The Poetics of Literary History in Renaissance England Christopher

Home , Blank verse, Daniel Woolf, Elizabeth Hand, Gorboduc, John Harington (writer), John Weever

The Poetics of Literary History in Renaissance England

Christopher Ross McKeen

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

2017

ABSTRACT

The Poetics of Literary History in Renaissance England

Christopher Ross McKeen

This dissertation expands the familiar concept of literary history in order to argue for the historiographic function of literary form in early modern poetry and drama. I propose that the

“literary history” of early modern England is not merely the history of literature, but also these writers’ methods of evoking history by means of the literary. For Christopher Marlowe, George

Herbert, and many of their contemporaries, the formal capacities of poetry offered methods for describing relationships between events in time, interpreting those events, and mobilizing those interpretations—in short, the formal capacities of poetry become ways of doing history. In the most familiar critical sense, literary history denotes canon-formations, literary influence, and the development of genres, trends, and fashions in poetic style. I demonstrate that early modern poets themselves recognized this sense of literary history, understanding their formal decisions in light of the history of poetic form. When Tudor and Stuart writers adopted a particular style or set of conventions, I argue, they did so with an awareness of how easily these styles could become—or had become—dated. While critics have demonstrated the political valences of writers’ recourse to specific genres and styles, I also insist on the specifically temporal and historical implications of poetic form as such, arguing that poets’ formal decisions, irrespective of earlier uses of those forms, encode ways of looking at and interpreting the past. The temporalities of verse—the way its meter produces forward momentum, its rhyme recalls earlier lines, its lyric voice arrests time—become, for the poets and dramatists I study, tools for understanding historical events and periods. By attending to the inherent temporality of poetry, I uncover the historical arguments poets and dramatists make, even in texts not overtly concerned

with historical topics. Indeed, I suggest that the very structure of poetry can become a way of thinking about the past and the passage of time.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………………………ii

Introduction……………………………………………………………………………………….1

1. Christopher Marlowe and the History of Blank Verse………………………………………. 25

2. Michael Drayton and the History of the English Sonnet ……………………………………..71

3. Ben Jonson and the History of the Epigram ………………………………………………...118

4. George Herbert and Literary History………………………………………………………...165

Bibliography …………………………………………………………………………………...192

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

No one writes a dissertation alone. Thanks belong, first of all, to Molly Murray, my most demanding and generous reader, who believed in this project even when I did not. Her keen interest and insight, both in conversation and in writing, have sharpened both my ideas and my prose. Alan Stewart continually helped me see what my arguments were really about, and I always left his office with my sense of the project grounded and clarified. Jean Howard taught me how chapters work. If my writing’s rhetorical structure holds together, it is because of her.

All three have read practically everything I ever wrote as a scholar. Their guidance and support over the years have made this dissertation possible.

I am fortunate to have shared the day-to-day work of writing with Candace Cunard. I developed my own writing practices and habits by working alongside her, and though our methods differ, I would not have found my own without her help. Moreover, the intellectual, emotional, and physical labor she provides made this dissertation possible. I am also thankful for important conversations about Theodor Adorno.

I was fortunate to have an abundance of readers while writing this dissertation thanks to the Early Modern Dissertation Seminar in the English Department at Columbia. These friends and colleagues responded to drafts of this dissertation with continual excitement, support, and critical insight, and I only hope I have offered the same to their work. Conversations with

Kathryn Fore helped to clarify my Herbert chapter. Andrea Crow, Arden Hegele, and Seth

Williams each offered important friendship, as well as loaning canine support. Gail Kern Paster unknowingly provided great encouragement at a crucial moment in this process. My external examiners, Rachel Eisendrath and Matt Zarnowiecki, gave me new insight into this dissertation; their comments have reinvigorated my interest in this project and spurred me to further research.

Ana Rudin and Janet Robblee read the entire dissertation and in doing so prepared me for the defense. Thanks, finally, to Ainsley Burke, Daniel Rosell, Ross McKeen, Robert and Kristen

Cunard, and the staff at the Hungarian Pastry Shop, where much of this was written. This dissertation is dedicated to David McKeen, teacher and adventurer.

iii

Introduction

“Literary histories are supposed to be a thing of the past.”1

This dissertation examines the relationship between poetic form and historical thought in the English renaissance. In it, I argue that early modern writers used the resources of poetry not only to give form to historical narratives, but to describe relationships between events in time, interpret those events, and apply those interpretations. In short, poetics provided English renaissance writers with an alternative means of doing history. The results are what I call

“literary histories”—a contested term in contemporary scholarship. As commonly understood,

“literary history” can be defined as “a narrative account of either literature as a whole or of specific modes (poetry, drama, fiction), genres (epic, comedy, pastoral), or forms (complaint, sonnet, ode).”2 As an approach to criticism, this sort of literary history is usually traced to the long eighteenth century, and indeed the OED finds the phrase used in this sense only as early as

1692.3 Over the past decade, however, “literary history” has become a key concept for digital humanities and practices of “distant reading.” Franco Moretti introduces these methods in

Graphs, Maps, Trees (2005), by calling them, in the subtitle of that book, Abstract Models for

1 Jonathan F. S. Post, English Lyric Poetry: The Early Seventeenth Century (New York: Routledge, 1999), ix.

2 Lee Patterson, “Literary History,” in Critical Terms for Literary Study, 2nd ed., Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin, eds. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010): 350.

3 OED, qv. “Literary history”; René Wellek, The Rise of English Literary History (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1941); Kevin Pask, “Ancients and Moderns: The Origins of Literary History,” Modern Language Quarterly 73, no. 4 (2012): 505-26.

Literary History.4 Subsequent studies in this field likewise use “literary history” to define their projects.5

In this dissertation, I put a different kind of pressure on the phrase “literary history” by exploring how literary forms and traditions—the subjects of traditional literary history—are themselves productive of histories in early modern England. I argue that in addition to recognizing that poetic form develops over time, certain English poets in this period mobilized this newly-recognized historicity of literary form to narrate, interpret, and theorize history itself.

“Literary histories,” in this dissertation, are therefore texts that both recognize the historicity of poetic form and use poetic form as a means of thinking historically. The well-studied proliferation of staged and versified historical narratives throughout the Elizabethan and

Jacobean reigns attests to poetry’s extensive use as a medium for thinking through historical problems. Texts from this period continually turn to the past in order to craft narratives, draw examples, defend arguments, and claim authority.6 Out of this deep investment with the past emerged new genres of historiography, including Tacitean political histories, non-narrative antiquarian writings, and, of course, the Elizabethan history play.7 Given the diversity and

4 Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History (Londonn: Verso, 2005).

5 Jockers, Matthew, Macroanalysis: Digital Methods and Literary History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013), as well as James F. English and Ted Underwood, eds., “Scale and Value: New Digial Approaches to Literary History,” Modern Language Quarterly 77, no. 3 (2016), 277-471.

6 Daniel Woolf, Reading History in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), ch. 2.

7 On the proliferation of historiographic genres, see Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). Studies of specific historiographic genres include on the history play: Teresa Grant and Barbara Ravelhofer, eds., English Historical Drama, 1500- 1660: Forms Outside the Canon (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); Phyllis Rackin, Stages of History: Shakespeare’s English Chronicles (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990). On historical narrative poetry, see Anthony LaBranche, “Poetry, History, and Oratory: The Renaissance Historical Poem,” SEL 9, no. 1 (1969): 1-19; Gerald M. MacLean, Time’s Witness: Historical Representation in English Poetry, 1603-1660 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990). On the chronicle Woolf, Reading ch. 1; Chloe Wheatley, Epic, Epitome, and the Early 2

copiousness of early modern history writing, it is unsurprising that most studies of early modern historiography, even from a literary perspective, concern themselves with texts that directly narrate or comment upon past events. My project takes the field in a new direction by considering the historical arguments implicit in texts that might seem unconcerned with history as such. Lyric love songs, court plays, devotional poems all, I argue, address problems that are historical—that deal with the interpretation and narration of the past, and with the use of the past to understand the present and the future—and do so, moreover, formally and stylistically rather than thematically.

