English Poetry of the Sixteenth Century

Gary F. Waller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317895572
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literaturkritik

Explores the poetry of the Renaissance, from Dunbar in the late 15th century to the Songs and Sonnets of John Donne in the early 17th. The book offers more than the wealth of literature discussed: it is a pioneering work in its own right, bringing the insights of contemporary literary and cultural theory to an overview of the period.

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Chapter 1

Reading the Poetry of the Sixteenth Century

Introduction

When a modern student, even a general reader, looks at a volume of sixteenth-century poetry, what is likely to be his or her impression? When I first started teaching the poetry of Wyatt and Sidney, even Shakespeare and Donne, there was a sense of their remoteness from most concerns we have in the twentieth century. Except as a kind of nostalgia, what do delicate love sonnets, songs with refrains like ‘hey nonny nonny no’, and seemingly artificial, conventional poems dealing with refined upper-class manners and the erotic anguish of long-dead high-born gentlemen (I mark the gender deliberately) have to say to us? Even if one were interested in the history of the time – with its stirring mixture of battles, beheadings, rebellions, and religious controversies – much of the poetry may seem pale and lifeless, or else crudely versified propaganda, monuments to dead ideas, especially to an unswerving sexism. Shakespeare and Donne are, perhaps, exceptions: as F. R. Leavis put it for us, only when we reach Donne after a century of dull poetry, can we ‘read on as we read the living’.¹

Today, all this has changed. The study of sixteenth-century poetry has become one of the most interesting fields in English literature. In part, it is because we have realized just how similar, in significant ways, our age is to the sixteenth century or what we now tend to call, significantly, the ‘early modern’ period. Despite real differences in the social, cultural, and ideological practices of the two ages in such issues as class, gender, and race or ethnicity, we seem to face either similar dilemmas and obsessions or else be able to trace the history of our dilemmas and obsessions to that period. In part this is because of a greater liveliness in the field of literary and cultural criticism in general. In the past two decades, we have asked different questions of our literature and even begun to question the nature and status of ‘literature’ altogether. This introduction to sixteenth-century poetry is written in the belief that the great advances in our understanding of the sixteenth century and its poetry – the work on canon, sources, traditions, conventions, rhetoric and poetics of the past century, all of which has given us access to the poems of the sixteenth century – will be wasted unless they are caught up into this new excitement about the ways we read literary and related texts. In order to make sixteenth-century poetry ours, to allow us to read it, to return to Leavis’s words, not ‘as students or as connoisseurs of anthology-pieces’, but ‘as we read the living’, we must let it speak within the world we, its readers, inhabit.² By beginning with what appear to be urgent questions for us, we let the poems speak to us not only of our history but also of our present and of our possible futures.

Let me give one example – a poem to which I shall return in Chapter 4. Some years ago, some of my students were asked to read Sir Thomas Wyatt’s best-known poem:

They flee from me that sometime did me seek

With naked foot stalking in my chamber.

I have seen them gentle, tame, and meek

That now are wild and do not remember

That sometime they put themselves in danger

To take bread at my hand; and now they range

Busily seeking with a continual change.

Thanked be fortune it hath been otherwise

Twenty times better, but once in special

In thin array after a pleasant guise,

When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall

And she me caught in her arms long and small,

Therewithal sweetly did me kiss,

And softly said, ‘Dear heart, how like you this?’

It was no dream; I lay broad waking.

But all is turned through my gentilness

Into a strange fashion of forsaking.

And I have leave to go of her goodness,

And she also to use newfangleness.

But since that I so kindly am served

I would fain know what she hath deserved.

