this advice is its attention to female sexual responsiveness. There are many misogynistic epigrams and other short obscene pieces in manuscript collections: for example, the poems about the allegedly libidinous and ugly widow Mrs Mallet (Corbett’s ‘Have I renounc’d my faith or basely sold’ and ‘Skelton some rhymes, good Elderton a ballett’), an object of laughter for Christ Church poets in the 1620s. Some pieces mock women from lower-class and/or country backgrounds. One rare, 186-line obscene narrative poem found in Sir Walter Chute’s anthology, British Library MS Additional 33998, ‘The Merkin Maker’ (fos. 53r–55v) portrays an innocent young country woman who seeks out a pubic-hair-wig maker, who then comically fits her with his product and sexually exploits her: such a work was designed for a readership of male urban sophisticates receptive both to misogynistic humour and expressions of class snobbery. Finally, one of the most popular poems in manuscript circulation was Thomas Carew’s ‘A Rapture’ (‘I will enjoy thee now my Celia, come’), a 166-line display of witty eroticism that assumes its audience’s familiarity not only with such love elegies as Donne’s ‘To his Mistress Going to Bed’ (see Chapter 63, Donne’s Nineteenth Elegy) but also with that most pornographic example of visual and textual eroticism, the woodcuts by Marcantonio Raimondi (after Giulio Romano) to show a series of sexual positions, accompanied by Aretino’s Sonetti Lussoriosi (Talvacchia 1999; Chapter 33, The English Broadside Print c.1550–c.1650). Given the strong libel laws, which punished not just those who lied about, but anyone merely defaming, an individual, even if what was written was true, the really

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dangerous items in manuscript collections were political libels, especially since one could be prosecuted for mere possession of such texts. Verse critical of contemporary political figures, which would not have been approved for publication, found a home in the system of manuscript transmission, serving some of the purposes of manuscript and print news media (Cogswell 1995). Although there are Elizabethan examples of libellous or dangerously political verse – poems such as the libel against William Bashe (victualler of the navy), libels against Oxford and Cambridge figures (May and Ringler 2004: EV 2283 and EV 9510), and a poem about international politics, ‘The French Primero’ (May 1971) – the early Stuart period produced a much larger body of poetry of this sort. The manuscript system of literary transmission was a relatively safe environment for the dissemination of political libels and other material that might have fallen victim to press censorship. Poems criticising prominent political figures such as Sir Robert Cecil and the duke of Buckingham circulated widely in manuscript.6 Alistair Bellany and Andrew McRae’s (2005) online edition of early Stuart libels testifies to the vitality of manuscript political verse in this period.7 Bodleian MS Donation c.54, for example, has several libels: ‘A libell upon Mr Edw[ard] Cooke, then Atturney general and sithance Cheife Justice of the Comon pleas upon some disagreement between him & his wife being widow of Sir W[illia]m Hatton Kt. and daughter to the now Earle of Exeter then Sir Tho[mas] Cecill’ (‘Cocus the Pleader hath a Lady wedd’, fo. 6v), followed by four more on the same topic; ‘A Libell’ (‘Admire-all weaknes, wronges, the right’, fo. 7), against the earl of Essex’s enemies; ‘A dreame alludinge to my L[ord] of Essex, and his aduersaries’ (‘Where Medwaye greetes old thamesis silver streames’, fos. 19r–20r); a ‘Libel against Robert Cecill’ (‘Proude and ambitious wretch that feedest on naught but faction’, fo. 20); ‘A libell against Somerset’ (‘Poore Pilott thou art like to lose the Pinke’, fo. 22v), concerned with the Frances Howard/earl of Somerset marriage scandal; and ‘A libell against Oxford upon their first entertainment of the kinge’ (‘When the king to Oxford came’, fo. 25). Bellany and McRae’s collection of early Stuart libels from manuscript sources includes some late Elizabethan poems, particularly those dealing the unfortunate careers of the earl of Essex and Sir Walter Ralegh, before turning to anti-James/antiScots pieces and poems on Parliament/Crown conflicts, the death of Sir Robert Cecil, the Somerset/Howard marriage scandal and Overbury murder, the execution of Sir Walter Ralegh in 1618 as a political martyr, the rise, exploits, and assassination of George Villiers, duke of Buckingham, the impeachment of Sir Francis Bacon, the Spanish Match and international religious politics, the scandalous sexual behaviour of the earl of Castlehaven, and other, miscellaneous, topics. Other, not strictly libellous, pieces in manuscript circulation deal with contemporary domestic and international political situations: for example, ‘Upon the breach between the King & the Subject, at the dissolution of the Parliament, March 1628’ (‘The wisest King did wonder’ (Bodleian MS Rawlinson Poetry 26, fo. 8v)) and a poem related to the same context, ‘Our state’s a Game at cards, the councell deale’ (Bodleian MS Ashmole 36, 37, fo. 174v – see McRae 2004: 144–5). One of the most troubling of the political

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poems in the period was the so-called ‘Commons Petition’ (‘If bleeding hearts dejected souls find grace’), a piece that captured the nostalgia for the reign of Elizabeth and expressed strong anti-Stuart sentiment that persisted through both the Jacobean and Caroline period: this work, which appears in at least fifteen manuscripts, was finally put into print in 1642 as The Commons Petition of Long Afflicted England. Several of the poems of John Hoskins, the active parliamentarian and wit who earlier collaborated with colleagues in composing ‘The Parliament Fart’ (see below), was imprisoned for his threateningly critical speech in the 1614 Parliament, addressed topical political issues and the question of free speech in his much-circulated verse (Colclough 1998). Other poems that were relevant to the political and religious struggles of the period proved quite popular in the manuscript system. Take, for example, the long poem by that Christ Church, Oxford, poet Richard Corbett, ‘Iter Boreale’ (‘Four clerks of Oxford, doctors two and two’), a piece that survives in some thirty-seven manuscripts. It eventually found its way into print, through the agency of John Donne, Jr., in the (poor) 1657 and 1658 editions of Corbett’s poems. Written shortly after the 1618 Midlands journey it narrates, it is an anti-Puritan work reflecting Corbett’s ecclesiastical conservatism, but it continued to be copied through the 1620s and 1630s in manuscript poetical collections not only because it was associated with a body of other Christ Church poetry, but also because it remained relevant to the struggles between conservative and radical religious factions in the period leading up to the English Civil Wars. Many anti-Puritan and anti-Parliament poems were circulated by royalist poets and compilers in the pre-Civil War and Civil War and Interregnum periods: the Calfe manuscript, British Library MS Harley 6917–18, for example, has many pieces of this sort. We find in two different manuscripts a long poem on the assassination of the politically oppositionist Thomas Scott, ‘A distracted Elegy on the most execrable murther of Tho[mas] Scott, Preacher; who was kill’d by an English soldyer, in a Church Porch at Utrecht, as he entred to performe divine service’ (fos. 90r–96v) – a 444-line piece found also in Bodleian MS Rawlinson Poetry 160 (fos. 5r–10r). Scott, who opposed the Spanish Match and the Jacobean noninterventionist foreign policy, was made into a Protestant martyr. The conspiracytheory explanation of his death is that he was the victim of a Jesuit plot, not simply of a deranged soldier.

Shorter Poetry in Manuscript Collections One of the notable features of personal anthologies is the heavy proportion of epigrammatic poetry – especially epitaphs. These poems are of two sorts, comic or comic/ satiric and serious. Sometimes sharing a collection with prose characters, these poems bespeak a desire to capture the social and ethical essence of actual or representative persons, to assert a kind of mastery by way of placing and controlling others in a complex social world to which the compiler belonged, whether it was the university, the court, the Inns of Court, or London, for example. Take, for instance, the large

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collection of poems, Folger MS V.a.345, assembled by an unidentified person whose educational background seems to have been at Christ Church, Oxford, and who had an especial interest in medicine and medical professionals. On the first page of the collection, the compiler announces a strong interest in epigrams and, like Martial, defends the salacious subject matter found often in poetry of this sort: Pardon mee (kinde reader) though now & than I shew my selfe to bee a very man That Epigrams does write, and ’tis knowne wel For wanton jests they beare way the bell. Then when lascivious rimes, you heer shal see Impute them to the Epigram, not t’me.

In the course of assembling the contents of this 515-poem collection, the compiler not only included single pieces and groups of poems often found in other Christ Church anthologies, but he also evidently copied a large number of epigrams from published collections: those of Thomas Bastard, John Owen, Sir John Harington, Francis Fitzjeffrey, and Thomas Freeman. The popularity of the epigram in manuscript collections was due to several reasons. First, this kind of verse was especially attractive to male writers and readers: it allowed them to be plain-spoken, critical and satiric, and wisely pithy, as well as to be obscene, joking, misogynistic, and snobbish. Second, the form was traditionally quite flexible, suitable for epistolary and epitaphic uses in addition to other purposes. Third, epigrams, especially those with recognisable targets, were dangerous to print and so safer in the more socially restrictive manuscript environment. Fourth, epigrams were easier than longer poems to memorise and reproduce on one’s personal collection. Fifth, and perhaps the most significant factor, given the way many manuscript compilations had blank portions of some pages, original or later scribes found these receptive to short poems that would fit into the space available: horror vacui, or at least a sense of thrift, affected compilers in their use of the medium. Many manuscripts contain large numbers of these ‘filler poems’. In fact, someone with the initials ‘F.V.’ inserted at the bottom of one of the pages of Thomas Manne’s manuscript collection, British Library MS Additional 58215: Nature abhorres Vacuitie And so doe I For I am Natures pride, and will This voyd page fill. Leafe thou before wast but a blanke now thou maist thanke my pen, but doe not; for unless thou this expresse I serve your Mistress still there’s emptiness. (fo. 72v)

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Perhaps someone to whom Manne lent the manuscript took the opportunity to enter a poem in available space – a not unusual practice.

Women and the Manuscript System Commonplace-book miscellanies and manuscript poetical collections were mostly kept by men, especially in such all-male environments as the universities and the Inns of Court. Scholars looking for evidence of women’s literary activities in the early modern period first turned to the print record to direct attention to such authors as Isabella Whitney, Emilia Lanyer, Mary Wroth, and Katherine Philips, but, as Margaret Ezell (1993, 2008) and others have pointed out, the manuscript remains from this era reveal a much wider range of involvement than does print. The ‘Perdita’ project of recovering women’s writings in manuscript culture has uncovered women’s extensive involvement in manuscript composition, transmission, and compilation – both of prose and poetical texts.8 Women, such as Anne Cornwallis (Folger MS V.a.89; see Marotti 2002), Margaret Bellasis (British Library MS Additional 10309), Henrietta Holles (British Library MS Harley 3357), Elizabeth Lyttelton (Cambridge University Library MS Additional 8460; see Burke 2003), Lady Anne Southwell (Folger MS V.b.198; see Klene 1997), Eleanor Gunter (Bodleian MS Rawlinson Poetry 108), and Constance Aston Fowler (Huntington Library MS HM 904; see Aldrich-Watson 2000), owned or compiled collections, and some recorded their own and other women’s poetic compositions in this medium. The much-studied Devonshire manuscript (British Library MS Additional 17492), which circulated among several women of the late Henrician court, includes the poems Margaret Douglas wrote in the context of her tragic romantic relationship with Lord Thomas Howard (see Heale 2004). In Folger MS X.d.177, Elizabeth Clarke transcribed one of her own poems, which she claims she wrote at the age of 20 (‘you craggie rockes & mountains hie’, fo. 8r). As Victoria Burke has pointed out, Clarke also transcribed a lyric from Thomas Stanley’s Poems (1651), ‘I love thee not cause thou art fair’ (fo. 8v), rewriting some of its lines to counteract its misogyny (Burke 2004: 79–80). Some manuscripts were produced in whole or in part for women readers. The collection of eighty-seven of Richard Crashaw’s poems in British Library MS Additional 33219 done in a neat scribal hand was designed for a woman, addressed as ‘Fair one’ (Beal 1980–93: 2.1.269). Bodleian MS Firth e.4 was done for Lady Harflete, beginning with a dedicatory poem to her: To the Incomparably vertuous Lady the Lady Harflett Lo here a sett of paper-pilgrimes sent From Helicon, to pay an Homage-rent To you theyre sainte: each brings by arts command A gemme, to make a bracelet for your hand.

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Arthur F. Marotti you’le crowne theyre journey, if free entrance lies At those same Christall portalls of your eyes. Or here’s a garden, planted by the care Of fancee: every elegie drawes some teare To water it, verses which diviner bee, Are wholesome hearbes: others more light, and free, Are painted flowers without smell: Here’s fixt A band of Roses; violets there are mixt, In the cheife perfection of all standes. If you’le but add the Lillies of your hands. Or here’s a feast, where poets are the Cookes. Fancies are severall dishes; Its that lookes For brisker wine, findes onely lovers teares. Drawne out by spungie greife, or palsie feares: Pallas serves in her olives; Thetis bringes In stead of fish, her Venus from her springes. Those thankfull paire of wonted Graces, bee In this same banquet, multipli’d to three. you are that guest, whom all doe humbly pray you’de not let harsh detraction take away. Bt this same word detracts, ’tis more then bold that thinks this sun, will not turne earth to gold Which changing powre theese poets come to try Knowinge your favour’s skil’d in chimicie theyre paper serves, but for theyre windinge-sheete: In you theyse fortunes lie, you you alone; The Muses stand for ciphers, add but one (your noble selfe) to those, theyre noughts; and then the number of the Muses will bee ten. Or if you will not daigne a Muses name yet let the Muses commit yours to fame.

The collection of secular and religious verse this manuscript presents is assumed to be suitable to a noble patroness who has the sophistication and aesthetic sensitivity to appreciate what is being offered to her (Marotti 1995: 53–4). A very different collection, British Library MS Harley 3357, copied by the playhouse scrivener Ralph Crane, was done for Henrietta Holles, but its contents are religious and devotional, the kind of verse deemed appropriate for a young woman’s moral and religious education. Some poems by women show up in men’s poetry collections. Poems by or attributed to Queen Elizabeth appear in several manuscripts: ‘The doubt of future foes exiles my present joy’, ‘I grieve and dare not show my discontent’, and ‘When I was fair and young then favour graced me’ (May 2004: 7–9, 12–13, 26–7), the last a dubious ascription, for it reads more like a male ventriloquising of the queen’s voice than the utterance of the queen herself. In Harvard MS English 626, a poetry collection owned

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in 1640 by Anthony St John, we find a piece by Lady Dorothy Shirley, the sister of the third earl of Essex, a woman who was part of a Catholic social and literary coterie:9 Why did you faine both sighs and teares to gaine My hart from mee, and afterwards disdaine To thinke upon the oaths you did protest As if mens soules were to bee pawn’d in jest. I cannot thinke soe lively any Art Could frame a passion soe farr from the hart. Doth not your hart knowe what your tongue doth saye? Or doe they both agree for to betraye. Poore weomen, that believe that faithlesse you Speake what you thinke, because themselves are true But you like to an Eccho doe I feare Repeate the wordes, which you from others heare And ne’re speake that which from your hart proceedes Like noble mindes, whose wordes fall short their deedes. Then lett these lines this favoure from you gaine Either to love, or not att all to faine This is noe more, then honour ties you to Tis for your owne sake I would have you true For if your worth you once with falsehood staine When you speake truth, all will beleive you faine. Finis L. Dorothy Sherley (fos. 17v–18r)

This poem, which views conventional expressions of love with a critical eye, also survives in three other manuscripts (Bodleian MS English Poetry c.50, fo. 81; Huntington Library MS 904, fo. 136r–v; and British Library MS Sloane 1446, fo. 49v), but it did not find its way into print in its own time. One of the most remarkable features of the manuscript system of verse transmission and compilation is the presence of a very large number of rare or unique poems – some, no doubt, by women. Most of these are anonymous or they are compositions by scribes and compilers, but, as a body of work, they fall largely outside the definition of canonical literature and literary history has been, for the most part, silent about them. Although the absence of a reliable first-line index of post-Elizabethan poetry has hampered research in this area, Margaret Crum’s (1969) first-line index of manuscript poetry in the Bodleian Library and Carolyn Nelson’s (in progress) online ‘Union First Line Index of Manuscript Poetry, 13th to 19th Century’10 and Hilton’s Kelliher’s first-line index of poetry from manuscripts purchased by the British Library after 1895 (available in loose-leaf binders in the Manuscript Room of the British Library) together help us get a sense of which poems were unique or rare in surviving documents from the period. In Ann Cornwallis’s manuscript (Folger MS V.a.89), nine of the twentyseven poems in the main collection are apparently unique manuscript copies (Marotti 2002: 79–85). In Humphrey Coningsby’s much larger manuscript, there are some

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fifty-five unique poems (Marotti 2008: 101–2). Among the 515 poems of Folger MS V.a.345, close to 20 per cent of the poems are apparently unique copies.

Scribes, Compilers, and the Freedom of the Manuscript System The presence of a large body of unique and/or anonymous poems in surviving manuscript documents points to the activities of scribes and compilers in shaping their collections. The manuscript system of literary transmission encouraged responsiveness on the part of those receiving texts from others. The sharp lines between author and reader, or producer and consumer, which mark print culture, were not in place in this environment. Scribes and compilers were not only free to alter, rearrange, supplement, imitate, conflate, excerpt, ascribe (sometimes misascribe), title or retitle, parody, or answer the texts they received, but also to record their own poetic compositions – that is to exercise a degree of collaborative and co-creative participation in literary creation. In one manuscript, for example, Donne’s ‘The Will’ is rewritten to make it into a poem in regular couplets, but there are also other variants perhaps caused by misremembering a memorised text (rather than because of copyist errors ). The changes are indicated in bold: A Lovers Testament dying for Love Before I grone my last gaspe, let me breath Great Love: some legacie I here bequeath. My eyes to Argus if my eyes can see If they be blind, the[n] Love I give them the. My toung to fame, to ambushes my cares, To women or the sea, I give my teares. Thou love hast me long e’re this to fore By making me serve her who’d twenty more, And that I should give what I had to such, And to none else but those that had too much. My constancy I to the Plannets give My truth to them, who at the court doe live. My ingenuity, my opennesse To Jesuits: Buffounes my pensiven[e]sse. My spleene to any that abroad hath beene. My money give I to a Capuchine. Thou love did teach me, by appointing me To love wher love, should not rewarded be. [stanza omitted] My reputation I bequeath to those Which were my friends, my industry to foes. [2 lines missing]

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To nature all that I in rime have writ And to my companie I give my wit. Love thou wast partiall making me adore Her who begot this love in me before. Taught me to thinke that I did give, when I Did but restore my lent felicitie. To him for whom the passing bell next tolles I give my phisicke books my writing toules. My morall councells I to Bedlem give My brazen mettalls unto them which live In want of bread. To them which passe among All forreiners, I give my English toung. Thou love by making me deerely love one who thinkes her Love a fit proportion For such as are but young in foolish love Thus disproportioning my guiftes disprove. (BL Add. 10309, fos. 50v–51r)

In two other manuscripts there are examples of rewriting and imitation of Donne’s ‘A Valediction: forbidding mourning’: a poem ascribed to Simon Butteris in Bodleian MS Ashmole 38 (‘As dying saintes who sweetly pass away’, p. 121) and an anonymous author’s refiguring of its famous compass image in a new poem, ‘The man and wife that kinde and loving are’ (Folger MS V.a.345, pp. 44–5) (Marotti 1995: 152–8). Some poems in the manuscript system were open to literary supplements. For example, Sir John Harington’s popular epigram on a knight’s telling his wife she is unconsciously exposing herself while sitting with her legs apart, ‘A virtuous lady sitting in a muse’, appears in some thirty-six different manuscripts, in one of them (Folger MS V.a.339, fo. 275) expanded by four more lines, with the marginal annotation ‘A couplet or two fastened to Sir John Harrington his epigram, to do his Town’s knight yeoman service’ (Beal 1980–93: 1.2.140). In an Oxford anthology, Bodleian MS English Poetry e.14, there is a supplement to Sir Henry Wotton’s poem for Princess Elizabeth, ‘You meaner beauties of the night’, to which the scribe refers: ‘Two other Staves added by Another’ (fo. 68v). Sir Walter Ralegh’s lyric, ‘Farewell falce love, thou oracle of lies’, grew in size in the course of manuscript transmission from eighteen to thirty lines (Marotti 1995: 145). On a grander scale, the satirical political poem ‘The Parliament Fart’, written during the time of the discussion of the possible political union of Scotland and England during King James I’s first Parliament (1604–10), continued to accrete additional couplets and, passing beyond the time of its original occasion, grew, in its longest surviving version, to 244 lines (O’Callaghan 1998: 81–96; Whitlock 1982: 283–93). In some manuscript poetry collections, we find interesting examples of poems that have been produced by conflating two different texts. For example, in Rosenbach Library MS 1083/16 Shakespeare’s Sonnet 106 is joined to a non-Shakespearean poem

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associated with someone who has been identified as a possible addressee of the ‘young man’ section of the sonnet collection, William Herbert, earl of Pembroke, creating a new piece entitled ‘On his Mistress Beauty’ (Redding 1960: 670–1). Shakespeare’s sonnets may have been associated with Pembroke’s own poetry and the non-Shakespearean part of this piece appeared in the 1660 edition of Poems Written by the Right Honourable William Earl of Pembroke … Many of which are answered by way of Repartee, by Sir Benjamin Ruddier (pp. 54–5) (Marotti 1990: 148–9). However the two poems came to be conflated, their presentation as a single lyric is a sign of the flexibility of the manuscript system and of its looser attitude towards authors’ prerogatives and literary authority. In a mid-seventeenth-century manuscript now in the Houghton Library at Harvard (Harvard MS English 626), we come across the following lyric: To what a cumbersome unrulinesse And burdenous corpulence my love is growne; But that I did to make it lesse And keepe it in proportion, Give it a Dyett, made it feede upon That which Love worst endures, Discretion, Above one sighe a daye I allow’d him not Of which my fortunes, and my faults had part And yf sometimes by stealth, hee gott A shee [woman’s] sigh from my Mistresse hart And thought to feast mee; then I lett him see ’Twas neither verie sound, nor meate to mee Helpe Mistresse, Helpe, the flames of my desire Have sett my frozen patience on fire While I with teares doe seeke to quench the same My sighs doe fann, and kindle more the flame O from your Corall lipp, lett Nectar flowe For nothing else will putt it out I knowe. Finis (fos. 77v–78r)

The piece consists of the first two of the five stanzas of John Donne’s ‘Loves Diet’ and an additional six lines from an unknown source.11 There are, of course, many examples in the manuscript collections of poetic excerpts from larger poems, in which case the sentiments expressed or the felicity of the expression were valued as more important than the integrity of the complete poems. Sometimes poems are reduced in size: for example, in Sir John Perceval’s collection (British Library MS Additional 47111), William Strode’s thirty-eight-line poem ‘Look how the russet morn exceeds the night’ is shortened to a twenty-line piece (fo. 4r); in Rosenbach MS 1083/16, lines 53–70 of John Donne’s ‘The Perfume’ are recorded as a stand-alone poem entitled ‘One Proving False’ (pp. 303–4). In British Library MS

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Harley 3991, there is a short section labelled ‘Donne’s quaintest conceits’ (fos. 113r– 14v) consisting of excerpts from various Donne poems; in an earlier part of the manuscript, there are short excerpts from Shakespeare’s The Tempest and The Merchant of Venice (fos. 83v–84r). This kind of treatment of literary texts is also found in those printed volumes such as Puttenham’s Art of English Poesy (1589) or in such collections of poetical excerpts as Belvedere: or the Garden of the Muses (1600) and England’s Parnassus (1600). One seventeenth-century compiler, probably a student, recorded three whole poems and twenty-eight shorter or longer excerpts from Shakespeare’s Sonnets, apparently copied from John Benson’s 1640 edition (Marotti 1990: 163–5). John Ramsey was moved to write an imitation/paraphrase of Spenser’s Amoretti LXIV in his miscellaneous collection of verse and prose, Bodleian MS Douce 280, ‘To the Fayrest. A Sonnet. In Eandem dominae suae’ (‘Survaying with a curious serchinge eye’, fo. 35), signing the item ‘Poore J. R.’. Elsewhere in the manuscript he assumes a Spenserian pastoral persona, ‘Sheephearde Montanus’ in two other poems, the second of which is followed by a transcription of Spenser’s own Tears of the Muses, then another of Ramsey’s pastoral lyrics (‘Sheepheardes confesse with me’, fo. 43v), Spenser’s Visions of Petrarch, and another of his own pastoral pieces, ‘Montanus the Sheephearde his love to Flora’ (‘I serve sweete Flora brighter then Cinthias light’, fo. 45v) (Marotti 1995: 189–94). Ramsey signalled his attraction to Spenser in imitating him stylistically. As another example of poetic imitation, in the Calfe collection there is a poem modelled on Ben Jonson’s popular lyric from Epicoene, ‘Still to be neat, still to be dressed’: A Motion to pleasure Still to affect, still to admire yet never satisfy desire with touch of hand, or lypp, or that which pleaseth best, I name not what, like Tantalus I pining dye taking Loves dainties at the eye; Nature made nothing but for use, and fairest twere a grosse abuse to her best worke, if you it hold un-used, like misers ill gott gold, or keep it in a virgin scorne like rich Roabes that are seldome worne. (BL MS Harley 6917, fo. 41)

This was written in the spirit of the original, but another response to Jonson’s poetry circulated as a parodic version of a stanza from one of his poems to ‘Charis’ (‘Haue you seene the white Lilly grow’, which follows it as a separate poem in this manuscript, ‘A sonnet’, pp. 30–1):

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Arthur F. Marotti Have you seene a blackheaded Magott, A crawling one a deade Dogge? Or an old Witch with a fagott, A swayling of an Hedge-hogge? Have you smelt Cauf-bobby tosted Or a shipskin roasted: Or have smelt to the Babe in the whittle [baby blanket], Or the Leaper in the spittle? Have you tasted the Sabin tree? O so blacke, O so rough, O so sowre is Shee! (p. 30)12

Answer-poems were a familiar fixture of the manuscript system and are preserved in many compilations (Hart 1956; Marotti 1995: 159–71). From the Elizabethan era, in Ann Cornwallis’s poetry collection, Folger MS V.a.89, there is a poem by the imperious earl of Oxford, ‘Were I a king I might command content’, that is followed immediately by a piece critical of the earl’s social snobbery, ‘Were thou a king? yet not command content’ (p. 7) (Marotti 2002: 72). There is another example of class antagonism manifested in the response to Sir Edward Dyer’s lyric arguing for the ability of people of all levels of society to experience love, ‘The lowest trees have tops, the ant her gall’: Bodleian Library MS Rawlinson Poetry 148 has ‘The answer to Mr Diers dittie’ (fo. 106r) arguing for the social exclusiveness of refined love experience, a poem that is reproduced in the printed poetical miscellany, A Poetical Rhapsody (1602). Lady Mary Cheke wrote a feminist rejoinder to Sir John Harington’s epigram ‘Of a certain man’, ‘That no man yet could in the bible find’ (May 1991: 245–6). Queen Elizabeth gave a playfully condescending reply to Ralegh’s ‘Fortune hath taken thee away, my Love’, ‘Ah silly pugg, wert thou so sore afrayd?’ (May 1991: 318–19) and Sir Thomas Heneage answered Ralegh’s ‘Farewell false love, thow oracle of lyes’ with ‘Most welcome love, thow mortall foe to lies’ (May 1991: 339–40). Christopher Marlowe’s ‘Passionate Shepherd’ (‘Come live with me and be my love’) was answered by ‘The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd’ (‘If all the world and love were young’), a piece attributed posthumously to Sir Walter Ralegh and found both in manuscript (Bodleian MS Rawlinson Poetry 148) and print (England’s Helicon (1600); Izaak Walton, The Compleat Angler (1653)). Sir Walter Ralegh’s ‘The Lie’ (‘Go soul, the body’s guest’) elicited several politically intense replies (Rudick 1999: xlii– lxvii, 30–45). Richard Corbett’s ‘To the ladies of the new dress’ and Henry Reynolds’ ‘A Blackmore Maid wooing a fair boy’, both elicited answer poems, a practice common in an academic environment where students were used to composing competitive verse on set themes. Corbett, Strode and Jeramiel Terrent, all Christ Church poets, wrote poems on the topic of the stained-glass windows of Fairford Church, a target of Puritan iconoclasm (Corbett’s ‘Tell mee, you Anti-Saintes, why glasse’, Strode’s ‘I know no paint of poetry’, and Terrent’s ‘I hope at this time ’tis no news’). John Grange’s poem, ‘Black cypress veils are shrouds of night’, which appears in some eighteen surviving manuscripts, is a ventriloquised female answer to Richard Corbett’s poem, which

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criticises fashion-mongering women, but Corbett himself penned a ‘Reply to the Answer’ (‘If nought but love-charms power have’). Reynolds’ poem, itself a translation of a Latin poem by George Herbert (King 1965: 226), was answered by Henry King (‘The Boy’s answere to the Blackmore’ – ‘Black Mayd, complayne not that I fly’). Ben Jonson’s poem about retiring from the stage after the widespread criticism of his play The New Inn (‘Come leave the loathed stage’) was answered by his ‘adopted son’, Thomas Randolph, (‘Ben do not leave the stage’) as well as by Thomas Carew (‘Tis true, dear Ben, thy just chastising hand’).13 John Cleveland’s satiric poem on the 1643 Westminster Assembly (‘Flea-bitten synod! an assembly brewed’), which appears in British Library MS Harley 6918, fos. 70r–71r, is answered by two different poems that appear earlier in the collection: ‘Saltmarsh of Magdal[en College]: against Clevelands new commencement’ (‘Leave off vaine Satyrist, and doe not thinke’, fo. 40r), a piece that then elicited an answer to it, ‘by Wilde of Saint Johns [College]’ (‘Why how now sacred Epigrammatist’, fo. 40v). Some manuscripts preserve the record of epistolary verse exchange. British Library MS Additional 47111, a commonplace book of Sir John Perceval’s, has a poem by Lot Peere, of Audley End (‘Had Mr Percivall perceivd it well’), answered by the compiler (‘Had Mr Peere but learnt that money was’), the second, as the title notes ‘To the Tune of Honesti fures or Nihil perdidimus’ (fos. 80v–81v, 82v). Perceval’s manuscript, which the British Library catalogue states was ‘probably compiled while at Magdalene College, Cambridge: 1646–1649’, mainly consists of unascribed poems, but it also has ‘exercises in Latin and Greek verse, including sacred epigrams’ as well as ‘copies of family and other correspondence, partly in Latin’. In one of the prose pieces, a letter to his mother (fos. 46r–48r), he explains that he has fallen in love with an Englishborn Catholic widow he met in France, who had six children. Just a few pages before this, there is a poem about a Frenchwoman that appears to have survived in no other manuscript: Amor Is any here in love & faine would know from whome at first this deadly wound did grow Is any here in love and faine would see what pritty wight this God of love might bee see here love comes, heer’s that majesticke face that awes the world with his heart charminge grace And here I prove the kinge of love’s divine; for in his looke I see an angell shine; heer’s beuty planted, heere the springe garden France thy faire lilie growes, with the English rose. Thou art a Queene faire Nimph whose orient haire like early sunbeames guild th’amazed aire. Ah could those cullers the sun of Venus get hee’d weave of them soe fine soe stronge A net that with thy haire he’d captivate more hearts

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Arthur F. Marotti Then ere as yet he wounded with his darts heer’s that love knott where all relation tide heer’s Prince and kingdome, father sonne & bride. (fo. 43v)

Several other poems in the collection were also written by the compiler. Scribal or compiler poetry is a normal part of the documentary record. Those who copied, altered, supplemented, or imitated poems they received often decided to write their own independent verse for inclusion in their collections. Often this poetry was directly related to the scribe’s or compiler’s social relationships, as in Perceval’s case. Humphrey Coningsby recorded several of his own poems in his large anthology (British Library MS Harley 7392), including an epistolary offer of love, ‘my curious Eyes (whose wary syght)’ (fo. 32v) (Marotti 1995: 176–81). Another Elizabethan compiler, John Lilliat, inserted his own poems in his anthology, Bodleian MS Rawlinson Poetry 148, among which are two lyrics inspired by Marlowe’s ‘Passionate Shepherd’: ‘Upon a kiss given’ (fos. 97v–98r) and ‘The S[h]heperdisse her Replie’ (fos. 100v–101r) (Doughtie 1985: 110–12, 114–15). Henry Stanford set aside space in his anthology (Cambridge MS Dd.5.75) for poetry written by his pupils and by him, including sonnets he wrote to accompany books he sent as gifts to his female aristocratic employers (Marotti 1995: 187–9; May 1988). Compilers often composed epitaphs and elegies about friends or family members. For example, at the end of British Library MS Harley 6917–18, Peter Calfe (the younger?) has ‘An Elegy: On the much Lamented Death of his Ever honourd friend George Gore Esquire’ (‘Since thou art fledd, nere more for to appeare’, fo. 96r) as well as eight other elegiac poems, including one for his own wife that was obviously inspired by the popular elegy by Henry King, many of whose poems were transcribed in the collection (Marotti 1995: 204–6). In the Skipwith family manuscript, a five-part compilation mainly assembled over several decades by or for Sir William Skipwith and his son Sir Henry, we find some of their own verse. Sir William’s poems register the stylistic influence of both Donne and Jonson, the first of whose poems form a large group in the early part of the collection (Marotti 1995: 196–9). Nicholas Burghe’s four poems in his collection (Bodleian MS Ashmole 38) embody some of the different poetic styles and idioms of the verse he selected for his manuscript, a fact that left him open to a charge of plagiarism apparently levelled at him by the recipient of one of his poems, to whom he replied: You cal’d me Theefe, when I presumed to Raise Thes few rude Lynes, thy bewtye for to Prayse Tho stol’st my hart; why then tis past beliefe ytt tis not I; but Thou that arte the theefe. (p. 23)

In the act of copying, scribes internalised and appropriated the words and the styles of the poems in their possession. Thus, especially in a period in which modern notions

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of originality were not the norm, the boundary between others’ work and one’s own was blurred.

