Early Modern English Lives

Autobiography and Self-Representation 1500–1660

Ronald Bedford, Lloyd Davis, Philippa Kelly

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781351942409
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

How did early modern English people write about themselves, and how do we listen to their voices four centuries later? The authors of Early Modern English Lives: Autobiography and Self-Representation 1500-1660 argue that identity is depicted through complex, subtle, and often contradictory social interactions and literary forms. Diaries, letters, daily spiritual reckonings, household journals, travel journals, accounts of warfare, incidental meditations on the nature of time, death and self-reflection, as well as life stories themselves: these are just some of the texts that allow us to address the social and historical conditions that influenced early modern self-writing. The texts explored in Early Modern English Lives do not automatically speak to our familiar patterns of introspection and self-inquiry. Often formal, highly metaphorical and emotionally restrained, they are very different in both tone and purpose from the autobiographies that crowd bookshelves today. Does the lack of emotional description suggest that complex emotions themselves, in all the depth and variety that we now understand (and expect of) them, are a relatively modern phenomenon? This is one of the questions addressed by Early Modern English Lives. The authors bring to our attention the kinds of rhetorical and generic features of early modern self-representation that can help us to appreciate people living four hundred years ago as the complicated, composite figures they were: people whose expression of identity involved an elaborate interplay of roles and discourses, and for whom the notion of privacy itself was a wholly different phenomenon.

PART 1

Early Modern Autobiography and Time

Chapter 1

A Life in Time

Marking Time: A Musician’s Life

In what has been commonly regarded as one of the earliest examples of ‘modern’ autobiographical writing in English – in the sense of a sustained life-narrative consciously designed with a beginning, middle, and end¹ – Thomas Whythorne’s manuscript, written about 1576 and discovered in 1955, ‘lay[s] open unto you the most part of all my private affairs and secrets’, and is structured along the ‘ages of man’ divisions. The full title of Whythorne’s combined life story and collection of musical compositions is: ‘A book of songs and sonetts, with longe discourses sett with them, of the chylds lyfe, togyther with A yoong mans lyfe, and entring into the old mans lyfe. devysed and written with A new Orthografye by Thomas Whythorne, gent’. Whythorne not only modifies normal orthography – a quixotic attempt to produce a phonetic spelling, not a Pepysian encryption – but, more interestingly, he abandons the day-of-the-week, date and year chronology of the customary diary or journal. At a stroke he generates instead what appears as a more ‘novelistic’ narrative mode structured upon ‘events’, circumstantial and psychological, extended over large temporal units, and providing opportunities for cross-reference, reflection and didacticism. These temporal units are both familiar and ancient, deriving from the division of a life into ages: seven is the most common – by analogy, as St Augustine has it², with the seven ages of world history, itself deriving from the seven days of creation – though the number can vary between four and ten: in his autobiography Whythorne, his life still of course in progress, has only three.

The most familiar and resonant example of this schema is probably Jacques’s catalogue in As You Like It, sources for which, as for Whythorne’s device too, may be found in Sir Thomas Elyot’s Castel of Helth (1534) or Marcellus Palengenius’s Zodiacus Vitae, translated by Barnaby Googe in 1565 and a well-known school text.³ The addition in Jacques’s speech of the theatrum mundi metaphor – ‘All the world’s a stage’ – reinforces Jacques’s own pessimism with an overarching determinism – men and women are ‘merely players’ and the successive parts they play are already assigned and written for them – which is consonant both with the dominant theological ethos of Calvinism of the time and Jacques’s particular brand of cynicism. Whythorne’s ages of a life can give rise to lengthy moral excursions, doggerel verses and accumulated biblical quotations on, for example, the subject of bringing up children. Yet the purpose of his approach is not so much to provide opportunity for instruction but the solution to a technical problem, a means of constructing an autobiography that will liberate both author and reader from the metrics of the mere calendar entry. It is also made clear in Whythorne’s address to the reader on the first page of his manuscript that his subject, in this account of his ‘whole life to this day’, is time and its effects on the human personality: ‘When ye have considered of this hereafter written, ye shall perceive that as I have changed from time to time, by Time, so altered mine affections and delights’. Thus ‘time’ for Whythorne is the agency of growth, change and alteration, but its relation to inscription, the act of writing, is one that paradoxically allows for the capture of that change, making it available for recording and for retrospective consideration and perception.