The students were asked to write one- or two-page ‘response statements’ to the poem in which they described in as much detail as possible the initial effect of the text upon them – whether it was confusion, suspense, interest, indignation or whatever. Then they were asked to try to account for why reading the poem had that effect. First, what was there in the repertoire of the text (its subject-matter, language, conventions, organization, themes, the gaps or indeterminacies which the reader has to fill in, and what is perhaps unstated but assumed by the writer of the poem and perhaps many of his original audiences)? Second, what was there in the repertoire of the reader that had contributed to that reading? What assumptions about subject matter, subjectivity, poetry, gender roles, class behaviour, was the reader bringing to his or her encounter with the text? How, in the act of reading, had reader and text co-operated? The results were fascinating. Most of the men in the class felt immediate identification with the wounded male ego that is seemingly articulated in the poem: he has been rejected by a woman with whom he has unexpectedly fallen in love only to be told by her that it was all enjoyable but superficial flirtation. Most of the women in the class were amusedly derisive of this attitude: what, they said, about the woman’s viewpoint? In such a society, and within such a philosophy of love, both so male-centred, why should a woman not get what she could out of the game of sex? Girls just want to have fun. It should be added, perhaps, on a pedagogical note, that this course on sixteenth-century poetry traditionally culminates in a banquet using Elizabethan recipes prepared by the students themselves and accompanied by music and poetry readings. If we want the sixteenth-century poets to come alive, what better way than to combine poetry, music, and food!

More seriously, the students in the course were being introduced to a method of reading that this study will employ. The intention was to create strong readers of the poetry who would, as self-analytically as possible, bring their own most intense, often apparently very personal, questions to bear on their reading of Wyatt, or Sidney, or Shakespeare, or Donne. But, of course, they were asked to do more. As a means of intensifying their readings of Wyatt’s poem, they were asked to read Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse, a remarkable anatomy of desire by a modern philosopher that seemed to many of the students, at this initial stage at least, to reflect uncannily on both the poetry they were reading and their own experiences. Barthes describes the lover, like the one in Wyatt’s poem, remembering a love scene over and over ‘in order to be unhappy/happy – not in order to understand’; and writes of how ‘the ego discourses only when it is hurt’.³ Barthes gave these student readers a powerful, contemporary vocabulary with which to articulate their questions about the text. He allowed them, too, to start to discover that his (and their) responses were not purely ‘subjective’, or ‘personal’, but rather constructed within a repertoire of common late-twentieth-century assumptions about love, desire, gender and sexuality. Readings, they were starting to learn, are never entirely ‘personal’ or ‘subjective’.

The aim of this study is to introduce the poetry of the sixteenth century so that such confrontations, or dialogues – what I like to call ‘polylogues’ since many, often contradictory, voices are involved –can occur between today’s readers and the texts that come to us from the sixteenth century. We need to realize that both texts and readers have vital parts to play in producing lively, informative, effective (and affective) readings. In a sense, the practice of ‘polylogue’ is not new: although without acknowledging (or perhaps even knowing) it, every age reads the poetry and other texts that come down to it from the past through its own concerns. If we look back a little further than our own time and study the history of the reception of sixteenth-century poetry, we can see how our understanding of it, and especially of the poems written in the two decades before 1600, has undergone quite distinct changes, especially over the past century. In 1861, Francis Palgrave’s Golden Treasury established what became the basis for the modern canon of Elizabethan poetry. It provided a set of criteria for evaluating the poetry that was largely accepted for more than a century. It assumed that the best poetry had an immediacy that made it easily accessible to the educated reader. While the long, public poems of the period – A Mirror for Magistrates, Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Harington’s translation of Ariosto – clearly required some kind of historical understanding, Palgrave’s selection suggested that the Elizabethan lyric poems could be immediately perceived as ‘treasures which might lead us in higher and healthier ways than those of the world’.⁴ They provided us with glimpses of an ideal order of love or harmony that the poets, all supposedly infatuated with the glories and buoyancy of the Elizabethan Age, celebrated in song just as they did in the pleasures, dances, and pageants of their lives at the Court. Even in modern times (in this case in the middle of the nineteenth century) we could have direct access to this magical world. Such poems were immediate in their appeal, and dealt directly with supposedly universal human experiences.