Poems Copied from Printed Books One of the common practices in manuscript culture, especially in the seventeenth century, is the transcription of poems from printed books. Earlier works, such as those that formed Tottel’s Miscellany, migrated from manuscript to print; similarly, the posthumous print editions of the poetry of Donne (1633) and Thomas Carew (1640) gathered work that had remained in manuscript circulation during the poet’s lifetime. The flow of texts, however, could be reversed, with work in print returning to manuscript. For example, British Library MS Harley 6910, as Katherine Gottschalk (1979– 80) has shown, was primarily based on printed texts. British Library MS Additional 34064 has poems copied from the 1593 edition of Sidney’s Arcadia, and from Spenser’s The Ruines of Time and Mother Hubbard’s Tale from the 1591 volume of his Complaints (Ringler 1984). The Burley Manuscript (Leicestershire County Council MS DG7/LIT 2), which has a selection of poetry and prose, has many passages from Edmund Spenser’s The Ruines of Time, undoubtedly copied from a printed edition.14 Bodleian MS Ashmole 38 has, among other items, many pieces lifted from the 1605 edition of William Camden’s Remaines. Folger MS V.a.162, a verse miscellany probably compiled at Oxford, not only has copies of Shakespeare’s Sonnets 32 (fo. 26r) and 71 (fo. 12v), but also, from other print sources, copies of Edmund Spenser’s Amoretti IV, appropriated for new use as ‘A Sonnett on the new yeere 1639’ (fo. 22v), George Herbert’s ‘The Altar’ (fo. 12v) and ‘Redemption’ (fo. 15v), poems by Thomas Watson, Henry Parrot, and William Habington (fos. 13v, 21v, 23v), as well as a piece ‘On Sir Thomas Overbury’ (‘Once dead and twice alive, death could not frame’), which was published in the 1616 posthumous edition of Overbury’s The Wife. A very large number of the other poems in this collection are rare, if not unique, pieces, suggesting that the two main scribes responsible for this manuscript wrote some of them – for example, ‘To his dear friend Mr Stephen Jackson’ (‘Brother for so I call thee, not because’, fo. 12r) and ‘On the wor[ship]full Sir Paul Pinder’ (‘Sir Paul of all that ever bare that name’, fo. 21r), an anagram poem the first letters of each line of which spell out the addressee’s name. The antiquary Marmaduke Rawden’s anthology (British Library MS Additional 18044) acknowledges in the text the printed sources from which poems were copied. Bodleian MS Douce 280 has texts from Spenser’s Mother Hubbard’s Tale, The Tears of the Muses, and The Visions of Petrarch, as well as songs from printed books (Doughtie 1993; Marotti 1995: 21).

Poems Popular in the Manuscript System If, with our familiarity with canonical texts, we look at the poems that were copied repeatedly in manuscript collections, we discover some expected and some unexpected

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things. We know, judging from the extraordinary number of manuscripts in which the poetry appears (some 250), that John Donne’s poems were in great demand in the manuscript system of literary transmission, particularly some of his love elegies and lyrics. There are poems by other canonical poets that, not surprisingly, recur often: for example, Ralegh’s ‘What is our life’, ‘Even such is time’, and ‘The Lie’; Sir John Harington’s ‘A virtuous lady sitting in a muse’; Jonson’s ‘The Hour-Glass’ and two of his Venetia Digby poems, ‘The Body’ and ‘The Mind’; Carew’s ‘Ask me no more whither do stray’, ‘A fly that flew into his mistress’ eye’ (‘When this fly liv’d, she us’d to play’), and ‘The Rapture’; King’s ‘The Exequy’; and Herrick’s ‘Curse’ (‘Go perjur’d man’), ‘Welcome to Sack’, and ‘Farewell to Sack’. What is, perhaps, surprising is the popularity of poems that, largely because of the low visibility of most of them in print, have not been well known beyond their own time: for example, Walton Poole’s ‘If shadows be a picture’s excellence’; William Browne of Tavistock’s epitaphs on the countess of Pembroke (‘Underneath this sable hearse’) and Anne Prideaux (‘Nature in this small volume was about’), and the lyric ‘On one drowned in the snow’ (‘Within a fleece of silent waters drown’d’); Sir Henry Wotton’s ‘The characters of a happy life’ (‘How happy is he born or taught’) and ‘O faithless world’; William Strode’s ‘On a blistered lip’ (‘Chide not thy sprowting lippe, nor kill’), ‘On a butcher marrying a tanner’s daughter’ (‘A fitter match hath never been’), ‘On a Gentlewoman walking in the snow’ (‘I saw fair Cloris walk alone’), and ‘My love and I for kisses played’; and such anonymous poems as ‘I’ll tell you how the rose did first grow red’ and ‘Farewell ye gilded follies’. Some of the popular pieces were popular because they were disseminated widely at the university, especially at Christ Church, Oxford. Others were popular because they were examples of wit like the pieces gathered in such mid-century miscellanies as (the much-reprinted and constantly expanding) Wits Recreations (1640), The Harmony of the Muses (1654), Sportive Wit (1656), and Parnassus Biceps (1656): they attracted the attention of educated, socially fashionable young men. Still others were popular because they dealt with socially or politically prominent individuals. Some of these poems, tied to their immediate contexts or not part, finally, of notable printed editions of particular canonical poets’ work, dropped out of sight. What is clear from the list of poems that were popular in manuscript transmission is that some poets who loomed large in print did not do so in manuscript, and vice versa. Some early modern English poets, such as Wyatt, Surrey, Sidney, Ralegh, Dyer, Greville, Harington, Gorges, Southwell, Donne, Carew, Corbett, Strode, Randolph, and Traherne, functioned almost exclusively in the system of manuscript transmission during their lifetimes, and their poetry was either put into print without their permission or published posthumously. Other poets, such as Gascoigne, Spenser, Daniel, Drayton, Jonson, Herrick, Shirley, and King, used the manuscript system of transmission, but also allowed their work to be printed or, as in the cases especially of Spenser, Daniel, Drayton, and Jonson, made a determined effort to publicise their names through print. Literary histories, which have been based largely on the products of print culture, have given less attention to manu-

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script-system poets such as Dyer, Gorges, Greville, and Strode (especially the last of these) and they have ignored most of the anonymous verse found in the manuscript medium.

Conclusions Manuscripts of poetry, first, highlight the connections of literary texts to their original and subsequent social and political contexts: lyrics by Sir Walter Ralegh, for example, could register one set of social and political attitudes in their original circumstances of composition, but also take on new significance in later historical contexts. Whereas printed collections, from the time of Tottel, tended to remove texts from their occasional matrices and lift them into a developing sphere of the literary, manuscript anthologies invited topical readings. Second, manuscript collections enact a different conception of textuality. Instead of maintaining an author-centred attitude, they present texts as changeable and changing, subject to the co-creative literary agency of the compilers and transmitters. Some authors’ works have a particularly interesting history in the manuscript system – Ralegh’s and Donne’s, for example. Michael Rudick’s (1999) edition of the former, which he terms ‘A Historical Edition’, presents the author as a changing sign within a materially grounded literary history rather than as a biographical entity whose texts need to be purged of (alleged) corruptions and misattributions, then reconstructed in an idealistic way. The manuscript evidence encourages this sociocentric approach. By contrast, authors not strongly represented in the manuscript anthologies of the period, such as Herbert and Milton, have a different relation to socio-literary history. Third, manuscript anthologies force us to pay attention to texts outside the familiar literary canon, especially to a large body of unidentified, rare, or unique poems – including verse written by the compilers themselves. Many of the pieces in the surviving manuscript collections are at least rare, if not unique. Some are skilful, some clumsy, but all are culturally symptomatic. Fourth, the combination of elements in personal anthologies is often idiosyncratic, a product not only of the developing interests of compilers, but also of happenstance (such as the acquisition from a particular source of a group of poems for transcription). The resulting collection may be quite heterogeneous, typically not arranged in a particular generic or other order, although some collections have an arrangement of their contents by genre. Fifth, manuscript anthologies often present individual authors within the social and literary networks in which they were enmeshed rather than in isolation from them. And so, if, for example, we compare the different ways we encounter their work within manuscript anthologies with its presentation in single-author editions, the traces of the social and political contexts are more visible in the former, as are the literary ‘conversations’ in which they were engaged with their contemporaries. The

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print publication of single-author editions removed poets from their socio-literary relationships. For example, we know that Spenser and Sidney exchanged verse with one another (Woudhuysen 1996: 297), but their published work does not reveal this reality. Sixth, the personal anthologies are important evidence for scholars to use in constructing narratives of changing aesthetic and literary tastes in the early modern period – a story worth telling, but one that should be based not simply on the printed remains from the period. Aesthetic judgement and connoisseurship were exercised to some degree in the construction of some of the personal anthologies of the period, and, although they were not the only or the consistent standards used to determine inclusion of particular pieces, it is fair to say that the artfulness and skill perceived in particular poems account for their presence in the collections. Just as keepers of commonplace books made judgements about what ideas and authoritative statements were worth recording (and internalising as part of their intellectual furniture), so too compilers of poetical anthologies, in a period in which the modern institution of literature was taking shape largely through the impact of print culture, transcribed poems whose artful expression made them worth preserving. To some extent, then, the compilers functioned as literary critics. There are, of course, many other reasons for examining these manuscript documents, including the important one having to do with the need to rewrite literary history to make it less dependent on print culture and more representative of the full system of textual circulation and transmission in all media – voice, manuscript, and print.

Notes 1 Woudhuysen (1996: 157) states that there are about 230 verse miscellanies surviving for the period before 1640, twenty-seven of which were compiled before 1600. 2 Ivy (1958: 40) states that ‘In manuscript times, the quire was the basic unit of the book. Most books were probably written by their authors in quires … Miscellaneous manuscripts were compiled by the quire.’ 3 In quoting from manuscript documents, I have modernised i/j and u/v and expanded contractions, but retained original punctuation. 4 See the description of this manuscript in Krueger 1975: 438–9. 5 On the last of these, see Brown 2003. 6 On the poetry concerning Cecil, see Croft 1991. On the latter, see McRae 2004: 46–80 passim and 120–43 passim and Marotti 1995:

107–10. Poems on both figures are reproduced in Bellany and McRae 2005. 7 See also Love and Marotti 2002: 74–80 and, for later satiric and political verse, Love 2004. 8 The manuscript catalogue developed through this multi-year project by Elizabeth Clarke, Victoria Burke, Jonathan Gibson, and others is now available online, accompanied by digitised copies of manuscripts, through Adam Matthew Publications: . 9 Lady Dorothy was close to the Catholic Tixall circle, a friend in particular of Constance Aston Fowler, in whose manuscript collection (Huntington MS HM 904) this poem also appears: for this, see Aldrich-Watson 2000: 105. Stevenson and Davidson (2001: 261–2) print another of her poems (from Fowler’s

The Manuscript Transmission of Poetry manuscript collection), ‘Deare Cosen pardon me, if I mistowke’. 10 This online resource, (now accessible only by password) should soon be posted on the Folger Shakespeare Library website. It conflates several separate first-line indexes: the old British Library handwritten index of poetry in manuscripts purchased before 1895, Crum’s Bodleian index, and the indexes of the Brotherton Collection (University of Leeds.), the Folger Library, the Houghton Library (Harvard), the Beinecke Library (Yale), and the Huntington Library. Peter Beal’s ongoing project of producing an expanded, online version of his Index of English Literary Manuscripts should help fill in some of the gaps in our knowledge. 11 The six lines beginning ‘Helpe Mistress Helpe, the flames of my desire’ also appear as a separate poem in Bodleian MS English Poetry c. 50, fo. 117v. Interestingly, two poems later, we find a transcription of the first two stanzas of Donne’s ‘Love’s diet’ (untitled), followed, on fo. 118r, by Ben Jonson’s ‘My Picture left in Scotland’ (untitled). The anonymous six-line poem is also found

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in Folger MSS V.a.96, fo. 51 and V.a.322, p. 127 and Bodleian MS English Poetry c.50, fo. 117v (ending ‘For nothing else will put it out I know’). 12 This piece is also found in British Library MSS Additional 19268, fo. 14 and Sloane 1792, fo. 92; Bodleian MS English Poetry f.25, fo. 64v; Westminster Abbey MS 41, fo. 89; and Yale Osborn MS b 205, fo. 73. 13 All three poems are found in Folger MS V.a.170, pp. 184–92, followed by Thomas Randolph’s and William Strode’s separate Latin translations of Jonson’s poem, pp. 192–7. 14 The Spenser selections are on fos. 317r–20v under the heading, ‘Verses taken out of the ruines of tyme’: (in order) The Ruines of Time, ll. 43–56, 83–4. 102–5, 106–19, 134–40, 159–61, 169–75, 183–96, 216–17; Mother Hubbard’s Tale, ll. 713–56, 891–908, 1021– 2, 1151–78; The Ruines of Time, ll. 223–8, 239–43, 258–64, 272–3, 302–5, 365–71, 435–59, 673–9, 517–28; The Tears of the Muses, ll. 571–82, 589–94; Mother Hubbard’s Tale, ll. 133–53, 254–8, 431–6, 457–8, 475–6.

References and Further Reading Aldrich-Watson, Deborah (ed.) (2000). The Verse Miscellany of Constance Aston Fowler: A Diplomatic Edition. Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies/Renaissance English Text Society. Armitage, C. M. (1966). ‘Donne’s poems in Huntington Manuscript 198: new light on “The Funeral” ’. Studies in Philology, 63, 697–707. Beal, Peter (comp.) (1980–93). Index of English Literary Manuscripts, vol. 1, pts. 1 and 2: 1450– 1625; vol. 2, pts. 1 and 2: 1625–1700. London and New York: Mansell Publishing. Beal, Peter (1993) ‘Notions in garrison: the seventeenth-century commonplace book’. In W. Speed Hill (ed.), New Ways of Looking at Old Texts: Papers of the Renaissance English Text Society, 1985–1991 (pp. 131–47). Binghamton, NY:

Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies/ Renaissance English Text Society. Beal, Peter (1998). In Praise of Scribes: Manuscripts and their Makers in Seventeenth-Century England. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Beal, Peter and Margaret J. M. Ezell (eds.) (2000). ‘Writings by early modern women’. English Manuscript Studies 1100–1700, 9. Bellany, Alastair and Andrew McRae (eds.) (2005). ‘Early Stuart libels: an edition of poetry from manuscript sources’. Early Modern Literary Studies, Text Series I. . Boffey, Julia (1985). Manuscripts of English Courtly Love Lyrics in the Later Middle Ages. Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer. Brown, Cedric (2003). ‘Recusant community and Jesuit mission in Parliament days: Bodleian MS

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Eng. poet. b.5’. Yearbook of English Studies, 33, 290–315. Burke, Victoria E. (2003). ‘Contexts for women’s manuscript miscellanies: the case of Elizabeth Lyttleton and Sir Thomas Browne’. Yearbook of English Studies, 33, 316–28. Burke, Victoria E. (2004). ‘Reading friends: women’s participation in “masculine” literary culture’. In Victoria E. Burke and Jonathan Gibson (eds.), Early Modern Women’s Manuscript Writing: Selected Papers from the Trinity/Trent Colloquium (pp. 75–90). Aldershot: Ashgate. Chartier, Roger (1989). ‘Leisure and sociability: reading aloud in modern Europe’, trans. Carol Mossman. In Susan Zimmerman and Ronald F. E. Weissman (eds.), Urban Life in the Renaissance (pp. 103–20). Newark: University of Delaware Press. Cogswell, Thomas (1995). ‘Underground verse and the transformation of early Stuart political culture’. In Susan D. Amussen and Mark A Kishlansky (eds.), Political Culture and Cultural Politics in Early Modern England: Essays Presented to David Underdown (pp. 277–300). Manchester: Manchester University Press. Colclough, David (1998). ‘ “The Muses Recreation”: John Hoskyns and the manuscript culture of the seventeenth century’. Huntington Library Quarterly, 61/3–4, 369–400. Crane, Mary Thomas (1993). Framing Authority: Sayings, Self, and Society in Sixteenth-Century England. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Croft, Pauline (1991). ‘The reputation of Robert Cecil: libels, political opinion and popular awareness in the early seventeenth century’. Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., 1, 43–69. Crum, Margaret (1961). ‘Notes on the physical characteristics of some manuscripts of the poems of Donne and of Henry King’. The Library, 4th ser., 16, 121–32. Crum, Margaret (ed.) (1969). First-Line Index of Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library, 2 vols. New York: Modern Language Association of America. Crum, Margaret (1979). ‘Poetical manuscripts of Dudley, Third Baron North’. Bodleian Library Record, 10, 98–108. Cummings, Laurence (1960). ‘John Finet’s Miscellany’. Ph.D. diss., Washington University. Doughtie, Edward (1993). ‘John Ramsey’s manuscript as a personal and family Document’. In

W. Speed Hill (ed.), New Ways of Looking at Old Texts: Papers of the Renaissance English Text Society, 1985–1991 (pp. 281–8). Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies/ Renaissance English Text Society. Doughtie, Edward (ed.) (1985). ‘Liber Lilliati’: Elizabethan Verse and Song (Bodleian MS Rawlinson Poetry 148). Newark: University of Delaware Press. Ezell, Margaret J. M. (1993). Writing Women’s Literary History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Ezell, Margaret J. M. (2008). ‘The laughing tortoise: speculations on manuscript sources and women’s book history’. English Literary Renaissance, 38/2, 331–55. Gottschalk, Katherine K. (1979–80). ‘Discoveries concerning British Library MS Harley 6910’. Modern Philology, 77, 121–31. Harrier, Richard (1975). The Canon of Sir Thomas Wyatt’s Poetry. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hart, E. F. (1956). ‘The answer-poem of the early seventeenth century’. Review of English Studies, ns 7, 19–29. Heale, Elizabeth (2004). ‘ “Desiring women writing”: female voices and courtly “balets” in some early Tudor manuscript albums’. In Victoria E. Burke and Jonathan Gibson (eds.), Early Modern Women’s Manuscript Writing: Selected Papers from the Trinity/Trent Colloquium (pp. 9– 31). Aldershot: Ashgate. Hobbs, Mary (1992). Early Seventeenth-Century Verse Miscellany Manuscripts. Aldershot: Scolar Press. Hughey, Ruth (ed.) (1960). The Arundel Harington Manuscript of Tudor Poetry, 2 vols. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Ivy, G. S. (1958). ‘The bibliography of the manuscript-book’. In Francis Wormald and C. E. Wright (eds.), The English Library before 1700: Studies in its History (pp. 32–65). London: Athlone Press. Kerrigan, John (1988). ‘Thomas Carew’. Proceedings of the British Academy, 74, 311–50. King, Henry (1965). The Poems of Henry King, ed. Margaret Crum. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Klene, Jean, C. S. C. (ed.) (1997). The Southwell– Sipthorpe Commonplace Book. Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies/ Renaissance English Text Society.

The Manuscript Transmission of Poetry Krueger, Robert (ed.) (1961). ‘The Poems of William Herbert, Third Earl of Pembroke’. B. Litt. thesis, Oxford. Krueger, Robert (ed.) (1975). The Poems of Sir John Davies. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Leishman, J. B. (1945). ‘ “You meaner beauties of the night”: a study in transmission and transmogrification’. The Library, 4th ser., 26, 99–121. Love, Harold (1993). Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Love, Harold (2004). English Clandestine Satire 1660–1702. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Love, Harold and Arthur F. Marotti (2002). ‘Manuscript transmission and circulation’. In David Loewenstein and Janel Mueller (eds.), The Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature (pp. 55–80). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McRae, Andrew (2004). Literature and the Early Stuart State. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marotti, Arthur F. (1986). John Donne, Coterie Poet. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Marotti, Arthur F. (1990). ‘Shakespeare’s sonnets as literary property’. In Elizabeth D. Harvey and Katharine Eisaman Maus (eds.), Soliciting Interpretation: Literary Theory and Seventeenth-Century English Poetry (pp. 143–73). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Marotti, Arthur F. (1995). Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Marotti, Arthur F. (2002). ‘The cultural and textual importance of Folger MS V.a.89’. In Peter Beal and Grace Ioppolo (eds.), ‘Manuscripts and their makers in the English Renaissance’. English Manuscript Studies 1100–1700, 11, 70–92. Marotti, Arthur F. (2008) ‘Humphrey Coningsby and the personal anthologizing of verse in Elizabethan England’. In Michael Denbo (ed.), New Ways of Looking at Old Texts, IV: Papers of the Renaissance English Text Society 2002–2006 (pp. 71–102). Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies/Renaissance English Text Society. May, Steven W. (1971). ‘The “French Primero”: a study in Renaissance textual transmission and taste’. English Language Notes, 9, 102–8.

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May, Steven W. (ed.) (1988). Henry Stanford’s Anthology: An Edition of Cambridge University Library Manuscript Dd.5.75. New York and London: Garland Publishing. May, Steven W. (1991). The Elizabethan Courtier Poets: The Poems and their Contexts. Columbia: University Press. May, Steven W. (ed.) (2004). Queen Elizabeth I: Selected Works. New York: Washington Square Press. May, Steven W. and William A. Ringler, Jr. (2004). Elizabethan Poetry: A Bibliography and First-Line Index of English Verse, 1559–1603, 3 vols. London and New York: Thoemmes Continuum. Millman, Jill Seal and Gilliam Wright (eds.) (2005). Early Modern Women’s Manuscript Poetry. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Moulton, Ian (2000) Before Pornography: Erotic Writing in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nelson, William (1976–7). ‘From “Listen, lordings” to “Dear reader” ’. University of Toronto Quarterly, 46, 110–24. O’Callaghan, Michelle (1998). ‘Performing politics: the circulation of the “Parliament Fart” ’. Huntington Library Quarterly, 69/1, 121–38. Powell, Jason (2004). ‘Thomas Wyatt’s poetry in embassy: Egerton 2711 and the production of manuscripts abroad’. Huntington Library Quarterly, 67/2, 261–82. Redding, David Coleman (1960). ‘Robert Bishop’s commonplace book: an edition of a seventeenthcentury miscellany’. Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania. Ringler, William (1984). ‘Bishop Percy’s quarto manuscript (British Museum MS Additional 34064) and Nicholas Breton’. Philological Quarterly, 54, 26–39. Rollins, Hyder Edward (ed.) (1965). Tottel’s Miscellany (1557–1587), rev. edn. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rudick, Michael (1999). The Poems of Sir Walter Ralegh: A Historical Edition. Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies/ Renaissance English Text Society. Saunders, J. W. (1951a). ‘From manuscript to print: a note on the circulation of poetic MSS in the sixteenth century’. Proceedings of the Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society, 6/8, 508–28.

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Saunders, J. W. (1951b). ‘ “The stigma of print”: a note on the social bases of Tudor poetry’. Essays in Criticism, 1, 139–64. Stevenson, Jane and Peter Davidson (eds.) (2001). Early Modern Women Poets: An Anthology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sullivan II, Ernest W. (1988). The First and Second Dalhousie Manuscripts: Poems and Prose by John Donne and Others, A Facsimile Edition. Columbia: University of Missouri Press.

Talvacchia, Bette (1999). Taking Positions: On the Erotic in Renaissance Culture. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Whitlock, Baird W. (1982). John Hoskyns, Serjeantat-Law. Washington, DC: University Press of America. Woudhuysen, H. R. (1996). Sir Philip Sidney and the Circulation of Manuscripts 1558–1640. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

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Poets, Friends, and Patrons: Donne and his Circle; Ben and his Tribe Robin Robbins

Invention and Imitation, Art and Values Thomas Carew’s ‘Elegy upon the death of the Dean of Paul’s, Dr John Donne’ laments firstly the loss of England’s pre-eminent preacher, who ‘Committed holy rapes upon our will; / Did through the eyes the melting heart distil.’ Similarly, Izaak Walton’s hagiography prefixed to the LXXX Sermons in 1640 is of an antitype of St Augustine, the profligate youth becoming a saint of the church. Donne himself had fostered this image, for example in his letter of 1619 to Sir Robert Ker asking him to regard the treatise on suicide, Biathanatos, written before his ordination, as ‘by Jack Donne and not by Dr Donne’. Ben Jonson reported to Drummond in the same year that Donne, ‘since he was made Doctor, repenteth highly and seeketh to destroy all his poems’ (Jonson 1925–52: I, 136). But though Carew finally falls in with this change of identity in his last line, ‘Apollo’s first, at last the true God’s priest’, he devotes the intervening three-quarters of his 98-line poem to Donne’s achievement for English poetry. Carew sees Donne as throwing off the dominance of what young men were made to read at school and university, principally Latin poets: The Muses’ garden, with pedantic weeds O’erspread, was purged by thee, the lazy seeds Of servile imitation thrown away, And fresh invention planted.

Donne has ‘opened us a mine / Of rich and pregnant fancy, drawn a line / Of masculine expression’. To claim that the dead person is inimitable is usual in funeral orations, but Carew foresaw rightly that thy strict laws will be Too hard for libertines in poetry:

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Robin Robbins They will repeal the goodly exiled train Of gods and goddesses which, in thy just reign, Were banished nobler poems.

Ironically, though he echoes Donne’s Holy Sonnet ‘Batter my heart’ with that metaphysical conceit (not an ‘image’ but the adducing of abstract similarities between things materially different) of ‘holy rapes’, Carew looks back to Greece and Rome in ‘Promethean breath … Delphic choir … The Muses’ garden … good / Old Orpheus … crown of bays … two flamens … Apollo’. Moreover, while Donne was inventive in his imagery and diction, he deployed them in the classical genres of epigram, verseepistle, elegy, lyric, satire, epicede (commemorative poem), hymn, and epithalamion, as well as a Renaissance form, the sonnet. Classical writers such as Ovid provided some of the stock figures in his earlier poems, such as the libertine woman of ‘Confined love’. ‘Go and catch a falling star’ derives ultimately from a classical tradition, that of likening the breach of love or friendship to a list of impossibilities (adunata). In the Christian era the device was diverted onto female fidelity, as in the fifteenth-century example (Robbins 1952: 101): ‘When nettles in winter bear roses red … Then put in a woman your trust and confidence.’ Another example, beginning ‘Embrace a sunbeam’ (Osborn 1937: 299), is possibly by Donne’s contemporary at Oxford and the Inns of Court, John Hoskyns. In octosyllabics, as Donne’s is predominantly, both might derive from a contest of wit among a group of young courtier-wits in the early 1590s. Donne’s itself became a classic, copied and recopied in numerous collections of his poems and miscellanies, and imitated by other poets. In the Elegies this insouciant dispraise tilted towards misogyny, and in his epistle to the countess of Huntingdon he denies that women have souls at all (Donne 2008: II, 237n.) – a suggestion gracefully dismissed in Jonson’s Masque of Beauty (Targoff 2008: 43–4). It has been suggested that those poems reveal the tensions experienced by men who had to submit to the authority of a female monarch (Guibbory 1990). William Habington (1605– 54) at last turned the tables ‘Against them who Lay unchastity to the sex of women’ in Castara, 1635 (Donne 1965: 152, 157). Donne, Carew implies, challenges head-on the ideals of Jonson, who in his Poetaster, satirising the satirist John Marston, has Virgil prescribe a corrective diet of classical authors. To the Scots poet-laird William Drummond, Jonson boasted in 1619 that ‘He was better versed and knew more in Greek and Latin than all the poets in England, and quintessenced their brains.’ Moreover, so central and sufficient for him was Horace’s ‘Ars poetica’ that when his 1604 translation was affected by a new critical text from the continent in 1610, he meticulously revised it, and wrote a commentary (destroyed in the burning of his library in 1623). Jonson’s poetic work, like Donne’s, is largely in the traditional genres, with the difference that he is concerned to emulate but not go far beyond them. Rosalind Miles defends his classicism as ‘never mere pedantry … He strove always for the timeless classical virtues of unity, symmetry, clarity and proportion’ (Miles 1990: 278–9). Accordingly, he opined to Drummond

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‘That Donne for not keeping of accent deserved hanging … that Donne himself for not being understood would perish’ (Jonson 1925–52: I, 133, 138). This is a selective version, however, of ‘classical values’: Jonson does not often display in his poems Plato’s rationalism, Horace’s urbanity, or Seneca’s stoical avoidance of emotion. In his longest poem, ‘On the famous voyage’, the concentration on the filthy side of London life is far from Horatian in its deliberate excess, though as an overt burlesque of the underworld journeys of classical myth, it follows an alternative classical precedent, that of parody such as the Homeric Batrachomyomachia, ‘The Battle of the Frogs and Mice’, and works by Aristophanes and Lucian, Horace, Ovid and Petronius. It was because Greek and Latin cultures contained so much variety and contradiction that they provided rich opportunities for imitation and development. Begging the question of his own qualification, Jonson asserted ‘the impossibility of any man’s being the good poet without first being a good man’ so as ‘to be able to inform young men to all good disciplines, inflame grown men to all great virtues’ (Epistle to the two universities prefixed to Volpone: Dutton 2000: 114–31). For ‘being’ read ‘seeming’: it is by the persona he constructs, by what Miles (1990: 175) calls ‘a consistent self-imaging along the wished-for lines’, screening his own vigorous indulgence in all seven deadly sins (except, perhaps, sloth), that he achieves the sound of moral authority. In life, as he makes clear to Drummond, no Horatian ethos of civilised restraint regulated the actual proud, ambitious, lustful, envious, greedy, irascible Jonson. His frank self-portrait in ‘Epistle to my Lady Covell’ as ‘Laden with belly, and doth hardly approach / His friends, but to break chairs or crack a coach. / His weight is twenty stone …’ – this and the claim to Drummond that he was ‘in his youth given to venery: he thought the use of a maid nothing in comparison to the wantonness of a wife, and would never have another mistress’ – his illegitimate offspring, his drunkenness, his gluttony, undercut his habitually moralistic posture in, for example, ‘On Gut’ (Underwood, 9, 56; Epigrams, 118; Jonson 1925–52: I, 140). The high valuation of male friendship instilled at school through Cicero’s De amicitia was often voiced but inconstantly practised by Jonson, especially with fellowdramatists such as Marston, Chapman, and Brome. His favourite pupil, Nat Field, had to go to law to recover a large loan. Another classical attitude he could not share was the relaxed acceptance of same-sex love by Plato (when young), innumerable Greek writers, and his esteemed Catullus, Tibullus, Ovid, Horace, and Martial. But same-sex killing was to be celebrated: Jonson enthusiastically echoed for England the Roman belief in the inferiority of all other nations, the militarism of Julius Caesar, the imperialism of Augustan Rome as expressed in Virgil’s Aeneid. Jonson’s vividly eloquent ‘Epistle to a friend to persuade him to the wars’ sees peace as ‘vicious ease’ and soon becomes an unrestrained satire in a prophetic vein, Juvenalian-cum-Jewish, a denunciation of gluttony, lust, fine clothing, and, at length, women who firk and jerk, and for the coachman rail, And, jealous of each other, think it long

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Robin Robbins To be abroad, chanting some bawdy song, And laugh, and measure thighs, then squeak, spring, itch, Do all the tricks of a salt lady bitch … (Underwood, 15)

In ‘To the immortal memory and friendship of that noble pair Sir Lucius Cary and Sir Henry Moryson’ (Underwood, 70), who set out to fight in Ireland, Jonson celebrates Moryson’s death as ‘a soldier to the last right end, A perfect patriot and a noble friend’ – in fact he died in bed of smallpox in Wales. The poem was presumably written to please not Jonson’s feelings but Cary’s: he fulfilled Jonson’s ideal of a soldier-poet, an intelligent man of action, as passionate as Jonson in love and hate, and himself idealising his beloved Moryson as poet, soldier, classicist, and admirer of Jonson (Peterson 1981: 195–9). Cary was proud in his ‘Epistle to his noble father, Mr Jonson’ to call himself a poetic ‘son of Ben’ – a title also claimed by Edmund Gayton, James Howell, William Cartwright, Thomas Randolph, Richard Lovelace, and Robert Herrick (Miles 1986: 292), and loosely applied to other younger poets of the 1620s and 1630s such as Carew. Jonson responded not only to such verbal tribute but to Cary’s material generosity: Clarendon recorded in his autobiography that Lord Falkland, as he became, ‘seemed to have his estate in trust for all worthy persons who stood in want of supplies and encouragement, as Ben Jonson and many others of that time’ (Riggs 1989: 316). Jonson’s easy intimacy with classical writers appears in his sophisticated reworking of them. Many of his most spontaneous-seeming poems, such as ‘To Penshurst’ (The Forest, 2) and the songs ‘To Celia’ (The Forest, 5, 6, 9), are tissues intricately woven from classical poems. From an aesthetic point of view, the reused materials are so completely merged that they are integral parts of a new work. He shows his discrimination and control in choosing a highly apt non-classical allusion in ‘To Penshurst’, the reminiscence of Kalander’s house in Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, showing his brother Robert’s accord with traditional values, Roman and English, in his maintenance of hospitality (in particular, his unstinting provision of food and drink for Jonson). With this poem and ‘To Sir Robert Wroth’, Jonson celebrated a fruitful tradition in English poetry, that of the ‘country-house poem’, emulated by Herrick in ‘Panegyric to Sir Lewis Pemberton’, and Carew in ‘To Saxham’ and ‘To my friend, G.N., from Wrest’, and transformed by Marvell in ‘Upon Appleton House’. (Amelia Lanyer’s ‘Cookham’ was written before ‘Penshurst’ [see Chapter 25, An Emblem of Themselves’: Early Renaissance Country House Poetry). Modern continental writers, too, he reworked, as in a more overtly artful poem (very popular with manuscriptmiscellany compilers (Marotti 1986: 127), ‘The Hour-glass’ (Underwood, 8): Do but consider this small dust Here running in the glass, By atoms moved: Could you believe that this The body ever was

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Of one that loved? And in his mistress’ flame playing like a fly, Turned to cinders by her eye? Yes, and in death as life unblessed: To have’t expressed Even ashes of lovers find no rest.

