A Preface to Donne

James Winny

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317881025
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Probably the most famous of the Metaphysical poets, John Donne worked with and influenced many of the leading poets of the age. This excellent introduction to his life and works sets his writing firmly in the context of his times.

Part One

The Poet and His Setting

Chronological table

	DONNE’S LIFE	HISTORICAL EVENTS
1570		Elizabeth I excommunicated and deposed by the Pope
1572	John Donne born, third child of John Donne, a London ironmonger, and his wife Elizabeth (formerly Heywood)	Massacre of St Bartholomew’s Day
1574		Persecution of English papists begins
1575		English Anabaptists burnt at the stake
1576	Death of Donne’s father. His mother remarries	Theatre playhouse built in London suburb. First recusant priests arrive secretly in England
1577		Drake’s circumnavigation begins (1577–80)
1578		Lyly’s Euphues, the Anatomy of Wit published
1579		Jesuit mission to England organized
1580		English recusants encouraged to regard assassination of the Queen as ‘lawful and meritorious’
1581		Clandestine recusant press set up in Essex. Edmund Campion executed
1582		Plague in London
1583		Somerville’s recusant plot exposed
1584	Donne and his brother Henry matriculate from Hart Hall, Oxford: probably at Oxford until 1588
1585		Netherlands expedition under Leicester
1586		Death of Sidney. Following the battle of Zutphen. Trial of Mary Queen of Scots. Star Chamber decree requiring all published works to have ecclesiastical approval
1587		Execution of Mary Queen of Scots. Pope proclaims a crusade against England
1588	Death of Donne’s stepfather	Defeat of the Spanish Armada
1589–91	Donne probably travelling in Europe
1591	Donne enters Thavies Inn as a law student. His mother married for the third time	Increasingly severe measures taken against recusants
1592	Donne admitted to Lincoln’s Inn. Most productive period of poetic writing—Songs and Sonets, Satires, Elegies—probably begins about this date
1592–3		Plague in London; all playhouses closed
1593	Death of Henry Donne of jail-fever in Newgate prison	Penalties for recusancy increased. Death of Marlowe
1595		Robert Southwell executed. Deaths of Drake and Hawkins in West Indies
1596	Takes part in the expedition to Cadiz as gentleman adventurer	Essex storms Cadiz
1597	Sails with the Islands expedition, July–October	Failure of expedition to the Azores
1598	Enters service of Sir Thomas Egerton as secretary
1599		Death of Spenser. Essex sent to Ireland; returns to England without permission and is imprisoned
1600		East India Company founded
1601	Elected MP for Brackley. Lives in the Savoy and in December marries Ann More	Rising and execution of Essex
1602	Marriage revealed to Sir George More. Donne briefly imprisoned, and dismissed from his secretarial post. Reunited with his wife after a lawsuit establishes the validity of his marriage
1603	Living in Pyrford, Surrey, at the home of his wife’s cousin	Conquest of Ireland completed. Death of Elizabeth I; accession of James I (1603–25)
1604–7	Working with Thomas Morton, one of the King’s chaplains, to convert recusants to Anglicanism
1605		Gunpowder Plot exposed
1606	Moves to Mitcham with his family of three children. Friendship with Mrs Herbert may date from this time	Penal legislation against recusants
1607	Morton urges Donne to take holy orders
1608	Countess of Bedford acts as godmother to Donne’s second daughter, Lucy. Tries without success to obtain secretaryship in Ireland	Milton born. Separatists emigrate to Holland
1610	Publishes Pseudo-Martyr, arguing that recusants are sham martyrs. Receives honorary MA from Oxford	Commons’ Petition of Right and Petition of Grievances
1611	Publishes The First Anniversary. In November, leaves England for Amiens, Paris and Germany with Sir Robert Drury, returning in September 1612	King James Bible published
1612	Moves to a house in Drury Lane with his family of seven children	Death of Prince Henry, the heir-apparent
1613	Seeks appointment as ambassador at Venice
1614	Sits as MP for Taunton. Deaths of two of his children	Parliament dissolved after protesting against impositions
1615	Ordained deacon and priest at St Paul’s cathedral, and appointed a royal chaplain. At the King’s command, receives honorary DD from Cambridge
1616	Granted livings in Huntingdonshire and Kent	Death of Shakespeare
1617	Ann Donne dies after giving birth to a stillborn child	Pocohontas presented at Court
1618		Ralegh executed
1619	Travels to Germany as chaplain with ambassadorial party: A Hymn to Christ at the Author’s last going into Germany	Death of Queen Anne
1620	Returns to London	Voyage of the Mayflower to New England
1621	Installed as Dean of St Paul’s	Andrew Marvell born
1622	Appointed JP for Kent and Bedfordshire; instituted as rector of Blunham in Bedfordshire	King restricts preaching
1623	Seriously ill in November–December. His daughter Constance marries Edward Alleyn, the actor
1642	Publishes Devotions upon Emergent Occasions
1625	Preaches first sermon to Charles I. Again falls ill. Goes to live in Chelsea to avoid the plague	Death of James I; accession of Charles I (1625–49). King marries Henrietta Maria of Spain. Recusancy laws suspended. Plague in London
1629		Death of Bacon. Parliament impeaches Buckingham, and declares poundage and tonnage illegal
1627	Deaths of his daughter Lucy, his close friend Sir Henry Goodyer, the Countess of Bedford and the former Mrs Magdalen Herbert, all within six months
1628	Death of his lifelong friend Christopher Brooke	Petition of Right becomes law. Buckingham assassinated. Bunyan born
1629		Laudian censorship of the press. Commons passes resolution against popery and Arminianism
1630	Falls seriously ill, makes his will	Great Migration to New England begins. George Herbert rector of Bemerton
1613	Death of his mother. Delivers his last sermon at Court on 26 February. Dies on 31 March	Laud enforces religious conformity
1632	Effigy placed in St Paul’s, showing him in his shroud
1633	Unauthorised publication of his poems, with further editions in 1635 and 1639	Laud appointed Archbishop. Death of Herbert
1640	LXXX Sermons published