By looking for early modern practices of history writing beyond texts that overtly narrate or comment upon historical events, I expand the range of what counts as historiography in renaissance texts. The historian Daniel Woolf has called for such a wider-ranging study of the early modern sense of history, arguing that scholars “need to look a bit nearer the ground … using a more open-ended definition of the past than that embraced by ‘history’ in its narrower definition as those aspects of the past that someone deliberately chooses to select, organize, and represent in a coherent literary form.”8 In a sense, my dissertation responds to Woolf’s call by looking beyond what is explicitly or narrowly historiographic in early modern texts. At the same time, in sharp contrast to Woolf, I do not thereby dismiss “coherent literary form.” Indeed, I argue that the “coherent literary form[s]” of history writing in the English renaissance are far more diverse than has been generally recognized. Learning to see short poems, for example, as

Modern Historical Imagination (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011). On antiquarianism, Graham Parry, The Trophies of Time: English Antiquarians of the Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).

8 D. R. Woolf, The Social Circulation of the Past: English Historical Culture, 1500-1730 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 6-7. Cf. Megan Matchinske, who examines “written history in its less explicit forms—as advice, counsel and memory”; Women Writing History in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 1.

historiographical will enable readers and scholars to better understand the pervasiveness, even ubiquity of historical thought in English renaissance culture. By revealing the historical arguments made through poetic form, this dissertation opens new texts to study by scholars interested in early modern historical thought.

In placing poetics at the center of my project, I moreover ask us to take seriously the versions of history made available by non-narrative poetry. Poetry, I argue, not only lends form or ancillary support to historical narratives, but itself makes arguments that the direct narration of the past cannot. Numerous studies of the “forms of history” have provided deeply insightful readings of early modern historiographical texts, but often begin with the well-recognized genres of historiography practiced in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and only then draw connections to more “literary” genres: so, the history play resists the chronicle, the romance imagines space like the chorography, the masque draws on the material discoveries of antiquarianism, and so on.9 Instead, this dissertation begins with the specific tropes and techniques of poetry writing, and then moves to consider the historiographic uses readers and writers found for these formal techniques. Often, I show, the “poetics of literary history”—or, alternatively, the “literary history of poetics”—challenges the arguments and narrative structures underlying more familiar forms of historiography. The writers I study rather than explaining the significance of poetic form by recourse to historical circumstances, instead often ask their readers to understand the significance of historical events formally. In this dissertation, I ask my

9 On the Tacitean “politic history,” see Blair Worden, “Historians and Poets,” in The Uses of History in Early Modern England, ed. Paulina Kewes (San Marino: The Huntington Library, 2006), 69-90; on antiquarian writings, see Hannah Crawforth, Etymology and the Invention of English in Early Modern Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 64-101; on the history play, see Rackin.

readers to be willing to see poetic form as a shaping force of historical consciousness, not just a discourse shaped by history.

Historical Thought

History, like much else in English culture, was undergoing a “revolution” in the early modern period.10 While historians have described the impact of social and material changes as the driving force behind much of this revolution, few would dispute the impact of humanist philology and pedagogy to the intellectual history of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century

England.11 Humanism had at its root the new Greek and Latin philology, the “revival” and imitation of classical Greco-Roman texts that developed in Italy over the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.12 C. S. Lewis defines the term broadly, writing that “By a humanist I mean one who taught, or learned, or at least strongly favoured, Greek and the new kind of Latin; and by humanism, the critical principles and critical outlook which ordinarily went with these studies.”13

These “critical principles and critical outlook” included a new sense of the historical distance of the classical period and a distaste for the writing of the intervening centuries. Humanists stressed historical change rather than continuity: as Joseph Levine writes, they “began with the notion that ancient and medieval culture could be sharply differentiated, and as a result they developed a

10 F. Smith Fussner, The Historical Revolution: English Historical Writing and Thought, 1580-1640 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962).

11 Daniel Woolf writes that “the revolution, which was a slow one, lay in the much longer-lasting change in sensibility, taste, and manners that turned history first from the minor pastime of a small number of monastic chroniclers and civic officials, into a major area of study and leisurely pursuit of university students, lawyers, aspiring courtiers, and ordinary readers”; see Woolf, Reading 7.

12 Joseph M. Levine, Humanism and History: Origins of Modern English Historiography (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), 10-1.

13 C. S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1944), 18.

keen sense of anachronism.”14 This version of renaissance humanism arrived in England in the early sixteenth century, and by the late Elizabethan period dominated educational practices at grammar schools and the universities, profoundly shaping English writing of all kinds.

As a diverse and often contentious movement, humanism resulted in a proliferation of historiographic forms and debates, rather than the imposition of a single historical outlook.

Woolf notes “two seemingly contradictory notions of the movement of time” in the Elizabethan mind: a Christian history, which moved in a “more-or-less straight line from Creation to

Apocalypse,” and classical models of history “based on cycles observable in nature.”15

Sixteenth-century writers had seemingly little trouble “synthesizing” these contrasting views; rather than raising debates over the truth of either model of history, historiographers in the period were comfortable drawing from either, depending on their needs in any given situation.16

Likewise, it is best to look at the effects of humanism on historiography as providing new ways of thinking about history, rather than closing off old modes. The chronicle, for instance, remained an important historiographic form well into the seventeenth century, even as other forms such as continuous narratives of narrowly-defined events developed.17 Conflicts erupted over certain historical facts—like the story of Britain’s Trojan origins—or historical methods, especially the place of speeches in histories, composed by the historians as an imitation of what

14 Joseph Levine, 49.

15 Woolf The Idea of History in Early Stuart England: Erudition, Ideology, and the ‘Light of Truth’ from the Accession of James I to the Civil War (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), 5; cf. Achsah Guibbory, The Map of Time: Seventeenth-Century English Literature and Ideas of Pattern in History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 5-6; and Timothy Hampton, Writing from History: The Rhetoric of Exemplarity in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 14.

16 Woolf, Idea 5.

17 Woolf, Reading ch. 1.

historical persons would have said in similar circumstances.18 Divergent views on history and methods of historiography continued to be written throughout the period.

Reading methods are as important as writing methods to understanding early modern historiography. English readers in this period turned to history for a variety of reasons, from establishing legal precedent to impressing others at social gatherings.19 Early in the period, readers tended to excerpt small portions of a historical text, while later in the seventeenth century reading a text continuously became more common.20 Either method was conducive to reading for analogies between past and present circumstances. This could be narrowly topical, with historians using narration of the past to implicitly comment on the current political situation. As an instance of such politically topical historiography, we might consider Sir John Hayward’s Life of Henry IV (1599), the story of a rebellion, dedicated to the controversial Earl of Essex; as

Annabel Patterson explains, “Hayward’s history had acquired its dangerous significance by appearing at a particularly tense moment toward the end of Elizabeth’s life … the significance resided precisely in the connection between ‘this time’ and ‘this storie.’”21 More often, readers

18 On these renaissance debates, see Anthony Grafton, What Was History?: The Art of History in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 34-49; and Nancy S. Struever, The Language of History in the Renaissance: Rhetoric and Historical Consciousness in Florentine Humanism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), 18-9. The problem is taken up in Thucydides, who defends the writing practice saying that “my method has been while keeping as closely as possible to the general sense of the words that were actually used, to make speakers say what, in my opinion, was called for by each situation”; see Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, trans. Rex Warner (New York: Penguin, 1972), 47. On other historiographic conflicts, see Patrick Collinson, “Truth, Lies, and Fiction in Sixteenth-Century Protestant Historiography,” in The Historical Imagination in Early Modern Britain: History, Rhetoric, and Fiction, 1500-1800, ed. Donald R. Kelley and David Harris Sacks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 45. But, cf. Woolf, Idea xiii-xiv, where he argues that there existed a broad consensus on English history prior to the Civil Wars.