Like a jeweller, Jonson exquisitely resets the gem of a conceit that he owes to a Renaissance Latin poet in an English poem with point, force, and whimsical humour. Word choice and verse form work together to produce between flow and restraint an engaging tension, just as the wit, jarring between frivolity and grim truth, gives both pleasure and pause for thought. Such crafting of tensions is as frequent an excellence in Jonson’s poems as in his plays. The reader who tires of strenuous abuse, moralising, and wit can find feeling and calm in equilibrium in his tenderly eloquent epitaphs (a genre in which his ‘son’ Herrick also excelled), such as ‘On my First Daughter’, ‘On my first son’, on the boy actor Salomon Pavy, ‘On Elizabeth, L.H.’, and on Vincent Corbett, the nurseryman father of Jonson’s poetic ‘son’ Richard Corbett (Epigrams, 22, 45, 120, 124; Underwood, 12). Reference to classical models functioned in various ways in the relationship between writer and reader. It borrowed authority for the new writing from the old that was taught as exemplary in school and university; it established, if perceived, that writer and reader shared membership of the educated minority, and thence, because these groups were largely congruent, the ruling gentry. Moreover, if a satire, or a tragedy such as Jonson’s Sejanus, could claim to follow closely a classical source, it might even manage to leave open (and so avoid prosecution) whether it was really aimed at contemporary people and institutions. But Elizabethans were instructed by their preachers in the application of old texts, in that case biblical, to themselves and their society, and the authorities were never short of perceptive, sometimes over-ingenious, denouncers: in 1605, at the behest of the earl of Northampton who alleged popery and treason, Jonson was summoned before the Privy Council for Sejanus (Jonson 1925–52: XI, 253). He had evidently composed an ‘argument’ for the text as it was printed in the quarto of that year which, in the manner of Tacitus, showed how men made their own history. As a consequence of his encounter with the Council, he added a pious gloss to his ‘argument’, invoking the orthodoxy of providential history: This do we advance as a mark of terror to all traitors and treasons; to show how just the heavens are in pouring and thundering down a weighty vengeance on their unnatural intents, even to the worst princes; much more to those for guard of whose piety and virtue the angels are in continual watch, and God himself miraculously working.1

This was printed in larger type in the quarto but then omitted when Jonson included the play in his folio Works of 1616 (Loewenstein 2002: 156). Some of Donne’s chosen classical genres put him in danger too: the new wine he put in old bottles could be explosive (Donne 2008: I, 363–460). In 1599, alarmed

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by the uneasy public situation concerning the succession to the aged queen, the archbishop of Canterbury and the bishop of London had ordered that all printed copies of Hall’s, Marston’s, and Guilpin’s satires, Marlowe’s elegies of Ovid and Sir John Davies’s epigrams, all books by Nashe and Gabriel Harvey, and various others, should be confiscated and burned, and ‘That no satires or epigrams be printed hereafter’. Donne voices anxiety about his poems in a letter of c.1599/1601 (Simpson 1948: 316): ‘To my satires there belongs some fear, and to some elegies and these [paradoxes] perhaps shame. … Therefore, I am desirous to hide them, without any over-reckoning of them or their maker.’ There are manuscript versions of Satire V, and some epigrams with and without possibly original proper names.2 Satire I is an innocuous imitation of Horace, reapplied to a universally ridiculed target, the fatuous, obsequious, quarrelsome devotee of fashion. Satire II, however, though its generalised target, the swindling professional lawyer, was despised by the gentry and hated by many more, chooses risky analogies for his lying, ‘Like a king’s favourite – yea, like a king’, and with his squalid law practice compares royal bastardy and churchmen’s corruption (65–76). That the reigning monarch was a queen, not a king would be no defence, since Elizabeth was notorious for her sometimes disastrously misjudged favouritism. Even more seriously, Donne went directly against the compulsory Oath of Allegiance in implicitly echoing the Pope’s decree that Henry VIII’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon was invalid and Elizabeth consequently illegitimate. Satire III interrogates the various brands of Christianity on offer in western Europe: Roman Catholicism, Genevan Calvinism, Anglicanism, independence, and eclecticism. Refusing to fall into any, yet feeling that ‘To stand enquiring right is not to stray, / To sleep or run wrong is’, Donne is nonetheless not impartial, coming out vehemently against the teaching and law of Elizabethan England: Some preachers – vile, ambitious bawds – and laws Still new, like fashions, bid him think that she Which dwells with us is only perfect … Fool and wretch! Wilt thou let thy soul be tied To man’s laws, by which she shall not be tried At the last day? (56–8, 93–5)

His fourth satire depicts treacherous machination at court, where a probable double agent tries to involve him in treasonous talk (119–20, 129–33). In line 216, some manuscripts read ‘Topcliffe’ (the officer Richard Topcliffe was notorious as a torturer) for ‘pursuivant’, suggesting a possibly earlier version prudently emended – not necessarily by the author, since anyone who owned manuscripts containing criticism of the authorities would be in danger. Even in Satire V (written when Donne is presumed to have converted to Anglicanism and become secretary to Lord Egerton), he denounces in lines 63–8 false accusations and extortion perpetrated by the government’s enforcers.

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Coteries It would be wrong to regard Donne and Jonson as conscious leaders of opposing poetic factions, innovators versus classicists. As well as using classical forms and materials, both showed that multivalent power esteemed as ‘wit’: mental sharpness, verbal ingenuity, fertile imagination, wide knowledge, and so on. Jonson declared in Epigram 23, ‘To John Donne’, that ‘every work of thy most early wit Came forth example, and remains so yet’, praising his ‘language, letters, arts, best life’. To Drummond he showed he treasured an image in ‘The Calm’ and knew by heart the epigram ‘Phryne’ (Jonson 1925–52: I, 135). Before readying his own epigrams for publication, he sent them to Donne That so alone canst judge, so alone dost make … and if I find but one Marked by thy hand and with the better stone, My title’s sealed. (Epigrams, 96)

Moreover, though a rival seeker of patronage, Jonson not only fulfilled the countess of Bedford’s wish to see Donne’s satires (perhaps prompted by Henry Goodyer), but added a poem lauding both them and her as ‘of the best’ (though one suspects no unwillingness to displace from Lady Bedford’s favour that Samuel Daniel whom he deemed ‘a good honest Man … but no poet’ (Jonson 1925–52: I, 132)). It may only have been in return for this favour that Donne provided the commendatory Latin verses prefixed to Volpone in 1607, but Jonson was the only living poet whose skill he ever praised. Both Donne and Jonson demanded acceptance as gentlemen: the son of a prosperous ironmonger, Donne used the arms ‘of the ancient family of Dwn of Kidwelly’ in Carmarthenshire. In 1604 Jonson claimed gentle ancestry and a coat of arms, telling Drummond later that ‘His grandfather came from Carlisle and he thought from Annandale to it; he served King Henry VIII and was a gentleman. His father lost all his estate under Queen Mary, having been cast in prison and forfeited, at last turned minister, so he was a minister’s son. He himself was posthumous, born a month after his father’s decease, brought up poorly, put to school by a friend’ (see Jonson 1925–52: vol. I). Jonson thus lacked Donne’s advantageous education at Oxford and Lincoln’s Inn, where he got to know lifelong friends among the gentry, such as Henry Wotton and Christopher Brooke. Instead, Jonson was taken away from Westminster School early, and set to work. In 1590–1 he preceded Donne at Lincoln’s Inn, not as a student but helping his bricklayer stepfather on a wall. Both served briefly against Spain, Donne as a gentleman volunteer with the earl of Essex to Cadiz and the Azores, Jonson in the Low Countries. From then on their courses differ: whereas there is no evidence that Donne was more than a spectator of the action, Jonson boasted of having killed and despoiled a Spaniard in single combat. Donne became secretary to the chief law

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officer of the Crown, Sir Thomas Egerton, Jonson one of Henslowe’s actors at the Rose. Both got into trouble, Jonson by killing a fellow-actor in a duel in 1598, and frequently over his plays, Donne ruining his prospects for a dozen years by eloping in 1601 with his employer’s niece by marriage. Jonson failed as an actor, and turned to writing plays, at first collaborating on hack-work that has perished. Donne probably exhausted his inheritance in the early 1590s, emulating the habits of his gentleman friends: a fellow-student remembers him as ‘not dissolute, but very neat; a great visitor of ladies, a great frequenter of plays, a great writer of conceited verses’ (Sir Richard Baker, in Bald 1970: 72). Jack Donne, young man about town in the early 1590s, seems to have popped like a cork from the dark bottle of an oppressive upbringing in the ‘old religion’ of Roman Catholicism. His maternal grandfather, John Heywood, was distantly related to the writer and martyr Sir Thomas More. Himself a courtier and epigrammatist, John and his son Jasper Heywood were exiled. The latter, one-time page to Princess Elizabeth and translator of Senecan plays, was caught after landing to head the Jesuit mission in England and imprisoned for two years under sentence of death in the Tower, where Donne as a 12-year-old may have visited him in the autumn of 1584. In May 1593 his brother Henry Donne was arrested by Topcliffe’s chief assistant, Richard Young, and died in prison for harbouring a priest who was hanged, cut down alive, castrated, disembowelled, and chopped into quarters at Tyburn. This was normal English practice in the fearful years when extreme Jesuits such as Robert Persons sought to bring about the death of Elizabeth and her replacement with the Spanish Infanta, so as to fulfil the Pope’s release of English Roman Catholics from their allegiance. Donne was telling no more than the truth in the preface to Biathanatos (Donne 1984: 29): ‘I had my first breeding and conversation with men of a suppressed and afflicted religion, accustomed to the despite of death.’3 Henry Donne was arrested in Thavies Inn: if elder brother John had not moved on to Lincoln’s Inn he might have shared his fate. But at Lincoln’s Inn a new life opened. Here, as with his last poem, the hymn to Hamilton, he started to write poems that were given only to friends in manuscript. The liberation he experienced at this time is expressed in the vigour and freedom of expression in his epigrams, lyrics, and love elegies. His earliest surviving poems include, for example, several erotically phrased verse-letters (Donne 2008: I, 31–120). In one, ‘To Mr T.W.’, he enjoins his verses to ‘Haste thee … to him my pain and pleasure’ (1–2): Plead for me and so, by thine and my labour, I’m thy Creator, thou my Saviour. Tell him, all questions which men have defended Both of the place and pains of Hell are ended, And ’tis decreed our Hell is but privation Of him, at least in this earth’s habitation: (5–10)

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These lines so outraged some later Christian fanatic and homophobe that he or she heavily inked them over in the manuscript compiled for the earl of Westmorland by Donne’s friend and contemporary at the Inns of Court, Rowland Woodward (Donne 2008: I, 43). The next poem but one in this Westmorland manuscript, again ‘To Mr T.W.’, begins ‘Pregnant again with the old twins Hope and Fear’, and is followed by one from T.W. ‘To J.D.’, which develops a lesbian image of his ‘sinful Muse … rubbed and tickled with thine’ in ‘mystic tribadry … oh strange and holy lechery’ (see Mueller 1993). It is evident that Donne and his set were not too pious to mix Christian and sexual metaphors for their private amusement.4 Donne’s coterie included more than the Woodwards, possibly including someone not suspected until recently. Curiously enough, between those two early poems to T.W., Rowland Woodward placed one he titled ‘To L. of D.’ This appeared in the posthumous printed edition of Donne’s Poems in 1633 as ‘To E. of D. with six holy sonnets’, an alternative title found in two out of the four surviving manuscripts, neither having the authority of Woodward’s. Poems itself is based on manuscripts at several removes from the author, so Dennis Flynn (1988) has argued plausibly that ‘L. of D.’ could denote ‘Lord of Derby’, referring either to Ferdinando, fifth earl from 1593 to 1594, or his brother William, sixth earl, and Donne’s fellow-student at Lincoln’s Inn. The similarity of its sexual metaphors for writing poems to those in Donne’s early verse epistles suggests it accompanied a group of poems much earlier than the Holy Sonnets: See, sir, how, as the sun’s hot, masculine flame Begets strange creatures on Nile’s dirty slime, In me your fatherly yet lusty rhyme (For these songs are their fruits) have wrought the same. But though the engend’ring force from whence they came Be strong enough, and nature do admit Seven to be born at once, I send as yet But six: they say the seventh hath still some maim.

If the printed title is ignored in favour of the more authoritative manuscript, the poem itself gives no hint of ‘holy sonnets’, and, unsurprisingly, Woodward placed the poem between those two ‘To Mr T.W.’. Both poet and patron, Ferdinando was celebrated as ‘Amyntas’ by Spenser in ‘Colin Clout’s Come Home Again’, and his taste for erotic verse is presumed from Thomas Nashe’s dedicating his ‘wanton elegy’ ‘A Choice of Valentines’ to ‘Lord S.’: he was summoned to Parliament as Lord Strange in his own right in 1589 and thus styled until he succeeded to the earldom on 25 September 1593. He himself punned on his name with the words ‘my lines strange things may well suffice’ in the poem ‘Of my Unhappy State of Life’ (printed in May 1991: 370–1). Donne punned on names too (see below), so could well have intended a quibble in likening the offspring of Ferdinando’s ‘fatherly yet lusty rhyme’ to ‘strange creatures’.

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Rather than hypothesise some lost (Roman Catholic) sonnets, we might more economically assume that by ‘these songs’ Donne refers to lyrics such as are found in the collection that was first entitled ‘Songs and Sonnets’ by the unknown editor of the second edition of Donne’s poems in 1635. One surviving manuscript (called the Dolau Cothi MS, pp. 100–5) does indeed group six lyrics as ‘Songs that were made to certain airs that were made before’: ‘The Message’, ‘The Bait’, ‘Community’, ‘Confined Love’, ‘Song: Sweetest Love, I do not go’, and ‘Song: go and catch a falling star’. It was, perhaps, this group of poems that was given to Lord Derby. Contemporary but subsequent musical settings exist for the first two and the last two, as well as for ‘The Expiration’ and ‘Break of day’, either of which (among numerous others) might have been ‘the seventh’ Donne alludes to. Whether or not that is so, these poems typify verse production by young wits and courtiers in the 1590s: imitations, responses, parodies, poems on shared themes. ‘The Bait’ is one of numerous rejoinders to Marlowe’s ‘The passionate shepherd to his love’, with its promise of an unflawed pastoral idyll (Donne 2008: 1, 132). There are parodies by Marlowe himself in The Jew of Malta (4.2.97–8), and by Shakespeare in The Merry Wives of Windsor (1597(?); 3.1.1619). In England’s Helicon (1600) it was followed by ‘The Nymph’s reply’ (anonymous, but generally ascribed to Ralegh), a detailed rejoinder pointing out the evanescence of all the promised pleasures, and by an anonymous parody which, as Gardner pointed out (Donne 1965: 155–6), may have sparked off Donne’s piscatorial version. In reading his poems, whether sacred or secular, we may understand them better, or at least not construct a false image of Donne, if we remember their status as fictions for particular readers.5 He is not seeking ‘to perplex the minds of the fair sex with nice speculations in philosophy’ (Dryden). No seducer as intelligent as Donne would expect results from handing to a woman poems such as ‘The Flea’, ‘Love’s alchemy’, with its ‘Hope not for mind in women’, the utterly callous ‘Anagram’, the crudely boastful ‘Comparison’, or ‘The Perfume’, with its frank admission that ‘Thy beauty’s beauty, and food of our love’ is the speaker’s desire for her father’s wealth: to call them ‘love poems’ blurs their original function in entertaining and winning admiration from male friends. Similarly, his disappointed hope in a letter to Goodyer of 1615 (Donne 1974: 149) that Lady Bedford would have forgotten his earlier life and believe in his reformation can warn us that when we read the Holy Sonnets, written probably during the period when he was actively courting her favour with the seven verse letters and funeral elegies on her friends Lady Markham and Cecilia Bulstrode, we should be as wary as perhaps she was of accepting them as transparent autobiography.6 Arthur Marotti has argued that salient features of Donne’s poems result from their being written for a coterie: His creation of a sense of familiarity and intimacy, his fondness for dialectic, intellectual complexity, paradox and irony, the appeal to shared attitudes and group interests (if not to private knowledge), the explicit gestures of biographic self-referentiality, the styles he adopted or invented all relate to the coterie circumstances of his verse. (Marotti 1986: 19)

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This ability to vary poems to suit their recipients matches the varied roles Donne plays in his portraits. He had at least five made. First came a miniature (surviving as the engraved frontispiece to the 1635 Poems), painted in 1591, in his eighteenth year, showing him dressed as a dapper courtier with a sword and a Spanish motto meaning ‘Sooner dead than changed’ – whether in religion or love is left to the imagination. He wears crosses in his ears, but the words come from a love story. In life-size oils in 1595 he is the melancholy lover with folded arms, a wide black hat and a Latin motto turned from the Prayer Book’s ‘Lighten our darkness, O Lord’ into ‘… O Lady’. Another miniature shows him in 1616, the year after his ordination, as a smart gentleman with ruff and pointed beard. In 1620, the year before he won the deanship of St Paul’s, he was again painted in oils (still in the deanery) as a bareshouldered ancient philosopher. In his last days he had the picture drawn which may have been the original of the frontispiece to his last sermon, Death’s Duel (1632), and the monumental effigy in St Paul’s, which survived the cathedral’s destruction in the 1666 Fire of London (see Figure 6). His poems are similarly dramatic portraits,

Image not available in the electronic edition

Figure 6 William Marshall, portrait of John Donne in his shroud, engraved frontispiece to his Devotions (London, 1634). The shroud is drawn aside to reveal his bearded head, and he wears a coronet – beneath the Baroque skull above. (Donne had died in 1631.) The four cameos depict biblical scenes. British Museum, London

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ventriloquising, posing as various personae – cynic, wit, seducer, lover, penitent, and more. Two at least are put in the mouth of a woman, ‘Break of day’ and ‘Confined love’. Readers have noticed some poems where Donne does introduce an autobiographical fact, his wife Anne’s maiden name, More. In the 1617 sonnet ‘Since she whom I loved hath paid her last debt’, asserting that ‘Wholly on heavenly things my mind is set’, he vacillates in this conviction, introducing the conflict that usually tautens his poems, when he hints at inability to forsake his earthly love entirely: ‘But why should I beg more love whenas thou / Dost woo my soul, for hers off ’ring all thine?’ Before he departed as chaplain to the earl of Doncaster on an embassy in 1619, he still demands God’s help in this: ‘Thou lov’st not till from loving more thou free My soul’ (‘A Hymn to Christ, at the author’s last going into Germany’). Seriously ill and expecting to die in 1623, he tells God thrice in ‘A Hymn to God the Father’ that he has not freed Donne from his dominating self or from his human love until he has promised salvation: ‘When thou hast done, thou hast not done, / For I have more’ (in manuscript, ‘done’ is sometimes spelt ‘donne’). In the past, readers seeking to idealise Donne as an exemplary figure tended to read all the songs and sonnets as addressed to Anne before and after marriage. That seems unlikely, but there are love poems that, like the three later religious poems quoted, echo her maiden name. One such is ‘A Valediction: of my name in the window’ (for possible dating in 1599 see Donne 2008: I, 162). This poem’s closing image of ‘dying men’ is the starting point of ‘A Valediction: forbidding mourning’ with its contrastingly quiet death-bed, which perhaps followed immediately on the same occasion, though the mutual love, described in religious terms, differs from the imagining of her ‘inconsiderate hand’ flinging open the window to greet a rich or witty lover. ‘A Valediction: of the book’ similarly uses religious terms (‘faith’, ‘schismatic’), a treatment most intensely applied to love in ‘The Canonisation’. In ‘A Valediction: of weeping’, the departing man says of her tears: For thy face coins them, and thy stamp they bear. And by this mintage they are something worth, For thus they be Pregnant of thee. Fruits of much grief they are, emblems of more: When a tear falls, that thou fall’st which it bore.

Later he asks her to ‘forbear To teach the sea what it may do too soon’, suggesting fearful anticipation of a sea crossing such as he made with Sir Walter Chute for a continental tour in 1605. Some of the songs and sonnets may thus have arisen from real occasions, but may well have been written with the coterie reader in mind. Whether they were intended for Anne More’s eyes, or for hers alone, is doubtful: Sir Henry Wotton concludes a letter from Ireland in April 1599, ‘May I after these kiss that fair and learned hand

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of your mistress, than whom the world doth possess nothing more virtuous’ (Bald 1970: 104). If Wotton is referring to Anne rather than Lady Egerton, he was party to Donne’s secret affair, and a likely recipient of poems stemming from it.7 Some of the most literally ‘metaphysical’ poems, containing abstract philosophical arguments, such as ‘Air and angels’ and ‘The Ecstasy’, are also likely to have been written for male readers, such as Sir Edward Herbert, who wrote three poems entitled ‘Platonic love’ (though one or more of them perhaps much later during the cult of it at King Charles’s court) and ‘An Ode upon a question moved, whether love should continue for ever’. Like ‘The Ecstasy’, this last poem is set in a spring landscape, with two unmoving lovers in a long embrace before they debate their love in octosyllabic quatrains in terms similar to Donne’s, but conclude, unlike his pair, by resuming ‘a moveless, silent peace’. The verbal similarities are such as to put beyond doubt that one poet had read the other’s work, and Donne’s closeness to a known source suggests he wrote first (Donne 1965: 259–65). There is, however, a crucial difference in tone in that Donne’s poem can be read not only as a celebration of the soul’s ability to ascend towards perfection but as a mannerly invitation to seduction: ‘small change’ would be observed if the lovers’ bodies were to be united in carnal love (Martin 2004). As to Wotton and to Goodyer, Donne wrote a verse epistle to Herbert at the siege of Juliers in 1610, confirming that they were all three in his poetic circle, though too concerned in worldly affairs to devote themselves in the same way to poetry. Identifying the probable contexts and recipients of Donne’s poems modifies his and his hagiographer Walton’s absolute distinction between rambling Jack the youthful author of erotica and the Doctor of Divinity devoting himself to sermons and hymns. The overlap and intermingling of categories is shown by poems associated with Sir Edward Herbert from 1610 to 1613. These might include ‘The Ecstasy’:8 Gardner (Donne 1965: 256–7) augments the close parallels with Herbert’s ‘Ode upon a question moved’ by noting Donne’s rare use of flower symbolism here and in ‘The Primrose’. To the latter’s title the 1635 second edition of Donne’s poems added ‘being at Montgomery Castle, upon the hill on which it is situate’; as Gardner (Donne 1965: 219, 255) observes, this is ‘too circumstantial not to be given credence’. Between ‘The Ecstasy’ and ‘The Primrose’ probably came the poem titled in the 1633 Poems ‘Good Friday, 1613. Riding westward’ (Donne 2008: 2, 102). We thus see a sequence of love poem–verse epistle–religious poem–love poem. We also have a picture of Donne circulating among his friends, repaying their hospitality with poetic currency. Donne and Jonson were members between about 1605 and 1615 of overlapping circles of acquaintances, largely comprising Inns of Court men, lawyers, parliamentarians, officers of government and court, men who appreciated wit and were capable of indulging in it themselves as a sideline. Both Donne and Jonson wrote epistles to Sir Henry Goodyer, for example, patron of Drayton, Gentleman of the Privy Chamber, Donne’s weekly correspondent, and entertainer at his country home of not only Donne and Drayton but also Jonson and Inigo Jones. Both Donne and Jonson were remembered among his circle of friends by Thomas Coryate (Bald 1970: 190–5). They include Christopher Brooke (addressee of Donne’s ‘Storm’ and ‘Calm’ and a verse

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letter), Hugh Holland (poet and, like Jonson, Old Westminsterian convert to Roman Catholicism), Inigo Jones, and two Inns of Court wits and MPs Richard Martin and John Hoskyns. The latter took a leading part in composing one of the century’s most popular poems on a response to the king’s wishes during the House of Commons debate on the Union of England and Scotland, ‘The Parliament Fart’.9 Towards the end of their lives, Donne and Jonson, when not at court, moved in largely different circles. Donne had among his acquaintance fellow-members of the Privy Council and other poet-clergymen such as Joseph Hall, Henry King, and George Herbert, while Jonson ended up in taverns (and, after a stroke in 1629, in bed) domineering over younger poets, his ‘sons’, who could tolerate his dogmatic assertions and rhodomontades. Donne seems to have bought from Jonson a copy of Nicholas Hill’s work on the soul Philosophia Epicurea, Democratica, Theophrastica, proposita simpliciter, non edocta (Paris, 1601). He heavily scored out Jonson’s name on the title page and covered it with a paper slip bearing his own signature (Targoff 2008: 7). So too he may have had Jonson in his sights when, in Satire II, he ridiculed those who professed playwriting: One (like a wretch, which at bar judged as dead, Yet prompts him which stands next, and cannot read, And saves his life) gives idiot actors means (Starving himself) to live by ‘his laboured scenes, As in some organ, puppets dance above And bellows pant below, which them do move.

Although it has been argued that this was written some four years before Jonson, having murdered the actor Gabriel Spencer, was saved from execution by reciting his neck-verse (Donne 1967: 127–8), it is difficult not to recall not only this event but Jonson’s lifelong disdain for playing and theatricality, his ambivalence towards the cony-catching literature of his time (Hanson 1998: 114–21), and, despite his theatrical successes, his hatred of what he termed ‘the loathèd stage’ in the ode he wrote on the occasion of the failure of his play The New Inn in 1629 (Jonson 1984: 204–9). One loyal ‘son’, James Howell, reported on a supper with Jonson in 1635 ‘that B[en] began to engross all the discourse, to vapour extremely of himself, and, by vilifying others, to magnify his own muse. T[om] Ca[rew] buzzed me in the ear that though Ben had barrelled up a great deal of knowledge, yet it seemed he had not read the Ethics, which, among other precepts of morality, forbid self-commendation, declaring it to be an ill-favoured solecism in good manners’ (Jonson 1925–52: XI, 429). Whereas Donne was regarded as a supreme preacher, Jonson did not achieve the universal literary dictatorship he would have liked: there were other gatherings of literary men without him in London in the 1620s: the playwright Philip Massinger, with his ‘Order of fancy’, and Edward Hyde, later earl of Clarendon, politician and historian; both had their circles, the latter’s including William Davenant and Thomas Carew (Hobbs 1992: 45, 100). And where Jonson was tolerated he was not given free rein

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if those present were more substantial men than his ‘sons’: at a gathering comprising ‘Sir John Suckling, Sir John Davies, Endymion Porter, Mr Hales of Eton, and Ben Jonson … Mr Hales … hearing Ben frequently reproaching him [Shakespeare] for the want of learning and ignorance of the ancients, told him at last, “That if Mr Shakespeare had not read the ancients, he had likewise not stolen anything from them (a fault that the other had made no conscience of)”’ (Miles 1986: 293, 262). Endymion Porter emphasised the difference in an epigram ‘Upon Ben Jonson and his zany, Tom Randolph’: But after times, with full consent, This truth will all acknowledge: Shakespeare and Ford from Heaven were sent, But Ben and Tom from college.10 (Miles 1986: 262)

The backhanded conclusion to Owen Felltham’s ‘To the Memory of immortal Ben’, was justified: But he Of whom I write this has prevented me, And boldly said so much in his own praise, No other pen need any trophy raise. (Jonson 1925–52: XI, 462)

Perhaps Jonson was wryly comparing his career as a would-be professional writer with that of Donne, whose verse its author regarded with studied indifference, as a private matter, complementary to his public life: Poetry, in this latter age, hath proved but a mean mistress to such as have wholly addicted themselves to her family. They who have but saluted her on the by, and now and then tendered their visits, she hath done much for, and advanced in the way of their own professions (both the law and the gospel) beyond all they could have hoped or done for themselves without her favour. (Jonson 1953: 51)

Poets, Patrons, and Publication Such members of the gentry were men whom Donne considered, like the recipients of his early verse letters, fellow-students, and young men about town, to be on his own social level: his relationship with later addressees of verse letters, funeral elegies, and epithalamia between 1607 and his ordination in 1615 is that of client to patron. Jonson was forced from the start to write for a living, a course which Donne, until he had spent his inheritance and forfeited his job, could disdain: as a student presuming on his own fine prospects, he asked in Satire II (20–1), ‘they who write to lords

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rewards to get, Are they not like singers at doors for meat?’ (He also sneers at ‘law practice for mere gain’, and in Satire I has the speaker portray himself as happily ‘consorted’ with books of theology, philosophy, political theory, history, and poetry – though the frivolous friend who lures him out into the town may well be a recognition of another side of the real Donne). Contemporary opinion was voiced by a friend of both Donne and Jonson, John Selden, in his Table-talk: ’Tis ridiculous for a lord to print verses; ’tis well enough to make them to please himself, but to make them public is foolish. If a man in a private chamber twirls his band-strings or plays with a rush to please himself, ’tis well enough; but if he should go into Fleet Street and sit upon a stall and twirl a band-string or play with a rush, then all the boys in the street would laugh at him. (Marotti 1995: 228)

When the need to pay debts forced Donne to crawl to the king’s favourite (the channel for most jobs and rewards), the soon to be disgraced earl of Somerset, he wrote to his close friend Henry Goodyer just before Christmas 1614: One thing more I must tell you, but so softly that I am loath to hear myself, and so softly that if that good lady [Bedford] were in the room with you and this letter, she might not hear. It is that I am brought to a necessity of printing my poems and addressing them to my Lord Chamberlain [Somerset]. This I mean to do forthwith, not for much public view, but at mine own cost, a few copies. I apprehend some incongruities in the resolution, and I know what I shall suffer from many interpretations, but I am at an end of much considering that; and if I were as startling [nervous] in that kind as ever I was, yet in this particular I am under an unescapable necessity … I must do this, as a valediction to the world, before I take orders. (Donne 1974: 196)

In the event, he escaped this indignity, his poems not being printed until 1633, after his death, and not from his own copies. Donne continued to write poems, but, like his earlier efforts, for transmission (and, almost unpreventably, circulation), only in manuscript. Even in this mode he for a time nursed the idea of restricting his output to the most useful recipient, Lady Bedford. When in 1609–10 his friend Henry Goodyer solicited complimentary verses for the countess of Huntingdon, whom Donne had known as Egerton’s stepdaughter, Elizabeth Stanley, he initially demurred: ‘I have these two reasons to decline it. That that knowledge that she hath of me was in the beginning of a graver course than that of poet, into which (that I may also keep my dignity) I would not seem to relapse. The Spanish proverb informs me that “He is a fool which cannot make one sonnet, and he is mad which makes two.”’ He then undermines his supposed disdain for poetry by admitting that ‘The other, stronger reason is my integrity to the other Countess … for her delight (since she descends to them) I had reserved not only all the verses which I should make, but all the thoughts of women’s worthiness’ (Donne 1974: 103–4). However, with typical inconstancy, he encloses verses to Lady Huntingdon (two verse epistles to her survive) as the ‘picture’ of Lady Bedford, to whom he later

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proposed the similar excuse that the others to whom he had written verses were ‘copies, not originals’. In 1612, Donne found that Lady Bedford was indeed offended by such disloyalty when he published the Anniversaries written for another patron, Sir Robert Drury (Donne 2008: 349–462). (Donne’s necessities had driven him, with some misgivings, to accept Drury’s offer to be his companion and secretary on a foreign tour.) Jonson was critical of the hyperbolic praise Donne bestowed on the young Elizabeth. Drummond of Hawthornden reported Jonson to have said ‘that Donne’s “Anniversary” was profane and full of blasphemies [and] that he told Mr Donne, if it had been written of the Virgin Mary, it had been something; to which [Donne] answered that he described the idea of a woman, and not as she was’ (Donaldson 1985: 596).11 Donne’s remorse was qualified: ‘Of my Anniversaries, the fault that I acknowledge in myself is to have descended to print anything in verse … I confess I wonder how I declined to it, and do not pardon myself ’ (Donne 1974: 255) – he regrets not the broken promise but the social descent. This was no eccentric prejudice: when in 1625 he acceded to Sir Robert Ker’s request for verses on the death of the marquess of Hamilton, disguising it as a ‘Hymn’ less inappropriate for a dean of St Paul’s to write, it was soon copied and circulated widely enough for the private newsletter writer John Chamberlain to observe the next month that ‘though they be witty, and reasonable well done, I could wish a man of his years and place to give over versifying’ (Donne 2008: II, 339). Indeed, ‘Upon the translation of the Psalms’ was embarrassingly obvious ammunition in his campaign for the deanship in 1621 (Bald 1970: 370–81) after Lady Pembroke’s death (God ‘hath translated these translators’, l. 53). She herself had sent the translation in hopeful tribute to Queen Elizabeth with an accompanying poem (Woudhuysen and Norbrook 1992: 131); in turn her son, the third earl of Pembroke, one of the most influential patrons in the land after Buckingham (whom Donne also courted) would have appreciated the tribute to his mother and famous uncle. Bald thinks it likely ‘that Donne had sedulously enlisted the aid of everyone who was capable of influencing the King in his favour’ (1970: 376). Jonson was held back by no such scruples as the churchman. He sought publication to augment his reputation and income. Unlike Shakespeare, he himself prepared his plays for the printers from Every Man out of his Humour in 1600 onward, ignoring any rights the players might have in the script, or, as with Sejanus, circumventing them by rewriting it so as to exclude his collaborator. As a writer of plays and masques, Jonson clearly understood the difference between the impermanence of performance and the durability of print. Like his old schoolmaster, William Camden, Jonson put his ‘Faith … in things.’ In his aspiration to a laureateship, he was the first English poet to take full advantage of the print medium to make durable, unchanging artifacts of his verse, editing two collections of his poems – Epigrammes and The Forrest – for inclusion in his 1616 Folio Workes. In publishing his plays and masques, he carefully altered performance scripts into artifacts. He did the same thing with his verse, frequently altering poems originally sent to individuals to make them appropriate

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for a general audience, both in his own time and thereafter, and stabilizing their public texts. For Jonson, even the pursuit of patronage – the most basic goal of the coterie poets with whom Donne was associated – could be accommodated within the print medium, as witness his Epigrammes and other tributes to the ‘great and good men: of his age’ (epistle dedicatory). Thoughout the medium of print, he was able to present patrons and prospective patrons not just to his age but to all time. (Pebworth 1989: 66; see also Loewenstein 2002)

Even Jonson’s ‘Charis’ poems, held in the nineteenth century to be autobiographical lyrics, are now best read not as charting the progress of a love affair but as charting ‘the progress of a story about that affair. Jonson is writing not only about the adventures of a lover, but also about the adventures of a poet; about the power of love and the power of poetry; and about the humorous, sublime, and troublesome ways in which those two great forces may tangle and intersect’ (Donaldson 1997: 150). When he claimed the status of classical authors, theologians, and the like by publishing selected plays and poems as The Works of Benjamin Jonson in 1616 (Loewenstein 2002: 182–97, 202–14), he was mocked for presumption, an attitude later embodied in Sir John Suckling’s ‘Session of the Poets’: The first that broke silence was good old Ben, Prepared before with canary wine, And he told them plainly, he deserved the bays, For his were called ‘works’, when others were but plays.