1 John Donne

Donne is not usually seen as a typical Elizabethan. Many of his readers, indeed, seem unready to associate him with the period of Elizabeth, and prefer to regard him primarily as a seventeenth-century poet, ignoring Ben Jonson’s opinion that Donne wrote ‘all his best pieces’ before he was twenty-five, and thus before the end of the sixteenth century. It is not difficult to understand why the facts should be resisted. Donne’s metaphysical style, with its bare scientific allusions and its insistently dialectical manner, seems almost completely at odds with the richly evocative language and the delight in natural creation that we find in Spenser, Marlowe and Shakespeare. Where their poetry expands imaginatively to take in great tracts of experience, Donne works tortuously towards a single, barely accessible point: his solution of a baffling intellectual problem.

If we associate the term ‘Elizabethan’ with discovery and colourful adventure, with richly textured speech and a sense of man’s magnificence, it may be easy to feel that Donne falls short of the aureate quality that characterizes the literature of his age. His restless intellectual probing and questioning, we may feel, belong rather to the seventeenth century: not Shakespeare but Bacon is his contemporary in spirit. It is a commonplace of literary appreciation—not necessarily one to be approved—that the scientific interests revealed in Donne’s poetry show him to be a forerunner of the new age of enquiry to which Bacon was herald. But it may be too readily assumed that references to spheres, maps and compasses demonstrate Donne’s concern with the new science whose outlines Bacon seems to have perceived, or indeed that they indicate a scientific interest of any kind. The poets of the 1930s who mentioned gasworks and pylons were drawing attention to objects with a certain symbolic potency, not commenting on the progress of modern technology.

Shakespeare probably represents his age more completely than any other Elizabethan, but no one man can reflect every aspect of his times. Another writer may be strikingly unlike Shakespeare in style and outlook without ceasing to be typically Elizabethan. Such is Donne’s case. The respects in which his thought and expression characterize the age will be discussed in later chapters of this book. For the moment, where we are concerned mainly with the biographical facts of his life, we shall find Donne typically Elizabethan in the uncertainty which dogged him throughout his career, in private belief as in material circumstances. He was born a Catholic at a time when increasing pressures were being applied to those of his faith, whose resistance endangered the newly established Anglican Church and its head, the Queen. No professing Catholic was allowed to take a degree at the two universities, nor could he hope for the kind of diplomatic or professional career to which an intelligent young man of good family was naturally inclined.