19 Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), ch. 2; Woolf, Reading 123-5.

20 Woolf, Reading 107.

21 Annabel Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), 47. Cf. Paulina Kewes, “History and Its Uses: An 7

drew more general comparisons of past to present as a way of becoming “studied for action,” that is, developing strategies for handling present circumstances based on the study of similar events in the past.22 This is, for example, the underlying premise and principal lesson of

Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy, in which he writes, “Whoever considers present and ancient things easily knows that in all cities and all peoples there are the same desires and the same humor, and there always have been. So it is an easy thing to whoever examines past things diligently to foresee future things in every republic and to take the remedies for them that were used by the ancients.”23

In addition to specific strategies for action, early modern readers searched history for ethical exemplars, both positive and negative, in what Timothy Hampton describes as “the humanist appropriation of ancient heroism.”24 Sir Henry Savile recommends this approach to reading in the preface to his translation of Tacitus (1598), where he writes, “For Historie, since we are eassier taught by example then by precept, what studie can profit vs so much, as that which giues vs patternes either to follow or to flye, of the best and worst men of all estates, cuntries, and times that euer were?”25 Sir Philip Sidney would famously challenges history’s ability to provide effective exemplars, writing that “the historian … is so tied, not to what should

Introduction,” in The Uses of History in Early Modern England, ed. Paulina Kewes (San Marino: Huntington Library, 2006), 14.

22 Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton, “‘Studied for Action’: How Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy,” Past and Present 129 (1990): 30-78. Cf. Worden 75-6.

23 Niccolò Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, trans. Harvey C. Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 83-4 [bk. 1 ch. 39].

24 Hampton 7.

25 Tacitus, The Ende of Nero and Beginning of Galba, trans. Sir Henry Savile (London, 1598), sig. ¶3r.

be but to what is,” and therefore cannot give unmixed examples of virtue.26 The wit and force of

Sidney’s suggestion, however, depends on the fact that many of his readers would have understood history precisely as a source of ethical examples for the present.

Over the sixteenth century, however, the confidence in historical similitudes between past and present was challenged by writers like Francesco Guicciardini, who claimed that the vast differences between past and present render lesson from the past a doubtful guide to present action.27 The breakdown of exemplarity as a model for reading history has to do with “The emergence of a sense of the past as continuous process and the establishment of the primacy of causal relationships between diachronically contiguous or proximate events over exemplary and analogical relationships between temporally remote and disconnected ones.”28 In other words, events were to be understood in terms of their immediate causes and effects, rather than their similarity to or difference from temporally-distant events. Woolf suggestively puts this transformation into poetic terms, calling it “a movement away from metaphor-intensive thought

(defined by analogy/similitude/typology) and toward metonymy-intensive (defined by contiguity/causation) thought.”29 This turn to a language of figuration helps to remind us that history is formal in both its composition and its use. I argue that English renaissance poets achieved formal effects both directly in their works and indirectly, in the interactions they imagine with their readers. When Sidney writes in Astrophil and Stella “Of all the kings that ever

26 Philip Sidney, “The Defense of Poesy,” in The Major Works, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 221.

27 Daniel Woolf, “From Hystories to the Historical: Five Transitions in Thinking About the Past, 1500- 1700,” in The Uses of History in Early Modern England, ed. Paulina Kewes (San Marino: Huntington Library, 2006), 43-4.

28 Woolf, “From Hystories” 36.

29 Woolf, “From Hystories” 42.

here did reign / Edward, named fourth, as first in praise I name,” he turns to a rhetoric of exemplarity, proposing Edward IV as a fit model for Astrophil to emulate. The following lines describe Edward as an exemplar of “balance,” an image enacted rhetorically by chiasmus:

“young-wise, wise-valiant,” “gained by Mars yet could mad Mars so tame.”30 The nearness of the octave’s A and B rhymes likewise suggests this balance—but the slight dissonance between the two indicates an imperfect imitation. Readers up on their English history would know, after all, that Edward IV was hardly an ideal model of kingship.31 Sidney thus uses the sonnet form to challenge practices of exemplarity, while at the same time, the poem’s implications depend upon the reader’s own historical knowledge and familiarity with other historiographic texts.

In his 1574 True Order and Methode of Wryting and Reading Hystories, Thomas

Blundeville defines history as “made of deedes done by a publique vveale, or agaynst a publique vveale, and such deedes, be eyther deedes of vvarre, of peace, or else of sedition and conspiracie.”32 However, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century historiographic practices extend well beyond the matters of high politics—though the texts they produced rarely went under the name of histories.33 Humanist philology, in praising the Latin style of classical Rome, established the historicity of language: recognizing that the forms and meanings of words change over the centuries, Italian humanists like Lorenzo Valla became better able to date texts and

30 Sidney p. 184.

31 On Elizabethan representations of the “exesses” of Edward IV and his court, see Daryl W. Palmer, “Edward IV’s Secret Familiarities and the Politics of Proximity in Elizabethan History Plays” ELH 61, no. 2 (1994): 279-315.

32 Thomas Blundeville, The True Order and Methode of Wryting and Reading Hystories (London, 1574), sig. C4v.

33 On the limited use of the term “history,” see Arthur Ferguson, Clio Unbound: Perception fo the Social and Cultural Past in Renaissance England (Durham: Duke University Press, 1979), ch. 1.

produce rules for good style. Valla famously used philological methods to prove the Donation of

Constantine—a document purporting to grant the Roman church land and power—a forgery.34 In

England, William Camden used similar methods to debunk the myth that the name “Britain” came from the Trojan Brutus, who supposedly founded the island’s first kingdom after fleeing the fall of Troy.35 Philological research like Valla’s was related to another major trend in renaissance historiography, the emergence of antiquarianism. Though early modern writers and readers considered antiquarianism as a different discipline than history, and one of much lower value, it nonetheless had an increasing impact on historiography as the era progressed.36 The antiquarians are noteworthy in their interest in the physical and literary remains of the past. For example, John Selden was both an antiquarian researcher and what we would call a textual editor, producing editions of both Chaucer and Skelton.

These changes in language use also historicized arguments about literary style, as writers like Erasmus argued that the proper style of writing was not ahistorical but depended on the needs of any particular historical moment. Henry Peacham thus urges the reader of The

Compleat Gentleman (1622) to keep their style “currant,” while Baldassare Castiglione notes (in

Thomas Hoby’s 1561 translation) that “facions” in style are “brought vp by custome” rather than the same in all ages.37 Style’s tie to history goes back at least to Cicero’s late rhetorical works,

34 On the Donation of Constantine, see Carlo Ginzburg, History, Rhetoric, and Proof (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1999), ch. 2.

35 William Camden, Britain, trans. Philemond Holland (London, 1610), pp. 6-9. Camden discusses his use of etymology in the address to the reader, sig. ¶4r.