The status of both printing and poetry were thus contested: Drayton, in the general preface to his Poly-Olbion (1612), complains against the privileging of manuscript circulation: ‘Verses are wholly deduced [removed] to chambers, and nothing esteemed in this lunatic age but what is kept in cabinets, and must only pass by transcription.’ Donne, on the other hand, in a Latin poem to Dr Richard Andrews, who had punctiliously replaced a book borrowed from Donne and damaged by his children, warmly thanks him on the grounds that manuscripts are to be more greatly venerated. In contrast to Donne’s not wanting Lady Huntingdon to remember him as a poet, Jonson’s Epigram 10, ‘To My Lord Ignorant’, snaps ‘Thou call’st me poet as a term of shame: / But I have my revenge made in thy name’ (perhaps a riposte to Lord Rutland’s sarcastic accusation of his wife, ‘that she kept table to poets’, related to Drummond (Jonson 1925–52: I, 141)). The bleak truth for Donne was that, though Jack would be a gentleman, having destroyed his career in December 1601 by eloping with Anne More, he had to sing for his supper. The spendthrift Lady Bedford, leader of the queen’s ladies at court, revelling in prodigiously expensive masques, gorgeous clothes, and high living, patron of poets such as Samuel Daniel, Michael Drayton, and Ben Jonson, was a good prospect for a substantial handout. Thus he promised her that his last verses would be for her, his ‘Obsequies to the Lord Harington’ her brother (Donne 2008, II, 314), but alluded in the accompanying letter to ‘your noble brother’s fortune being yours’, and elicited

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an ‘offer to pay my debts’ before he entered holy orders. To his chagrin, he told Henry Goodyer in March 1615, she sent him only £30, far short of what he wanted, with the excuse that her immediate debts were ‘burdensome’, and a promise of good intentions ‘on all future emergent occasions’. Donne acknowledged her sincerity on both counts: apart from his having so trusted her earlier promise as to fix times with his creditors (Donne 1974: 218–19, 149), what really stung was her ‘suspicion of my calling, a better memory of my past life than I had thought her nobility could have admitted’. The would-be Doctor Donne was still haunted by Jack. We have seen how capable Donne was of evoking imaginary situations, so it is no surprise that poems associated with Lady Bedford are outstandingly skilful and inventive examples of their kind. Addressing love poems to a woman with whom no real erotic relationship can be envisaged is now a strange mode: in England it had been normalised at the court of Queen Elizabeth. That the central source of status, wealth, and power should be praised was to be expected; it is the terms in which the queen was presented, the idealising analogues and conceits that are remarkable. Just as the styles of royal portraiture were followed in paintings and engraving of non-royal subjects, so their literary equivalents were applied by Donne, Jonson, and a host of others to potential or actual patrons. There are multitudinous examples of courting the favour of the queen in the posture and with the images of Petrarch wooing Laura (see Wilson 1966: 239–55). Donne’s verse letters to ladies (Donne 2008: II, 205–72), mostly to Lady Bedford but also to Magdalen Herbert (for whom he also wrote the sequence of devotional sonnets, La Corona), to Lady Huntingdon, to the daughters of Sidney’s (later scandalously adulterous) Stella, to Lady Carey and Essex Rich, and to Lady Salisbury (sister of the also scandalous Frances Howard, countess of Essex and then of Somerset), all adopt a posture of humble devotion, praising, as such poems conventionally did, not just those qualities which the ruling class might be thought to need – prudence, insight, and so on – but their beauty, making them Neoplatonic types whose looks are the outward expression of inner goodness. The limited possibilities of the genre are suggested by the repetition of material from one author to another. Samuel Daniel, in ‘To the Lady Lucy, Countess of Bedford’, printed in 1603, lauded her as ‘So good, so fair; so fair, so good’, and praised her studiousness: ‘you run the rightest way’. In ‘To the Countess of Salisbury’, Donne praises her too as ‘Fair, great, and good’, and in ‘To the Countess of Bedford: honour is so sublime perfection’, he thus supports her religious conduct: ‘Go thither still; go the same way you went’. When Jonson wrote ‘To Lucy, Countess of Bedford, with Mr Donne’s Satires’, he punned on her name: Lucy, you brightness of our sphere, who are Life of the Muses’ day, their morning-star!

Donne too alludes, with a pious reservation, to the etymological significance of her name (‘To the Countess of Bedford’, 21): ‘But one, ’tis best light to contèmplate you’. Even Daniel’s unusual ‘clearness’ of her heart may also be a play on her name.

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But Donne ingeniously varies the routine, at least with Lady Bedford, drawing on his learning and imagination to adduce analogies for her excellences from the sun, religion, an epigram by Martial (on the bee), and a celebrated temple in ancient Rome that was built of translucent stone. Masquerading as a lower being addressing a higher in ‘Twickenham Garden’ (the countess’s current home county seat), he flatteringly laments the sin of carnal longing aroused by such beauty as hers: But oh, self-traitor! I do bring The spider love, which transubstantiates all, And can convert manna to gall, And that this place may thoroughly be thought True paradise, I have the serpent brought.

As in many of his poems, the tension between society’s laws and forbidden desire makes a little drama even of a poem suing for patronage. Other songs and sonnets, such as ‘The Fever’ and ‘The Relic’, may relate to Lucy Bedford. One of the most likely is ‘A Nocturnal upon St Lucy’s Day’, its seasonal setting functional, as in ‘Twickenham Garden’, but in tune with the mood. Lady Bedford was so seriously ill in 1612 that on 23 November she was described by Lord Dorset as ‘speechless, and … past all hopes’. The intensity of this poem’s language, which Marotti (1986: 233) compares to ‘the vivid hyperboles of the Anniversaries’, might seem, as it does there if misunderstood, to be inappropriate, but the sense of being ‘nothing’ which it so forcefully expresses usually related not to Donne’s wife (thought by some to be the subject) but to his lack of position in the world, as in a letter to Goodyer of September 1608: I would fain do something, but that I cannot tell what it is is no wonder. For to choose is to do, but to be no part of any body is to be nothing. At most, the greatest persons are but wens and excrescences, men of wit and delightful conversation [such as he could claim to be] but as moles for ornament, except they be so incorporated into the body of the world that they contribute something to the sustentation of the whole. (Donne 1974: 50–1)

With the countess all his worldly hopes of being something might die. Moreover, if Donne did not, for once, expect her to be able to read and reward the poem, that might well explain the focus on himself, even more intense than in ‘Twickenham Garden’, because more serious. Although Lucy Bedford may have been better by her name-day, 13 December, Donne could have anticipated it as an appropriate occasion for his lament. Panegyrics to patrons may now seem not just tedious but distasteful. Donne, Jonson, and most other poets of their time praised those they knew to be unworthy because there was no alternative for anyone who wished not just to rise in society but even to survive. Lady Bedford was interested in and capable of writing verse herself (see Donne 1978: 235–7), and might welcome some enhancement of her current

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image at court as an intriguer and extravagant pleasure-lover. But those with the power to assign the means of earning a living found it easy to keep petitioners at their mercy: as Robert Evans points out, the transaction was not one of guaranteed fairness; the supply of writers from the universities, expanded in the later sixteenth century to produce a literate clergy, far exceeded the available patronage. The very unreliability of patronage reinforced subservience, keeping people such as Donne and Jonson dangling in hope. Poetry was a central concern of poets, not those whose money and influence the poets wanted in exchange. Moreover, rivals were dependable in their hostility (Evans 1989: 29–33, 178). Nor was it only material reward that poets needed: Jonson was saved from hanging for homicide by being able to repeat the psalm verse requisite to prove his literacy, but when arraigned for his writings12 he depended on the favour of members of government and those who might influence them. After Eastward Ho his gratitude to James, Salisbury, Monteagle, Suffolk, and Aubigny was expressed in Epigrams, 35, 43, 60, 67, and 127. The incentive to keep in favour is made plain by the rumour that the prisoners ‘should then have their ears cut and noses’, so that his mother was ready to provide poison, he told Drummond, and kill herself with him (Jonson 1925–52: I, 140). Sheavyn (1967: 61) lists a couple of dozen writers of the period who suffered interference by the authorities. Without powerful protectors, Jonson would have been treated like the scholar of Merton College, Oxford, who in 1602 ‘was whipped in London and lost his ears in Oxford for libelling the Vice-Chancellor and the Council’ (Marotti 1995: 93). As Riggs puts it, after Jonson’s release from prison after The Isle of Dogs in 1597, he set his mind on acceptance as a man of letters, not a mere ‘playwright’ (his own derisory coinage for the lowly, ill-paid labour of a dramatist), ‘and patronage was the common denominator of all his new undertakings’ (Riggs 1989: 63). He took Every Man out of his Humour to a bookseller located, exceptionally, in Fleet Street, the main road between the City and the Inns of Court. He wrote poems to various noblemen and women, centring on the clan connected with Sir Philip Sidney, many of whose members were both patrons and writers: his brother, Sir Robert at Penshurst, his daughter the countess of Rutland, his nephew the earl of Pembroke, his niece Lady Wroth, his distant cousin Lucy Harington, countess of Bedford. Pembroke and Lady Bedford were generous patrons of poets such as the sonneteers Daniel and Drayton, and the pastoralist William Browne of Tavistock. In 1602 Thomas Overbury told the diarist John Manningham that ‘Ben Jonson the poet now lives upon one [Sir Robert] Townshend, and scorns the world’ (Riggs 1989: 92). He then made a better catch than this heir of a Norfolk squire in the person of Lord Aubigny, one of the six Gentlemen of the Bedchamber, and thus intimate with the king. For Lady Bedford and the queen, Jonson wrote court masques, and in dedicating his Epigrams to Lord Pembroke in 1612 as ‘the ripest of my work’ announced that he had risen clearly above the rank of playwright to that of man of letters, on familiar terms with the nobility, a status further enhanced by the almost unprecedented publication of them and choice plays in the grand folio of 1616. He was substantially rewarded, telling Drummond in 1619 that ‘every first day of the New Year he had £20 sent him from the Earl of

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Pembroke to buy books’ (Jonson 1925–52: I, 141). After the death of Salisbury, and temporary eclipse by the Howards and Somerset of the Pembroke–Lady Bedford faction, until they groomed and put before James’s eye young George Villiers (soon to be Buckingham), Jonson worked for Sir Walter Ralegh on the latter’s History of the World, and gained the position of tutor to his son Wat on a continental tour. So, despite Donne’s youthful scorn of poetic clientage and Jonson’s boast to Drummond that if made a churchman he would preach to the king, and ‘not flatter, though he saw death’ (Jonson 1925–52: I, 141), their urge to survive prevailed. The humiliation was covered by claiming a didactic role: in Essays in Divinity (Donne 1952: 34) Donne points out that ‘over-praising is a kind of libelling’. After three epigrams praising Salisbury’s virtues, Jonson places (prudently, for publication in 1612 after Salisbury’s decline and death) ‘To my Muse’, pointedly regretting his ‘fierce idolatry’ of ‘a worthless lord’ but in conclusion consoling himself that ‘Whoe’er is raised / For worth he has not, he is taxed, not praised’ (Epigrams, 43, 63–5). (He seems to have seen no irony in his complaint to Drummond that ‘Salisbury never cared for any man longer nor he could make use of him’ – exactly Jonson’s way with patrons.) In a commendatory poem of 1612 to a friend, the jurist John Selden (Underwood, 14), he admits that I have too oft preferred Men past their terms, and praised some names too much; But ’twas with purpose to have made them such.

However, this humanist precept of teaching by praising, in the hope that recipients would try to live up to the image made by the poet, and be shamed by publicly visible discrepancies, was effective more in saving the self-respect of poets than in preventing or reforming abuses of power. So desperate was Donne for employment that in 1613–14 he abased himself to Somerset, suing for any and every government job possibly available, whether ambassador to Venice or Clerk to the Privy Council or personal secretary. This last post was vacant because Somerset had contrived to get his then secretary Sir Thomas Overbury imprisoned in the Tower, so that he could not interfere with the countess of Essex’s scheme to divorce her husband and marry Somerset. Donne’s project for dedicating a collection of poems to the latter came to nothing, but he wrote a 235-line eclogue and epithalamion celebrating the marriage. Jonson provided a eulogy of ‘virtuous Somerset’ (Ungathered Verse, 18, excluded from his later collection, The Underwood), A Challenge at Tilt, and (to suit the taste of those honoured) the bawdy Irish Masque. In the latter he exhorted Frances Howard to ‘Outbe that Wife, in worth, thy friend did make’, referring to the popular poem by his friend Overbury, whom the Somersets were later convicted of murdering (but let off their sentences by King James). Jonson had been fortunate in arousing some feeling of affinity in James: apart from the former’s claim to Scots ancestry, both were irresponsible, scornful of the people, unashamedly lascivious, coarse, or downright filthy in their personal habits, and

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addicted to alcohol (Riggs 1989: 112, 207). And although Jonson, like Donne, gloried in being a self-confessed practising heterosexual, and denounced all other orientation, he brought himself to flatter the king’s physical attraction to young men with the sexual innuendo of the Porter’s invitation into Buckingham’s Burley-on-the-Hill in The Gypsies Metamorphosed (1621): ‘The house your bounty built, and still doth rear. … The master is your creature as the place … please you enter Him and his house, and search him to the centre.’ That earned Jonson £100, rather better than the £5 to be expected from playhouse or bookseller. To earn such rewards, he had to concur with ‘the half-baked whims of his capricious patrons’ (Miles 1990: 153), but also with central doctrines of royal power. From the start he deified James and Charles as God on earth, as in the courtier’ song of Pan’s Anniversary (1620): ‘by him we breathe, we live, / We move, we are’, reapplying the description of God in Acts 17:26–8. Donne as dean of St Paul’s had likewise to remember that he was put there to serve king and government: Jeanne Shami (Donne 1996: 24–35) has shown the differences between a sermon prepared by Donne for posthumous publication and the more circumspect version he actually delivered from the pulpit and then sent to the king to be vetted before printing (which, even so, did not take place). Donne managed his performance as the reformed doctor at St Paul’s as a preacher who could ‘through the eyes the melting heart distil’, including his final appearance in the pulpit as a dying man preaching on death, with the skill of an actor-manager. Ben Jonson in the end played a less admired part. On this praiser in his poems to patrons of all the traditional virtues of temperance, prudence, fortitude, and so on, Drummond’s verdict, after days of conversation, is borne out by Jonson’s life: He is a great lover and praiser of himself, a contemner and scorner of others; given rather to lose a friend than a jest [a joke Jonson had made of himself as ‘Horace’ in Poetaster 4.3]; jealous of every word and action of those about him (especially after drink, which is one of the elements in which he liveth) … For any religion, as being versed in both. Interpreteth best sayings and deeds often to the worst. Oppressed with fantasy, which hath ever mastered his reason (a general disease in many poets). His inventions are smooth and easy, but above all he excelleth in a translation. (Jonson 1925–52: I, 151)

In his strenuous self-assertion and competitive denigration of others, he was perhaps over-compensating for the humble occupation of his stepfather, which dogged him till the end. Henslowe wrote to his partner Edward Alleyn that ‘Gabriel [Spencer is] slain in Hoxton Fields … by the hands of Benjamin Jonson, bricklayer’ (Jonson 1925–52: I, 164) – not ‘fellow-actor and poet’. His self-praise and sneering at others inevitably prompted reminders of bricklaying from Dekker in Satiromastix (1601), a Paul’s Cross preacher in 1612 (Riggs 1989: 195), a courtier, Nathaniel Brent, in 1618 (Jonson 1925–52: X, 576–7), and Alexander Gill in 1632 (Jonson 1925–52: XI, 348). Though buried in Westminster Abbey, that was because he lived in the precinct; though followed to his grave by a throng of nobility and gentry, he had died almost destitute; writer of gracious epitaphs, his was simply ‘O rare Ben Jonson’ – and that

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possibly the mason’s error for ‘Orare …’, ‘Pray for …’. Donne arranged his own commemoration in inscription, effigy, and the publication of his sermons, perhaps even Walton’s biography emphasising the Christian, not the poet. As writer of the play of his own life, he rivalled Jonson’s creations for the theatre and Banqueting House. Jonson in his poems bore the standard for the classicism that after the Restoration was to dominate English writing for a century. Donne’s came into their own with the twentieth century’s preference for the innovator and inventor, evoker not of communal ideals but individual psychology. Both still fascinate as skilled writers and for the way they interacted as such with a society so foreign to the twenty-first century, yet sharing the human strengths and failings they brought vividly to life.

Notes This essay was updated by the editor for the second edition of these volumes. 1 Jonson, Sejanus, 1605, sig. A4r. 2 For the political context of the Satires and the way they differ from those contemporary poems that adopted the persona of a twisted and disappointed ‘satyr’, see Wiggins 2000: 25–59. 3 Dennis Flynn has advanced the intriguing hypothesis (which hangs primarily on identifying the names ‘Donnes’ and ‘Downes’ with Donne) that only three months after matriculating from Hart Hall, Oxford, the 12-yearold Donne was taken to Paris in the ambassadorial train of the Roman Catholic Henry Stanley, fourth earl of Derby, in order to avoid his being made to swear to the articles of the Church of England (Flynn 1995). However, such a short stay at Oxford would have made unlikely the gathering of the wide range of acquaintance he is supposed by others to have made there, and he shared his exact name, let alone ‘Downes’, with other recusants (Bald 1970: 23). Sir Richard Baker, who shared rooms at Donne’s Oxford college with their friend in common Henry Wotton, and then read law in London, says that Donne, ‘leaving Oxford, lived at the Inns of Court’, implying no interval. 4 Conversely, a later Donne applies the language and ideas of physical human love to religion, but in deep seriousness. The educated Christian reader knew the biblical Song of Songs, on whose originally erotic purpose

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had been imposed a religious reading as the courtship of Christ and his bride, the universal church, for instance of S. of S. 5:2: ‘Open to me, my sister, my love, my dove, my undefiled’. Donne’s more violent religious eroticism was to be found in the Spanish Counter-Reformation poet St John of the Cross. A letter of about 1600, probably written to Sir Henry Wotton, gives a good idea of Donne’s mixture of pride and diffidence as he sends his friend some of his ‘Paradoxes’ (Donne 2002: 5–6). That Lady Bedford saw at least one of the Holy Sonnets is indicated by the opening of her elegy on Cecilia Bulstrode: ‘Death, be not proud’ (Donne 1978: 235–7). Wotton’s own freer morality is suggested by an anecdote told by Jonson to Drummond: ‘Sir Henry Wotton, before His Majesty’s going to England, being disguised at Leith [as ‘Octavio Baldi’; sent in 1602 via Norway by the duke of Florence to warn James of assassination plot (see Wotton 1907: I, 40– 2)], on Sunday when all the rest were at church, being interrupted of his occupation by another wench who came in at the door, cried out “Pox on thee, for thou hast hindered the procreation of a child!” and betrayed himself ’ (HS 1.146). A verbal link occurs in the opening of what is evidently one of Donne’s Tuesday letters from Mitcham to Henry Goodyer (Donne 1974: 11), dated merely ‘9 October’, but

Poets, Friends, and Patrons: Donne and Jonson falling on a Tuesday in 1610 (its other echoes of ‘To Sir Edward Herbert at Juliers’, 1610, and Ignatius his Conclave, written in 1610, supporting this year): ‘I make account that this writing of letters, when it is with any seriousness, is a kind of ecstasy, and a departure and secession and suspension of the soul, which doth then communicate itself to two bodies.’ 9 See Marotti 1995: 93, 127–8. One of the longer versions is printed from manuscripts in Whitlock 1982: 288–92. 10 Shakespeare himself was alleged to have exacted a jest from this too in the anonymous Shakespeare’s Jests, or, The Jubilee Jester (c.1769): ‘Shakespeare seeing Jonson in a necessary-

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house with a book in his hand, reading it very attentively, said he was sorry his memory was so bad that he could not shite without a book’ (Miles 1986: 169). For the critical debate over this disagreement, see Targoff 2008: 87 and 195–6. He was imprisoned for The Isle of Dogs and Eastward Ho in 1597 and 1605; cited before the Lord Chief Justice for Poetaster, 1601; summoned before the Privy Council for Sejanus, 1603; ‘accused’ for The Devil is an Ass, 1616; examined by the Privy Council for alleged verses of his on Buckingham’s death, 1628; and cited before the Court of High Commission for The Magnetic Lady, 1632.

References and Further Reading Bald, R. C. (1959). Donne and the Drurys. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bald, R. C. (1970). John Donne: A Life. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Bates, Catherine (1992). The Rhetoric of Courtship in Elizabethan Language and Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Beal, John (2002). ‘John Donne and the circulation of manuscripts’. In J. Barnard, and D. F. McKenzie (eds.), The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain (vol. 4, pp. 122–6). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bradley J. F. and J. Q. Adams (1922). The Jonson Allusion Book: A Collection of Allusions to Ben Jonson from 1597 to 1700. New Haven: Yale University Press Brennan, Michael G. (1988). Literary Patronage in the English Renaissance. London: Routledge. Carew, Thomas (1949). The Poems, with his Masque, ‘Coelum Britannicum’, ed. Rhodes Dunlap. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Carey, John (1986). John Donne: Life, Mind and Art. London: Faber & Faber. Cedric, C. B. (2008). ‘Presence, obligation and memory in John Donne’s texts for the countess of Bedford.’ Renaissance Studies, 22/1, 63– 85. Colclough, David (ed.) (2003). John Donne’s Professional Lives. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer.

Cummings, B. (2002). The Literary Culture of the Reformation: Grammar and Grace. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Donaldson, Ian (ed.) (1985). Ben Jonson. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Donaldson, Ian (1997). Jonson’s Magic Houses: Essays in Interpretation. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Donaldson, Ian (2001). ‘Perishing and surviving: the poetry of Donne and Jonson’. Essays in Criticism, 51, 68–85. Donne, John (1952). Essays in Divinity, ed. E. M. Simpson. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Donne, John (1965). The Elegies and The Songs and Sonnets, ed. Helen Gardner. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Donne, John (1967). John Donne. The Satires, Epigrams and Verse Letters, ed. W. Milgate: Oxford: Clarendon Press. Donne, John (1974). Letters to Severall Persons of Honour (1651) [facsimile]. Hildesheim: Georg Olms. Donne, John (1978). The Epithalamions, Anniversaries and Epicedes, ed. W. Milgate. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Donne, John (1984). Biathanatos, ed. E. W. Sullivan. Newark: University of Delaware Press. Donne, John (1990). John Donne [the poems with a selection of the prose], ed. John Carey. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Donne, John (1996). John Donne’s 1622 Gunpowder Plot Sermon: A Parallel-Text Edition, ed. Jeanne Shami. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Donne, John (2002). Selected Letters, ed. P. M. Oliver. Manchester: Fyfield Books. Donne, John (2008). The Poems of John Donne, ed. Robin Robbins, 2 vols. Harlow: Longman. Dutton, Richard (2000). Licensing, Censorship, and Authorship in Early Modern England. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Evans, Robert C. (1989). Ben Jonson and the Poetics of Patronage. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University. Press. Flynn, Dennis (1988). ‘ “Awry and squint”: the dating of Donne’s Holy Sonnets’. John Donne Journal, 7, 35–46. Flynn, Dennis (1995). John Donne and the Ancient Catholic Nobility. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Guibbory, Achsah (1990). ‘ “Oh, let mee not serve so”: the politics of love in Donne’s Elegies’. ELH, 57, 811–33. Guibbory, Achsah (ed.) (2006). The Cambridge Companion to John Donne. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hanson, Elizabeth (1998). Discovering the Subject in Renaissance England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Harp, Richard and Stanley Stewart, (eds.) (2000). The Cambridge Companion to Ben Jonson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hobbs, Mary (1992). Early Seventeenth Century Verse Miscellany Manuscripts. Aldershot: Scolar Press. Jonson, Ben (1925–52). The Works, ed. C. H. Herford, Percy Simpson, and E. Simpson. 11 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Jonson, Ben (1953). Timber; or, Discoveries, ed. R. S. Walker. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Jonson, Ben (1975). Poems, ed. Ian Donaldson. London: Oxford University Press. Jonson, Ben (1984). The New Inn, ed. Michael Hattaway. Manchester: Manchester University Press. King, Henry (1965). The Poems, ed. Margaret Crum. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Lewalski, Barbara K. (1973). Donne’s Anniversaries and the Poetry of Praise: The Creation of a Symbolic Mode. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Loewenstein, Joseph (2002). Ben Jonson and Possessive Authorship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Love, Harold (1993). Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England. Oxford: Clarendon Press. McClung, W. A. (1977). The Country House in English Renaissance Poetry. Berkeley: University of California Press. McEuen, Kathryn (1968). Classical Influences Upon the Tribe of Ben. New York: Octagon Books. Marotti, Arthur F. (1986). John Donne, Coterie Poet. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Marotti, Arthur F. (1995). Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Marotti, Arthur F. (2005). Religious Ideology and Cultural Fantasy: Catholic and Anti-Catholic Discourses in Early Modern England. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Martin, Catherine Gimelli (2004). ‘The erotology of Donne’s “Extasie” and the secret history of voluptuous rationalism’. Studies in English Literature 1500–1900, 44, 121–47. Martindale, Joanna (1993). ‘The best master of virtue and wisdom: the Horace of Ben Jonson and his heirs’. In C. Martindale and D. Hopkins (eds.), Horace Made New: Horatian Influences on British Writing from the Renaissance to the Twentieth Century (pp. 50–85). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. May, Steven W. (1991). The Elizabethan Courtier Poets: The Poems and their Contexts. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. Miles, Rosalind (1986). Ben Jonson: His Life and Work. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Miles, Rosalind (1990). Ben Jonson, his Craft and Art. London: Routledge. Montrose, L. A. (1977). ‘Celebration and insinuation: Sir Philip Sidney and the motives of Elizabethan courtship’, Renaissance Drama, 8, 3–35. Mueller, Janel (1993). ‘Troping Utopia: Donne’s brief for lesbianism’. In J. G. Turner (ed.), Sexuality and Gender in Early Modern Europe (pp. 182– 207). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Norbrook, David (1990). ‘The monarchy of wit and the republic of letters’. In Elizabeth D. Harvey and Katherine Eiseaman Maus (eds.), Soliciting Interpretation: Literary Theory and Seventeenth-Century English Poetry (pp. 3–36). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Poets, Friends, and Patrons: Donne and Jonson Osborn, Louise Brown (1937). The Life, Letters, and Writings of John Hoskyns 1566–1638. New Haven: Yale University Press. Pask, Kevin (1996). The Emergence of the English Author: Scripting the Life of the Poet in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Patterson, Annabel H. (1984). Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Pebworth, Ted-Larry (1989). ‘John Donne, coterie poetry, and the text as performance.’ Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 29/1, 61–75. Peterson, R. S. (1981). Imitation and Praise in the Poems of Ben Jonson. New Haven: Yale University Press. Riggs, David (1989). Ben Jonson: A Life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Robbins, Rossell Hope (1952) (ed.), Secular Lyrics of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Saunders, Ben (2006). Desiring Donne: Poetry, Sexuality, Interpretation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sharpe, Kevin (1987). Criticism and Compliment: The Politics of Literature in the England of Charles I. Cambridge University Press.

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Sheavyn, Phoebe (1967). The Literary Profession in the Elizabethan Age, rev. J. W. Saunders, 2nd edn. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Simpson, Evelyn M. (1948). A Study of the Prose Works of John Donne, 2nd edn. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Smith, Barbara. (1995). The Women of Ben Jonson’s Poetry: Female Representations in the Non-Dramatic Verse. Aldershot: Scolar Press. Summers, Joseph H. (1970). The Heirs of Donne and Jonson. London: Chatto & Windus. Targoff, Ramie (2008). John Donne, Body and Soul. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Whitlock, Baird W. (1982). John Hoskyns, Serjeantat-Law. Washington, DC: University Press of America. Wiggins, Peter DeSa. (2000). Donne, Castiglione, and the Poetry of Courtliness. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Wilson, Elkin Calhoun (1966). England’s Eliza. London: Frank Cass. Wotton, Henry (1907). The Life and Letters of Sir Henry Wotton, ed. Logan Pearsall Smith. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Woudhuysen, H. R. and David Norbrook (eds.) (1992). The Penguin Book of Renaissance Verse: 1509–1659. Penguin Press, no. 31. London: Allen Lane.

16

Law: Poetry and Jurisdiction Bradin Cormack

In his Defence of Poesy (c.1580; printed 1595) Sir Philip Sidney defines the truth and thus use value of literary fiction as the product of a kind of imaginative suspension. ‘What child is there’, he rhetorically asks, ‘that coming to a play and seeing “Thebes” written in great letters upon an old door doth believe that it is Thebes?’ Since poetic fiction presents things ‘not affirmatively but allegorically and figuratively written’, it follows that only those spectators or readers who come to poetry on its own terms will be able to determine its particular mode of truth-telling: ‘looking but for fiction, they shall use the narration but as an imaginative ground-plot of a profitable invention’, he posits.1 A ground-plot is a foundation or plan in outline, and invention is a term from classical rhetoric (Lat. inventio) for the discovery of where a persuasive argument for some position lies. In the idea of an imaginary foundation, Sidney is thus associating the reading and reception of poetry with its creation: just as a poetic fiction constructs its narrative argument from a hypothetical starting point, so the reader is released by that hypothesis into a parallel process of constructing, up from the fiction, the invention or thought experience that issues from poetry and can be said to define its value. Poetic fiction is a framework within which to discover ways of apprehending experience that might otherwise evade you. At this point in the Defence Sidney makes a highly tactical comparison by turning, as one critic has noted (Eden 1986: 1), to English common law: But hereto is replied, that the poets give names to men they write of, which argueth a conceit of an actual truth, and so, not being true, proves a falsehood. And doth the lawyer lie then, when under the names of ‘John of the Stile’ and ‘John of the Nokes’ he puts his case. (cit. Alexander 2004: 35)

Unlike modern law’s John or Jane Doe (fictive names that serve to protect the identity of parties in a real case), John of the Stile and John of the Nokes were names given to fictive persons as deployed in a genre of thought experiment whose purpose was to

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clarify a legal problem. To ‘put’ a case is to lay out a set of hypothetical circumstances in order to test their legal implications. Lawyers used this kind of experiment both in the courtroom, where they might put forward fictive cases as comparisons for the one being tried, and in their learning exercises or moots at the four Inns of Court (Inner Temple, Middle Temple, Lincoln’s Inn, Gray’s Inn), the common lawyers’ institutional home and the centre of legal education in England. A moot was a formal exercise in legal pleading in which, before the gathered members of an inn, a lawyer considered a problem as given by a set of hypothetical facts that, taken together, issued in some legal question to be put into conceptual order and so resolved (see Baker and Thorne 1990). As Karen Cunningham (2007) has argued, the hypothetical ‘facts’ in the moot are thus closely analogous to the imagined facts that, in literary fictions, generate emplotted situations requiring narrative resolution. Sidney’s comparison of law and poetry points, then, not just to the shared use of fictive names across disciplines, but to a whole method for analysing experience. The method’s end, furthermore, whether in law or the literary arts, was often less to generate an answer than to put on display the mind’s capacity to see, among all possible moves, where an answer to a complex problem might lie. In this way, the fictive hypothesis could be said to guide the hearer’s mind as it confronted some question of relevance to the world, before exiting the hypothesis (and the period of suspension therein granted), so as to decide the question in light of its expanded conceptualisation. Mooting is defended along just these lines in The Misfortunes of Arthur, a play written by Thomas Hughes and other members of Gray’s Inn, and presented to Queen Elizabeth in 1588, probably as a post facto justification for the 1587 execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, and as a warning about the ongoing danger of Spanish Catholicism. A chronicle history on King Arthur that combines native and Senecan elements, the play begins with an introductory stage debate between the Muses, who speak on behalf of poetic eloquence and the arts of language, and the common lawyers, who speak on behalf of law. The lawyers defend their linguistic practice as one that, weighing ‘with steady and indifferent hand / Each word of law’, in effect makes civil life possible, protecting the ‘Prerogative of Prince, respect to Peers, / The Commons liberty, and each mans right’ even as it suppresses ‘mutin[ous] force, and practic[al] fraud’ (‘Introduction’, 75–90).2 Answering the Muses’ argument that mooting uselessly generates ‘points strange, and doubts / Still argued but never yet agreed’, the lawyers defend the apparently recondite exercise by calling attention to the instrumental force of increasing doubt within the appropriate sphere: ‘One doubt in moots by argument increased / Clears many doubts, experience doth object’ (26–7). So the argument might go, too, on behalf of reading poems or plays, or of liberal education generally. In fact, against the Muses’ efforts to dismiss the law as crabbed ineloquence, the gentlemen of Gray’s Inn insist that it is ‘slander’ to say that lawyers have banished the ‘ornaments of knowledge [or] of tongues’, since their law allows ‘intercourse’ with the Muses and their ‘foreign freight’, without, however, ever rendering ‘homage nor acknowledgment / Such as of Subject’s allegiance doth require’ (92–8). According to this nice distinction, the law is sovereign in a way analogous to

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a state embedded in a global economy of other sovereign states. If, on the one hand, law and poetry operate in separate spheres, with the law demanding its ‘Subject’s allegiance’ and poetry implicitly demanding the same, the ornaments of knowing and of speaking across field are nevertheless one. When Sidney conflates legal and poetic hypothesis, he is making much the same point, from outside the law and now on behalf of poetry, rather than its sister art. Understood as a comment on discursive method, Sidney’s legal move in the Defence is superbly tactical because law, then as now, was a serious and paradigmatically profitable way to spend one’s time – just the kind of work, in contrast to poetry, that an ambitious parent or guardian might want a ‘child’ to take up. Even the law, Sidney avers, indulges the kind of thinking for which poets and writers for the stage are condemned. In a lovely doubling back of the argument, Sidney thus uses poetry to cast the fiction-making at law in high relief, even as law’s sanctioned fictions then work to authorise poetry’s unsanctioned ones. Especially when read against the claims made for the law by the lawyers at Gray’s Inn, Sidney’s witty analogy nicely exemplifies the point that the encounter between early modern law and literature derived its character as much from the complexity of law and legal thinking as from anything that imaginative literature might do to the law. This essay follows Sidney’s lead by offering, in place of a survey of early modern literature’s attention to the law, some further frames for thinking about the continuity between legal and literary thinking, legal and literary textuality, and legal and literary authority. The essay is in two parts: after some introductory remarks about the formal life of jurisprudential activity and the general shape of imaginative literature’s encounter with law, I offer, more speculatively, three readings as cases specifically of the production of literary authority in relation to the authority of law.