Such a reading has been increasingly questioned in our century, even though it underlies the most comprehensive anthology of the period’s poetry, E. K. Chambers’s Oxford Book of Sixteenth-Century Verse (1932). Eliot’s championing of the highly intellectual ‘Metaphysical’ as opposed to the Elizabethan poets; Winters’s construction of a native plain-style tradition that existed alongside the dominant ‘golden’ or ‘aureate’ court lyric in the sixteenth century; Lewis’s division of the century’s poetry into drab and golden (terms which he ingenuously asserted were not qualitative but descriptive); the articulation of the subtlety and richness of the Elizabethan poets’ rhetorical training by such scholars as Lanham and Tuve – all these developments have made the Golden Treasury model of Elizabethan poetry less acceptable. Refinements upon Winters’s approach have been especially influential, such as Peterson’s influence of medieval rhetoric on both the plain and eloquent style and of the religious tradition of plain statement, Hunter’s discussion of the division in the 1570s between moralistic, patriotic poems and courtly aestheticism, Inglis’s or John Williams’s reassertions of Winters’s stress on the ‘plain’, moral-reflective, style and the claim that courtly Petrarchism is a deviation from the main English tradition. Valuable work, too, has been done on the canon of such poets as Wyatt, Googe, and Mary and Robert Sidney; Spenser has been rescued from disfavour (and even encyclopedized!) and most recently, the canon has been expanded by a significant amount of poetry written by women. As matters stand now, the reader of sixteenth-century poetry can find diverse approaches, all of which show that it offers very different kinds of interest. Nearly a century and a half after Palgrave, the dominaijt ‘canon’ of sixteenth-century poetry does not consist only of the golden lyrics and delicate songs of which he approved.⁵

There is one aspect of the Golden Treasury’s praise, however, which remained curiously untouched in the dominant evaluations of sixteenth-century poetry well into the 1980s, and indeed is still with us. Palgrave praised the Elizabethan poets for their ability to unify a variety of experience, asserting that their special excellence lay rather in the whole than in the parts, in their creation of unity, harmony and coherence. Most modern criticism – including the ‘New Criticism’, as well as ‘Historicist’ approaches that relate texts to their historical background – took for granted that a literary text is a unified, organic creation which ‘reflects’ or ‘expresses’ its author’s views or vision, or the dominant philosophical assumptions of its age. What Tillyard termed the ‘Elizabethan World Picture’ – a philosophical conglomerate, supposedly believed by all Elizabethans, that the universe was a divinely created organism, characterized by unity, harmony and hierarchy – was widely seen as reflected in the age’s poetry. In the last two decades, however (and if one traces its philosophical sources, at least as far back as Marx, Nietzsche and Freud) a new paradigm has arisen in our understanding of many of the human sciences, one that has drastically affected the way we read literary and related texts. Louis Althusser once suggested that our age would be looked back to as one in which the most fundamental human activities – perceiving, reading, writing – were radically revalued.⁶ Perhaps not since the late eighteenth century have the roles and status of interpretation, history, reading and writing been put so fiercely and fundamentally into question. It is now difficult to approach literary history or criticism, the teaching of language, literature, culture – even the most fundamental human traits of perception and description – without being aware of radically different questions and to consider, however tentatively, new and disturbing answers.

It was not, however, until the late 1970s that such tremors started to affect sixteenth-century studies. They were first seen in print in such studies as Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980), Goldberg’s Endlesse Worke (1981), and Sinfield’s Literature in Protestant England (1983), which indicated that some of the major philosophical and cultural changes that had started to reconstruct literary criticism generally were having some impact upon sixteenth-century studies. As Patterson put it in 1980, ‘the theorists’ have at last ‘got into the Renaissance’.⁷ What did she mean? The assumption that underlay most criticism before the 1980s was that meanings – or what are still widely termed a text’s themes – were not only inherently ‘in’ the text, but that they were accessible to close, empirical attention to the text itself. In Britain, the influence of Leavis, Richards and others enshrined ‘practical criticism’ as the dominant mode of reading, and similar in many respects was the American New Criticism. The fundamental reading strategy of both – the means by which a work’s supposed ‘themes’ were elucidated – was ‘close reading’, by means of which texts were supposed somehow to yield up their hidden meanings. Rather than acknowledging the constructed nature of meaning, such an approach tended to be objectivist, assuming that meanings were independent of the historical or cultural context of the reader or critic. In an obvious sense close reading underlies all approaches to literature: it is important to pay careful attention to one’s interactions with the text, and to the questions and issues one finds oneself asking to explain those interactions. The assumption that meanings are ‘in’ a text has, in recent years, been increasingly seen as naïve empiricism, ignoring what a r...