36 On the difference between historians and antiquarians, see Ferguson 51-8; Joseph Levine 101-2; Woolf, Idea 13-21.

37 Henry Peacham, The Compleat Gentleman (London, 1622), sig. G4v; Baldesar Castiglione, The Courtyer of Count Baldessar Castilio, trans. Sir Thomas Hoby (London, 1561), sig. L3r.

especially his dialogue Brutus, which offers a history of the development of rhetoric from the

Greeks to his own contemporaries. The dialogue takes place as the Roman Republic nears its end and the speakers describe it as a welcome retreat from the troubles facing the Republic; in effect, the history of rhetorical styles becomes a history of the rise and fall of a political ideal. For

Cicero, rhetoric develops over the generations reaching ever-greater perfection, but this stylistic ascendance could only exist in a Republic where the orator’s art could serve the commonwealth; under the tyrannizing times of the late Republic, the orator could only mourn. Within this general argument about the historicity of style, Cicero and his interlocutors introduce a range of ways for mapping style onto time, from national timescales (in which Greece’s late period overlaps with

Rome’s early), to the succession of generations (aetates), to the newfangledness of fashionable

Attic and Asiatic styles of oratory. These historicizing schemes do not neatly nest within one another, and instead prove, within the dialogue, to be at best useful heuristics that break down under the right circumstances. The most significant source of such complexity is the problem of the possibility and desirability of imitation. As such, Cicero’s dialogue is not simply an account of literary history; instead, it presents the problems involved in constructing and interpreting literary histories as ongoing questions. Because of this, the renaissance reception of these texts cannot be understood as the assumption of a Classical position, but as the reinvigoration of an ongoing debate.38

The expansive range of methods for reading and writing history in early modern England attests to both the importance of the past to early modern culture and the dramatic changes the concept of history was undergoing in the period. This dissertation places the poetics of literary history beside these other methods as a means by which early modern readers and writers

38 On historical period and style, see Grafton 17, and Struever 69.

grappled with the past. These historiographic discourses help to indicate what is at stake for an

English renaissance poet in writing a history. To understand how these writers approached the task, we must take a closer look at poetic form.

Poetic Form

“Poetic form” is, admittedly, a capacious designation. It can refer to set stanzaic patterns

(sonnet, sestina), sonic structures (meter, rhyme), and conceptual figures (metaphor, synecdoche). Its relation to genre or mode is likewise difficult to pin down or define. In this dissertation I do not argue for a singular or particular definition for form—while at the same time, I try to avoid a general or “totalizing” argument about what form does.39 To this end, I draw on what Caroline Levine has recently called “the affordances of form.” Levine adopts the concept from design theory, in which affordance is “used to describe the potential uses or actions latent in materials and designs,” both intentional and unintentional. Thinking of forms in terms of their affordances, she argues, helps us to see how a form’s use and meaning draw from, but are not bound by, its original use and purpose; in fact, “a specific form can be put to use in unexpected ways that expand our general sense of that form’s affordances. Rather than asking what artists intend or even what forms do, we can ask instead what potentialities lie latent— though not always obvious—in aesthetic and social arrangements.”40 Even as Levine asks us to consider the properties inherent in forms, her terminology also disallows any direct and necessary link between form and meaning. Just because a form is capable of doing something

39 Marjorie Levinson, “What Is New Formalism?” PMLA 122, no. 2 (2007): 563.

40 Caroline Levine, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 6-7.

does not mean that the affordance is active in every instance: rhymed couplets can suggest finality in a speech, express conventional wisdom, and deliver satiric deflation, but do not, by their simple presence, mean anything. Levine’s formulation is useful in that a form’s affordances are to be found at the intersection of its inherent properties and the uses writers and readers make of it, each shaping the other.

An example of the relationship I am proposing between form, affordance, and literary history can be found in John Marston’s Scourge of Villainie (1598), a collection of verse satires in imitation of Juvenal. In the preface to the reader, Marston addresses the challenge brought by his fellow satirist Joseph Hall, that satirical poetry must be “both hard of conceipt [i.e., hard to understand], and harsh of stile” in order to properly imitate the classical form.41 Marston, however, argues to the contrary that the Roman satirists Juvenal and Persius only seem difficult because of their remoteness in time.42 Marston writes, “Persius is crabby [i.e. difficult to understand] because antient” and “Juvenall (upon the like occasion) seems to our judgement gloomie [i.e., obscure].”43 The reason they haven’t aged as well as Virgil or Horace, say, is because satire has a particular relationship to its own moment, being directed at the sins of its contemporary times; Persius’s “jerkes,” according to Marston, are “perticulerly given to private customes of his time.”44 Because of this insistence on its contemporaneity, satires would

41 Joseph Hall, Virgidemiarum, (London, 1598), sig. H3v.

42 On Juvenal and Persius in the 1590s, see Anne Lake Prescott, “The Evolution of Tudor Satire,” in The Cambridge Companion to English Literature, 1500-1600, ed. Arthur F. Kinney (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000): 227. On the difficulty of Juvenal and Persius generally, see the introduction to Juvenal and Persius, trans. Susanna Morton Braund, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004).

43 John Marston, The Poems of John Marston, ed. Arnold Davenport (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1961), p. 100. OED qv. “glory.”

44 Marston p. 100. See also Alvin B. Kernan, The Cankered Muse: Satire of the English Renaissance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), 2-3; and Fredric V. Bogel, The Difference Satire Makes: Rhetoric and Reading from Jonson to Byron (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), 9-10.

“expresse themselves in termes, that breathed not long even in their daies.”45 “But,” he continues, “had we then lived, the understanding of them had been nothing hard.”46 My need to gloss “conceipt,” “crabby,” and “gloomy” just proves Marston’s point: language changes over time, and what one age finds clear another finds confusing. As Marston writes, “Chaucer is harde even to our understandings: who knowes not the reason?”47 In this passage, Marston turns to the literary history of his chosen form in order to explain the relationship of his style to his contemporary moment, and in doing so he develops a historical perspective through which to understand the affordances of Juvenal’s rough rhythms and challenging syntax. Marston acknowledges that these formal characteristics may signify differently at different historical moments, and uses this insight to read Juvenal as his contemporary; The Scourge of Villainie incorporates near translations of Juvenal’s poetry, but updates the relevant sins and social types to those of Elizabethan London.

The concept of affordance thus helps to articulate how a poetic form’s development over time (its literary history, in the familiar sense) can make it available for historiographic use (its literary history, in the sense I advance in this dissertation). It also suggests that literary form can also signify in ways that do not necessarily depend on precedent or context. So, rather than simply pointing out the political valences of writers’ recourse to specific genres and styles at particular moments, I also attend to the specifically temporal and historical implications of poetic form as such. I argue that poets’ formal strategies, irrespective of earlier uses of those forms, encode ways of looking at and interpreting the past. The temporalities of verse—the way its

45 Marston p. 100.

46 Marston p. 100

47 Marston p. 100

meter produces forward momentum, its rhyme recalls earlier lines, its lyric voice arrests time— become, for the poets and dramatists I study, tools for understanding historical events and periods. Indeed, I suggest that the very structure of verse itself affords poets and readers a way of thinking about the past and the passage of time.48

Take, for example, the work of rhyme in William Shakespeare’s sonnet 55:

Nor marble nor the gilded monuments Of princes shall outlive this pow’rful rhyme, But you shall shine more bright in these contents Than unswept stone, besmeared with sluttish time. When wasteful war shall statues overturn, And broils root out the work of masonry, Nor Mars his sword nor war’s quick fire shall burn The living record of you memory. ’Gainst death and all oblivious enmity Shall you pace forth; your praise shall still find room, Ev’n in the eyes of all posterity That wear this world out to the ending doom. So, till the judgement that yourself arise, You live in this, and dwell in lovers’ eyes.49

The rhyme of “rhyme” and “time” in the opening quatrain calls attention to the way the poetic technique depends on time for is effects. Rhyme works, that is, by repeating sounds across a temporal distance. The basic conceit of the poem—that poetry can preserve the addressee’s

48 Susan Stewart lists several ways that poetic form produces temporal effects, including the divergence “between metrical structure and the shifting progress of the individual line; the lexical transformation implicit in rhyme with its simultaneous link across time and denial of repetition; the tension between pronounced speech and fixed inscription; the reversal and reorganization of syntax and rhythm; the fluctuating stability of stanzaic structure and the spatial and temporal breaks effected by such forms as the caesura, the volta, refrains, choruses and burdens; and the historical accretions, borrowings, and metaphorical approximations of ‘metrical structure’ itself in practices such as contrafacta, parody, and other modes of metrical allusion”; Susan Stewart Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 227. Cf. Susan Cameron, who writes that “All time converges upon the poem in whose one space splintered temporal fragments lodge and totalize. The poem lifts the fragments out of a severative reality. It prolongs, exaggerates, speeds up, subordinates, and simultaneously, seals its moments off from the world so that, unlike the sand in the proverbial hour glass, they do not sift through”; Susan Cameron, Lyric Time: Dickinson and the Limits of Genre (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), 257-8.