Law as Practice and Jurisdiction For the English sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, we will do best to characterise law as a complex set of related social and cultural functions. Then as now, law was first and foremost a practical activity undertaken by a range of institutional actors – judges, lawyers, justices of the peace (inferior magistrates appointed at the local level), sheriffs, bailiffs, jailers, jurors, clerks, scriveners – at all levels of society for the ordering of that society. Law was also a body of doctrine, of rules and norms that shaped political and social life and helped produce the individual’s identity as subject and social actor. As mediated through institutional practice, furthermore, the law was both worldly ideal – the utopian promise of justice – and, just as dramatically, the image of justice’s only ever imperfect instantiation in the historical here and now. In a yet different register, the law was a profession, one of the main routes to social and political advancement. For that reason it was both an important site of nationalism, with the lawyer here taking the role of protector of English liberty and identity, and a lightning rod for social critique and social satire, with the lawyer there taking the role of self-interested scoundrel. (The debate that introduces The Misfortunes of Arthur

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exemplifies both attitudes.) As a discipline, finally, law – along with theology, medicine, and, increasingly, natural philosophy – was one of the learned or bookish disciplines, a knowledge form whose textual method and transmission were essential to its identity as knowledge. Early modern poets and dramatists correspondingly represented law as image, doctrine, practice, institution, and discipline. In making their fictions, writers went to the law, first, as a site of unusual importance for the social production of meaning. This quality of literary production is easily grasped, for example, in the Renaissance stage’s extensive use of trials for dramaturgical effect, whether in courtroom scenes (e.g. The Winter’s Tale, Volpone, or The White Devil) or in scenes of judgment that simulate or even parody the courtroom (e.g. King Lear, The Cure for a Cuckold). The trial scene is dramatically effective, because, independent of whether it is shown to uphold justice or pervert justice, it stands always as a forceful instance of human activity in the process of making meanings that have a measurable effect in the world. Literature’s debt to law as a social phenomenon is similarly indexed by drama’s broad thematic attention to law, whether in relation to dynastic rule and political constitutionality, to the legal aspects of property, marriage, and inheritance, or to questions of debt and the place of contract in commercial exchange and the regulation of labour. So represented, the law stands as a social practice and framework that either produces good order or, in a satirical mode, dramatically undermines it. But even more importantly, it stands for a conspicuously modern mode of figuring identities within the rapidly differentiating culture and economy. The inhabitants of Tudor and Stuart England were haunted by law’s power and tormented by its constraints, but they were also absorbed, prodded, and excited by its possibilities. The drama of the period is peppered with law in part because post-Reformation England was itself awash in litigation, suffused by legality as the most important field for producing, naming, and regulating human relations. At a second level, the law presented itself to writers of imaginative literature as institutional knowledge and as a useful example of institutional authority. The case of drama is again suggestive. On the one hand, the lawyers and law students at the Inns of Court were powerful forces for early modern drama, acting both as sponsors of sometimes highly political performances within the Inns of Court and at the royal court, and as an important audience for the commercial theatre. The plays and masques that the common lawyers included as part of their holiday celebrations at the Inns (e.g. Gorboduc, Inner Temple, 1561–2; The Comedy of Errors, Gray’s Inn, 1594–5) or had produced for the monarch (e.g. The Misfortunes of Arthur, 1588; The Triumph of Peace, 1634) functioned not only as entertainments, but, especially during times of heightened political tension, as occasions for the lawyers to offer counsel, to celebrate the common law as a kind of knowledge that sustained the polity, and to advertise the lawyers’ own special authority as guardians of that law and polity (see Raffield 2004: 84–156; Winston 2005). If the lawyers used drama instrumentally to identify themselves as professionals uniquely capable of advising the royal court, writers of imaginative literature con-

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versely found in law an order of knowledge useful for their own poetic making, exploiting the example of legal method and legal epistemology in order to speak more effectively to their audiences. Thus playwrights looked, for example, to classical legal rhetoric for the shape of argumentation on both sides of the question (in utramque partem), a dialogic mode deployed on the English stage in the representation of characters’ opposing positions on some issue central to the plot (Altman 1978). Playwrights were equally energised by the legal-rhetorical concept of equity, the interpretative principle that, in the interest of justice, relaxes a strict rule in light of the particular circumstances in which an action took place or a written statute was to be applied. In equity, writers correspondingly found a model for the kind of judgment that a play or poem encourages when it presents a fictive world rich in particulars as the appropriate context for evaluating behaviour or norms (Eden 1986: 25–61). Alongside these more general imports from law and legal rhetoric, the more specialised side of English law had a similarly foundational impact on the theatre. For example, the common law’s increasingly complex doctrines for attributing intention to an agent involved in voluntary or accidental homicide, say, or in a contractual promise, provided playwrights with a powerful instrument to conceptualise action and intention on the stage (Wilson 2000). Similarly, playwrights discovered in the common law’s evolving norms for the evaluation of circumstantial evidence new ways of making mimetically convincing plots and compelling character, with the play audience taking the place of a jury in detecting the hidden causes and consequences of the action unfolding before them (Hutson 2007). In addition to such epistemological frames for representing action and character, writers of imaginative fiction found in law, too, a local and rapidly developing textuality useful for the articulation of their own textual authority as writers. The genre of the legal report is particularly useful as an indicator of the changing textual culture in English law. The common law was not codified, finding expression, instead, in the judges’ legal decisions and, most importantly, in the culture of professional learning at the Inns through which the law was learned, guarded, and transmitted. But the sixteenth century was a period in which, as a result of expanding litigation, lawyers and their clients came increasingly to feel the need for greater certainty about what to expect in a case than this system could provide. In light of this need, lawyers like Edmund Plowden, in the two parts of his Commentaries (1571, 1579), and, even more importantly, Sir Edward Coke, in his several volumes of Reports (1600–16), found an eager print market for carefully prepared collections of reports on recent cases in the common-law courts. These became foundational books. Coke compiled his volumes while he was Attorney General and Chief Justice first of Common Pleas and then of King’s Bench (the two principal central courts of common law). Of his texts, Sir Francis Bacon went so far as to assert, ‘Had it not been for [Coke’s] Reports, the law by this time had been almost like a ship without ballast.’3 Bacon’s evaluation reflects the fact that these were reports that, although few in number in comparison to the vast number of cases heard, could be received by the legal community as authorita-

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tive examples of the common law in action. The legal historian J. H. Baker notes that the case report had traditionally been more a professional instrument than a repository of legal principles per se – a guide not to legal precedent, but rather to how a lawyer might best approach a question when pleading the case: the decision, if reported at all, was to that extent irrelevant to the genre. As distinct from these older reports, Baker shows, Plowden and then Coke were highly selective in their approach, including only cases in which a decision had been taken by the court, and then shaping their narrative accounts of those cases in such a way as to make them authoritative guides to the unwritten law, as that had been expressed in the arguments on both sides of the question and in the legal decision itself (Baker 2000: 158–64). Coke’s and Plowden’s renovation of the older textual form they inherited is important, because it emblematised, and even facilitated, a fundamental shift in the nature of the common law, which saw the locus of its authority move from ‘doctrine (or common learning) to jurisprudence (or judge-made law)’ (Baker 1985: 59). Put another way, the early modern period is one in which a legal authority preserved by the common lawyers as specialised guild knowledge was giving way to a new kind of authority that, evolving case by decided case, could be located on the page and preserved as such in books. The cultural impact of these changes in the authority of legal reporting (and, relatedly, of the expanding market for legal treatises directed to professional lawyers, justices of peace, and laypersons) cannot be overestimated. As one of the most consequential cultures of writing and written interpretation in postReformation England, the law functioned as a body of writing both against which to measure the claims of imaginative literature and on which to model the authority towards which imaginative literature might aspire. In this period, literature and law were friendly antagonists, twinned experiments in the textual adjudication of experience and twinned expressions of a social system in which, as one critic has urged for post-Reformation writing, textual interpretation was increasingly understood as producing the very authority it also indexed (Weimann 1996). One further point is relevant for how writers of imaginative literature engaged law as contemporary social practice. A still under-appreciated indicator of law’s complex meaning for the broader culture is that English law was anything but single even in its most specialised aspect as a source for rules and norms. Against the image of law as order of discourse that is, as it were, always already effective in its normativising and disciplinary organisation of experience, a number of social historians describe law as being shaped, bottom-up, by the contestatory practices of legal actors at the local and central levels, and by the interaction among different kinds of legal forums as these managed the business brought before them (e.g. Hindle 2000; Stretton 1998; Wrightson 1980). Seen from the ground, that is, early modern law was a complex matrix of plural laws still in formation, a messy complex of multiple, overlapping, and sometimes competing jurisdictional spheres, each one potentially the source of an organising norm. English law was not so much Law as it was local law or central law, spiritual law or temporal law, common law or the ius

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commune (the combined Roman canon and civil laws, as these were used in English ecclesiastical courts, in some of the courts of equity, including Chancery, and in the Admiralty courts).4 If law in the early modern imagination was always a practice, it was also always a jurisdiction, a delimited sphere of practice among other such spheres. The cultural implications of this fundamental legal principle are worth pausing over. Jurisdiction is a formal framework for jurisprudential activity. But it matters for law’s substantive encounter with human experience because it shapes what the law is able or willing to see. In a series of important studies on the culture of medieval and early modern law, the legal theorist Peter Goodrich has focused attention on the ‘minor jurisdictions’ against which English common law defined itself in the ongoing historical process that eventually brought it to dominance as national law (e.g. Goodrich 1990: 15–52). In doing so, he has been particularly interested in excavating a law and jurisdiction more adequate to love, and to the idea of an intimate public space, than are the jurisdictions of state and church (Goodrich 1996, 2007). In this provocative understanding of law, jurisdictional plurality allows for a legal conceptualisation of areas of experience that might otherwise be excluded from the purview of law more narrowly conceived. So understood, jurisdiction promises an expanded encounter between the worlds of law and of human experience. For this reason, early modern writers found in jurisdiction a highly useful conceptual instrument for theorising authority in the social sphere. As a principle fundamental to law’s operation, jurisdiction was of interest, first, because it makes clear how little given the law is, and how far law’s authority emerges as a function of legal practice (Cormack 2007). Of equal interest to literary writers was the impact of jurisdiction on the idea of literature itself. Because jurisdiction is itself a mode of distribution – the law’s way of marking authority as a consequence of limits and delimitations – the concept of jurisdiction helped writers of imaginative literature test the authority of their own texts against the ‘real’ authority of the state. As we have seen in Sidney’s sense that a playwright’s fictions produce knowledge within a system analogous to the law’s system, or in the Gray’s Inn lawyers’ sense that law must not do ‘homage’ to the literary muses as to a foreign power, the authority of law amplifies the fact that literature, too, has authority in its sphere. Jurisdictionally speaking, poetry is not so much subordinate to power as parallel to it. The second part of this essay extends this last point by treating, rather more speculatively, three moments in the jurisdictional encounter between legal discourse and its literary twin. These cases – a few scenes from Ben Jonson’s Poetaster, a poem by Shakespeare, and a phrase from Thomas More’s Utopia – exemplify some of the ways in which writers of imaginative literature drew on law in order to define the peculiar authority of their own language. In each instance, the text exploits small turns in language, and small shifts in tone or register, to draw the reader into a semi-technical sphere of law, which then doubles back to charge the literary environment and thereby bring the technical and the non-technical into an intimate encounter.

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Poetry and Jurisdiction: Jonson, Shakespeare, More For Ben Jonson in Poetaster, the law stands professionally and textually against the work of poetry, while simultaneously making visible poetry’s special authority as a textual practice. First performed in 1601 and subsequently printed in a 1602 quarto and the 1616 folio, the play represents the literary culture and literary authority of classical Rome through two interrelated plots, each culminating in a legal judgment expressive of the power of the state. The first plot purports to explain the cause of Ovid’s historic exile from Rome to the Black Sea, and reaches its climax in a banquet scene in which Ovid and his friends impersonate the gods. The emperor Augustus intrudes on the banquet and, taking it for blasphemy and a kind of treason, formally exiles the poet who has presided over the fiction. Jonson’s second plot concerns Horace, usually understood as a stand-in for Jonson, as he defends himself against the poetic and legal assaults of Demetrius and the poetaster Crispinus, who aim through their slanders to ingratiate themselves at court, but who instead, in a triumphant final trial scene, are exposed and punished for their slanderous misuse of language. From different angles, the two plots take up the question of how poetic authority relates to state authority, asking both whether the poet’s authority over his fiction-making seals him off from state power (it doesn’t), and whether the state is needed to protect the poet, as one who pre-eminently embodies the power of language, from the injury that language can effect (it is). The play’s opening scene dramatically presents the relative claims of law and poetry through a microanalysis of legal language and form, turning the traditional opposition between law and poetry into an argument for their complementarity and for their operation in distinct textual jurisdictions. At the beginning of Act 1, instead of studying the law, as his father has instructed, Ovid is writing an elegy. Ovid Senior discovers his son, and chastises him for so wasting his time. In a passage first printed in the folio text of 1616 and probably excluded from the quarto printing through Jonson’s self-censorship, Ovid assures his father that he will attend to his proper studies, but he does so in a language that still binds him to the practice of poetic eloquence that so offends the father: ‘I’ll prove the unfashioned body of the law / Pure elegance’, he says, ‘and make her ruggedest strains / Run smoothly as Propertius’ elegies’ (Poetaster 1.2.103–5).5 Unsurprisingly, Ovid Senior is not consoled by his son’s conception of what legal study entails: ‘Why, he cannot speak, he cannot think out of poetry, he is bewitched with it.’ And when the tribune Lupus steps in, on behalf of the son, to urge, ‘Come, do not misprize him’, the father angrily replies: Misprize? Ay, marry, I would have him use some such words now: they have some touch, some taste of the law. He should make himself a style out of these, and let his Propertius’ elegies go by. (1.2.108–14)

The small exchange depends on hearing the force of two words, one from the legal arts and one from the literary ones. First, Jonson plays on a distinction between two

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meanings of ‘misprize’. Lupus means that the father has mistaken or misunderstood his son, but Ovid Senior hears in the word the legal category of ‘misprision’, a technical word in the Elizabethan period for ‘crime’, specifically a non-capital crime associated with, but less serious than, its capital counterpart: the word is most familiar, therefore, in phrases like ‘misprision of treason’ and ‘misprision of felony’. As Jonson exploits the language of law, this quibble around misprision turns out to be a grounding joke for the play’s major plot. For like Ovid Senior at the beginning of the play, Caesar at its crisis moment misprizes the force of poetic fiction when, coming upon the banqueters dressed as gods, he mistakes the poet’s fictive performance as a form of treason against the gods whom they make into ‘counterfeits’ (4.6.37), against the virtue whose ‘law’ they ignore (4.6.45), and implicitly against the state, whose divinely ordained authority the emperor dramatically reasserts at the moment he pronounces judgment against the masquers: ‘If you think gods but feigned and virtue painted, / Know we sustain an actual residence, / And with the title of an emperor / Retain his spirit and imperial power’ (4.6.47–50). In his poetic weighing of ‘misprision’, Jonson thus exploits the language of English law to align Augustus’ error of interpretation with Ovid Senior’s earlier linguistic conversion of a mistake into a crime: the emperor’s judgment against poetic fiction, in Jonson’s analysis, is misprision of treason, indeed. A second charged word in Ovid Senior’s attack on his son is ‘style’, which the father surprisingly associates with law, and which Jonson thus makes a keyword for his account of the relation between legal and literary discourse. Why might Jonson, for whom poetic style was so much the marker of poetic achievement, want to insist that law, the art of indifferently weighing words and motives and causes, has a style of its own? One answer, certainly, would be that, as opposed to poetic style, law’s style is bad style. In fact, this was a period commonplace, recycled in contemporary satires on the law such as George Ruggle’s academic drama Ignoramus (Latin 1615; English trans. 1660), which excoriates common-law culture by mocking the title character’s Latinisms and Gallicisms. In a satirical poem printed in 1614, John Taylor stages a dialogue between a pedantic lawyer and pedantic poet, each one arguing his authority by spewing forth the inkhorn terms proper to his discipline: the lawyer’s case and cause, attachments, citations, latitats, and delays are answered by the poet’s stops and commas, parenthesis, palinodes, accents, figures, and tautologies (Taylor 1614: fo. G1r). And John Donne, in his great ‘Satire 2’ from the 1590s, attacks the lawyer Coscus for misusing language, both by wooing in an absurdly technical court jargon – ‘I have been / In love, ever since tricesimo of the Queen, […] / You said, if I returned next ‘size in Lent, / I should be in remitter of your grace’ (49–55) – and by manipulating the technical legal instruments he draws up to his own material advantage (87–100). Certainly, in Poetaster’s allusion to a legal style there is something of this same satirical orientation, but that point is subordinate to Jonson’s interest in the more basic fact that law, like poetry, should be made in language and transmitted in books. Style for Jonson is the sign that, no less than poetry’s authority, law’s authority is

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made. Jonson emphasises this continuity between the two disciplines by adding to the distinction between legal and poetic textuality a distinction, within law, between the two primary models for the writing of law in books. The first is aligned with Rome and the second with England. On his father’s departure, Ovid, nauseated by his formal course of study, begs the gods of Rome to ‘give me stomach to digest this law’ (1.2.230), a sentence that punningly alludes to the Justinian Digest and thereby to the idea of Roman law as a written and contained code of law. A second pun identifies the second legal style. In the following scene, Tibullus enters the study to urge his friend to come into the city for a walk. ‘No, good Tibullus’, Ovid replies, ‘I’m not now in case’, which is to say, not in the appropriate state of mind. ‘How, not in case?’ Tibullus asks, ‘Slight thou ’rt in too much case, by all this law’ (1.3.11–13). As against Ovid’s joke, which references Roman civil law, Tibullus’ joke alludes to the case-oriented method of English common law, as exemplified by books like Plowden’s or Coke’s. As Jonson has represented him, Ovid is caught not just between law and poetry, but between the textual forms pertaining to English common law and its primary counterpart in the Roman civil law. Law allows Jonson to say that having a style means being in language in such a way that a book might not only imply your authority, but actually produce it. By amplifying the law as a place of competing textualities, Jonson suggests how, even in a world where poetry’s power is controlled by the state, poetry can be said nevertheless to have an authority parallel to the state’s. As the Digest is to Rome, and the case report is to England, so poetry is to the textual sphere in which it makes meaning. This is why, at the play’s opening, which finds Ovid working on his poems, Luscus urges him, in expectation of the father’s arrival, to put away the paper on which he is writing poems and become differently textual: ‘Get a law book in your hand’, he says, adding, when Ovid takes up the prop, ‘Why so: now there’s some formality in you’ (1.1.12–13). Like the ‘gown and cap’ that the student Ovid is also supposed to wear (1.1.5–6), the book effects a style by transforming the body that uses it, entering the body as formality, which we can understand as the very promise of institutional authority through textual form. In Jonson’s hands, the idea of a law that is made through different textual traditions belonging to different spheres gives to poetry, and to the idea of text and book that sustains it, the cast of authority within its jurisdictional sphere. As a second case for the kind of encounter between law and literature that analytically amplifies continuities between the two discourses, I turn to one of Shakespeare’s sonnets, which though printed in 1609 were written across the preceding two decades. Sonnet 30 is one of the most famous legal sonnets in the sequence, and probably belongs to the 1590s, a decade in which the literary culture around the inns of court sustained a frenzied production of sonnets, including many poems that, like Shakespeare’s, drew on the technical language of law to make their erotic arguments.6 Shakespeare’s poem uses the conceit of legal testimony and legal remedy to describe the experience of loss as a repetitively enacted trauma that no amount of affective work can quite counter. Hidden in the poem’s logic is a jurisdictional distinction that

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allows Shakespeare to intensify the poem’s analysis of erotic relation and lyric subjectivity: When to the sessions of sweet silent thought I summon up remembrance of things past, I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought, And with old woes new wail my dear time’s waste; Then can I drown an eye (unused to flow) For precious friends hid in death’s dateless night, And weep afresh love’s long-since-cancelled woe, And moan th’expense of many a vanished sight; Then can I grieve at grievances fore-gone, And heavily from woe to woe tell o’er The sad account of fore-bemoanèd moan, Which I new pay as if not paid before. But if the while I think on thee (dear friend) All losses are restored, and sorrows end.7

The conceit here is that, in an act of self-punishing remembrance, the speaker finds himself having to pay a debt of grieving (or moaning) owed for love on a bond of woe that, though cancelled in the sense of having been discharged (with the speaker’s fore-bemoaned moan), nevertheless continues to exert a claim upon him. The speaker’s ‘sad account’ of his grief is both testimony and the currency in which the debt must repeatedly be paid. Thinking about the beloved friend, as the couplet has it, allows the speaker to exit this cycle and, the cancelled debt paid once and for all, see his sorrows end. In the idea of a cancelled debt that yet remains in force, the poem alludes to a standard case about common-law jurisdiction. Lorna Hutson has shown that the same case structures the moment in Love’s Labour’s Lost in which Navarre insists to the Princess of France that her father has failed to pay a loan for which Aquitaine is security, and the princess responds that the debt has ‘faithfully been paid’ (2.1.156), only then to have Boyet reveal that the ‘acquittances’ which act as evidence of the debt’s payment are missing (2.1.160).8 As Hutson shows, the underlying structure here is the ‘archetypal case of “conscience” which defined the limits of the common law with relation to Chancery’, which as the principal court of equity had jurisdiction over various matters that the more formalist common law was unable to consider. Because the common-law courts ‘offered no remedy for the debtor who, bound in a written obligation, paid off his debt [but] failed to take, or lost, the written receipt or acquittance of his payment’, in such cases, the debtor had to seek remedy in Chancery, according to the more flexible operation of equity and the Chancellor’s freer investigation of ‘who was behaving unconscionably’ in the matter (Hutson 2007: 298).9 This is a highly illuminating context for Sonnet 30, since it allows us to see that the sonnet’s major turn, at the couplet, is a jurisdictional event. The speaker of the poem is in the difficult position (as the Princess of France potentially is in Love’s

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Labour’s Lost) of needing to ‘new pay as if not paid before’ a bond that has already been cancelled. In the legal context I have described, in which the lack of written testimony is at issue, a first point is that the poet’s oral testimony, his ‘sad account’ of his sorrow, might be exactly the wrong kind of witness to his debt’s having been paid. Read through the legal metaphor, the traumatic repetition of grief emerges as a consequence of the formal inadequacy of speech to close off an affective burden. In turning to the friend, however, the speaker finds the remedy that ‘sweet silent thought’ is juridically unable to provide: ‘But if the while I think on thee (dear friend) / All losses are restored, and sorrows end.’ The major effect of the poem’s argument is that, by analogy to the legal situation, the poem turns out to represent, across the break between quatrains and couplet, not one court, but, jurisdictionally, two. The shock of the poem, consequently, is that thinking is thus doubled as not one forum, but two: against the court of ‘sweet silent thought’, in which the speaker finds no remedy for his loss but only iterative expense, the poem imagines a second court – a court of thinking ‘on thee’ – in which a remedy does become available. In the technical version of Sonnet 30 towards which Shakespeare’s legal language pulls the reader, the idea is that, in the manner of jurisdictional complements, thought emerges as plural, in response to the very object of thought – as though the act of thinking, which pertains to the thinker, were altered by the object of thought, or as though the thinker, and lover, were suffused by his orientation towards the other. Shakespeare’s poem uses the idea of jurisdictional difference in law to invent a lyric and erotic self whose identity depends on the relational scene of which he is a part. In its connection to the object of knowledge or love, the poetic self emerges as a jurisdictional self, made by the same boundaries (in the other) that limit it. My third case for the encounter between the worlds of law and poetic fictionmaking comes from Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), a book whose portrait of the ideal republic is vexingly caught up with the practical question of how a manifestly speculative fiction can be relevant to the real world of politics. In an extreme form, Utopia poses the general question of where a fiction’s authority lies. At the beginning of the narrative, More makes a passing reference to English legal office that interestingly impinges on that question. Alluding to the 1515 diplomatic mission that brought him to Bruges, where the conversation about the island of Utopia is imagined to take place, More names Cuthbert Tunstall as his companion on the mission, adding that this is someone whom the king ‘has just created Master of the Rolls, to everyone’s immense satisfaction’.10 This biographical detail – Tunstall was indeed elevated to that office on 12 May 1516 – has two functions relevant to More’s fiction. The Master of the Rolls was the principal clerk in the court of Chancery and the chief assistant to the Chancellor, an office that since December 1515 had been held by Cardinal Wolsey. More’s opening detail is a first hint that the book has a special relevance to the new Chancellor and to the court over which he now presided, a court that in England embodied the idea of justice that is Utopia’s principal theme (see Cormack 2007: 102–9). The second function of Tunstall’s office relates to the meaning of the rolls he oversees. In legal

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culture, these are the parchment documents that preserved as formal record the matters that came before a court. The Chancery rolls had a primarily administrative function as an official register for legal instruments such as charters, grants, and patents. Like all formal records, however, they were the textual repository of what the law acknowledged and would admit into consideration. At its most extreme, the operative principle was that embodied by the medieval saying Quod non est in actis non est in mundo: ‘That which is not in the register in not in the world’ or, in one historian’s phrasing, ‘reality is what is found in files’.11 This textual reconstruction of the real is relevant to More’s own fiction in a very simple sense. In making a text that revels in its own fictiveness, and then insisting on its relevance for the polity, More is indulging a version of the true analogous to that implied in the idea of a formal and conclusive record. The roll is the form that truth takes, not because it is true, but because it is appropriately textual. In that sense, the legal office held by Tunstall provides More with a wonderfully simple case for the power of his textual Utopia, which gets its authority, not because it corresponds accurately to the political world, but because it opens a textual space that remains in conversation with that world precisely by defining its own mode of truth-telling. The space of Utopia, like the space of law itself, is a jurisdiction produced through text. We are back to Sir Philip Sidney’s claim that the poet’s ‘truth’ and the lawyer’s ‘truth’ are complementary expressions of a shared method for analysing experience. As an emblem for the force of poetic fiction generally, the power of More’s fictional Utopia derives, not from its author’s mimetic adherence to the real, but only from his control over the system in which the fiction operates. In their activation of law’s language for poetic ends, the texts of Jonson and Shakespeare similarly look inward, even as they reach outward to the kind of social authority that the law manifestly embodies. In their inwardness, too, literature is intimately law’s companion. Although poetry and law both belong to the world, the authority of each derives from a shared capacity to make in language a different world, which as jurisdiction meets the real and accommodates it, but without doing homage.

Notes 1 Cited from Alexander 2004: 34–5. Alexander’s excellent gloss on ‘imaginative groundplot’ is on p. 342. 2 Cited, in modernised spelling, from Corrigan 1992. On the political background, see pp. 41–51. 3 Cited from a letter written by Bacon to King James in 1616, as reprinted in Bacon 1857– 74:, XIII, 65. 4 For the jurisdictional complexity in English law during the Tudor period, see Baker 2003:

117–319. On the ius commune in English legal culture, see Helmholz 2001. On the canon law and ecclesiastical courts in relation to the dramatic representation of marriage and sexual life, see Mukerji 2006. 5 Cited from Poetaster, ed. Cain (Jonson 1995). 6 See e.g. poems 5, 6, 20, 37, and 38 in the anonymous Zepheria (London, 1594). Zepheria’s excessive use of law is parodied by John Davies in Sonnets 7 and 8 from his Gullinge

Law Sonnets, edited by Robert Krueger (Davies 1975: 166–7). 7 Cited from The Complete Sonnets and Poems, ed. Burrow (Shakespeare 2002). 8 Cited from Love’s Labor’s Lost, ed. Woudhuysen (Shakespeare 1998). 9 For the case as given in Christopher St. German’s widely diffused treatise on equity and common law, see Plucknett and Barton 1974: 77–9.

10

11

261 Cited from Utopia, ed. Surtz and Hexter (More 1965). The original Latin is quem sacris scriniis nuper […] praefecit, which translates as ‘whom he [Henry VIII] recently appointed as superintendant of the royal [sacred] files’. Vissman 2008: 56. On the Chancery rolls as an official register, see Clanchy 1993: 69–70.

References and Further Reading Alexander, Gavin (ed.) (2004). Sidney’s Defence of Poesy and Selected Renaissance Literary Criticism. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Altman, Joel (1978). The Tudor Play of Mind. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bacon, Francis (1857–74). Works, ed. James Spedding. London: Longman. Baker, J. H. (1985). ‘English law and the Renaissance’, Cambridge Law Journal, 44/1, 46–61. Baker, J. H. (2000). The Common Law Tradition: Lawyers, Books and the Law. London: Hambledon Press. Baker, J. H. (2002). An Introduction to English Legal History, 4th edn. London: Butterworth. Baker, John (2003). The Oxford History of the Laws of England, vol. 6: 1483–1558. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Baker, J. H. and Samuel Thorne (eds.). (1990). Readings and Moots at the Inns of Court in the Fifteenth Century, vol. 2. Selden Society 105. London: Selden Society. Clanchy, M. T. (1993). From Memory to Written Record: England 1066–1307, 2nd edn. Oxford: Blackwell. Cormack, Bradin (2007). A Power to Do Justice: Jurisdiction, English Literature, and the Rise of Common Law, 1509–1625. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Corrigan, Brian Jay (ed.) (1992). The Misfortunes of Arthur: A Critical, Old-Spelling Edition. New York: Garland. Cunningham, Karen (2007). ‘ “So many books, so many rolls of ancient time”: the Inns of Court and Gorboduc’. In Dennis Kezar (ed.), Solon and Thespis: Law and Theater in the English Renaissance (pp. 197–217). Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press.

Davies, Sir John (1975). Poems, ed. Robert Krueger. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Eden, Kathy (1986). Poetic and Legal Fiction in the Aristotelian Tradition. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Goodrich, Peter (1990). Languages of Law: From Logics of Memory to Nomadic Masks. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Goodrich, Peter (1996). Law in the Courts of Love: Literature and Other Minor Jurisprudences. London: Routledge. Goodrich, Peter (2007). The Laws of Love: An Introductory Manual. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Helmholz, Richard (2001). The ‘Ius Commune’ in England: Four Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hindle, Steve (2000). The State and Social Change in Early Modern England, c.1550–1640. London: Macmillan. Hutson, Lorna (2007). The Invention of Suspicion: Law and Mimesis in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hutson, Lorna and Victoria Kahn (eds.) (2001). Rhetoric and Law in Early Modern Europe. New Haven: Yale University Press. Jonson, Ben (1995). Poetaster, ed. Tom Cain. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Jordan, Constance and Karen Cunningham (eds.) (2007). The Law in Shakespeare. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Kezar, Dennis (ed.) (2007). Solon and Thespis: Law and Theater in the English Renaissance. Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press. More, Thomas (1965). Utopia, ed. Edward Surtz and J. H. Hexter, vol. 4 in The Complete Works. New Haven: Yale University Press.

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Mukherji, Subha (2006). Law and Representation in Early Modern Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Plucknett, T. F. T. and J. L. Barton (eds.) (1974). St. German’s ‘Doctor and Student’. Selden Society 91. London: Selden Society. Raffield, Paul (2004). Images and Cultures of Law in Early Modern England: Justice and Political Power, 1558–1660. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shakespeare, William (1998). Love’s Labor’s Lost, ed. H. R. Woudhuysen. Arden edn. Walton-onThames: Thomas Nelson. Shakespeare, William (2002). The Complete Sonnets and Poems, ed. Colin Burrow. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sokol, B. J. and Mary Sokol (2004). Shakespeare’s Legal Language: A Dictionary. London: Continuum. Stretton, Tim (1998). Women Waging Law in Elizabethan England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Taylor, John (1614). ‘An inkhorn disputation, or mongrel conference, betwixt a lawyer and a poet’. In Taylors Water-worke. London.

Vissman, Cornelia (2008). Files: Law and Media Technology, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Weimann, Robert (1996). Authority and Representation in Early Modern Discourse, ed. David Hillman. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Wilson, Luke (2000). Theaters of Intention: Drama and Law in Early Modern England. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Winston, Jessica (2005). ‘Expanding the political nation: Gorboduc at the Inns of Court and succession revisited.’ Early Theatre, 8/1, 11–34. Wrightson, Keith (1980), ‘Two concepts of order: justices, constables, and jurymen in seventeenth-century England’. In John Brewer and John Styles (eds.), An Ungovernable People: The English and Their Law in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (pp. 21–46). New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Zurcher, Andrew (2007). Spenser’s Legal Language: Law and Poetry in Early Modern England. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer.

