U Gly Beauty

CHAPTER FIVE � FOREIGN CURRENCIES: JOHN COLLOP AND THE "UGLY BEAUTY" TRADITION I ir John Davies praises a prostitute. Thomas Carew and Lord Herbert of S Cherbury both celebrate women sufferingfrom the "green-sickness."1 Their less well known contemporary John Collop renders the cur rency of love poetry as unstable as the literal currency of Henrican England by repeatedlylauding women with what he terms " golden skin." As we have observed, the diacritical drive at the core of anti-Petrarchism can take many different fo rms: writers mock other poets fo r insincerity, parody Petrarchan language, substitute spiritual values fo r erotic imperatives, and so on. In the poems explored in this chapter, however, the process of differentiation is even more central, constitutingthe primarydrive behind them and often the global speech act within them. Under what circumstances and fo r what rea sons, then, does the diacritical impulse of anti-Petrarchism generate a dia critical response to the Petrarchan lady-that is, the ironic praise of a woman who is, or who seems to be, her opposite? Widely though misleadingly termed the ugly beauty or deformed mistress tradition, the mode in question comprises poems that describe, generally in ostensibly favorable terms, a woman with qualities that are seldom the subject of praise.2 Instances range from texts that satirize indubitably neg- 'For a seventeenth-centurydiscussion of this condition, see Nicholas Culpeper, Culpeper's Directoryfo r Midwives: or, A Guide fo r Wo men. The Second Part (London, 1662), pp. 100-106. This text must be distinguished from one with a similar tide, A Directoryfor Midwives, which Culpeper published in 1651. 2Critics have devoted Iitde attention to these poems. The best discussion is the briefbut suggestive introduction in Conrad Hilberry, ed., The Poems ofJohn Collop (Madison: Uni versity of Wisconsin Press, 1962), pp. 1!)-26. 164 ECHOES OF DESIRE ative characteristics, such as Davies's epigrammatic description ofa prosti tute, to ones that fo cus on a trait sometimes coded as negative by the culture at large but seemingly not by the poet at hand, such as Lord Her bert's apparently unironic praise of a woman with what he calls brown skin, to the many poems that occupy a contested and mined territory be tween praise and dispraise, such as "One Enamour'd on a Black-moor" by the minor seventeenth-century poet Eldred Revett. Often, as in Carew's "On Mistris N. to the Greene Sicknesse," it is almost impossible to deter mine whether the thrust of the lyric is ironic. In some instances, such as Shakespeare's Sonnet 130, the poem fo cuses on traits that render the woman more human; frequently, however, they render her unappealing, even disgusting, with certain texts portraying an agingor illbody and others reversing characteristics so that she has, say, red eyes and bluish lips rather than blue eyes and red lips. In one subdivision of the tradition, a type of poem that is Cavalierin several senses of the word, the poet celebrates his ability to love women with a wide range of appearances, including some generally considered unattractive. If ugly beauty poems vary in their portrayal of the woman, they vary, too, in genre, some borrowing the sonnet fo rm, others adopting epigram matic characteristics, and yet others combining elements of sonnet and epigram and thus reminding us of Rosalie L. Colie's emphasis on the fre quent twinning and overlapping of those types.3 Members of this third, hybrid group, such as Sidney's poem on Mopsa, may shift the generic balance of Petrarchism by playing up the epigrammatic elements subordi nated in more straightforward sonnets, hence making what had been minor or latent more prominent, much as they accord dominance to the subver sive, anti-Petrarchan strains that are often latent even in apparently con ventional Petrarchism. In short, the lyrics that describe women who are marginal to the culture because of their skin color and other traits or women who unsettle cultural standards of beauty often occupy marginal ized spaces in a generic system that itself was prone both to establish and to flout generic standards. In so doing, they may implicitly comment on the norms of the sonnet, demonstrating once again that the counterdis courses of Petrarchism allow poets to practice genre criticism by example rather than precept. Even this brief introduction suggests the problem of labeling such texts. AlthoughI adopt fo r convenience the term used by most critics, ugly beauty, that phrase (like its French analogue, jolie laideur) ignores the fact that some 3Rosalie L. Colie, Shakespeare's Living Art(princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), chap. 2. THE "UGLY BEAUTY" TRADITION 165 of the women are not ugly according to prevailing cultural norms. And, more to the point, that oxymoron accepts the very cultural standards that these poems are at pains to undermine.4 Some poems do so direcdy, by arguing that, say, the racial Other is attractive. And in the very act of describing an unambiguously