49 William Shakespeare, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. Stephen Booth (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978).

memory—is performed by these rhyme words, with “time” pulling forward the poet’s poem, his

“pow’rful rhyme.” Describing the poem as “these contents,” meanwhile, represents the poem as a spatial container for the addressee to occupy, an image reinforced by the rhyme with

“monuments.” In the second quatrain, “masonry” is echoed by “memory,” again suggesting that the “living record” not only represents but contains the addressee. When, in the final quatrain, we hear that “your praise shall still find room,” we are well-prepared to take the image as a space of security from the dangers of time. It is startling, therefore, to have this space located “in the eyes of all posterity / That wear this world out to the ending doom”—the rhyme landing us in more dangerous circumstances than the earlier spaces of security. If the initial quatrain instructs readers to understand rhyme as the measure of time’s passing, the sonnet quickly carries us to the end of human history. In this sense, the poem fulfills its promise: the addressee has been carried from the present to “the judgement” at which he shall “[him]self arise.” Shakespeare thus uses the sonnet form’s rhyme structure to enact the temporal movement that the poem promises. The poem produces temporal arguments through its formal structures. By presenting the poem as a

“record,” moreover, and filling the passage of time with matters of war, Shakespeare situates the lyric against historical action. The sonnet’s self-contained stasis is contrasted with the violent action that makes up history.

I am not the first, of course, to see poetry as in some sense formally implicated in a sense of temporality. Much modern poetic criticism and theory has done so, but mainly by challenging a strict opposition between poetry and narrative; Roland Greene, for example, places lyric poetry within a dialectic between opposed poles of narrative and “ritual” temporalities, while Heather

Dubrow describes the ways that non-narrative poetry can imply, impel, and culminate narrative

action.50 In turning to the relationship of poetry and history, I draw on these critical arguments in order to show how literary histories often resist the dominant narrative modes of historiography, or at least challenge readers to think historically without necessarily thinking narratively. Poetry, in other words, often provides alternative ways of making sense of the past. So John Donne contrasts modes of memorializing persons of the past, writing that

If no peece of Chronicle we prove We’ll build in sonnets pretty roomes As well a well wrought urne becomes The greates ashes, as half-acre tombes.51

Grave, lyric, and historiography vie here for the proper means of keeping the past and preserving it into the future. The sonnet, it seems, is an acceptable alternative to the chronicle history.

In this dissertation, I argue that poetic form both emerges from the historical past and enables writers to conceive of history in new ways, that it, as Susan Stewart writes, “makes possible links and adaptations between and across social and historical contexts.”52 For Stewart, however, this is a function of literary history in the usual sense, with these “links and adaptations” the result of a “revival of forms” that “is always accompanied by an accretion of nostalgia.”53 I expand on Stewart’s proposition that “Forms are a legacy from the dead and to the future” by demonstrating how, in the works of some English renaissance poets, something like the reverse takes place: forms, in these poems, are claims upon the legacy of the past. The forms

50 Roland Greene, Post-Petrarchism: Origins and Innovations of the Western Lyric Sequence (Princeton: Princeton Univrsity Press, 1991), intro; Heather Dubrow, The Challenges of Orpheus: Lyric Poetry and Early Modern England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), ch. 5.

51 John Donne, “The Canonization” ll. 31-4; in The Complete English Poems, ed. C. A. Patrides (New York: Knopf, 1991).

52 Stewart 252.

53 Stewart 251.

used by future writers, I argue, can alter the significance of poetic form in the past, effectively reshaping history.

The Forms of History

Simply to suggest that historiography has a formal dimension would hardly be an original claim; a number of twentieth-century critics have exposed (if it was ever truly hidden) what

Hayden White terms the “poetics of history,” identifying the ways historiography depends on literary tropes and genres.54 Some have gone so far as to say that history is “prefigure[d]” before any historiography even begins; White thus argues that the historian must first “constitute

[history] as an object of mental perception” before he “can bring to bring to bear upon the data of the historical field the conceptual apparatus he will use to represent and explain it.”55 White suggests, in other words not only that historiography is produced through engagements with literary form, but that the historical consciousness that precedes historiographic writing is already formally constructed. The theories of history advanced by White and others lie in the background of this dissertation, but my own work turns away from the formal analysis of explicitly historiographic texts. After all, a hermeneutics of exposure—catching out the rhetorical basis of historical “truth”—hardly suits a period in which history was already conceived of as a branch of rhetoric.56 Instead, I begin with the histories of specific poetic forms—primarily blank verse, the sonnet, and the epigram—and argue that English renaissance

54 For “poetics of history,” see Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth- Century Europe (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1973), intro.

55 White 30.

56 Ivo Kamps, Historiography and Ideology in Stuart Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 38. I will note here that I disagree with Kamps’s interpretation of this fact and dismissal of matters of style from proper historiography.

poets found in these forms new ways of thinking historically, of interpreting and arguing about the past.

This dissertation takes some distance from extant early modern studies of the “forms of history.”57 Key to these studies is Richard Helgerson’s Forms of Nationhood (1992), which argues that the late Elizabethan generation was, consciously or not, engaged in “the writing of

England.” Central to this “concerted generational project,” Helgerson argues, was the chronicle form of historiography, and Helgerson goes on to show how the chronicle interacted with history writing in other genres, such as the local chorography or the legal compendium.58 In the decades since, these various historiographic forms have been the subject of innumerable studies, and while Helgerson’s arguments about the construction of nationhood are regularly challenged, his work remains foundational to the sub-field.59 My work departs from such earlier studies in three major ways. First, many of these studies slide quickly from “form” to “genre,” and thus pivot on the various genres of historiographical writing active in the early modern period.60 By describing a poetics of literary history, I keep the plurality of forms, and the range of techniques that count as form, central. This is linked to the second, most obvious difference between my project and earlier studies of the early modern “forms of history”: that I deal only glancingly with explicitly historiographical forms. Finally, my dissertation does not offer a single overarching thesis about

57 I take the phrase from Bart Van Es, Spenser’s Forms of History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).

58 Helgerson 1, 11, 7.

59 See, for example, David Galbraith, Archetectonics of Imitation in Spenser, Daniel, and Drayton (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), ch. 5; Van Es, passim.; Claire McEachern, The Poetics of English Nationhood, 1590-1612 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 20-1.

60 Van Es 7.

the purposes or effects of writing history through different forms; instead, I show the diversity of historical thought that literary form affords.

* * *

This study centers on four poets active between about 1580 and 1630: Christopher

Marlowe, Michael Drayton, Ben Jonson, and George Herbert. Though the chapters are arranged chronologically, I do not seek to advance an argument for the progressive development of the formal practices of literary history. Indeed, the resistance to historical teleology in the literary histories I study would preclude such an argument. Instead, these four poets demonstrate the range of historical arguments writers could make via poetic form. In chapter one, I contextualize the versification of Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine among sixteenth-century efforts to reform English vernacular verse on the model of Latin unrhymed quantitative meter. As I demonstrate, literary histories of unrhymed verse in the poetic and rhetorical theory of Roger

Ascham, Gabriel Harvey, and others align the disappearance of unrhymed meter with the fall of civilizations, and propose the return to classical metrics as a means of transferring the cultural and political authority of ancient Rome to Tudor England. Marlowe, however, offers in

Tamburlaine an alternative literary history of unrhymed poetry through the formal affordances of blank verse. As an open form, blank verse lends itself to expansive speeches that, in the mouth of

Tamburlaine, can paradoxically both produce action and arrest time. The form of blank verse thus resists the imperial teleology of its origins in the classicizing projects of the Tudor humanists.