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Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Book 5: Poetry, Politics, and Justice Judith H. Anderson

Until quite recently it would have been inconceivable to focus the essay on Spenser in a Companion to the literature and culture of the English Renaissance on the fifth book of The Faerie Queene, the book treating justice and concluding with efforts to impose an effective political order on England’s unruly colony Ireland.1 By traditional moral and aesthetic standards, the fifth book is deeply flawed: as C. S. Lewis memorably asserted of its morality, ‘Spenser was the instrument of a detestable [colonial] policy in Ireland, and in his fifth book the wickedness he had shared begins to corrupt his imagination’ (Lewis 1936: 349). This book also doubly disappoints readers’ normal expectations of structural closure: both the hero Artegall’s quest to establish justice and his prophesied union with Britomart, the heroine of a love quest spanning the two preceding books, are summarily aborted, the latter never to be mentioned again in the poem. By comparison, the four earlier books of The Faerie Queene further magnify the shortcomings of Book 5. Like this book, the first two – on holiness and temperance – have a single major hero and a dominantly linear structure; the allegory in them is fairly tight, and a moralistic reading, while grossly oversimplified, is possible. Although the linear structure of the fifth book invites comparison with these, comparison highlights not only its problematical ending but also the persistent strains throughout: between metaphorical and material dimensions of meaning, between concept and history, word and thing. Instead of a linear structure, the two books immediately preceding the fifth, on chastity (pure married love) and friendship, have a romance structure in which the related experiences of many characters revolve around a mythological and thematic core; rather than linearity, the interlacing or entanglement of several stories characterises these books. Allegory in them is looser, more suggestive, and relatively closer to symbolism. Indeed, the fourth book is so loosely or experimentally structured as to challenge the assumptions and methods that underlie Books 1 and 2. When we work our way through Book 4 and then reach Book 5, the linearity and the superficially tight allegory of the later book are made to look

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and feel like the forceful, artificial imposition of order they are, and the strains of their reimposition are both everywhere evident and essential to interpretation. Even as order becomes conspicuous – indeed thematic – within Book 5, the concerns of this book engage history, first conceived as the general materialism(s) of social issues, such as crime, taxation, corruption, inheritance, patriarchy, and legal equity, and then of history conceived more specifically as current political problems in England, on the continent, and in Ireland. This combination of the messiness of history and tight order, whether understood theoretically, structurally, or allegorically, is a recipe for trouble and, to my mind, for deliberated trouble on the part of the poet who penned Book 5. Besides the clear signs of deliberation (or intention) I have mentioned to this point, the literary theory of the Renaissance, and particularly of the Italians, would have alerted Spenser to the dangers (and to the shock value) of treating current history. He appears to reflect its cautions when he notes in the Letter to Ralegh published with the 1590 instalment of The Faerie Queene that he ‘chose the historye of king Arthure [for the general frame of the poem], as … furthest from the daunger of enuy, and suspition of present time’ (Spenser 1932–57: I, 167; all further reference is to this edition ). Closer to home, the representative views of the idealising Sidney and the materialising Bacon would further have guaranteed Spenser’s awareness of the necessary difference between the immediate, specific concerns of history and the more general, fictive concerns of poetry. Sidney considers real poetry, or fiction, ‘truer’ than history because it is not restricted to what actually happened but necessarily is more nearly perfect or ideal; in contrast, Bacon distinguishes sharply between ‘true history’ and untrue history, which he dismissively terms ‘poetry’ and which, in his negative view as well as in Sidney’s positive one, is necessarily an idealising fiction (Anderson 1984: 124–5, 164–5). But if Spenser’s fifth book engages current history, as poetry it still remains at some distance from A View of the Present State of Ireland, the political tract presumably written by Spenser in the 1590s to persuade the English court to adopt severely repressive measures in order to establish a stable government in Ireland and thus to ensure peace and prosperity there.2 Far more deeply and extensively than the tract, Book 5 examines the abstract principle of justice as it relates to human experiences and material conditions, often questioning the principle itself and exposing the inadequacy or cruelty of its unqualified application. As poetry, Book 5 has different purposes, or ends, from the tract, and deals more hypothetically and conceptually than practically and immediately with the historical problems it addresses. Whether from a modern or a Renaissance view, it is finally a hybrid – what Shakespeare’s Perdita would consider a bastard – of poetry and history that threatens conventional moral, political, and aesthetic categories of interpretation. Precisely because this book is so fundamentally problematical, in an age suspicious of easy answers and neat solutions, especially political ones, it claims our attention. The problems of Book 5 begin with its titular virtue of justice. Unlike the virtues of the earlier books, justice, ‘Most sacred vertue she of all the rest’, is impersonal and external, committed to an objective world that is outside the subject (proem, 10).

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The justicer, according to such traditional definitions as those of Aristotle and Aquinas, is ‘a sort of animate justice’, a ‘personification of justice’, ‘a living justice’ (Anderson 1970: 74). He must abstract himself from respect of persons, maintaining objectivity at the expense of anger and empathy. Not surprisingly, the hero of Book 5, Artegall (‘art equal’, ‘art of equality’, ‘Arthur’s equal’), is often torn between his roles as romance knight and rational justicer. The contrary vices of cruelty and vain pity alike threaten the objectivity of his virtue, and his personal life as Britomart’s lover, while not irrelevant to our conception of him, stands apart from his quest as justice. But even before the action begins in Book 5, the length and anxiety of its proem (prologue) signal a difference in orientation from the earlier books of Spenser’s romance epic. This is the first of the proems with a truly dramatised speaker, one whose voice is not conventionally that of the poet describing his song. In the first two lines of the proem, the speaker laments the ‘state of present time’, comparing it unfavourably with the ‘image of the antique world’, the latter a recurrent figure of a lost age of virtue, and thus he introduces a contrast between past and present, poetic image and actual temporality, idealising fiction and material history. He substantiates his neardespair by reference to morality, the conditions of meaning, and physical mutability – more exactly, to an erosion of virtue, a lack of congruence between word and thing (‘that which all men then did vertue call, / Is now cald vice’; emphasis added), and to apparently irrational movements in the heavens, such as the precession of the equinoxes, the obliquity of the ecliptic, and the seemingly retrograde orbits of the planets. Since these phenomena were largely susceptible of rationalisation in the sixteenth century, we might suspect that the poet is merely setting his speaker up as a fin-desiècle worry-wart, were it not that the speaker’s awareness of degeneration emerges recurrently in Book 5, as well as in Book 6, where it has the last word, and in the Mutability Cantos, where it refers to the inexplicable presence of a new star and similarly worrisome appearances of comets in the seemingly unchanging heavens (Meyer 1984: 118–19). Perhaps the appropriate response is to recognise that the fifth proem represents the historically prevalent claims of degeneration for our consideration and, temporarily suspending an evaluative judgement, to read on.3 Seeking refuge from despair, the proem’s speaker pivots from the retrograde planet Saturn to myth, recalling the golden age of mythic Saturn’s reign before Jove supplanted him, a time when Justice sat ‘high ador’d with solemne feasts’ (proem, 9). Abruptly and not entirely convincingly, in the proem’s final stanza the speaker waxes idealistic and hopeful, addressing the ‘Dread Souerayne Goddess’ whose just instrument ‘here’ is Book 5’s hero Artegall. Blurring the identities of the mythic Astraea, Goddess of Justice in Saturn’s reign on earth, and Queen Elizabeth I, he leaves open whether ‘here’ is on earth or in Faerie, here in the present or in the mythic past. Clearly, however, Artegall is introduced with fanfare that is in discord with the dominant pessimism of this proem. Not an isolated effect, such dissonance recurs in the early cantos, which repeatedly pair hyperbolic praise of the justicer with questionable justice (e.g. 5.1.2–3, 5.2.1, 5.4.2).

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The history of the justicer, recounted at the beginning of the first canto, itself gives us reason for pause. As a child Artegall is lured from human company with gifts and kind speeches by Astraea and then brought up by her in a cave, where he is taught the discipline of justice, ‘which, for want there of mankind, / She caused him to make experience / Vpon wyld beasts’. By the time he reaches manhood, wild beasts fear the sight of him, ‘and men admyr’d his ouerruling might; / Ne any liu’d on ground, that durst withstand / His dreadfull heast, much lesse him match in fight’ (5.1.7–8). Notably, force, not authority, is at the beginning his strongest suit. Nonetheless, to ensure even greater dread of him, Astraea, ‘by her slight’, steals from Jove the sword he used against the Titans, now to become the sword of earthly justice (5.1.7–9). Her justicer thus educated and equipped, if somewhat dubiously for human society, Astraea makes her servant, the implacable iron man Talus (Latin talus, ‘heel’, talio, ‘an eye for an eye’), her final gift to him. She then flees the sinful earth, metamorphosing into the heavenly sign associated with her, the virgin in the zodiac (see also Spenser 1977: 532 n., 5.5.12) Once on his own, Artegall’s first exploit is to adjudicate the conflicting claims of the Knight Sanglier and a squire, both of whom claim possession of one lady and disavow responsibility for the decapitation of a second. To solve this mystery, Artegall imitates the biblical Judgment of Solomon, proposing to divide the living lady between the two claimants. The murderer quickly accepts his offer, but the squire, her true love, as quickly rejects it, preferring to spare his lady’s life and to accept the Artegallian penalty to be imposed on the murderer, namely, the bearing of the dead lady’s head for a year. Now satisfied that the squire is innocent, Artegall proceeds to judgment: the guilty knight gets the head, the guiltless squire ‘adore[s]’ Artegall for his great justice, and the latter takes his leave, ‘Ne wight with him but onely Talus went. / They two enough t’encounter an whole Regiment’ (5.1.30). Fanfare swiftly follows (5.2.1). Tonal dislocations, the result of pacing and the juxtaposition of incongruous details, slightly skew Artegall’s initial triumph. His resolution of the conflict is correct, but the punishment he metes out hardly seems adequate to the crime, which greatly exceeds that in his biblical model. His justice reduces the decapitated lady to the level of a dead albatross. While it might be argued that the Artegallian penalty is appropriate to romance, it ill suits the virtue of justice in a real world of men and women. In actuality, Artegallian justice in this instance mimics the barnyard, where a dog that kills a domestic animal such as a goose is first beaten with its carcass and then bears this around its neck, a folk remedy for the killer instinct. The Knight Sanglier’s name, ‘Wild Boar’, his initial apprehension by Talus, who seizes him in his ‘iron paw’, and Sanglier’s assuming his burden, the lady’s head, ‘for feare’ ‘As [does a] rated Spaniell’ all suggest that Artegall’s training among the beasts has enduringly marked him (5.1.22, 29). Artegall’s next exploit takes him to a bridge where Pollente, a powerful but corrupt lord, exacts unjust tolls from any who would pass over it. Although Artegall rectifies this injustice by killing Pollente and executing his daughter Munera (Latin

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munus, ‘office, duty, favour, gift’), he again does so at some cost to his own ideality. His defeat of Pollente comes with mundane and material detail that at moments gestures towards mock-epic. These include an emphasis on his swimsmanship (‘But Artegall was better breath’d beside’) that is digressive in length and focus, and descriptions of battle that disappoint heroic expectation. When Artegall and Pollente meet at close quarters, for example, ‘They snuf, they snort, they bounce, they rage, they rore’, thus expressing the sounds of mortal combat between a dolphin and a seal (5.2.15–17). The execution of Lady Munera affords tonal dissonance still more pronounced. One the one hand, Munera is said to have metal hands and feet, which suggest that she is merely an allegorisation of social corruption, and more specifically of bribery. On the other hand, she is described a little too much as an attractive but erring young woman, led astray by her wicked father. From the latter point of view, we can read her ‘hands of gold’ as richly adorned like those of her prototype Lady Meed, rather than as monstrously metallic or even as gold-dispensing, and we can see her feet similarly furnished with jewellery or net-work slippers of ‘trye’, that is, ‘choice’ silver. In fact, the word ‘trye’ itself intimates that the silver of the slippers carries a symbolic or an aesthetic meaning. To make matters worse, Lady Munera’s hands and feet are first ‘Chopt off, and nayld on high’ even while she is ‘Still holding vp her suppliant hands on hye, / And kneeling at his [ambiguously Artegall’s or Talus’] feete submissiuely’ (5.2.26). The remainder of her, ‘in vaine loud crying’, is cast over the castle wall to drown in the ‘durty mud’. And the dissonance does not end even here: in a biblical echo of purgation by water, the stream is said to have ‘washt away … [Munera’s] guilty blood’, suggesting the mercy she is denied by our heroic justicer. Just before, her plight has been described as ‘seemelesse’: that is, ‘unseemly’, ‘seamless’, ‘unseeming’, or real; this single word summarises the inseparability of her plight into human and abstract parts – parts of human flesh and parts of legal theory (5.2.25, 27). The whiff of parody that accompanied the justicer’s victories over Sanglier and Pollente has given way to questions more probing: how far can the objectivity and externality of justice be carried without denying the humanity of the justicer and reducing human beings to lifeless objects? Within the same canto, as if an effect of Munera’s elimination, Artegall next encounters the levelling Giant, who would reduce hierarchical distinctions to equality and distribute all wealth accordingly. Given the size of the Giant, he is somewhat ironically an equaliser, and he is fundamentally a materialist in the literal sense, since he bases his arguments exclusively on quantity and sight: ‘The sea it selfe doest thou not plainely see / Encroch vppon the land there vnder thee?’ (5.2.37). Yet his pessimistic view of present conditions accords with that of the speaker of the fifth proem, and the reassertion of this view within the fiction itself attests to its historically real pressure, owing not only to irrational movements in the heavens but also to persistent crop failures, rampant inflation, further enclosures of land, and consequent poverty and vagrancy in England, as well as to anxieties about the spread of the economic communism of religious radicals on the continent, such as the Anabaptists, and about

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uprisings and invasions in Ireland (Anderson 1996: 173; 167–89 are more generally relevant ). Debating the materialistic Giant and the mutability necessarily entailed by his view, Artegall takes an equally extreme position, however, arguing that nothing really changes and that ‘All change is perillous, and all chaunce vnsound’ (5.2.36). His position recalls the unnatural impasse in Book 2, where Guyon and the Palmer attempt to keep Occasion fettered, in effect stopping time and the forward movement of their own quest. As Mutability will declare in the cantos bearing her name: ‘all that moueth [that is, all that lives], doth mutation loue’ (7.7.55). Notably, Mutability is the offspring of the giant Titans and, like the levelling Giant, a natural enemy of the Jovian force invested in Artegall’s sword. But Artegall himself is more immediately caught in contradictions. Although he argues for intangible values and tells the Giant that ‘in the mind the doome of right must bee’, his justice relies conspicuously on physical signs, on spectacle (Pollente’s head on a pole, Munera’s extremities nailed on high), and above all, on physical force (5.2.47). His high-minded debate with the Giant ends when Talus abruptly shoulders the Giant off a cliff to destruction ‘in the sea’ below (5.2.49): Like as a ship, whom cruell tempest driues Vpon a rocke with horrible dismay, Her shattered ribs in thousand peeces riues, And spoyling all her geares and goodly ray, Does make her selfe misfortunes piteous pray. So downe the cliffe the wretched Gyant tumbled; His battred ballances in peeces lay, His timbered bones all broken rudely rumbled. (5.2.50)

Ironically, this stanza celebrates Artegall’s victory in the very terms the Giant embraced, not only levelling him but also drowning him in the punning of ‘sea’ with ‘see’. Although Talus is the immediate agent of this levelling, his charge from Astraea is to do whatever Artegall intends (5.1.12); the adjective ‘cruell’ in the simile therefore participates in the increasing association of Artegall with cruelty, traditionally the vice opposed to justice, prior to his crucial encounter with Radigund, the Amazon Queen. Leaving the seaside, Artegall next appears in the very different context of a tournament celebrating the spousals of Marinell and Florimell (the fruitful conjunction of water and earth, the harmonious union of a Mars with a Venus). Both characters are holdovers from the two preceding books of romance, and Artegall’s appearance in their romance world foreshadows his experiences at Radigund’s hands, in Radegone, her city of women. Here, he acts less as a justicer, an animate abstraction, and more as a knight. Indeed, to participate in the tournament, he borrows another’s shield and thereby his identity, disguising his own as a justicer. His doing so enables his knightly rescue of Marinell but soon after actually furthers injustice until he reassumes his identity as Justice. Once he reassumes it, however, his choler has to be calmed by the

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Knight of Temperance, a personal, inner virtue that by definition has no necessary relation to the impersonal, outer nature of justice yet obviously affects it – and I intend the word ‘affects’ for all it is worth. The paradox, indeed the bind, is that temperance is different in nature from justice and cannot be channelled directly into a quest for it. At the same time, Artegall’s human, knightly response to the abuse of his honour threatens to affect his ability to administer justice impartially. This whole romance episode takes ‘vsurie of time forepast’ (5.3.40); it lingers in memories of earlier times and earlier books of the poem. It also serves as a paradigm – a ‘foreconceit,’ in Sidney’s term – for the central cantos of Book 5, Artegall’s adventures among the Amazons and Britomart’s rescue of her lover. Artegall might be said to fall into full humanity in the fifth canto of Book 5 when he battles Radigund, who challenges men to battle, subdues them ‘by force or guile’, clothes them in shameful ‘womens weedes’, and sets them to spin cloth in her prison (5.4.31). He first overcomes her, but, stooping to behead her, he discovers in her face ‘A miracle of natures goodly grace’: he experiences, as if for the first time, ‘his senses straunge astonishment’ (5.5.12). Suddenly torn between insensitive cruelty and vain pity, he throws away his Jovian sword (which Radigund subsequently breaks) and yields himself to her. While hardly right, his response, like that of Milton’s Adam, is all too human. Had he decapitated the beautiful Radigund after experiencing passion for her, his act would have been perversely cruel and inescapably vicious, far worse than the death of Lady Munera, since he, not Talus, would have been be the executioner of a woman about whose humanity there is no ambiguity. Although the poet reflects here ironically on Artegall’s ‘goodwill’ in yielding, he offers no viable alternative to it, and indeed he cannot without denying history in the biblical Garden (5.5.17). Only when Artegall falls into the selfish city of Radegone – for him a city of the subject (in both senses) – does his prior history in the preceding books become relevant to him.4 Before this point it is treated as if it were non-existent, as it is for his impersonal quest, and indeed it would be hard to square with the figure we see operating in the early cantos. Now suddenly, his beloved Britomart enters the picture and does so with a vengeance. Learning of Artegall’s capture by another woman, she sets out to rescue him. In her own eyes, she is simply and literally rescuing her lover, not the personification of justice, but her route to him is a conspicuous process of suppression and transference. In it, the poem asks her to change from an immoderate woman, raging at the disloyalty of her lover, to a myth, a goddess of equity to complement her Jovian justicer. At the same time, however, the poem openly questions and indeed exposes what is lost in her progress – namely, her personal identity, which is synonymous with her own quest for chaste love in marriage. This loss is most evident in the episode in Isis Church, where Britomart has a richly mythopoeic ‘dream of sexuality, death, and birth’ which, as a myth of procreative power, is matched nowhere else in the poem (Miskimin 1978: 32–3). She dreams that she is the goddess Isis and that the phallic crocodile beneath her feet but enfolding her middle with his tail impregnates her. First she feels from below ‘an hideous tempest’

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that scatters the holy fire ‘Vppon the ground, which kindled priuily, / Into outragious flames vnwares did grow’: With that the Crocodile, which sleeping lay Vnder the Idols [statue of Isis’] feet in feareless bowre, Seem’d to awake in horrible dismay, As being troubled with that stormy stowre; And gaping greedy wide, did streight deuoure Both flames and tempest: with which growen great, And swolne with pride of his own peerelesse powre, He gan to threaten her likewise to eat; But that the Goddesse with her rod him backe did beat. (5.7.15)

Resisted, the crocodile becomes humble, throws himself at her feet, and sues for grace and love: ‘Which she accepting, he so neare her drew, / That of his game she soone enwombed grew, / And forth did bring a Lion of great might’ (5.7.16). The morning after, Isis’ priest rationalises all this fire and fear and potency into a dynastic allegory of justice, utterly failing to acknowledge or account for ‘The troublous passion’ in Britomart’s ‘pensiue mind’ (5.7.19). Her personal experiences are reduced, or sublimed, into an externalised allegory of justice, even while the text demands another reading. When Britomart finds and battles Radigund, she is wounded to the bone by her, allegorically suggesting not only her vulnerability to the tyranny of affection (emotion, passion) that Radigund represents, but also its depth. Yet there is a disturbing excess to their battle that is wasteful in a specifically sexual sense: ‘But through great fury both their skill forgot, / And praticke vse in armes: ne spared not / Their dainty parts … Which they now hackt & hewd, as if such vse they hated’ (5.7.29). As they fight on, the blood flows from their sides and gushes through their armour, so that they tread in blood and strew their lives on the ground, ‘Like fruitles seede, of which vntimely death should grow’ (5.7.31). Through this battle, Britomart is purged of more than her affections; she is fitted to perform as the agent of a purely symbolic love to free fallen man, Artegall the justicer, from Radegone. What I would stress, however, is the extent to which the poem has made the sacrifice of her own character, her own persona, visible. Freed from Radegone by love, Artegall returns to his quest for justice. Symbolically at least, he is now a whole person, ‘inly’ a human being with operative affections and not simply a personification of externalised Justice. His virtue, moreover, is presumably charged with a significance more specifically Christian, a justice more forgiving than Talus’ identity – an ‘eye for an eye’ – symbolises. But now it is Artegall’s task to realise his redeemed virtue in a real world, or at least in a world that refers openly, at times even blatantly, to Tudor history, including the defeat of the Spanish Armada (the Suldan and his chariot), the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots (Duessa), Henri de Navarre’s apostasy to gain the throne of France (Burbon and Fleurdelis), Spanish

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tyranny in the Netherlands (Belge and her seventeen sons) and rebellion, abetted by Spain and the papacy, in Ireland (Irena’s island). After leaving Radegone, accompanied only by Talus, Artegall encounters Prince Arthur, best and most Christian of princes, who ironically mistakes our justicer for the pagan villain he is pursuing. Both knights prepare to fight until the maiden Samient (sameness, togetherness) intercedes to stop them. Raising their ventails (moveable parts of their helmets) and thus exposing what is within, the knights recognise their kinship: Artegall, ‘touched with intire affection’, yields allegiance to Arthur, who for his part apologises for having ‘mistake[n] the liuing for the ded’ – the redeemed for the pagan, the saved for the lost – and enters into alliance with Artegall. This episode testifies to the inner transformation of Artegall as a result of Radegone, and it introduces the co-operation of the two knights in the following cantos. At the same time, Arthur’s initial misrecognition dramatises the fact that, from the outside, Artegall’s virtue still looks as unredeemed as ever. While Arthur and Artegall travel together, the course of justice runs smoothly because they can divide the tasks that would otherwise have pulled Artegall simultaneously in two directions. Arthur deals with the Suldan, the explicit historical threat, and Artegall with the Suldan’s wife Adicia, the principle of wrong whom the Suldan has wed. Arthur also deals with Malengin as a specific manifestation of guile in Ireland, be it rebel Irish or Jesuit priests and missionaries, and Artegall, through his ruthless agent Talus, eliminates Malengin when he turns into the metamorphic principle of Guile itself.5 In each of these exploits, Artegall has the more mythic task and represents the principle of justice without encountering the dissonant strains of realism. The advantages of his co-operation with Arthur are perhaps most obvious when the two knights stand like balances in the scale of justice on either side of Mercilla during the trial of Duessa. Arthur responds as would any knight to a damsel in distress; he is so ‘sore empassionate’ in heart that ‘for great ruth his courage gan relent’. Precisely because he is so, Artegall does not have to be. Instead, the justicer, ‘with constant firme intent, / For zeale of Iustice was against her bent’ (5.9.46, 49). Once Arthur and Artegall separate, however, their stories differ sharply. Arthur goes off to fairy-tale success in Belge’s land, success that is very much at odds with the actual history of English attempts to intervene against the Spanish power in the Netherlands. Meanwhile, Artegall returns to his original quest to assist the Lady Irena in reclaiming her kingdom (Ireland) and, unhappily, to the contradictions between his humanity and his principle, his knighthood and his justice, that earlier beset him. If anything, these are exacerbated by his having recovered the wholeness of his identity in his fall at Radigund’s hands and his redemption by Britomart. Encountering Burbon and Fleurdelis (France) under attack by a lawless mob, Artegall shifts abruptly back and forth between the responses of a knight and those of a virtue. Now he sees Burbon’s shield as merely a piece of armour and now as the emblem that morally and religiously defines him; now he regards Burbon as a fellow knight in need and now as a shameless apostate. There is no uncompromising way for him either to assist

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Burbon and his lady or to abandon them to the mob. The demands of virtue simply do not coincide here with those of history. Generously choosing to help Burbon, Artegall is further delayed in his quest on behalf of Irena, whose side he finally reaches just in time to stay her execution. He battles and defeats her oppressor, but when he tries radically to reform her country, pursuing and punishing those who resist, he is abruptly summoned back to Faerie Court. On his way there, the hags Envy and Detraction revile him and set on him the Blatant Beast, monster of slander, accusing him of having abused his honour and having stained the sword of justice with cruelty. Their words return us to the early cantos of Book 5 as if Artegall, our judgment of him, and our awareness of the dilemmas of justice had never been affected by the rest of his quest. Artegall’s ending is like – indeed, equal to – that of Arthur, Lord Grey de Wilton, whom Spenser served as secretary in Ireland and to whom the figure of Artegall unmistakably alludes in canto 12. In deliberate contrast to the providential version of history granted Arthur in canto 11, the version Artegall gets testifies loudly and discordantly to the injustice of a real world.

Notes 1

2

This essay draws on the various discussions of Book V of The Faerie Queene I have published: Anderson 1970, 1976, 1990, 1996. For additional extension and substantiation, these might be consulted. Brink (1997) has argued that Spenser was not the author of A View. The jury is still out on this issue: many Spenserians remain convinced of Spenser’s authorship on the basis of internal evidence.

3 My view of an appropriate response has shifted in emphasis from 1976: 184–6, to 1996: 172– 3. My effort to settle on an appropriate response is in Anderson 1998 (e.g. 97–8). 4 On Britomart’s history in The Faerie Queene prior to Book V, see Anderson 2009. 5 On the relevance to Malengin of laws against Catholic missionaries, see Clegg 1998: 250–5.

References and Further Reading Anderson, J. H. (1970). ‘ “Nor man it is”: the Knight of Justice in Book V of Spenser’s Faerie Queene’. PMLA, 85, 65–77. Anderson, J. H. (1976). The Growth of a Personal Voice: ‘Piers Plowman’ and ‘The Faerie Queene’. New Haven: Yale University Press. Anderson, J. H. (1984). Biographical Truth: The Representation of Historical Persons in Tudor-Stuart Writing. New Haven: Yale University Press. Anderson, J. H. (1987). ‘The antiquities of Fairyland and Ireland’. JEGP, 86, 199–214.

Anderson, J. H. (1990). ‘Artegall’ and ‘Britomart’. In A. C. Hamilton et al. (eds.), The Spenser Encyclopedia. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Anderson, J. H. (1996). Words that Matter: Linguistic Perception in Renaissance English. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Anderson, J. H. (1998). ‘Narrative reflections: reenvisaging the poet in The Canterbury Tales and The Faerie Queene’. In T. Krier (ed.), Refiguring Chaucer in the Renaissance (pp. 87–105). Gainesville: University Press of Florida.

Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Book 5 Anderson, J. H. (2000). ‘Better a mischief than an inconvenience: “The saiyng self.” In P. Cheney and L. Silberman (eds.), Worldmaking Spenser: Explorations in the Early Modern Age (pp. 219– 33). Lexington: University of Kentucky Press. Anderson, J. H. (2009). ‘Britomart’s armor: reopening cultural matters of gender and figuration’. English Literary Renaissance, 39, 74–96. Aptekar, J. (1969). Icons of Justice: Iconography and Thematic Imagery in Book V of ‘The Faerie Queene’. New York: Columbia University Press. Baker, D. J. (1997). Between Nations: Shakespeare, Spenser, Marvell, and the Question of Britain. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Berger, H. (1961). ‘The prospect of imagination: Spenser and the limits of poetry’. Studies in English Literature, 1, 93–120. Brink, J. R. (1997). ‘Appropriating the author of The Faerie Queene: the attribution of the View of the Present State of Ireland and A Brief Note of Ireland to Edmund Spenser’. In P. E. Medine and J. Wittreich (eds.), Soundings of Things Done: Essays in Early Modern Literature in Honour of S. K. Heninger, Jr. (pp. 93–136). Newark: University of Delaware Press. Clegg, C. S. (1998). ‘Justice and press censorship in Book V of Spenser’s Faerie Queene’. Studies in Philology, 95, 237–62. Coughlan, P. (ed.). (1989). Spenser and Ireland: An Interdisciplinary Perspective. Cork: Cork University Press.

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Fowler, E. (1995). ‘The failure of moral philosophy in the work of Edmund Spenser’. Representations, 51, 57–86. Hadfield, A. (1997). Spenser’s Irish Experience: Wilde Fruit and Salvage Soil. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hadfield, A. (1998). ‘Was Spenser a Republican?’ English, 47, 169–82. Lewis, C. S. (1936). The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Maley, W. (1997). Salvaging Spenser: Colonialism, Culture and Identity. London: Macmillan. Meyer, R. J. (1984). ‘ “Fixt in heauens hight”: Spenser, astronomy, and the date of the Cantos of Mutabilitie’. Spenser Studies, 4, 115–29. Miskimin, A. S. (1978). ‘Britomart’s crocodile and the legends of Chastity’. JEGP, 77, 17–36. O’Connell, M. (1977). Mirror and Veil: The Historical Dimension of Spenser’s ‘Faerie Queene’. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Patterson, Annabel (1993). Reading between the Lines. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Spenser, Edmund (1932–57). The Works of Edmund Spenser: A Variorum Edition, ed. Edwin Greenlaw, Charles Grosvenor Osgood, and Frederick Morgan Padelford, 11 vols. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Spenser, Edmund (1977). The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton. London: Longman.

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‘Law Makes the King’: Richard Hooker on Law and Princely Rule Torrance Kirby

Much of Richard Hooker’s (1554–1600) career was spent in theological controversy concerning the constitutional provisions of the Elizabethan Settlement of 1559 (Kirby 2008: 1–26). In his capacity as Master of the Temple in the Inns of Court, Hooker preached a series of sermons in the mid-1580s on some of the central themes of Reformation theology, including A Learned Discourse of Justification, an influential piece on the doctrine of faith and salvation first published in 1612 (Hooker 1977–90: 5:83ff.). Hooker’s orthodoxy was formally challenged by the disciplinarian Puritan divine Walter Travers in A Supplication made to the Privy Council: he sharply challenged Hooker’s strong appeal to the authority of reason and natural law in religious and ecclesiastical matters as inconsistent with the chief tenets of reformed doctrinal orthodoxy (Hooker 1977–90: 5: 264–9). Hooker’s formal Answer (Hooker 1977–90: 5:227–57) to Travers’s objections laid the groundwork of the philosophical and theological system, which he expounded, in considerably greater detail, in his treatise of the 1590s, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity. From the outset the question of the consistency of Hooker’s defence of the ‘Erastian’1 presuppositions of the Elizabethan religious settlement with his theological premises – more specifically on the question of the unification of civil and ecclesiastical jurisdiction in the Crown – lay at the very heart of these disputes. The Laws is a very considerable undertaking, and consists of a lengthy preface and eight books, usually published in three separate volumes.2 The first four books address (1) the nature of law in general, (2) the proper uses of the authorities of reason and revelation, (3) the application of the latter to the government of the church, and (4) objections to practices inconsistent with the continental ‘reformed’ example. The final four address the more particular issues of (5) public religious duties, (6) the power of jurisdiction, (7) the authority of bishops, and (8) the supreme authority or sovereignty of the prince in both church and commonwealth, and hence their unity in the Christian state. Throughout the treatise Hooker’s express aim is to explicate systematically the principles underlying the religious Settlement of 1559 in such a manner as to

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secure conscientious obedience and conformity by means of all the instruments of persuasion: my whole endeavour is to resolve the conscience, and to show as near as I can what in this controversy the heart is to think if it will follow the light of sound and sincere judgement, without either cloud of prejudice or mist of passionate affection. Wherefore, seeing that laws and ordinances in particular, whether such as we observe, or such as your selves would have established, when the mind doth sift and examine them, it must needs have often recourse to a number of doubts and questions about the nature, kinds, and qualities of laws in general, whereof unless it be thoroughly informed, there will appear no certainty to stay our persuasion upon. I have for that cause set down in the first place an introduction on both sides needful to be considered, declaring therein what law is, how different kinds of laws there are, and what force they are of according unto each kind (Hooker 1977–90: preface, 7.1, 2; 1:34.20–35.2)

The treatise is framed as a response to Thomas Cartwright, who had been John Whitgift’s formidable adversary in the Admonition Controversy of the 1570s (see Chapter 27, English Reformations). The preface is in fact addressed formally ‘to them that seek (as they term it) the reformation of laws and orders ecclesiastical in the Church of England’ (Hooker 1977–90: preface title; 1:1.1), that is to disciplinarian Puritans who, like Cartwright and Travers, sought closer conformity to the pattern of the ‘best reformed churches’ on the continent, especially Calvin’s Geneva. The preface sets the tone of the work and announces Hooker’s main apologetic intent. There is a significant difference between Hooker’s rhetorical approach and that of previous contributions to Elizabethan polemics. He abandons the usual recourse to ridicule and personal abuse, which was so characteristic of the vast majority of tracts contributed by both sides of the controversy, and speaks irenically (in the spirit of peace) to the fundamental theological assumptions, with the professed aim of securing conscientious acceptance of the Settlement. To this end he sets out to persuade by an appeal to mutually acceptable theological assumptions and authorities: ‘we offer the laws whereby we live unto the general trial and judgement of the whole world’ (Hooker 1977–90: 1.1.3; 1:58.5–6). Hooker’s starting-point is to accept unconditionally the disciplinarian premise that the doctrinal tenets and the pastoral aspirations of the Reformation had to be fulfilled in the polity of the Church of England. The rhetorical slant is intended to serve the main apologetic aim of the treatise, namely to justify the Elizabethan Settlement as consistent with the principles of reformed doctrinal orthodoxy. Thus the grand cosmic scheme of laws set out in Book 1 is intended to place the particulars of the controversy within a foundational context: because the point about which we strive is the quality of our laws, our first entrance hereinto cannot better be made than with consideration of the nature of law in general and of that law which giveth life unto all the rest, which are commendable, just, and good, namely the law whereby the Eternal himself doth work. Proceeding from hence to the law, first of nature, then of scripture, we shall have the easier access unto those

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things which come after to be debated, concerning the particular cause and question which we have in hand. (Hooker 1977–90: 1.1.3; 1:58.11–19)

