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University of California Santa Cruz the Protestant Reformation and the English Amatory Sonnet Sequence

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University of California Santa Cruz the Protestant Reformation and the English Amatory Sonnet Sequence UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SANTA CRUZ THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION AND THE ENGLISH AMATORY SONNET SEQUENCE: SEEKING SALVATION IN LOVE POETRY A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in LITERATURE by Lauren Shufran June 2017 The Dissertation of Shufran is approved: ____________________________________ Professor Sean Keilen, chair ____________________________________ Professor Jen Waldron ____________________________________ Professor Carla Freccero _____________________________ Tyrus Miller Vice Provost and Dean of Graduate Studies Copyright © by Lauren Shufran 2017 TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract iv Acknowledgements vi Introduction 1 Chapter 1: “Till I in hand her yet halfe trembling tooke”: Justification in Edmund Spenser’s Amoretti 18 Chapter 2: Thomas Watson’s Hekatompathia: Reformed Grace and the Reason-versus-Passion Topos 76 Chapter 3: At Wit’s End: Philip Sidney and the Postlapsarian Limits of Reason and Will 105 Chapter 4: “From despaire to new election”: Predestination and Astrological Determinism in Fulke Greville’s Caelica 165 Chapter 5: Mary Wroth’s “strang labourinth” as a Predestinarian Figure in Pamphilia to Amphilanthus 212 Chapter 6: Bondage of the Will / The Bondage of Will: Theological Traces in Shake-speares Sonnets 264 iii ABSTRACT THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION AND THE ENGLISH AMATORY SONNET SEQUENCE: SEEKING SALVATION IN LOVE POETRY Lauren Shufran When he described poetry as that which should “delight to move men to take goodnesse in hand,” Philip Sidney was articulating the widely held Renaissance belief that poetry’s principal function is edification. Scholars have tended to observe a tension between Sidney’s description and the English sonnet sequence, as though didacticism and love poetry are fundamentally in opposition. But Petrarch’s Canzoniere–from which these sequences derive–is a conversion narrative; and the perceived opposition between amatory poetry and didacticism dissolves when we read English Petrarchism as a conversion genre. This dissertation begins with the suspicion that the theological infrastructure of these sequences is underplayed in the criticism. It is interested in what happens when we encounter these collections awake to the historical fact that Petrarchism and the Protestant Reformation came to England at the same time. A.E.B. Coldiron has described Sidney’s historical moment as one marked by both the “problem of how to establish a productive relation with the literary past” and “the problem of making poets, not versifiers in England.” English Petrarchans, I argue, were compelled to write poems in this vein to assert the legitimacy of English lyric from within a genealogy that enthusiastically embraced the literary accomplishments of the Italian poet. But the poets’ employment of Protestant tropes iv in these collections asserts an explicitly English lyric authorship: at once legitimized by its embeddedness in a literary tradition and morally eclipsing that tradition through recourse to right (Protestant) religion. When the Canzoniere arrived in England, its lover was ripe for comparison with the “spirit-versus-flesh” Paul. Taking a cue from this resemblance, English poets turned to Paul’s Epistles not only to recast Petrarch’s moral instruction (Paul, too, was a convert), but also to legitimize carnal love as a serious–and ineluctable–topic. Amatory poetry proved remarkably amenable to accommodating reformed, Pauline teachings on human will (and thus works, grace, and predestination). Sonnet sequences by Edmund Spenser, Thomas Watson, Sidney, Fulke Greville, Mary Wroth, and Shakespeare testify to an extensive effort among English love poets to offer a Protestant English literary exemplum to rival Petrarch’s Catholic one. v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Profound gratitude to my committee–Jen Waldron, Sean Keilen, and Carla Freccero– for their attentions, questions, and proffered wisdom throughout this journey. To David Marno for stepping in in the early stages of this project with the perceptive insight on sonnets that only a scholar of John Donne could have. To the poets and fellow-dissertators in my life who sporadically drew me out of the Renaissance and into the magnificent present. And to the sangha, for the perpetual reminder that this, too, has been part of the practice: deep bows. vi INTRODUCTION By the time Shake-speares Sonnets was published in 1609, there was a strain of English Petrarchism well underway–indeed, its moment nearly finished–that this study argues was distinctly “Protestant.” Our received wisdom about sonnets and sonnet sequences is that they are comprised of some combination of the following: unrequited love; a beloved who is cruel, but necessarily so, because she is virtuous; (thus) a fervent, impetuous, and miserable lover who must accept his pain even as he complains about it; the fluctuations of the lover in the face of the beloved’s steadfast refusals; superlatives and hyperbolic praise; lascivious play; an interest in