In chapter two, I read Michael Drayton’s 1599 sonnet sequence, Idea, as an attempt to bridge the temporal distance between himself and Philip Sidney, dead since 1586. Drayton puts the sonnet form and its conventions to historiographic use, both to cast the 1590s as a historical

period that has come to a close, and to forge a connection between his own contemporary moment and the historical moment of poetic and political possibility Sidney had come to represent. Sidney, I argue, offers Drayton a poetics of the political occasion, whereby real-world events are interpreted through the conventional tropes of Petrarchism. Additionally, Drayton makes the sonnet a historiographic tool by connecting the sonnet sequence Idea to another poetic collection, Englands Heroicall Epistles: a set of verse letters written in the voices of men and women from England’s past—including one of the earliest practitioners of the sonnet form in

English, the Earl of Surrey. By printing Idea and the Epistles together, Drayton offers a complete literary history of the English sonnet, from its origins in Surrey’s contact with Italian poetry, through its parody in the late 1590s. The recursive form of the sonnet sequence, in turn, allows

Drayton to cast the 1590s as a stalled historical period, repeating the tropes of Sidney’s day to little political effect, while also holding out hope that the old tropes can be reinvigorated.

Chapter three moves forward to the early Jacobean period and asks why Ben Jonson might wish to refer to the gossipy, trivial, minor poetic form of the epigram as enabling “the ripest of my studies.” I argue that the literary history of the epigram centers on a tension between medium and message: that is, the genre’s origins as inscription, able to endure the vicissitudes of time, seems at odds with its thematic investment in small, transitory occasions. For Jonson, the epigram’s contrary impulses create a space in which to think through the proper scale of history both temporally (lasting vs. ephemeral spans of time), and thematically (major vs. minor occasions). The epigram’s characteristic formal features—its concision, its urbane voice, its plain style—condition its integral relationship to contexts, both material and social. As I demonstrate,

Jonson’s epigrams work by building a historical context around themselves, both through their references to the social world of early modern England and through their particular formal

characteristics. Belying the familiar account of Jonson’s denigration of the merely transitory in favor of that which endures through time, I argue that his Epigrams offer a history of small things, through formally delimited poems centered on minor events and matters.

I conclude with a chapter on George Herbert, a poet whose innovative collection of devotional lyrics, The Temple (1633), I argue, challenges the historiographic capacities of poetic form through its turn to the divine. Like the earlier poets I study, Herbert uses various forms— including the sonnet and the epigram—to think through the structure, meaning, and use of the past. This happens most explicitly in the concluding poem to The Temple, “The Church

Militant,” which offers a partly-prophetic history of the world from creation to judgment. Within the lyrics of The Temple, however, I find Herbert continually questioning the suitability of poetic form for understanding time. More particularly, poems like “Church Monuments” question the possibility of approaching the divine time of eternity from within the mortal time of history.

Many of Herbert’s poems, then, are about the claims poetry makes to historiographic power. By experimenting with forms of temporality and looking forward into a historical future, Herbert puts the poetics of literary history under strain. In this respect, Herbert both exemplifies and challenges the claims I make throughout this dissertation.

“The Poetics of Literary History in the English Renaissance” brings together formalist and historicist methods in order to demonstrate the degree to which form and history were intertwined in early modern writing. Throughout, I argue that in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries poetic form could be a topic for historical commentary, evidence in a historical argument, and, most importantly, a means of thinking historically. By expanding the significance of “literary history,” this dissertation demonstrates the work of form in interpreting

history. Far more than a simple narrative of development and influence, literary history is a shaping force in our sense of the past.

Chapter 1 Christopher Marlowe and the History of Blank Verse

The literary history of blank verse is remarkable for having a definite point of origin:

“Blank verse in England,” the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics confidently proclaims, “was invented by the Earl of Surrey” for his translation of the Aeneid in the 1540s.1

The form then migrated to drama thanks to Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville’s Gorboduc

(1561), before finally reaching maturity when “Christopher Marlowe came fully into his powers,” after which the form becomes ubiquitous in early modern drama.2 This is a familiar trajectory, found in many studies and handbooks on renaissance drama.3 It is also a literary history that Marlowe’s own work challenges. By the late sixteenth century, ongoing debates about the historical position of English poetry with respect to classical Greek and Latin had latched on to unrhymed verse as a marker of eloquence and cultural authority. Poets and poetic theorists from Ascham to Puttenham mobilized blank verse’s similarity to the unrhymed poetry of classical Greek and Latin as a means of interpreting the downfall of the Roman Empire and bringing about the cultural ascendancy of Tudor England. The literary history of unrhymed verse

1 Roland Greene and Stephen Cushman eds., The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 4th ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 145.

2 Ibid 146.

3 For examples, see Adolphus William Ward, A History of English Dramatic Literature to the Death of Queen Anne (London, 1875), 109; George Brandes, William Shakespeare: A Critical Study, 2 vols. (New York, 1898), 35; T. S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood (New York, 1928), 86; Russ McDonald, “Marlowe and Style” in The Cambridge Companion to Christopher Marlowe, ed. Patrick Cheney (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 62-3; Robert B. Shaw, Blank Verse: A Guide to Its History and Use (Athens, Ohio 2007); Rebecca Bushnell, Tragedy: A Short Introduction (London, 2008), 44; Marina Tarlinskaja, Shakespeare and the Versification of English Drama, 1561-1642 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), 48; Margaret Tudeau-Clayton, “‘The Lady Shall Say Her Mind Freely’: Shakespeare and the S/Pace of Blank Verse,” in Shakespeare and Space, ed. Ina Habermann and Michelle Witen (London, 2016).

thus offered an epic and imperial narrative, passing cultural and political authority from a fallen empire to a rising one.

In this chapter, I read Marlowe’s earliest plays, Dido Queene of Carthage (printed 1594) and Tamburlaine, Parts 1-2 (printed 1590), as responses to the literary tradition that lay behind blank verse. While unrhymed verse could support the imperial and classicizing narrative of its earlier advocates, Marlowe finds in blank verse the formal affordances to resist such narratives, most importantly by developing the form’s lyrical capacities. Blank verse’s capacity for endless extension, I argue, allows Marlowe to craft speeches that pause the action of his plays to elaborate upon cosmological imagery, deliver amorous speeches, and offer paeans to beauty.

While critics have long recognized the presence of lyrical passages in Marlowe’s plays, they have generally treated such passages as at odds with the violent action surrounding them, especially in Tamburlaine; Neil Rhodes, for example, describes Marlowe’s major achievement in

Tamburlaine as the insertion of epic into theater, while the amorous speeches represent bursts of

“spangled lyricism” standing out from their surroundings.4 But as many scholars have observed,

“lyric” is an ill-defined genre in the renaissance, especially in contrast to the cultural authority of the epic.5 In Marlowe, I argue, the lyrical mode can best be recognized in temporally-complex passages that hold action in suspension. Rather than a pure opposition to narrative, lyrical passages dwell on anticipated or imagined or debated action. The highly-wrought language of

4 Neil Rhodes, The Power of Eloquence and English Renaissance Literature (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), 80-2; other critics who treat Marlowe’s lyricism as conflicting with the general tenor of his plays include Clifford Leech, Christopher Marlowe: Poet for the Stage, Anne Begor Lancashire, ed. (New York: AMS Press, 1986), 56-7, and Judith Haber, Desire and Dramatic Form in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 17-9.