The rhetorical aim is to persuade opponents of the Settlement to conscientious conformity by demonstrating the coherence of the ‘particular decisions’ of the Settlement – the liturgy of the Book of Common Prayer, hierarchy, episcopacy, royal supremacy, and thus ultimately ‘ecclesiastical dominion’ or sovereignty itself, with certain ‘general meditations’ on the metaphysics or first principles concerning the nature of law. Hooker’s foundational proposal in Book 1 of the Laws is easily summarised: ‘God is Law’. From a metaphysical or theological point of view, this claim is neither original nor remarkable. It represents a restatement of classical ‘logos theology’ such as one finds in Platonic and Aristotelian metaphysics, in the thought of Philo of Alexandria derived from pre-Socratic sources (Heracleitus and Anaxagoras), and developed into the premise of a complete practical philosophy in the writings of the Stoics. Drawing upon the florilegium of Stobaeus (a Greek anthologist of the fifth century CE), Hooker cites all of these authorities. Christian appropriation of this Greek metaphysical theme is prominent among the early Church Fathers, for example Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Ambrose, Jerome, Eusebius of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa, Cyril of Alexandria, or Augustine (Kirby 2008: 51–88), as it was characteristic also of the later scholastic theology of such as Anselm, Bonaventure, Aquinas, and Duns Scotus, as well as Protestant reformers like Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli. Again, Hooker’s eclectic references remind us of the extraordinary breadth of his scholarship. For all of these theologians, an uncreated divine principle, the Word (logos, or ratio, or paradeigma – i.e. reason, order, or plan) constitutes the ‘idea of ideas’, the Platonic ‘archetypal idea’ and ‘first principle’ of all created order, while the creation itself, both visible-material and invisible-spiritual, proceeds from and is wholly dependent upon this original, underived, hidden, and transcendent first principle as its first and primary cause. For Hooker, an appeal to logos theology entails considerably more than a purely metaphysical claim concerning the nature of the first principle. As the argument of Book 1 develops it becomes clear that Hooker is thoroughly invested in the practical, political, and constitutional consequences of this elaborate theology of law, of the claim that ‘God is law’. Indeed the edifice of his apology of the Elizabethan Settlement rests upon this philosophical point of departure: The stateliness of houses, the goodliness of trees, when we behold them delighteth the eye; but that foundation which beareth up the one, that root which ministreth unto the other nourishment and life, is in the bosom of the earth concealed. And if there be at any time occasion to search into it, such labour is then more necessary than pleasant both to them which undertake it and for the lookers on. In like manner the use and benefit of good laws, all that live under them may enjoy with delight and comfort, albeit the grounds and first original causes from whence they have sprung be unknown, as to the greatest part of men they are. (Hooker 1977–90: 1.1.2; 1:57.6–16)

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The burden of his argument is thus to demonstrate that the entire constitutional arrangement of the Elizabethan Settlement – the ‘stately house’ of the established church and the ‘goodly tree’ of the flourishing commonwealth united under the rule of one sovereign – has its ultimate ground and justification in a ‘hidden’, transcendent first principle, a ‘first original’ of all external manifestations of order. For Hooker the institutions of the Elizabethan religious settlement rest upon this foundational proposition of metaphysical ontology, viz. that God is Law. This account of his apologetic purpose constitutes, moreover, Hooker’s own explicit claim to coherence of argument – he intends this theory of law to provide the necessary justification for his later defence of the institutions of the Settlement, and more specifically for his account of the theory of sovereignty. Hooker’s adaptation of this classical logos theology to the concrete political and constitutional issues of his particular time and place is unique when judged beside other contemporary contributions to Elizabethan religious polemics (Kirby 2008: 121–50). Indeed his prodigiously sustained effort to explore the underlying theological and metaphysical connections connecting the theories of law and sovereignty – his intimate knitting together of high theology and politics – is arguably the defining characteristic of Hooker’s thought, such that the designation ‘political theology’ is probably the most accurate designation of his venture (Kirby 1990: 1–4). Such an approach to political theory is thoroughly in keeping with Hooker’s repeated affirmation of the Neoplatonic logic of ‘participation’, whereby all things are understood to exist within their ‘first original cause’ and, conversely, the cause to dwell within all derivative beings (Kirby 2003: 165–84). As C. S. Lewis once commented in this connection, Hooker’s universe is ‘drenched with Deity’ (Lewis 1954: 462). ‘Nomos-theology’ or a theology of law, then, is the substantive proposition of Book 1 of the Laws. Hooker summarises his general aim towards the end of Book 1: the drift and purpose of all is this, even to show in what manner as every good and perfect gift, so this very gift of good and perfect laws is derived from the father of lights; to teach men a reason why just and reasonable laws are of so great force, of so great use in the world; and to inform their minds with some method of reducing the laws whereof there is present controversy unto their first original causes, that so it may be in every particular ordinance thereby the better discerned, whether the same be reasonable just and righteous or no. (1977–90: 1.16.1; 1:135.11–13)

Hooker defines law in general as ‘that which doth assign unto each thing the kind, that which doth moderate the force and power, that which doth appoint the form and measure of working … so that no certain end could ever be attained unless the actions whereby it is attained were regular, that is to say, made suitable for and correspondent unto their end, by some canon, rule or law’ (1977–90: 1.2.1; 1:58.26–9). This definition places him in a scholastic teleological tradition derived ultimately from the metaphysics of Aristotle and mediated by Thomas Aquinas. The definition is an

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almost verbatim quotation of Aquinas’s definition of the ‘essence of law’ (Aquinas 1947: Ia IIæ, qq. 90–6). Hooker asserts that everything works according to law, including God himself: ‘the being of God is a kind of law to his working: for that perfection which God is, giveth perfection to that he doth’ (Hooker 1977–90: 1.2.2; 1:59.6). Just as the traditional logos theology accounts for the genesis of the world by means of an emanation or processio from an originative principle of divine unity, so also Hooker derives a diverse hierarchy of laws from the eternal law as their ‘highest wellspring and fountain’. In this respect he also adheres to Aquinas’s position (compare Aquinas 1947: Ia IIæ, q. 91, art. 1). Hooker’s emphasis upon the divine unity is marked: ‘our God is one, or rather very Oneness and mere unity, having nothing but itself in itself, and not consisting (as all things do besides God) of many things besides’ (1977–90: 1.2.2; 1:59.14–19). It is precisely, however, in his insistence upon the divine unity and simplicity that we can begin to discern a glimmer of Hooker’s departure from the Thomistic paradigm. On a certain level, it is as if Hooker had conflated Aquinas’s treatise on law in the secunda pars with the argument of the articles on the divine simplicity in the third question of the prima pars (Aquinas 1947: Ia, q. 3, art. 7). All derivative species of law participate in the divine, undifferentiated unity of what Hooker calls ‘that law which as it is laid up in the bosom of God’ (1977–90: 1.3.1; 1: 63.15), and emanate from it ‘dispositively’, that is, by way of a gradual hierarchical ‘procession’ from higher to lower species. In this respect, Hooker’s nomostheology adheres to the Neoplatonic logic of the so-called lex divinitatis (the law of cosmic order, the law of the ‘great chain’ of being) whereby the original and generative principle of law remains simple and self-identical while simultaneously emanating beyond and below itself ‘dispositively’ in its process of bringing into being the manifold, derivative species of law (Kirby 2005: 29–44). Unlike Aquinas’s definition of eternal law in the second part of the Summa, however, Hooker distinguishes between a ‘hidden’ first eternal law and a ‘manifest’ second eternal law on the ground that God is a law both to himself (in se) in his inaccessible divine simplicity, and to all creatures besides (ad extra), and thus invokes the ineffably transcendent divinity of Thomas’s discussion of the ‘simplicity of God’ (Aquinas 1947: Ia, q. 3) in his definition of the original Eternal Law: ‘that law which as it is laid up in the bosom of God, they call eternal’ (Hooker 1977–90: 1.3.1; 1:63.6–64.3). While his discussion of the first eternal law adheres closely to traditional formulations of logos theology (such as found in the opening questions of the first part of Aquinas’s Summa), Hooker’s invention of the category ‘second eternal law’ introduces something thoroughly distinctive, unusual, and unexpected within the tradition of Christian legal theory (Hooker 1993–7: VI(1), 92). ‘All things’, Hooker maintains, including God’s own self, ‘do work after a sort according to law’ (1977–90: 1.2.2; 1:58.33–59.1). Whereas all creatures work ‘according to a law, whereof some superior, unto whom they are subject, is author’, nonetheless ‘only the works and operations of God have him both for their worker and for

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the law whereby they are wrought. The being of God is a kind of law to his working’ (1977–90: 1.2.2; 1:59.12–15). As the first principle of law, God alone is a completely self-regulated agent and, ‘being the first, it can have no other then itself to be the author of that law which it willingly worketh by. God therefore is a law both to himself, and to all other things besides’ (1977–90: 1.2.3; 1:60.16–18). All derivative species of law, therefore, have their origin in this first eternal law; however, for Hooker their derivation from the first eternal law is not in the first instance through a gradual, hierarchically mediated dispositio, but rather they are understood by him to be gathered together within the second eternal law. In this fashion Hooker simultaneously guards the transcendent simplicity and unity of the divine source of law – God in his ‘very oneness’, the first eternal law – and by positing the second eternal law he asserts the radical immanence of God in all the manifold participating forms bound together within it. The crucial consequence of this gathering together of the various species of law within a second eternal law is to diminish the overall significance of the hierarchical dispositio as the primary mode of mediation between the divine source of law and the finite, created order of laws. In place of the Thomist logic of a gradual, hierarchical disposition of the species of law, Hooker’s positing of the second eternal law sets up an Augustinian ‘hypostatic’ relation between the Creator/Eternal Law and creature/ manifold determinate species of law, i.e. a relation which presupposes such a radical distinction between their respective natures as to preclude the possibility of any proportional dispositio. The other principal aspect of the second eternal law, i.e. the law of God’s special revelation of himself in the Scriptures, presupposes a disruption of the order regulated by the natural law and introduced into that order by the Fall and by original sin. This divinely revealed law provides the means of the restoration or ‘return’ of the creation to its original condition of unity under the eternal law; the second eternal law thus works through the revelation of Scripture to ensure that nothing in the created order falls outside the regulation of God’s ordering purpose. Hooker’s distinction between these two summa genera of the second eternal law – viz. natural law and divine law – corresponds, as has already been shown, to the cosmic logic of procession and return of Neoplatonic metaphysics, but for Hooker it also reflects the epistemological distinction of the twofold knowledge of God (duplex cognitio Dei), namely by the light of supernatural revelation and by the natural light of reason so critically important to Protestant theology (Calvin 1986: 1.2.1). On the side of natural law there are further derivative and composite species of law – chief among them human positive law and the law of nations, for example – which depend upon a conscious, pragmatic reflection upon the general principles contained in the natural law and their application to particular, concrete circumstances. These additional derivative species of law are viewed by Hooker as a consequence of human sin and, like the divine law, they constitute part of the divinely ordained means of correction to the disorder introduced by the Fall – as Augustine would say, coercive human law is both a penalty and remedy for sin (Augustine 1998: Book 19). Throughout all this the human creature as the imago dei is portrayed by Hooker as the focal

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point of the divine operation of procession from and return to the original fount of order established in divine simplicity of the first eternal law. To sum up, Hooker’s theology of law displays many of the distinctive characteristics of the Thomist account of law as a hierarchical emanation of the Eternal Law. Yet, by gathering natural law and divine law together within the second eternal law, Hooker introduces a decisively significant Augustinian theological turn derived from the thoroughly Protestant assumptions of his doctrine of grace. The Eternal Law proper, i.e. the first eternal law, is distanced from its derivative forms of law in such a fashion that the natural law cannot serve to mediate between fallen humanity and the divine source of justice. In this respect Hooker’s theory of law takes on the marked Augustinian flavour of his theology of grace outlined earlier in A Learned Discourse of Justification: the light of nature is never able to find out any way of obtaining the reward of bliss but by performing exactly the duties and works of righteousness. From salvation, therefore, and life, all flesh being excluded this way, behold how the wisdom of God hath revealed a way mystical and supernatural, a way directing unto the same end of life by a course which groundeth itself upon the guiltiness of sin, and through sin deserving of condemnation and death. (Hooker 1977–90: 1.11.5, 6; 1:118.11–18)

There is no ‘natural’ mediation between fallen humanity and divine justice: solely by means of grace – ‘a way mystical and supernatural’ – is the gulf between man and God bridged. In this respect, the hierarchical dispositio of laws cannot serve to link heaven and earth in any saving fashion. Grace alone is capable of overcoming the distance. In this way, Hooker’s appropriation of the Thomist legal theory with its assumption of gradual hierarchical mediation is properly understood to be contained within the boundaries of an Augustinian logic of hypostatic mediation. Hooker allows the logic of hierarchy, but not at all in the Thomist sense of a gradual dispositio connecting heaven and earth, with nature assisting grace. This ‘containment’ of the hierarchical principle within an Augustinian hypostatic framework has very pronounced implications for ecclesiology and constitutional theory. Hooker works out these implications throughout the remainder of his treatise. Leaving Books 2 through 7 aside, in admittedly procrustean fashion, I propose to examine the consequences of my reading of Hooker’s theology of law for the interpretation of his theory of sovereignty.

‘Law Makes the King’ There are two critical features of Hooker’s theory of sovereignty that stand at the centre of the debate over the coherence of his thought. First is his claim that the power of ‘supreme jurisdiction’ over the church or ‘ecclesiastical dominion’ rightfully belongs to the ‘civil prince or governor’ to ‘order and dispose of spiritual affairs, as

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the highest uncommanded commander in them’ (Hooker 1977–90: 8.1.8; 3:330.14– 16); the second is the distinctively dialectical manner of his assertion of the divine right of sovereigns as ‘God’s lieutenants’ who, nonetheless, should attribute to the law what the law attributes to them, namely power and dominion (‘Attribuat rex legi quod lex attribuit ei potestatem et dominium’: 1977–90: 8.2.1; 3:332.23–4). unto kings by human right, honour, by very divine right, is due. Man’s ordinances are many times presupposed as grounds in the statutes of God. And therefore of what kind soever the means be whereby governors are lawfully advanced unto their seats, as we by the law of God stand bound meekly to acknowledge them for God’s lieutenants and to confess their power his, so they by the same law are both authorised and required to use that power as far as it may be in any sort available to his honour. (1977–90: 8.3.1 [Keble 1888: 2.6]; 3:335.22–336.4)

Scholars have frequently portrayed the Erastian constitution described and boldly defended by Hooker in Book 8 as essentially irreconcilable with the supposedly Thomistic theology of law outlined in Book 1. Peter Munz sets the pattern when he argues that in his defence of the royal ecclesiastical supremacy Hooker abandons his previous adherence to a Thomist theology of law with its gradual disposition of the powers of nature and grace in favour of a species of ‘Tudor Averroism’ (Munz 1970: 49–57). Hooker’s willingness to affirm subjection of the governance of the church to the civil power is deemed inconsistent with the Thomist first principles, that is to say, with the logic of the lex divinitatis whereby the temporal power must be subordinated hierarchically to the spiritual power, as the order of nature itself is subordinated to the order of grace, or as natural law is subordinate to divine law. Munz’s argument takes as its unspoken premise that Hooker actually affirms the Thomist metaphysics of hierarchical dispositio. Given such a premise, Hooker’s ‘general meditations’ of Book 1 are plainly contradicted – in the view of Munz and in that of many other scholars besides – by the ‘particular decisions’ concerning constitutional order argued in Book 8 (Munz 1970: 96–111). This conclusion concerning the logical incoherence of Hooker’s account of sovereignty with his legal principles rests, however, on a fallacy, namely that the theology of law of Book 1 is indeed a simple appropriation of Thomist metaphysical principles. I have attempted to show above how Hooker does indeed appropriate elements of Aquinas’s theory of law, how on occasion he appears almost to be quoting directly from the Summa, but how also, nonetheless, he modifies the Thomist legal theory substantively by setting it within a larger framework marked by its Augustinian soteriological assumptions. Our main purpose in comparing the arguments of Books 1 and 8 yet again is to attempt to show that, far from tending to logical incoherence, Hooker’s Erastian defence of the civil magistrate’s role as the ‘highest uncommanded Commander’ (Hooker 1977–90: 8.1.8 [Keble 1888: 2.1]; 3.330.15) of the ecclesiastical as well as the civil hierarchy is nothing less than the practical completion of his argument, the necessary fulfilment of his nomos-theology.

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Hooker’s defence of the constitutional arrangements of the Elizabethan Settlement is accurately described as an instance of ‘Tudor Averroism’ following the path blazed two centuries earlier by Marsilius of Padua (1275–1342).3 Marsilius was a resolute critic of the claims of the papacy to jurisdiction over princes on Augustinian theological grounds, very similar to those embraced by Hooker (see Marsilius of Padua 2005). The particular relevance of this fourteenth-century work of Augustinian political theology to Hooker is evident in Marsilius’ chief aim, namely to expose the Roman papacy’s quest for domination – the libido dominandi of Augustine’s earthly city – that is, supreme jurisdiction not only over the spiritual and ecclesiastical realms but over the temporal or civil realms as well. According to Marsilius, such over-reaching of spiritual authority was the central cause of conflict and disorder within Christendom. In the bull Unam Sanctam Boniface VIII (pope 1294–1303) set out a series of dogmatic propositions that culminated in the assertion of papal supremacy.4 His assertion of the pope’s supremacy with the corollary subordination of princes and civil rulers to the so-called papal ‘plenitude of power’ is grounded in an interpretation of Romans 13 according to the logic of the lex divinitatis – the same logic which informs Thomas Aquinas’s theory of the hierarchically ordered, dispositive emanation of the species of law in the Summa Theologica (Aquinas 1947: IIa IIæ, q. 172, art. 2). Over against logic of dispositio implied by the lex divinitatis favoured by both Aquinas and Boniface VIII, Marsilius proposes a radical redefinition of spiritual power along Augustinian soteriological lines and consequently in direct opposition to the hierarchical claims of the papacy to the plenitudo potestatis implicit in the lex divinitatis. Over against the metaphysics of hierarchical dispositio, Marsilius’ Augustinian critique asserts a hypostatic relation between the spiritual and temporal realms, between the orders of grace and nature. This Augustinian rejection of the metaphysical primacy of mediated hierarchy (lex divinitatis) undergirding the logic of Unam Sanctam led Marsilius to assert the converse and equally totalising claim of temporal power over all matters of ecclesiastical jurisdiction. An Augustinian hypostatic view of the relation between spiritual and temporal power similar to that which informs the Marsilian political theology also shapes Hooker’s interpretation of the relation between church and commonwealth and the unity of civil and ecclesiastical jurisdiction in the person of the godly prince: A church and a commonwealth we grant are things in nature the one distinguished from the other: a commonwealth is one way, and a church another way defined … We may speak of them as two, we may sever the rights and causes of the one well enough from the other in regard of that difference which we grant there is between them, albeit we make no personal [emphasis added] difference. For the truth is the church and the commonwealth are names which import things really different. But those things are accidents, and such accidents as may and should always lovingly dwell together in one subject. (Hooker 1977–90: 8.1.2, 5; 3:318, 324)

Proceeding from an Augustinian premise, that church and commonwealth can be united as ‘accidents’ within a single ‘subject’ and that civil and ecclesiastical jurisdic-

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tion may coincide in the person of the prince as the Act of Supremacy proclaims,5 is for Hooker a logical and necessary consequence of the nomos-theology set out by him in the first book of the Laws. Indeed it is the common thread of Hooker’s political Augustinianism that connects the arguments of Books 1 and 8 and renders them coherent with each other. Hooker’s interpretation of the royal supremacy certainly bears more than a passing resemblance to the political theology of Marsilius (Hooker 1977–90: 7.11.8; 3:208.17h). The common ground is their embrace of the precepts of political Augustinianism.6 It is precisely owing to Marsilius’ thoroughly Augustinian insistence upon the need to distinguish sharply and clearly – and therefore ‘hypostatically’ rather than ‘dispositively’ – between the spheres of the spiritual and the temporal powers that the ‘external’ and coercive jurisdiction over the church as a human, political organisation is ascribed by him to the sovereign power of the Legislator. By a similar line or reasoning Hooker maintains that Christ alone (solus Christus)7 exercises headship over the church as an inner, invisible, and mystical civitas – i.e. the church as a ‘society supernatural’ – while the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the prince belongs properly to the outward, visible, and external civitas – i.e. the church as a ‘human, politic society’: The church, being a supernatural society, doth differ from natural societies in this: that the persons unto whom we associate ourselves, in the one are men simply considered as men; but they to whom we be joined in the other, are God, angels, and holy men. The church being both a society, and a society supernatural – although as it is a society, it have the self same original grounds which other politic societies have, namely the natural inclination which all men have unto sociable life, and consent to some certain bond of association, which bond is the law that appointeth what kind of order they shall be associated in – yet unto the church as it is a society supernatural this is peculiar, that part of the bond of their association which belong to the Church of God, must be a law supernatural, which God himself hath revealed concerning that kind of worship which his people shall do unto him. (Hooker 1977–90: 1.15.2; 1:131.6–20)

Just as the second eternal law is related hypostatically (and not dispositively) to the first eternal law, so also the church as a ‘society supernatural’ with its ‘law supernatural’ is related to the church as a human ‘politic society’ (1977–90: 1.15.3; 1:131.25) governed by positive human law which in turn is derived from a reflection upon the natural law – in short, by the authority of the Crown in Parliament. Yet, just when we think we have found our footing on solid Augustinian ground, Hooker gives us pause to consider further. Early in Book 8 he invokes the lex divinitatis in the most explicit terms: And if things and persons be ordered, this doth imply that they are distinguished by degrees. For order is a gradual disposition. The whole world consisting of parts so many so different is by this only thing upheld: he which framed them hath set them in order. Yea, the very deity itself both keepeth and requireth for ever this to be kept as a law, that wheresoever there is a coagmentation of many, the lowest be knit to the highest

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by that which being interjacent may cause each to cleave unto other, and so all to continue one. (1977–90: 8.2.1; 3:331.17–332.1)

Moreover, in Hooker’s Autograph Notes from Trinity College, Dublin (Hooker 1977– 90: 3:494.10–14) he quotes almost verbatim from the bull Unam Sanctam where Boniface VIII defends the doctrine of the papal plenitude of power (plenitudo potestatis) by asserting the necessary hierarchical subordination of temporal to spiritual jurisdiction: For according to the blessed Dionysius, it is [by] the law of divinity [lex divinitatis] that the lowest things are led to the highest by intermediaries. Then, according to the order of the universe, all things are not led back equally and immediately, but the lowest by the intermediary, and the inferior by the superior … Therefore if the terrestrial power err, it will be judged by the spiritual power. (Friedberg 1955, 1959: II, cols. 1245–6)

This relation of subordination between the spiritual and the temporal realms establishes the ecclesiastical hierarch as an ordained agent or sacramental mediator between the worlds. Hooker’s naming of the sovereign as ‘uncommanded commander’ – a probable allusion to Aristotle’s ‘unmoved mover’ – would no doubt have pleased both Thomas Aquinas and Boniface, yet the metaphysical premise concerning the manner of that mediation has been radically transformed. Hooker parts company with the two scholastics when he avoids inferring any necessary subjection of the terrestrial (i.e. civil) to the spiritual (i.e. ecclesiastical) power. On the contrary, he attributes the plenitude of power unequivocally to the civil magistrate, thereby completely redefining the meaning of the relation between the powers. Ecclesiastical power is reinterpreted as belonging to terrestrial government; the church is a ‘politic society’. Just as Aristotle’s unmoved mover gives life and motion to the entire physical cosmos, so also the prince is the lex animata of the political realm – ‘politic society’ – in the case of England, ‘a free Christian state or kingdom where one and the selfsame people are the church and the commonwealth’ (Hooker 1977–90: 8.3.5; 3:355.33). In making this claim is Hooker trapped in some deep internal contradiction of argument? Is this the product of an incoherent political theology? Such has been the prevailing judgement of numerous scholars for many years. By attending closely to the underlying Augustinian contours of Hooker’s thought, however, we can discern in this account of the nature of the sovereign power a theological pattern reminiscent of the subtle structure of his nomos-theology in Book 1. Just as the hierarchical dispositio of the generic division of laws is contained by a broader hypostatic logic on the basis of the distinction drawn between the first and second eternal laws, so here the hierarchical dispositio of jurisdiction and authority is interpreted within the larger Augustinian frame. The church, as a mystical, invisible, and divine ‘society supernatural’, is distinguished hypostatically from the church as an external, visible, and human ‘politic society’. Christ alone rules as head of the ‘society supernatural’, where he rules ‘by the inward influence of heavenly grace’:

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we make the spiritual regiment of Christ to be generally that whereby his church is ruled and governed in things spiritual. Of this general we make two distinct kinds, the one invisibly exercised by Christ himself in his own person, the other outwardly administered by them whom Christ doth allow to be the rulers and guiders of his church. (Hooker 1977–90: 8.4.9; 3:377.7–10)

The species of jurisdiction are hypostatically distinguished as visible/invisible, inward/ outward, temporal/eternal, yet Christ is nonetheless ‘personally’ the source of both. Being ‘severed in nature’, these two ‘kinds’ of power are incommensurable, and therefore cannot be ordered by means of gradual dispositio. Consequently, there can be no dispositive subordination of human jurisdiction to spiritual jurisdiction, but solely a hypostatic distinction – as Marsilius had also argued. The result is a ‘humanising’ of the church as an external, political organisation under the jurisdiction of the Crown, with the consequence that an ‘essential’ distinction between ecclesiastical and civil power was no longer a theological or metaphysical necessity; both powers are recognised by Hooker as properly belonging to the sphere of the ‘politic society’. At the same time, there is a parallel, symmetrical ‘sacralising’ of the commonwealth: ‘even as the soul is the worthier part of man, so humane societies are much more to care for that which tendeth properly unto the soul’s estate than for such temporal things as this life doth stand in need of … so in all commonwealths things spiritual ought above temporal to be provided for. And of things spiritual the chiefest is religion’ (Hooker 1977–90: 8.1.4; 3:321.10–16). Moreover, since civil jurisdiction derives authority directly from heaven, ‘God doth ratify the works of that sovereign authority which kings have received by men’ (1977–90: 8.3.1; 3:336.14). Consequently, power derived constitutionally from ‘below’, that is by consent of the governed, is itself recognised as having a divine sanction from ‘above’: vox populi, vox Dei or, as Hooker expresses this famous formula in his discussion of positive human law in Book 1, ‘The general and perpetual voice of men is as the sentence of God himself ’ (1977–90: 1.8.3; 1:83.33–84.2) For Hooker the logic of hierarchical dispositio is retained within the political organisation of the state – a term he uses in a remarkably modern sense for a sixteenth-century theorist – with its ‘natural’ but not ‘personal’ distinction between civil and ecclesiastical powers (1977–90: 8.1.2; 3:320.9–12). Speaking simultaneously of his adversaries in both Geneva and Rome, Hooker remarks that ‘they hold the necessity of personal separation which clean excludes the power of one individual’s dealing in both [i.e. civil and ecclesiastical jurisdiction], we of natural which does not prevent that one and the same person may in both bear a principal sway’ (1977–90: 8.1.2; 3:320.9–12). Both the disciplinarian Puritan polemicist Thomas Cartwright and the exponent of the Catholic Counter-Reformation Robert Bellarmine maintained the common position that ecclesiastical authority was autonomous in its foundation. Yet for Hooker these two distinct powers are united in the person of the sovereign, in a manner analogous to the uniting of diverse species of law within the embrace of what Hooker calls the ‘second’ eternal law. Hierarchical order properly obtains within the self-complete unity of the politic society, rather

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than through a subordination of a temporal jurisdiction to a separated spiritual jurisdiction. Hierarchy continues to obtain within the political realm, but a hierarchy answerable to the prince as sole and supreme ruler: in a free Christian state or kingdom where one and the selfsame people are the church and the commonwealth, God through Christ directing that people to see it for good and weighty considerations expedient that their sovereign lord and governor in causes civil have also in ecclesiastical affairs a supreme power, forasmuch as the light of reason doth lead them unto it, and against it, God’s own revealed law hath nothing; surely they do not in submitting themselves thereunto any other than that which a wise and religious people ought to do. (Hooker 1977–90: 8.3.5; 3:355)

Moreover, in a manner logically parallel to this unification of church and commonwealth, Hooker insists that power from above (divine right) and power from below (human right) are also to be understood as united and yet distinct. It is as if Hooker understood the sovereign power of the Elizabethan constitution to embody a reconciliation of the competing claims of Henry Bolingbroke and Richard II as represented by Shakespeare. On the one hand, Hooker acknowledges Richard’s assertion of the divine basis of royal authority and his claim concerning the mystical analogy of sacred kingship between Christ and that of an anointed ruler: Not all the water in the rough rude sea Can wash the balm from an anointed king; The breath of worldly men cannot depose The deputy elected by the Lord. (Richard II 3.2.54–7; see Mayer 2003: 103–20)

Hooker qualifies this by insisting that divine right is implicated in human right: ‘unto kings by human right honour by very divine right is due’. On the one hand, As for supreme power in ecclesiastical affairs, the Word of God doth nowhere appoint that all kings should have it, neither that any should not have it; for which cause, it seems to stand altogether by human right that unto Christian kings there is such dominion given. (1977–90: 8.3.1; 3:335.5–9, emphasis added)

Yet, at the same time, the Law of God doth give them, which once are exalted unto that place of estate, right to exact at the hands of their subjects general obedience in whatsoever affairs their power may serve to command, and God ratifies the works of that sovereign authority, which Kings have received by men. (1977–90: 8.3.1; 3: 336.11–15)

Thus, in a dialectical fashion, Hooker proposes a bridge to reconcile the competing claims concerning the ultimate source of political power. This subtle argument was destined to be largely ignored throughout the ensuing conflict of the Civil War.

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Notes 1

Taking its name from the late sixteenth-century theologian Thomas Lüber, alias ‘Erastus’ of Heidelberg, the ‘Erastian’ political theology conceives of society as a single, unified corpus christianum, where membership of church and commonwealth as well as civil and religious authority were understood to be coextensive, and consequently where the civil magistrate exercised sovereign jurisdiction over the church. 2 Books 1–4 were published in 1593, Book 5 in 1597, and Books 6 and 8 posthumously in 1648, and the first complete edition, including Book 7, was edited by John Gauden and published in 1662. 3 For a discussion of Tudor appeals to the political theology of Marsilius, see Lockwood 1990.

4 The bull was issued on 18 November 1302. For an English translation see Tierney 1988:188–9. 5 1 Elizabeth I, cap. 1; Statutes of the Realm, 4: 350–5. See also 26 Henry VIII, cap. 1; SR 3: 492–3. 6 On political Augustinianism in the Middle Ages, see Dyson 2003. 7 See Hooker 1977–90: 8.4.9 [Keble 1888: 4.10]; 3:377.16–20: ‘Him only therefore we do acknowledge to be that Lord which dwelleth, liveth, and reigneth in our hearts; him only to be that head which giveth salvation and life unto his body; him only to be that fountain, from whence the influence of heavenly grace distilleth …’.

References and Further Reading Aquinas, Thomas (1947). Summa Theologiae, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province. New York: Benziger Brothers. Augustine, Aurelius (1998). The City of God against the Pagans, ed. R. W. Dyson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Calvin, John (1986). Institutes of the Christian Religion. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Dyson R. W. (2003). Normative Theories of Society and Government in Five Medieval Thinkers: St. Augustine, John of Salisbury, Giles of Rome, St. Thomas Aquinas, and Marsilius of Padua. Lewiston, NY: Mellen. Eppley, Daniel (2007). Defending Royal Supremacy and Discerning God’s Will in Tudor England. Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Faulkner, Robert K. (1981). Richard Hooker and the Politics of Christian England. Berkeley: University of California Press. Friedberg, Emil (ed.) (1955, 1959). Corpus Iuris Canonici. Leipzig: B. Tauchnitz, 1879; repr. Graz: Akademische Druk-u. Verlagsanstalt. Gascoigne, John (1997). ‘Church and state unified: Hooker’s rationale for the English postReformation order’. Journal of Religious History, 21, 23–34.

Guy, John (1995). ‘The Elizabethan establishment and the ecclesiastical polity’. In John Guy (ed.), The Reign of Elizabeth I: Court and Culture in the Last Decade (pp. 125–49). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Helgerson, Richard (1992). ‘Defending the ecclesiastical polity’. In Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood (269–83). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hill, W. Speed (1972a). ‘Doctrine and polity in Hooker’s Laws’. English Literary Renaissance, 2/2, 173–93. Hill, W. Speed (ed.) (1972b). Studies in Richard Hooker: Essays Preliminary to an Edition of his Works. Cleveland, OH: Press of Case Western University. Hooker, Richard (1888). The Works of … Mr. Richard Hooker, ed. John Keble, 7th edn., rev. R. W. Church and F. Paget, 3 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hooker, Richard (1977–90). The Folger Library Edition of the Works of Richard Hooker, gen. ed. W. Speed Hill. Vols. 1–5: Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press; (1993–7) vols. 6–7: Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies.

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Kirby, W. J. Torrance (1990). Richard Hooker’s Doctrine of the Royal Supremacy. Leiden: Brill. Kirby, W. J. Torrance (ed.) (2003). Richard Hooker and the English Reformation. London and Dordrecht: Kluwer. Kirby, W. J. Torrance (2005). Richard Hooker, Reformer and Platonist. Aldershot: Ashgate. Kirby, W. J. Torrance (ed.) (2008). A Companion to Richard Hooker. Leiden and Boston: E. J. Brill. Lake, Peter (1988). Anglicans and Puritans? Presbyterian and English Conformist Thought from Whitgift to Hooker. London and Boston: Unwin Hyman. Lewis, C. S. (1954). English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Lockwood, Shelley C. (1990). ‘Marsilius of Padua and the case for the royal ecclesiastical supremacy’. Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6/1, 89–119. McCoy, Richard C. (2002). Alterations of State: Sacred Kingship in the English Reformation. New York: Columbia University Press. McGrade, Arthur S. (1985). ‘Constitutionalism late-medieval and early-modern – lex facit regem: Hooker’s use of Bracton’. In R. J. Schoeck (ed.), Acta Conventus Neo-Latini Bononiensis: Proceedings of the Fourth International Congress of Neo-Latin Studies, Bologna, 26 Aug.–1 Sept. 1979 (pp. 116–23). Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies. McGrade, Arthur S. (ed.) (1997). Richard Hooker and the Construction of Christian Community.