Whythorne’s other ingenious structural device or aide-memoir is to refer to the manuscript of his chronologically sequenced Songs and Sonnets in the ordering of his life story. The appearances of most of these many verses in his text are prefaced by phrases such as ‘wherefore to ease my heart I wrote as followeth’, or ‘whereupon I made this sonnet following’. His larger narrative moves successively through the age of childhood “from the infancy until fifteen”, the age of ‘adolescency’ (‘the first part of the young man’s age’ from 16 to 25), and the age of juventute from 25 to 39. According to some models, ‘old age’ began at 40, to others senectute began with the sixtieth year: Whythorne himself was about forty eight when he wrote the autobiography.⁴ His modern editor suggests that the use made of this framework is unique in early autobiographical practice, and is a significant example of Whythorne’s originality in the endeavour to construct a life.⁵

The life thus constructed is of course precisely that: a discursive artifact. Recent commentary on Whythorne has highlighted particularly the tension between his projected role as would-be courtier, writing and performing amorous ditties for female patrons, and his desire to appear as the moral gentleman – roles which reveal, it is argued, the uncertainty of his social situation as both employed tutor and gentleman musician.⁶ The emphasis here, however, is less on Whythorne’s sense of economic and social marginality and more on his characteristic tendency, as Anne Ferry describes it, ‘to see himself not as a unique individual but as a particular instance of the general condition of man’.⁷ To a sensibility like Whythorne’s – and in this he seems entirely representative of his age – the agency which constructs the life may appear to be the individual author but is in fact a combination of a series of social and moral generalities assembled from the Bible, ancient authors, and everyday proverbs, to whose collective injunctions and wisdom he, like everyone else he supposes, seeks to conform. And in shaping his life, the temporal process itself is always predominant, however ingeniously its musician author may appear to be beating time.

A characteristic passage from Whythorne makes this point with great clarity. He is contemplating having a second portrait painted of himself now that he is twelve years older than his ‘last counterfeit’, and he notes how he ‘was much changed from that I was at that time, as by the long and fullness of my beard, the wrinkles on my face, and the hollowness of mine eye’ – thoughts which provoke the following verse and commentary:

Who that will weigh, of ages all,

Their change of shapes from time to time,

What childish thoughts to younglings fall,

As years wax ripe how they do climb,

May well in mind this sentence call:

As time doth alter every wight,

So every age hath his delight.

This foresaid cause of writing of the ages of mankind brought now to my remembrance that which I wrote before touching the childish years, the adolescency and the juventute or young man’s age. And therefore I considering with myself that I was now above thirty years of age and growing toward the age of forty, at the which years begins the first part of the old man’s age, I took occasion to write thereof this sonnet following:

The force of youth is well nigh past,

Where heat and strength of late took place,

And now is coming in all haste

The cold, weak age for to deface

The show of youth. Wherefore I must

Yield to my chance and thrall my lust.

Now farewell youth and all thy toys:

I will go seek more certain joys.⁸

What is to be emphasized here is the very unremarkableness of Whythorne’s sentiments: they are of course among the most repeated commonplaces of Elizabethan and Jacobean writing and culture. To be sure, Whythorne as active subject adds that he looked after his diet and exercise, and ‘did not continually use anything that should deface my show of youth or bring untimely age upon me, wherefore I was judged of many which did not know my years to be always younger than I was indeed’.⁹ This may have a modern ring to it and remind us of the utter seriousness of our own culture’s vast investments in such a project, but Whythorne is not fooled by his momentary vanity. It is clear that he has thoroughly internalized those commonplaces of life’s brevity and of the stations marking the Gradual or progress towards eternity: the awareness of Time’s bending sickle is everywhere evident in his verbosely pedantic prose, both explicitly, for instance, when in London during the plague, ‘whereby I looked every minute of an hour when I should be visited as the rest were’¹⁰, and in more subterranean indications. Within a handful of paragraphs we have, for example, the nervously, even obsessively, iterated locutions, ‘after I had been a certain time’, ‘from time to time to see how time doth alter them’, ‘for the time present’, ‘as it was in time past’, ‘to see how time doth alter them from time to time’, ‘I being at this time’, ‘that I was at that time’, ‘thus having passed my time’, ‘the loss of my time’, ‘within a short time’, ‘by that time that I had passed my time’, and so on.¹¹ Whythorne’s sensitivity to chronology can move from the macro-time of the seven ages of man to the micro-time of the ticking of minute after minute.