Donne’s private difficulties as a Catholic epitomize the state of turbulence which England was going through during his early years. Since the reformation carried out by Henry VIII, the English Church had been twice set on contradictory courses, first under Mary who annulled all the religious changes introduced by the two previous monarchs, and then by Elizabeth who swept away Marian catholicism. When Donne was a young man there was no assurance that the Anglican Church would prove strong enough to withstand the attacks of its two enemies, Catholic and Puritan. Not only was the Anglican future in doubt: for many devout subjects of Elizabeth there were serious issues of conscience and political loyalty, and an anxious perplexity over the conflicting claims of several churches, all claiming sole authority:

But unmoved thou

Of force must one, and forc’d but one allow;

And the right: ask thy father which is she,

Let him ask his: though truth and falsehood be

Near twins, yet truth a little elder is.

Donne’s Satire III, in which these lines occur, proves the concern which he shared with the great body of Elizabethans who could not easily assure themselves that the form of religion authorized by the Queen was spiritually superior to the others, or that catholicism and true allegiance were incompatible. We see no evidence of this struggle in Shakespeare, even though his father may have been a recusant; and in this important respect Shakespeare proves a misleading guide to the human outlook of his times. The golden atmosphere of his early comedies may truly represent the optimism and self-confidence which the nation felt in its growing commercial strength and maritime daring, but Shakespeare gives no hint of the troubled spirit of the English Catholics, vainly trying to reconcile religious faith with their duty as loyal subjects of the Queen. For this aspect of Elizabethan life Donne acts as spokesman.

Donne’s private career falls into two parts, separated by his decision at the age of forty-one to accept holy orders within the Anglican Church. The contrast between secular and religious in Donne is startling, as we might imagine by comparing one of the more scandalous of his love poems with one of the Holy Sonnets, or one of the many sermons which he preached as dean of St Paul’s. As a student of Lincoln’s Inn during the 1590s Donne was described as ‘a great visitor of ladies, a great frequenter of plays’, and although the writer conceded that he was ‘not dissolute’, the impudent and rebellious spirit of the poetry he wrote at this time suggests that this glimpse of his character as a young man does not misrepresent him. His first biographer, Isaak Walton, preferred to skirt this doubtful area of his subject and to concentrate attention upon the eagerness for study which Donne was later to attribute to himself in these early years: ‘an hydroptic immoderate desire of human learning and languages’; but Walton admits that after studying from four in the morning until ten, Donne then ‘took great liberty’.

There is no need to censure Donne for taking the kind of wild pleasures that often form a complement to intense intellectual activity. In his case there might have been special reasons for seeking an outlet for the impetuous energies which his poetry reveals; for according to Walton, at this period Donne had not decided whether to continue a Catholic or not. The frustration and uncertainty of his position, which beside its effects on his future had the power to disturb his emotional being whichever decision he took, was a direct encouragement to Donne to lose himself temporarily in amusement and distraction. He seems not to have done things by halves. As the student was urged by an ‘immoderate desire’ for learning, so the playgoer was a ‘great frequenter’ of theatres and a great visitor of ladies.

The charged emotional nature was to remain when Donne became a churchman, but its energies were now turned upon a very different purpose. The element of rebellious protest conspicuous in his secular poetry, which overturns conventional attitudes and modes of expression and asserts a defiant individualism, is replaced by a conservative and authoritarian outlook as Donne upholds the rights of the established Church and its head, James I. If there are reasons for associating the Donne of the Songs and Sonets with the intellectual movements of a new age, there are equally strong arguments for seeing the dean of St Paul’s as a figure of an age about to be eclipsed: a man whose anguished awareness of mortality and corruption seems to belong less to the period of Bacon than to the medieval past. In this paradoxical mixture Donne again characterizes his times.

Early career

If the second of these two figures dominates our impression of Donne, that is because we know so much less of the younger man. His family background at least is clear. He was born in 1572, the first son of a well-to-do London ironmonger who two years later was made head of his company. His father did not enjoy his prosperity very long, for he died soon after making his will in January 1576. Donne’s mother, Elizabeth Heywood, was the daughter of a minor Elizabethan writer; and both parents were Catholics. Donne was to remark in Pseudo-Martyr, which argues against the readiness of English recusants to suffer for their faith, that no family had ‘endured and suffered more in their persons and fortunes for obeying the teachers of Roman doctrine’ than his own.

The Heywoods were particularly unfortunate. Donne’s grandfather was obliged to flee the count...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Series page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Dedication
• Part One The Poet and His Setting
• Part Two Critical Survey
• Part Three Reference Section
• Index