Tempe, AZ: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies. McGrade, Arthur S. and Brian Vickers (eds.) (1975). ‘Hooker’s Polity and the establishment of the English church’. Introduction to Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, abridged edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marsilius of Padua (2005). The Defender of the Peace, ed. Annabel Brett. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mayer, Jean-Christoph (2003). ‘Shakespeare’s religious background revisited: Richard II in a new context’. In Dennis Taylor and David Beauregard (eds.), Shakespeare and the Culture of Christianity in Early Modern England (pp. 103–20). New York: Fordham University Press. Munz, Peter (1970). The Place of Hooker in the History of Thought. New York: Greenwood Press. Patterson, Patrick D. M. (2002). ‘Hooker’s apprentice: God, entelechy, beauty, and desire in Book One of Richard Hooker’s Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity’. Anglican Theological Review, 84/4, 961–88. Sommerville, Johann P. (1983). ‘Richard Hooker, Hadrian Saravia, and the advent of the divine right of kings’. History of Political Thought, 4/2, 229–45. Tierney, Brian (1988). The Crisis of Church and State, 1050–1300. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Williams, Rowan (2006). ‘Richard Hooker: The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity revisited’. Ecclesiastical Law Journal, 8/3, 283–91.

19

Donne, Milton, and the Two Traditions of Religious Liberty Feisal G. Mohamed

In a recent adjustment of his views on the public sphere, Jürgen Habermas engages the ‘new, hitherto unexpected political importance’ of ‘religious traditions and communities of faith’ (Habermas 2006: 1). A truly democratic engagement of this importance, he claims, cannot simply treat believers as unenlightened secularists – as the equivalent of children who have not yet reached the maturity rewarded with full enfranchisement – a tendency enshrined in the liberal insistence on secular public discourse. If the public sphere is exclusively secular, it necessarily denies full access to those individuals motivated by beliefs for which they cannot articulate rational justification: ‘In the liberal view, the state guarantees citizens freedom of religion only on the condition that religious communities … accept not only the separation of church and state, but also the restrictive definition of the public use of reason’ (2006: 6). If, on the other hand, faith-based claims are allowed too much sway in public discourse and institutions, then arises the majoritarian imposition of religion that liberal toleration successfully avoids: ‘Majority rule turns into repression if the majority deploys religious arguments in the process of political opinion and will formation and refuses to offer those publicly accessible justifications which the losing minority, be it secular or of a different faith, is able to follow in the light of shared standards’ (2006: 12). The beliefs of citizens are thus potentially threatened both by the liberal state that is too severe in its demands for secular public discourse and by the state allowing religious expression too free a rein. Two approaches to religious liberty have arisen in response to this dilemma, both of which jurists find to be relevant to current debates: the one a negative liberty that allows scope for religious expression so long as it does not impinge upon the same right extended to others, and the other a positive liberty that allows full expression of religious enlightenment howsoever it chooses to present itself (see Ahdar and Leigh 2005; Kahn 2005). The former, liberal toleration, assumes that the state has a role to play in securing the condition of religious freedom to which all have equal access and in imposing the limits on religious expression necessary to maintaining that equality.

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In the latter, liberty of conscience, state non-interference in matters religious may be a temporary measure, and one not necessarily applied equally to all citizens, allowing believers to seek a divine truth that worldly institutions are expected to respect. The complexities of religious liberty are of course as much a part of the early modern period as they are of our own time, and exploring their dynamics in the temporally distant case of seventeenth-century England might help us refine our understanding of this currently pressing issue. To that end, this chapter explores views on religious liberty in the works of John Donne and John Milton. In Donne we find a position resembling liberal toleration avant la lettre. Though a liberal view of toleration cannot be said to have developed in his time, we see him anticipate several of its claims in his emphasis on the separation of religious worship and political obedience. Milton is quite clearly an advocate of liberty of conscience who becomes increasingly hostile over his career to state involvement in matters religious. Such hostility consistently defends the right of Protestant sects – and only Protestant sects – to seek and to apply divine truth.

Donne and Liberal Toleration Donne’s view of religious liberty emerges most fully in his 1610 treatise PseudoMartyr. The aim of the work is to encourage Roman Catholics in England (‘recusants’), to take the Oath of Allegiance that James had devised as a means of separating loyal recusant subjects from those extremists who accepted the Pope’s authority to declare that a king should be deposed – the kind of extremist, in other words, who might have sympathised with the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. In current scholarship on the oath, two polarities have emerged. The one takes James at his word when he describes himself as moderate: both when he points to the prominence of recusants in his court and when he claims that he demands only the civil obedience of his subjects. This view tends to present the oath as a relatively restrained response to the ‘Powder Treason’ in that it eschews persecution of all Roman Catholics and takes steps to distinguish between loyal subjects and fanatics (Fincham and Lake 1985). The other polarity is more sceptical of the oath’s good intentions, and sees it as a rather more cynical attempt to sow the seeds of division among recusants. Michael Questier has suggestively shown how it had the effect of creating confusion among English Romanists, including their leading divines, and that it was rather more rigorously enforced than we often suppose (Questier 1997). These facts must qualify, the argument runs, James’s self-styled moderation. We shall return to these apparently opposite views after exploring Donne’s tract. In some ways Donne’s defence of the oath adopts James’s own terms; it has been speculated that Donne wrote the piece at James’s request. Whether he did or not, it is his first published work of any real length and one seeking the favour of the king. Ameliorating the view of his earlier Paraphrase Upon the Revelation of St. John, at this juncture James identifies the Pope as Antichrist only in so far as he meddles in the

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temporal affairs of monarchs. His own defence of the oath, Triplici nodo, triplex cuneus, consistently emphasises the ‘natural obedience’ he is owed as temporal monarch and denies any intention to coerce Roman Catholic subjects into Protestant worship (James VI and I 1971: 249). Despite his focus on the monarch’s governance of externals, James also adopts the status of godly monarch of which he was clearly fond. His biblical examples of temporal obedience move from that paid by the Israelites to Pharaoh to a series of references indicating that the authority of the monarch is second only to God’s and suggesting the monarch’s role as political and spiritual leader, drawn from Tertullian, Justin Martyr, and St Ambrose, among others (James VI and I 1971: 255; see also Doelman 2000: 20–38 et passim; Sommerville 1991: 59–61). Several defenders of the oath followed his lead in this regard: writing from the Clink, Richard Sheldon adopts in his 1611 defence of the oath language satisfying to his keepers in emphasising the king’s role as God’s vicegerent (Sheldon 1611: 10–11, 18–19). Pseudo-Martyr travels some of the same ground, but in a fuller spirit of ecumenism and humanity – Victor Houliston claims that we can take the treatise’s ecumenism largely at face value, and Rebecca Lemon argues persuasively that Donne’s emphasis on conscience shows a recognition of the complex loyalties at stake for individual believers (Houliston 2006: 477; Lemon 2006: 112). Ecumenism seems to be a consistent concern for Donne in both his private and his public writings, early and late. In a letter to his friend Henry Goodyere, written as he formulated Pseudo Martyr, Donne sets himself apart from such defenders of the oath as William Barlow, bishop of Lincoln, whose Answer to a Catholic English-Man (1609) he dismisses not only as ‘unscholar-like’ but also as divisive and narrowly partisan in its handling of the Jesuit Robert Persons and in its insistence that only Protestant authors be considered in the debate (Gosse 1959: I, 222). In the same letter Donne declares his favour for ‘unity in religion’ and his view of Christendom as a single ‘corporation’, though he recognises the irreconcilability of the issue at hand (Gosse 1959: I, 223, 221–2). The balanced spirit in which Donne writes to his fairly unreligious friend Goodyere should not be overemphasised. Pseudo-Martyr is quite clearly a Protestant tract with flourishes in praise of ‘the good health and sound constitution of the Reformed Religion’ (Donne 1993: 21). It separates itself from more vitriolic controversialism, however, in the genuineness of its declared purpose to achieve ‘unity and peace’ in the church, and in the personal connection Donne makes with his recusant audience through his famous conversion narrative (Donne 1993: 12, 13). The humanity of Pseudo-Martyr is subtly signalled to the narrow circle of coterie readers familiar with Donne’s Biathanatos, a work circulated in manuscript before 1610 and arguing that suicide is not always and necessarily sinful. He begins both works by qualifying Aristotle’s unequivocal view of self-destruction in the Ethics, interrogating ecclesiastical and legal inflexibility on ‘this ordinary disease’, and referring to the presence of the human impulse of suicide even in the utopian visions of Plato and Sir Thomas More (Donne 1993: 29–30; cf. Donne 1984: 62–3, 72–4, 86). For the purposes of Pseudo-Martyr, he does adjust his reference to suicide among

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natives of the Indies more fully to emphasise Spanish brutality (Donne 1984: 52). This is more than innocent writerly recycling. It signals Donne’s recognition of the complex loyalties at stake for English Romanists and his reluctance to trade in highhanded dogmatism. Though fundamentally reformed, then, Donne’s approach does not dismiss Romish religion out of hand. It claims instead that in its pretension to terrestrial authority the Roman church is not ‘catholic’ at all. The tract extends an olive branch to the individual believer as it heaps scorn upon the Pope and his Jesuit henchmen – Pseudo-Martyr thus differs in prevailing tone, but not in substantive argument, from the satirical association of the papacy and the Jesuits with Lucifer in Ignatius His Conclave, published in 1611. While it is tempting to see this position as reflective of Donne’s personal experience as a convert, it must be recalled that several divines in the early Stuart church made claims on Romanism resembling those in Pseudo-Martyr, including James Ussher, William Bedell, and Joseph Hall (Milton 1995: 140–2). Somewhat more specific to Donne is the argument implied by his title. He claims that because the English church provides recusants with a place to take the sacraments and hear the Word preached, they are not being prevented from practising fundamental elements of Christian faith; and because England secures these fundamentals, the martyrdom and resistance encouraged by Rome is entirely baseless. Opposed to the Pope’s misguided foreign influence, he encourages a nationalist regard for civil order (Donne 1993: 26). This logic implies that recusants take the sacraments and attend sermons in the national church in a way going beyond ‘church papistry’, the token attendance required to avoid punitive aspects of laws concerning recusants. Donne suggests that the individual believer can participate in English church services while maintaining full spiritual allegiance to Rome. He is reading selectively from the Articles of Religion, emphasising the thirtieth article, which guarantees that ‘both parts of the Lord’s Sacrament … ought to be ministered to all Christian men alike’, but overlooking for the moment the twenty-eighth article, with its dutifully Calvinist interpretation of the significance of the Lord’s Supper and its anti-Roman remarks against transubstantiation and worship of the sacrament (Church of England 1562: 18–19). Such an approach holds significant implications for the nature of both church and state. It reduces the English church’s communitarian worship to external observance; by extension, the monarch as head of the church governs only external conformity. Donne’s emphasis on the individual believer provides quite a different view than had Hooker in his view of the Book of Common Prayer, which takes seriously the divine mystery of church worship suggested by the angelic presence of 1 Corinthians 11:10 (see Chapter 18, ‘Law Makes the King’: Hooker on Law and Princely Rule). As for the state, Donne pushes the secular character of the ‘natural obedience’ owed to the king a little further than do his contemporaries. Immediately after likening the king to his counterparts in Israel and to ‘emperors in the primitive church’, he proceeds to distinguish between the duties of prince and priest:

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It is entire man that God hath care of and not the soul alone; therefore his first work was the body and the last work shall be the glorification thereof. He hath not delivered us over to a prince only, as to a physician and to a lawyer, to look to our bodies and estates; and to the priest only, as to a confessor, to look to and examine our souls, but the priest must as well endeavour that we live virtuously and innocently in this life for society here, as the prince, by his laws, keeps us in the way to heaven. (Donne 1993: 38–9)

Though the prince governs the body with regard for the soul, and the role of the body in creation cannot be discounted, the office of the priest is more fully associated with the higher calling of spiritual care (see also Donne 1993: 173–4, 190–1). This is not the typical Jacobean argument for the prince as a David or a Solomon; he is instead a legislator who guides subjects on the path to heaven in so far as encouragement of external virtue can. While Donne’s defence of the oath thus appeals to the nationalist sentiment valuing preservation of peace in the realm, it also subtly adjusts James’s pretensions to spiritual authority over his subjects as it adjusts the Pope’s pretensions to temporal authority. More than other defenders of the oath, Donne rests his argument on a separation of the order of nature and the order of grace. Though critics can tend to brand him a time-server, he consistently holds this distinction early and late: it is the standard by which he criticises papal intervention in temporal affairs in the Pseudo-Martyr and by which he defends James’s directions to preachers in 1622. It is the claim of the Third Satire, composed in the 1590s, that every individual must make a doctrinal choice on which no terrestrial authority provides reliable guidance – the poem is best summed up by a Beastie Boys couplet that captures its central argument and its tone of direct challenge: ‘Wheredja get your information from, huh? / Ya think that you can front when Revelation comes?’ (Beastie Boys 1999). Nowhere else in the satires are we confronted with so many imperatives – ‘Know thy foes’ (33), ‘Seek true religion’ (43), ‘Be busy to seek her’ (74), ‘doubt wisely’ (77), ‘Keep the truth’ (90) – urging us to make the religious commitment for which, we are ominously reminded over and again, we will be judged at the end of time. The poem provides one model after the next of conclusions falsely drawn from the superficial qualities of churches, which gives over the active search for truth: Mirreus turns to Rome (43–5), Crantz to Calvinist Geneva (49–50), Graius turns to the English church out of jingoism and blind conformism (55–8), Phrygius uncritically thinks that all must be wrong (62–4), and Graccus uncritically thinks that all must be right (65–9). Despite these satirical portraits, the option implied as positive in the poem seems very much like the English church, with the proviso that it be joined as part of an ongoing and energetic process of spiritual seeking. In emphasising individual conscience, the poem presents the law as unable to illumine spiritual matters: ‘Fool and wretch, wilt thou let thy soul be tied / To man’s laws, by which she shall not be tried / At the last day?’ (93–5). The knowing soul does not resist terrestrial authority but rather knows the magistrate’s ‘bounds’ (100); the state is obeyed in the order of nature, Donne implies, but one must rely on God alone for guidance in the order of grace.

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In Donne we receive a glimpse – small, perhaps, but perceptible – of the liberal argument on toleration, which relegates religion to the private sphere and demands that all citizens, regardless of religious affiliation, recognise the state’s authority in preserving law and order. Pseudo-Martyr suggests that it is the role of the monarch to govern externals in a way that does not impinge upon a subject’s conscience, and that it is the role of divines to attend to the spiritual state of the laity without interfering in civil affairs. Donne’s view resembles in some respects current communitarian adjustment of liberal theory, what John Rawls describes as a ‘pluralism’ that does not ‘impose the unrealistic – indeed, the utopian – requirement that all citizens can affirm the same comprehensive doctrine’, but only ‘the same conception of political order and justice’ (Rawls 1993: 39). In examining Pseudo-Martyr we also see that this Rawlsian principle offers limited incorporation into the liberal state of those with strong religious conviction, for at bottom Donne is saying that it is all right to be Roman Catholic so long as one does not take the Pope entirely seriously. Questier is certainly correct in noting that the separation of the orders of nature and grace is itself a disruption of a core Roman Catholic belief, which held the ‘unity of spirituals and temporals in a single hierarchy’ (Questier 1997: 320). Donne would move beyond the modus vivendi toleration that Rawls associates with sixteenth-century divisions between Protestants and Roman Catholics, which only defers conflict – the principle of ‘toleration’ as ‘a mere modus vivendi’ implies that ‘if either faith becomes dominant, the principle of toleration would no longer be followed’ (Rawls 1993: 148). By making the kingdom, rather than the church, the site of aspiration and sacrifice in the order of nature, recusants are being enlisted not only to preserve the peace but also to hold allegiance to a state in conflict with their co-religionists. It shouldn’t surprise citizens of the twenty-first century that the memory of terrorist threat is kept fresh by the state as a device by which to solidify such allegiance – James gets as much mileage as possible from the shock and horror of the Powder Treason in the exordium to Triplici nodo. With this in mind we can return to the polarities on the oath controversy with which we began, and see that it both extends an opportunity to recusants to lead an unencumbered life of obedience to the state and that it forces upon them a change in beliefs that some would see as central to religious identity. These two arguments on the oath are not antithetical; they are, rather, two sides of the same coin. In demanding natural obedience the oath both provides a way for recusants to lead relatively unobstructed lives within the realm while also forcing them to accept a view of the state potentially at odds with fundamentals of faith. If we search today for a Donne redivivus, we might find one in Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im, a professor of law at Emory University and author of such titles as Toward an Islamic Reformation (1996) and Islam and the Secular State (2008). He prefaces the more recent of these with a declaration of confessional allegiance: ‘I speak as a Muslim in this book because I am accountable for these ideas as part of my own religion and not simply as a hypothetical academic argument’ (An-Na’im 2008: vii). This calling higher than mere intellectual exchange lends him an aura of identification with Islam

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– much like Donne’s prefatory conversion narrative does with recusants – that serves as cover for a model of toleration so aggressively secularist that it would make Rawls blush. An-Na’im questions the very notion of belief, arguing that any human perception or iteration, even if it takes a verse of the Qur’an as its subject, is necessarily a by-product of reason (An-Na’im 2008: 46–7); the test of reason must thus be applied to all human affairs, in religion and the state. It is not inconsistent with their religious beliefs, he continues, for Muslims to embrace the principle of universal human rights and to affirm the ‘obligations of citizenship of their country and of the world at large’. While An’Na’im recognises that it is the politics of states that determine how universal human rights are enforced, he offers the optimistic view that citizens can hold the state accountable in this regard even as he diminishes the role of religion in providing a communitarian critique of liberal democracy (An-Na’im 2007: 18). He is concerned that Muslims in Europe become accepted as European Muslims, but predicates that acceptance upon their embrace of a liberal theology. This is a position with a great deal of merit, and, like Donne, one can see a fundamental humanity driving An-Na’im’s approach to the issue of religious freedom. But we can discern at its heart the same double bind of toleration and solidification of state authority: in fully becoming citizens, tolerated subjects must accept a fundamentally secular view of civil society that disempowers their religious communities’ critique of state power. The limits of An-Na’im’s argument are the limits of the human rights approach to religious toleration that has grown out of the natural law tradition: it depends upon the individual’s acceptance of a conception of justice and external governance existing over and above demands that religion can make in these areas. Those who defend this position claim that the liberal state must demand conformity in certain essentials necessary to its preservation – that such a state imposes only those limits on personal freedom necessary to preserve basic law and order. In a climate of terror, however, such ‘essentials’ tend to proliferate, so that the state can justify domestic wire-tapping, as was done in the United States after 9/11, or surveillance of mosques, as was done in the United Kingdom after July 2005.

Milton and Liberty of Conscience The subject of religious liberty exercised Milton over his entire career. Indeed, his first prose tracts decry the religious conformity imposed by the bishops, and his last prose tract, Of True Religion (1673), argues for the relaxation of laws limiting the right to worship of nonconforming Protestant sects. By his own (perhaps exaggerated) account, he cut short a continental tour of 1638–9 in which he delighted in meeting leading intellectual and artistic luminaries – Galileo among them – in order to rush home and apply his pen to the cause of religious liberty coming to its head during the Bishops’ Wars, Charles I and William Laud’s ill-conceived attempt to impose English liturgy and church government forcefully upon a staunchly Presbyterian Scotland. The result of that homecoming was a series of tracts directed against the

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bishops, supporting the growing movement against them that found legislative expression in the bill for ‘Root and Branch’ extirpation of episcopacy being urged through Parliament under the considerable steam of Oliver Cromwell and the younger Sir Henry Vane. But at that juncture Milton wished to do more than simply criticise the religious conformity of the English church under the aegis of the bishops. The invective tone of the tracts is deliberately inflammatory, and seeks to sour the climate of the debate on church government and so to derail negotiations on the preservation of some elements of prelacy. The fate of the bishops described in the famous conclusion to Of Reformation illustrates this strategy: But they contrary that by the impairing and diminution of the true faith … aspire to high dignity, rule and promotion here, after a shameful end in this life (which God grant them) shall be thrown down eternally into the darkest and deepest Gulf of Hell, where under the despiteful control, the trample and spurn of all the other damned, that in the anguish of their torture shall have no other ease than to exercise a raving and bestial tyranny over them as their slaves and negroes, they shall remain in that plight for ever, the basest, lowermost, the most dejected, most underfoot and down-trodden vassals of perdition. (Milton 1935–82: I, 617)

It is hard to imagine this as the deserved end of such learned and urbane bishops as Joseph Hall and Lancelot Andrewes, the latter of whom is the subject of Milton’s third Latin elegy, composed in 1626 and thus well before the full awakening of his iconoclastic spirit – even in those early days the poem on Andrewes may not have indicated deep emotional sympathy; elegy-writing was a promiscuous endeavour for the young Milton. This passage in Of Reformation is not the only time when Milton would take the African slave trade to be a simple fact of life. It is equally so in his handling of the curse of Ham, often taken in the period to provide biblical sanction for slavery, in his systematic theology De doctrina Christiana (Milton 1953–82: VI, 387) and in Paradise Lost (12.101–4; see Jablonski 1997). Among the antiprelatical tracts, The Reason of Church Government unfolds most fully Milton’s view of the course that the English church should take as an alternative to episcopacy. There he describes the biblical sanction of Presbyterian church government, as opposed to Paul’s installation of bishops in Timothy (1 Tim. 1:3–4) and Titus (1:5), which had been deployed in scriptural arguments for episcopacy since the reign of Elizabeth (see Chapter 27, English Reformations). We must not confuse, however, such an argument for Presbyterian church government with full support for the Presbyterian party, those English divines who wished to retain a national church but to do away with episcopal hierarchy. Upon the elimination of the bishops in 1643 and sitting of the Westminster Assembly, Milton is quickly distressed by the Presbyterians’ desire to exercise authority over matters religious. It is something of an open question as to whether this reflects a change of heart from those pamphlets supporting such Presbyterians as the Smectymnuans, among whom was his tutor Thomas Young, or whether Milton had never realised in the heat of the anti-episcopacy debate

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the extent of Presbyterian desire for control over religion (see Smith 2007: 29; von Maltzahn 2007: 100–1). The first expression of what would become a recurring antiPresbyterian refrain emerges in Areopagitica (1644): Who cannot but discern the fineness of this politic drift, and who are the contrivers; that while bishops were to be baited down, then all the presses might be open; it was the people’s birthright and privilege in time of parliament, it was the breaking forth of light. But now, the bishops abrogated and voided out of the church as if our Reformation sought no more but to make room for others into their seats under another name, the episcopal arts begin to bud again, the cruse of truth must run no more oil. (Milton 1953–82: II, 541)

The accusation of hypocrisy is just: the Presbyterian camp that had argued against the bishops’ stifling of religious liberty had themselves become energetic heresyhunters, as attested by that paranoid multi-volume diatribe against the growing infection of religious schism, Thomas Edwards’ Gangraena (1646). Milton himself had come under fire from Edwards and had his divorce tracts cried down in a sermon before Westminster Assembly by Herbert Palmer: ‘If any plead Conscience for the Lawfulness of Polygamy (or for divorce for other causes then Christ and His Apostles mention; Of which a wicked book is abroad and uncensured, though deserving to be burnt, whose Author hath been so impudent as to set his Name to it, and dedicate it to your selves,) or for Liberty to marry incestuously, will you grant a Toleration for all this?’ (Palmer 1644: 57; see Parker 2003: I, 263–4). The divorce tracts had argued only for the relaxation of divorce laws, but Palmer is incisive in one respect: early and late Milton is sympathetic to polygamy, from the Commonplace Book to the Christian Doctrine, and implicitly in Paradise Lost as the brand of wedded love ‘by Saints and Patriarchs used’ (Milton 1953–82: I, 397–400, VI, 355–68; PL 4.762; see Miller 1974 and Rudrum 1970). Over the remainder of the 1640s, the shafts of ridicule he once hurled at the bishops thus find a new target, most savagely if brilliantly in the tailed sonnet ‘On the new forcers of conscience under the Long Parliament’, likely composed in 1646: Dare ye for this adjure the civil sword To force our consciences that Christ set free, And ride us with a classic hierarchy Taught ye by mere A. S. and Rutherford? Men whose life, learning, faith and pure intent Would have been held in high esteem with Paul, Must now be named and printed heretics By shallow Edwards and Scotch What-d’ye-call. (5–12)

As in his eleventh sonnet, Milton satirises those Scottish divines whose works were cramming the bookstalls. Here he refers to Adam Stewart, Samuel Rutherford, and

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the heresiographer Thomas ‘Shallow’ Edwards; the ‘Scotch What-d’ye-call’ could be a catch-all for this class of Presbyterian, or it could have someone specific in mind whom Milton wishes to impugn with anonymity (Robert Baillie, who attacked the divorce tracts, has been suggested). ‘New Presbyter’, the poem concludes, ‘is but old Priest writ large’ (20) – a barb that plays with the etymological roots of the word ‘priest’ from contraction of the Latin presbyter. The poem also indicates the standard by which Milton consistently measures debates on religious liberty: the conscience that Christ set free. As his views on religious liberty develop over his career, and as events of the Interregnum make him increasingly sceptical of worldly authorities claiming to preserve God’s order on Earth, his ideal of Christian liberty develops greater prominence. In the antiprelatical tracts and in Areopagitica (1644), he seems optimistic about the possibility of a new era in English governance, civil and ecclesiastical, that would place the nation on the vanguard of Reformation. If we glimpse a liberal position in Milton, it is in those moments where these early tracts imagine a tolerationist state guiding the nation’s progress towards enlightenment (see Mohamed 2008). The later tracts on disestablishment of the church, A Treatise of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes (1659) and Considerations Touching the Likeliest Means to Remove Hirelings out of the Church (1659), do not entertain such a possibility in unfolding policy consistent with the principle of Christian liberty. The preface to Civil Power, addressed to Richard Cromwell’s parliament, presents its argument as completing the task envisioned in the English republic’s heyday of 1649–51 (Milton 1953–82: VII, 240). Milton adopts similar language in Hirelings, praising Parliament in his exordium and calling attention to his own achievements on behalf of the Cause: ‘Owing to your protection, supreme Senate, this liberty of writing which I have used these eighteen years on all occasions to assert the just rights and freedoms both of church and state’ (Milton 1953–82: VII, 274). This allows Milton to adopt a topos of loyalty to a Parliament suppressing groups like the Quakers even as he argues for a position very close to such sectarians. These passages also show that Milton is not necessarily advancing the Quaker cause; he seems to refer to that champion of rootand-branch extirpation of episcopacy, Sir Henry Vane, whose mixed feelings about the Society of Friends are revealed in his objections to their overemphasis of external moral conduct rather than internal seeking – a damning criticism in enthusiast circles (Vane 1655: 184, 211). Vane and his disciple Henry Stubbe did, however, share the Quakers’ animosity towards a paid ministry, as evinced in the latter’s Light Shining Out of Darkness (1659), a tract that, as David Hawkes observes, is frequently described as influencing Milton’s statements on tithing (Hawkes 2004: 76–7). Milton associates the idea of a ‘national church’ with the ‘Jews’ and points to the universality of the Christian church: ‘the Christian church is universal; not tied to nation, diocese or parish, but consisting of many particular churches complete in themselves’ (1953–82: VII, 291–2). A Protestant state is one allowing individuals freely to interpret Scripture and to follow inner light:

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First, it cannot be denied, being the main foundation of our protestant religion, that we of these ages, having no other divine rule or authority from without us warrantable to one another as a common ground but the holy scripture, and no other within us but the illumination of the Holy Spirit so interpreting that scripture … can have no other ground in matter of religion but only from the scriptures. And these being not possible to be understood without this divine illumination, which no man can know at all times to be in himself, much less to be at any time for certain in any other, it follows clearly, that no man or body of men in these times can be the infallible judges or determiners in matters of religion to any other men’s consciences but their own. (Milton 1953–82: VII, 242–3; emphasis added)

In this, the third paragraph of the tract proper, Milton twice draws our attention to the applicability of his arguments to a specific moment in biblical history – ‘we of these ages’ must rely on Scripture; no ‘body of men in these times’ can judge religious matters infallibly – emphasising the consequences of the Edenic fall, which occupies a good deal of his attention at a time when he is composing his great epic, and anticipating that time when the human darkness necessitating reliance on Scripture will cease to exist and God will be ‘all in all’. But we also find in the logic of Milton’s argument the limits on religious toleration inscribed within the principle of liberty of conscience. In associating a national church with Judaism, he is presenting its defenders as menacing to true Christians: their desire for external conformity reveals imperfect embrace of the spiritual principles of the Gospels; they rest on implicit faith and superstition rather than searching for God’s truth through Scripture and the promptings of grace. Those who make such claims for uniformity of external worship are not to be tolerated, as evinced in Milton’s opposition first to the bishops, then the Presbyterians, and always to Roman Catholics. His claim that no ‘body of men in these times’ can determine matters religious would be recognised by those close to him as anticipating an age when the religiously enlightened would govern. Vane’s Retired Mans Meditations (1655) shows that the separation of church and state for which proponents of liberty of conscience argued was a temporary measure. In the ‘day of their ascension and final exaltation’ the spiritual elect will commence a terrestrial reign that Vane identifies with the power of the keys: ‘they have committed unto them, the power of the keys, in the full extent and exercise thereof, whereby, all that they bind in earth, shall be bound in heaven, and all that they loose on earth, shall be loosed in heaven’ (Vane 1655: 410). The liberty of conscience for which Vane argues over his career is intended to provide conditions by which the elect would make this ascension. It does not separate obedience in the orders of nature and grace as a matter of principle, but rather as an expedient to be set aside when God’s chosen are in a position to exercise authority in matters temporal and spiritual. Sir James Harrington is thus right to see a potential threat to civil stability in lending priority to liberty of conscience. In 1659–60 he advances claims resembling what we have described as liberal toleration: ‘The distinction of liberty into civil and spiritual is not ancient but of a latter date, there being indeed no such distinction;

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for the liberty of conscience once granted separable from civil liberty, civil liberty can have no security’ (Harrington 1977: 742). Like Donne before him and John Locke after him, Harrington seems to see a measure of outward religious conformity as necessary to civil stability. Nicholas von Maltzahn has recently and persuasively shown how Milton’s friend and fellow-poet Andrew Marvell is allied with such proto-liberals in his arguments for a ‘more comprehensive but still national church’ (von Maltzahn 2007: 89). Liberty of conscience is thus not a claim for religious liberty per se but rather an argument for state non-interference, advanced by a group anticipating their rise to authority in God’s time. In his accounts of political liberalism, Rawls describes groups making such claims as ‘free-riders’ in a liberal state ‘who seek the advantages of just institutions while not doing their share to uphold them’ (Rawls 2003: 340). The clearest example of such individuals in our own time are so-called Christian Conservatives in the US, whose ‘conservatism’ is a radical desire to make government conform to their brand of religion, and whose arguments for religious freedom typically claim the right to public expressions of belief – defending the public installation of Christmas trees, or the display of the Decalogue outside a courthouse, or the supposed right of hospital or government officials not to perform such duties as abortion or gay marriage on the grounds of tender conscience. (Lest we think that the last of these is only an American affliction, the UK has provided an example of such conscientious objection: a civil registrar whose refusal to perform a gay marriage ceremony was upheld by an employment tribunal (Verkaik 2008).) For such ‘Christian Conservatives’ the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), with its aim of equal treatment for all citizens and thus of preserving the secular character of public institutions, engages in a satanic oppression of the godly. To counter such influence, Pat Robertson founded the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ), which claims that ‘religious freedom and freedom of speech are inalienable, God-given rights’. Given such a source for these freedoms, there can be no limit placed on them on secular grounds; the ACLJ is thus representing an Ohio state judge, James DeWeese, in a suit brought against him by the ACLU for the display of a poster in his courtroom titled ‘Philosophies of Law in Conflict’. One side of the poster, titled ‘Moral Absolutes: The Ten Commandments’, features the Decalogue, while the other side, ‘Moral Relatives: Humanist Precepts’, features, among other items, quotations from former Supreme Court Chief Justice Charles E. Hughes and from the Supreme Court decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which upheld the right to abortion in Pennsylvania. The poster also features DeWeese’s own words, which state that ‘the cases passing through this courtroom demonstrate we are paying a high cost in increased crime and other social ills for moving from moral absolutism to moral relativism since the mid 20th century’ (Sekulow 2008). In liberal terms to have a court official dismiss precedents and a chief justice of the Supreme Court in favour of Mosaic law is troubling, to say the least. Not so in the liberty of conscience view, which does not accept the secular state as referee in the arena of religious claims.

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Conclusion Habermas has suggested that the return of religion to the centre of debates on the public sphere forces us to revise our view of modernity into one ‘washing away or at least levelling the thresholds hitherto assumed to pertain between “traditional” and “modern” societies. In this way, the Occident’s own image of modernity seems, as in a psychological experiment, to undergo a switchover’ (Habermas 2006: 2). The student of the early modern period will know that modernity at its roots is predicated upon confessional divisions much more than a secularist telos: one of its founding moments is the emergence of Protestantism, and it is from the turmoil of this diminution of Roman influence that the modern nation-state with its confessional commitments, secularism among them, is born. Searching for the roots of liberal toleration in the early modern period might also lead us to be chary of the supposed neutrality of the secular state: those in the seventeenth century who anticipate such toleration tend to favour some measure of religious conformity under the aegis of a national church, an argument we find not only in Donne, but also in Marvell, Harrington, and Locke. In this light we see how ‘toleration’ can serve to incorporate individuals into institutions under state authority, which institutions gradually take on a more secular caste under the truth regimes of the Enlightenment described by Foucault. Analysing liberal democracy in the early essay ‘On the Jewish Question’, Karl Marx noted how separation of the orders of nature and grace, which we have seen somewhat in Donne, leads to a subject’s double life, ‘a heavenly one and an earthly one’; such subject formation occurs in the ‘complete state’ that no longer needs the external approval of religious institutions (Marx 1971: 93–4). In this completion the state effects a political emancipation only in so far as the political life of the individual is freed from religious expression. This is not to be confused with human emancipation in Marx’s terms, which would depend upon liberation from the demands of religion and state, and the formation of collectives not bound to these bodies that creates a freedom based on ‘the union of man with man’ rather than the freedom ‘of a man treated as an isolated monad’ (1971: 103). Analysing the persistence today of ‘the Jewish question’ in his Defence of Lost Causes, Slavoj Žižek claims that ‘fidelity to the name “Jews”’ is the silent recognition of ‘the defeat of authentic emancipatory struggles. No wonder those who demand fidelity to the name “Jews” are also those who warn us against the “totalitarian” dangers of any radical movement’ (Žižek 2008: 5). While we might be rightly suspicious of the search for a new Messianism endorsed by Žižek – which finds most ludicrous expression in his defences of Stalinism – there is justice in h