5 See esp. Heather Dubrow, The Challenges of Orpheus: Lyric Poetry and Early Modern England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), and Roland Greene, “The Lyric,” in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism: The Renaissance, ed. Glyn P. Norton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 216-28.

these passages encourages readers, auditors, and actors to attend to their formal features, slowing down the pace of the play. In short, Marlowe uses lyrical language in ways that challenge a literary history that interprets the development of unrhymed verse as a means of claiming the historical legacy of Roman antiquity.

The prologue to Tamburlaine, Part 1 opens by declaring its departure from the theatrical styles of the 1580s professional stage. Dismissing these other plays as the “jygging vaines of riming mother wits, / And such conceits as clownage keepes in pay,” the prologue promises that

Tamburlaine will instead

lead you to the stately tent of War: Where you shall heare the Scythian Tamburlaine, Threatning the world with high astounding tearms And scourging kingdoms with his conquering sword. (1 Tam Pro.1-6)6

First and foremost, Marlowe presents Tamburlaine as distinct from contemporary drama in terms of its language, asking the audience specifically to “heare” the difference between the hero’s mode of speech and the rhymes and bouncingly irregular rhythms of competing plays.7

Moreover, the prologue develops a spatial metaphor of “lead[ing]” the audience from the native realm of “mother wits” to Tamburlaine’s world-spanning conquests, again predicating this expanded geographic range on the play’s poetic style. The hard alliterative k- and t-sounds of these lines not only mimetically represent the violence latent in the protagonist’s language but

6 Unless other wise noted, quotations from Christopher Marlowe, including prefaces to early editions, are taken from The Complete Works, ed. Roma Gill, Richard Rowland, David Fuller, and Edward J. Esche, 5 vols. (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1987-98).

7 Scott McMillin and Sally-Beth MacLean argue that Marlowe is specifically targeting the Queen’s Men in this prologue. The leading company of players in the 1580s, they were known for their clowning and amalgamation of various irregular verse forms; see McMillin and MacLean, The Queen’s Men and Their Plays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 128-9, 143-54.

aid in making the lines sound unmistakably like verse, despite the lack of rhyme.8 The prologue thus places literary style at the intersection of foreign history and contemporary England, gesturing on the one hand to the immediate context of neighboring playhouses and on the other to expansive spaces covering multiple distant kingdoms. Tamburlaine’s style becomes meaningful not because of some inherently “foreign” or “exotic” qualities, but specifically by contrast with familiar English stage verse.

The contrast between foreign and domestic drawn by the play’s verse corroborates many influential studies that read Tamburlaine as juxtaposing exotic and the familiar worlds only to efface the boundaries between them.9 Its immediate context in the London “popular” theaters, moreover, has led many to argue that the play’s ambivalent depiction of imperial power appealed specifically to the class politics of Elizabethan London.10 Thomas Cartelli thus argues that

Tamburlaine’s status as an “aspiring commoner,” making his way from shepherd to emperor, would provoke fantasies of “inversions of the social and political order,” especially among the artisan and apprentice classes.11 Without denying the play’s broad appeal, however, I argue that

Marlowe’s investment in poetic style requires that we reorient the play toward the university and

8 As O. B. Hardison observes, the words rhyme and rhythm are closely related and often interchangeable in early modern English. The association was supported in that vernacular poetry, unlike Greek and Latin poetry, had both rhythm (as distinct from quantitative measure) and rhyme; the two appeared together so consistently that describing verse as having one or the other implies both. See Hardison, Prosody and Purpose in the English Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 12, 127.

9 See esp. Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 193-4 and Emily Carroll Bartels, Spectacles of Strangeness: Imperialism, Alienation, and Marlowe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), ch. 3.

10 Stephen Mullaney influentially insists upon the difference between the “popular” drama of the public playhouses and the private playhouses with their more elite clientele. Tamburlaine, he suggests, retains an association with the liberties in later Elizabethan and Jacobean allusions. See Mullaney, The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 8, 50, 53.

11 Thomas Cartelli, Marlowe, Shakespeare, and the Economy of Theatrical Experience (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), 67, 79, and ch. 3 passim.

more generally humanist contexts of sixteenth century English rhetoric and poetics. Marlowe’s education in Canterbury and Cambridge would have attuned him to the cultural and historical specificity of rhetorical and poetic style, and especially to the challenges involved in adapting classical models of eloquence to English writing. As Catherine Nicholson has recently shown, humanists like Roger Ascham and Thomas Wilson, in their attempts to cultivate rhetorical eloquence in England, had to confront England’s “historic marginality … if not outright barbarity” with respect to the classical rhetorical tradition.12 In presenting Tamburlaine’s language as capable of transporting audiences to far-away spaces, Marlowe draws upon a link between style and place well established in this rhetorical theory. The Scythian’s own alterity to

Roman civility, moreover, mirrors England’s own perceived barbarity in contrast with the

European continent, with the result that Tamburlaine becomes an apt, if surprising, figure through which to produce a new English eloquence.13

In attempting to revive classical Latin standards of eloquence, sixteenth-century rhetorical and poetic theorists developed an implicit theory of history, mapping the rise and fall of eloquence onto the rise and fall of political powers. As Ascham explains, eloquence, political power, and virtue always accompany one another: “For marke all aiges: looke upon the whole course of both the Greeke and Latin tonge, and ye shall surelie finde, that, whan apte and good wordes began to be neglected, and properties of those two tonges to be confounded, than also began ill deedes to spring … right judgement of all thinges to be perverted, and so vertue with

12 Catherine Nicholson, Uncommon Tongues: Eloquence and Eccentricity in the English Renaissance (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 22; on Ascham, 30-8; on Wilson see 49-59.

13 Nicholson 130.

learning is contemned, and studie left of[f].”14 By privileging rhetoric, the humanist educational program implicitly approached style as not just a product of historical circumstances, but capable of producing history as well. Humanist rhetorics of this sort were major contributions to the concept of the translatio imperii studiique, the doctrine that both imperial power and learning had gradually moved westward from the Babylonians and Greeks, through the Roman empire, and finally to the modern Christian states.15

The prologue’s emphasis on rhyme and rhythm point especially to one major outcome of this classicizing project, the effort by a number of university-associated writers to reform English vernacular poetics in order to bring it in line with classical Greek and Latin models—most significantly, quantitative meter. Whereas most English verse since the seventeenth century bases its meter on patterns of stressed versus unstressed syllables, classical Latin and Greek meter works on the basis of long versus short syllables, with two short syllables conventionally taking the same time to pronounce as one long.16 Vernacular English poetry, with rhyme as its most obvious structural principle, was held to be “rude” by comparison.17 Even though the

14 Roger Ascham, The Scholemaster, ed. John E. B. Mayor (New York: AMS Press, 1863; reprint 1967), 137.

15 Exactly which state depended, of course, on who was invoking the topos. For an excellent overview of the concept of translatio imperii studiique and its significance for English renaissance literature, see Heather James, Shakespeare’s Troy: Drama, Politics, and the Translation of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 1-35. The concept of translatio imperii studiique emerges in the Carolingian period and remains active through the “middle ages” (contributing to the Carolingian and Twelfth Century renaissances), but gained new relevance with the re-emergence of Greek learning in fifteenth century Italy. See Karlheinz Stierle, “Translatio Studii and Renaissance: From Veritcal to Horizontal Translation,” in The Translatability of Cultures: Figurations of the Space Between, ed. Sanford Budick and Wolfgang Iser (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 55-67, and R. J. Schoeck, “Erasmus in England, 1499-1517: Translatio Studii and the Studia Humanitatis,” Classical and Modern Literature 7, no. 4 (1987): 269-83. For the relationship of translatio and metaphor, see Patricia Parker, Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property (London: Methuen, 1987), 44.