Whether the structuring of early modern life-writing takes the form of the unreflective diary entry against day and month and year or an alternative organization of a life like Whythorne’s, the sense of subservience to a larger ‘plot’ is always strong. Almost inevitably, Whythorne’s depression after rebuffs to his self-esteem takes the form of reflection ‘on the old saying, “This world is but a scaffold for us to play our comedies and tragedies upon”’. Whythorne confirms and acquiesces in a sense of the ordinariness, the un-uniqueness, of every individual: everyone marks time to the clock and calendar; everyone processes, with varying degrees of success or dignity, through the allotted ages of a life. Belief in the power of certain numbers, notably seven and three, meant that some ages in this process were fraught with special danger. A couple of generations on from Whythorne, the nonconformist minister Philip Henry’s diary furnishes a characteristic instance of the sense of a life lived against a temporal backdrop with whose segments and divisions the individual is most likely to conform but which he or she may, providentially, manage to evade or survive. Echoing the emperor Augustus, who is supposed to have expressed considerable relief ‘at having survived my climacteric, the sixty-third year’¹², Philip Henry’s progress towards his last days are described by his son Matthew:

When he was in the Sixty third Year of his Age, which is commonly called the Grand Climacterick, and hath been to many the Dying Year and was so to his Father, he numbred the days of it, from August 24 1693 to August 24 1694, when he finished it. And when he concluded it, he thus wrote in his Diary This Day finisheth my commonly Dying-Year, which I have numbred the Days of, and should now apply my Heart, more than ever to Heavenly Wisdom.¹³

Further, what is proper to us as individuals – as in Whythorne’s promise to reveal ‘my private affairs and secrets’ – is articulated through a universally shared temporal continuum, not merely discursive or rhetorical but actively suggesting pre-emption and inevitability rather than agency and choice. Whythorne escapes the mere calendar only to substitute, inevitably, an alternative temporal determinant.

In life-writing such as Whythorne’s or Henry’s the sense that a convincingly autonomous subject is being depicted is further diluted by the social determinism evident in two of Whythorne’s more characteristic discursive strategies. Firstly, interpolated poems and songs – so distinctive a feature of his autobiography – are singled out by Whythorne in his address to the unnamed friend for whom ostensibly the life story is written: ‘I did think it needful not only to show you the cause why I wrote them [the poems] but also to open my secret meaning in divers of them’.¹⁴ And yet, despite the citing of often distraught and poignant narrative moments and motives for the writing of the poems, they themselves invariably emerge not as vehicles of personal revelation but as conventionally anonymous verse for general public consumption. Secondly, and with a similar effect, his individual life story is paradoxically vocalized, by proxy as it were, through an accumulation of biblical phrases, folk-wisdom from compendia, familiar saws from Erasmus’s Adagia, worn-out sayings of all sorts, and a huge linguistic investment in proverbial or pseudo-proverbial phrases. For paragraphs at a time he appears to be depicting himself in a ventriloquized omnivocal vulgate in which the individual voice struggles for breath – or, of course, into whose very anonymity it may retreat and hide. And yet rather than reenacting the familiar New Historicist motif of the individual subordinated by the moral and social, Whythorne’s selfdepiction seems to suggest that the individual ‘knows’ himself only through these social moments. A sense of self emerges from a conglomerate of impressions and apprehensions about the swiftness of time passing and the externally documented milestones of a life. Thus, the self is not something privately held and inwardly focused, separable from these social moments and topoi, but is understood as a rhythmic part of, and participation in them.

A sense of communal identity and solidarity which Whythorne’s autobiography insists upon – even its novel orthography is at least designed as a contribution to easier communication – may be seen as indicative of a period when generally speaking – and unlike our own time – most people did not have to find a place in the world but inherited it and knew what it was; when there was a deep sense that everything did in fact hang together; when the natural human desire for accountability, predictability and inevitability – including the comforting bad faith of ‘if we can’t help it, we can’t help it’ – could be satisfied at every turn. The world of early modern England, as also of generations of medieval and Renaissance Europe, was one in which every item of experience, from the weather to the fall of princes, was seen as providentially disposed, and which no one but the occasional paranoid or heretic would ever suggest was merely chaotic, unpatterned, random. For a culture steeped in the great determinisms of providentialism and Calvinist theology the exact nature of human agency would always be problematic¹⁵: a sense of individual autonomy could be simultaneously enhanced and erased by the paradoxical conviction that one was both part of the plan, or the plot, or the ‘meaning’, and that one was also – like everything else in the creation – bounded and placed, subject to the rules of the game, and hence nothing unique, nothing special. Whythorne’s simultaneous self-advertisement and self-negation points to the paradox of a socially and theologically determined early modern world whose temporal paradigms are indelibly blue-printed upon every individual, but whose subjects nevertheless seek, through self-representation in diary, journal, life-writing, or portraiture, to discover and measure the extent both of their authenticity and autonomy and of their relation at any given moment to the inevitable succession of birth, maturity and death. This characteristic early modern, or rather premodern, dualism, which is so evident in Whythorne’s representations of himself, may be located in some of the tensions which much life-writing exhibits y...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part 1 Early Modern Autobiography and Time
• Part 2 Reflections: Selves and Others
• Part 3 The Self at War: Military Diaries and Journals
• Part 4 Women and Life-Writing
• Bibliography
• Index