beauty and how poetry augments it; an interest in time and how poetry extends it. Indeed, these are all aspects of the Petrarchan lyric sequence that Shakespeare inherited, and they are the conventions most regularly emphasized in scholarship on the genre. This study begins with the suspicion that the theological infrastructure of these sequences is underplayed in the criticism. It is interested in what happens when we encounter these collections awake to the historical fact that Petrarchism and the Protestant Reformation came to England at the same time.1 The reader will forgive me for opening with what is probably the most recognized description of poetry from the sixteenth century. In his Defence of Poesie– the first work of literary criticism in English–Philip Sidney defined “right Poets” as those poets who: 1 Stephen Hamrick, “Tottel’s Miscellany and the English Reformation” in Criticism 44.4 (Fall, 2002), 329. 1 [I]mitate both to delight & teach, and delight to move men to take that goodnesse in hand, which without delight they would flie as from a stranger; and teach to make them know that goodnesse whereunto they are moved.2 For Sidney, the purpose of poetry was fundamentally didactic: not only should it teach men what goodness is; it should also teach them to desire it for themselves, and then move them to take it. Sidney’s best friend Fulke Greville–less famously but no less significantly–later wrote in his biography of Sidney that his friend’s “end [in writing] was not vanishing pleasure alone, but morall Images, and Examples (as directing threds) to guide every man through the confused Labyrinth of his own desires, and life.”3 Both the Defence and the Life of Sidney exemplify the widely held Renaissance belief that poetry’s principal function is edification. Both poets also dedicated substantial portions of their lives to writing love poetry. Scholars have tended to observe what appears like a tension in these bodies of work–particularly in Sidney’s–as though love poetry and instruction are necessarily in opposition. But Petrarch’s Canzoniere–from which each of the sequences in this study derives–is, significantly, a conversion narrative. And it is in part by reading English Petrarchism as a “conversion genre” that the opposition between amatory poetry and didacticism is dissolved. A.E.B. Coldiron has located Thomas Watson’s Hekatompathia (1582)–written contemporaneously with Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella, and the focus of Chapter 2–at 2 “The Defence of Poesie” in The Prose Works of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Albert Feuillerat. Vol. 3: The Defence of Poesie, Political Discourses, Correspondence and Translation (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1923), 9-10. 3 Cited in Richard Hillyer, Sir Philip Sidney, Cultural Icon (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 48. 2 a historical moment in England marked by both the “problem of how to establish a productive relation with the literary past and the literary Other” and “the problem of making poets, not versifiers in England: how to assert the status, value, and legitimacy of lyric and lyric authorship.”4 Indeed, this is one of the fundamental questions that Watson’s sequence of love poems appears to be asking; and its answer rests, in no small part, in the catalogues of classical sources and allusions in the headnotes that precede each sonnet, as well as in its many references to Petrarch. But at the same time, Watson’s employment of explicitly Protestant tropes (tropes that each of the poets in this study takes up, though to varying ends) permits the assertion of a particularly English lyric authorship: at once legitimized by its embeddedness in a classical literary tradition, and morally eclipsing that tradition through its recourse to right (Protestant) religion. Similarly, while Sidney’s poetic persona announces he is dispensing with literary heritage in the first poem of Astrophel and Stella, the collection’s pronounced Petrarchisms belie his claim. Sidney, too, was compelled to write poems in this vein to assert the legitimacy of English lyric from within a genealogy that enthusiastically embraced the literary accomplishments of the Italian poet. But Sidney’s transformations of the sequence– specifically, as we will see, his employment of Paul’s Epistle to the Romans– transfigured the genre to offer a Protestant English literary exemplum to rival Petrarch’s Catholic one. In both sonnet sequences, subtle claims to right religion assist an English bid for literary superiority to both Petrarchan and classical 4 “Sidney, Watson, and the ‘Wrong Ways’ to Renaissance Lyric Poetics” in Renaissance Papers 1997, ed. T.H. Howard-Hill and Philip Rollinson (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1997), 51. 3 predecessors by way of religious preeminence. What Coldiron calls “the status, value, and legitimacy of lyric and lyric authorship” was thus, I argue, evidenced by two concerns in English Petrarchism: its relationship to a literary genealogy, and its recourse to a scriptural one. In his work on the figure of the prodigal in Elizabethan literature, Richard Helgerson argues that: Unable to ignore the suspicion that poetry was morally harmful, and equally unwilling to forgo it, [Elizabethan poets] had to prove again and again that it might be made beneficial.
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