unattractive woman and distinguishing her from attractive ones, certain lyrics unmoor the categories on which they depend-ugliness and beauty-thus rendering problematical the oxymoron that customarily labels their tradition. Hence they also slide between satiric and epideictic modes, confounding those categories too. In skidding be tween literary types and tones, as in so many other ways, the poems enact generically the processes of disguise, equivocation, and transformation which they perform rhetorically. As an instance of the paradoxical encomium, the ugly beauty tradition traces its ancestry to classical versions of that literary type.s The paradoxical encomium, a popular and varied fo rm, was apparendy deployed as a school exercise in Greece and Rome. Gorgias, Isocrates, Lucian, and Plato, among other authors, write paradoxical encomia, while classical commentaries both anatomize and advocate them. In a passage particularly germane to the English tradition, Ovid ironically suggests that rather than reproaching women with their faults, one should reinterpret those fa ilings as strengths: "Nominibus mollire licet mala: fusca vocetur, / Nigrior lliyrica cui pice sanguis erit" (Ars Amatoria 2.657--658,"With names you can soften short comings; let her be called swarthy, whose blood is blacker than lliyrian pitch").6 Notice that the subject of gendered transgressions generates an example of what might today be viewed as racial ones and that malum, the word translated as "shortcomings," could also be read as "evil" or "calam ity. "7 Medieval instances of paradoxical encomia, though scanty, include the mock blazon in the Nun's Priest's Ta le.s In both the Continental and the English Renaissance, the paradoxical encomium flourished, as did the <My omission of quotation marks around "ugly beauty" does not imply my acceptance of the implications behind the phrase. I thank Amy Ling fo r useful insights into this and several other issues in this chapter. SOn the tradition, see Theodore C. Burgess, Ep ideictic Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1902); Rosalie L. Colie, Paradoxill Ep idemica: The Renaissance Tradition of Paradox (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966); J. B. Leishman, The Monarch of Wit: An Analytical and Comparative Study ofthe Poetryof John Donne (London: Hutchinson, 1951), pp. 74-8 1; Heruy Knight Miller, "The Paradoxical Encomium with Special Reference to Its Vogue in England, 1600-1800," MP, 53 (1956), 145-178; and Arthur Stanley Pease, "Things without Honor," Classical Philology, 21 (1926), 2']-42. "The citationto Ovid is from TheArt of Love and OtherPoems, trans. J. H. Mozley (London and Cambridge: William Heinemann and Harvard University Press, 1957). 7Charlton T. Lewis, A Latin Dictionary, rev.ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980), s.v. "malum." 81 am indebted to Alger N. Doane fo r helpful suggestions about medieval and other texts. 166 ECHOES OF DESIRE version of it which praises unattractive women; especially relevant to the English tradition is Francesco Berni's "Chiome d'argento fine." As this influential text reminds us, such poems of praise were hardly unique to early modem England, but they interacted in distinctive ways with the distinctive chemistry of that culture. Among the ugly beauty poems in Tudor and Stuart England are two little known poems by Gascoigne, the ninth and thirteenth lyrics in his Devises of Sundrie Gentlemen; the tribute to Mopsa in the third chapter of the New Arcadia; the mock encomium in Lyly's Endymion; Davies's epigram "In Gellam" ("Gella, if thou dost"); Barnes's Sonnet 13; Shakespeare's Sonnet 130 and some of the other Dark Lady poems; three of Donne's elegies; and lyrics by Drayton, Carew, Herrick, and Suckling. Less well known authors also contributed to the tradition: Poems, a collection that Eldred Revett published in 1657, includes a fe w texts about black women, and the most prolific writer in the tradition is the seventeenth-century poet and doctor John Collop. Members of the English ugly beauty tradition sport complex and difFe r ing intellectual and literary genealogies. They are all heirs and assigns of the classical paradoxical encomium, but they may variously participate as well in Restoration satire, Platonism, and iconographical traditions of van itas.9 Although Petrarchism is the primary target of texts like Sidney's, it is a more subsidiary antagonist in lyrics like Lord Herbert of Cherbury's de scriptions of women with atypical skin colors. Nonetheless, the ugly beauty tradition remains one of the most significant and most suggestive instances of our counterdiscourses. These poems are the epicenter of the eruptions that shake English Petrarchism. II What rhetorical strategies recur even in these seemingly dissimilar texts, and what do they suggest about the agendas that impel the ugly beauty tradition? Because many of its poems are unfamiliar and because their sig nificance often resides in nuances of tone, addressing these problems calls fo r detailed textual analyses.

Load more