16 Hardison 7.

17 For “rude,” see e.g. Richard Stanyhurst, preface to the translation of the Aeneid, in Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. G. Gregory Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1904; reprint 1964), vol. 1, p. 141.

quantitative movement had largely petered out by the seventeenth century, it nonetheless informed a great deal of the theory and practice of English vernacular poetry in the sixteenth.18

In particular, the problem of English’s compatibility with Greek and Roman measure was a major challenge to establishing England’s parity with—or inferiority to—the cultural and political authority of imperial Rome. Writers in the quantitative movement practiced literary history as I have defined it: they combined an interest in the historical contexts of poetic form

(quantitative meters as a distinct product of classical cultures) and imagined the possibility of using poetic forms to understand and intervene in history. By seeing the decay of meter as intimately tied to the decay of Rome’s imperial authority, these poets and theorists also proposed that a revival of these old forms could alter England’s relationship to the past and redirect its future destiny. By mocking rhymed poetry as the work of mere “mother wits”—literally, those with only the homely wit born with them through their mothers and without the superior training in Greek and Latin at the male spaces of the universities—Marlowe enters the ongoing debates on the proper historical position of English poetry.

Marlowe’s writings, however, take a skeptical stance toward the civilizing powers of eloquent style.19 Indeed, Tamburlaine produces a literary history essentially opposed to the humanist translatio imperii studiique. Where the proponents of quantitative verse sought a

18 The best account of the quantitative movement in English poetry remains Derek Attridge, Well-Weighed Syllables: Elizabethan Verse in Classical Metres (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974).

19 Neil Rhodes writes that “Marlowe’s heroes are vehicles through which he explores the contradictions of Renaissance Humanism”; see Rhodes 117. Catherine Nicholson finds Marlowe “less persuaded by the potency of rhetoric” than the “humanist fantasies of eloquence” would invite; see “Marlowe and the Limits of Rhetoric,” in Christopher Marlowe in Context, ed. Emily Carroll Bartels and Emma Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 28. Bryan Lowrance argues that Marlowe’s writing emerges as a result of his social position having “thwarted” his use of eloquence as a route to action; see “Marlowe’s Wit: Power, Language, and the Literary in Tamburlaine and Doctor Faustus,” Modern Philology 111, no. 4 (2014): 711-32. My work differs from these studies in focusing on the historical dimension of Marlowe’s skepticism towards rhetoric.

legitimizing connection to the classical past, Marlowe challenges the very possibility of such a connection. He does so, moreover, not simply by rejecting classical forms in favor of native

“Gothian” poetry, but rather by working in blank verse, a form that resembles classical poetry in its lack of rhyme but does not attempt true quantitative measure.20 The developing discourses around vernacular poetry in the Elizabethan era presented unrhymed poetics as the key to reforming English verse and elevating the vernacular to the status of the Classical tongues.

Marlowe’s own experiments with blank verse show, however, that the form could be used to a much greater range of purposes. Blank verse, for Marlowe, demonstrates the irreconcilable distance between Imperial Rome and Tudor England, as well as the folly of trying to eliminate that distance, for in “affecting to write like Romans,” English writers end up sounding like

Tamburlaine, a figure as eloquent as he is threatening and alienating.21 Tamburlaine thus exposes the barbaric violence underlying Roman eloquence and civilization.22 By reading Tamburlaine’s blank verse in the context of university poetics, this chapter demonstrates that Marlowe’s play interrogates the link between literary history and literary efficacy. That is to say, Marlowe challenges the notion that imitating the modes of the literary past can somehow produce a link to that past. Instead, he explores how a literary form can break free from its historical moment, revealing an investment in both the historical contexts of poetic style and in the possibility of using poetics as a means of understanding history.

20 For the word “Gothian,” see e.g. Ascham 178.

21 Tucker Brooke, “Marlowe’s Versification and Style,” Studies in Philology 19, no. 2 (1922): 188.

22 Cf. Sheldon Brammall’s argument that Marlowe’s Dido Queene of Carthage “should be regarded as the one, and only, extensive example of a ‘pessimistic’ reading of Virgil’s epic from the English Renaissance”; see Brammall, “‘Sound This Angrie Message in Thine Eares’: Sympathy and the Translations of the Aeneid in Marlowe’s Dido Queene of Carthage,” Review of English Studies 65, no. 270 (2013): 402.

By the time Marlowe was writing, unrhymed poetry belonged to the histories of Greece and Rome, the form having fallen with their empires and returning only thanks to the efforts of humanist scholars. George Puttenham tells a particularly forceful version of this literary- historical narrative, writing that as a result of “the barbarous conquerors invading [Greece and

Rome] with innumerable swarms of strange nations, the poesy metrical of the Greeks and Latins came to be much corrupted and altered, insomuch as there were times that the very Greeks and

Latins themselves took pleasure in rhyming verses,” especially “from the time of the emperors

Gratian and Valentinian downwards, for thenabouts began the declination of the Roman empire by the notable inundations of the Huns and Vandals in Europe, under the conduct of Totila and

Attila and other generals.”23 With Tamburlaine, Marlowe displaces the form out of that history by putting such verse into the mouth of an Eastern conqueror, the very barbarians blamed for bringing rhyme and ruin to Rome. Marlowe, that is, uses Tamburlaine to revive, rather than destroy the form of unrhymed verse.

In both Dido Queene of Carthage and Tamburlaine, Marlowe explores the affordances available to the form of blank verse. By doing so, he challenges the claims made on behalf of quantitative meter by those seeking to reform English poetry. Even though poetry in Greek and

Latin antiquity was composed in unrhymed measures, restoring that form does not, in itself, revive the eloquence and authority of the ancients and transplant them to (early) modern

England. In his plays, Marlowe shows the full range of blank verse’s capabilities. At the same time, Marlowe’s blank verse cannot fully escape the historiographic arguments underlying its development. As Caroline Levine argues, even as forms “travel” across time and geography, they

23 George Puttenham, The Art of English Poesy, ed. Frank Whigham and Wayne A. Rebhorn (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007), 100-1 [bk. 1 ch. 39].

still carry their affordances with them; even though a form’s meanings and capacities are not determined by its past uses, its history can nonetheless bear upon its later function.24 Marlowe’s blank verse therefore remains implicated in its origin in the classicizing project of sixteenth- century language reform.

The most readily apparent affordances of blank verse in the sixteenth century thus depend on its lack of an audible shape and boundary. Unrhymed poetry promised readers and auditors that it epitomized shaped language more purely than rhyme, yet the reality of that shape remained unclear.25 The absence of rhyme also makes blank verse an open form capable of being extended to any length. Barbara Herrnstein Smith describes this open-endedness, writing that blank verse, more than any other poetic form, “depends upon its repeated extension” to achieve any formal effects: “the kind of systematic repetition by which blank verse is generated is a particularly strong force for continuation: any given blank-verse line will cause the reader to expect another one.”26 Smith’s observation has special relevance for Marlowe in the literary- historical context of 1580s drama, in which fourteener couplets were the norm. Scott McMillin and Sally-Beth MacLean describe the particular pleasure of such “long-line rhymes” as “the exhilaration [that] comes from its continually successful closure against all odds.”27 In place of such satisfaction, Marlowe’s blank verse lends itself to an expansive style, building conceits over several lines of cosmological imagery and allusion, typically on a metonymic principle, leading

24 Caroline Levine, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 4-5.

25 On shaping language, cf. Rayna Kalas, Frame, Glass, Verse: The Technology of Poetic Invention in the English Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007), esp. ch. 3. See also Roland Greene 221.

26 Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 79-80.

27 McMillin and MacLean 148.

from one image to a related one. Indeed, his propensity for “overreaching” imagery draws on the affordances of the open form, both mimicking the line in its resistance to limits and benefiting from the opportunity to extrapolate upon any one conceit indefinitely.

Blank Verse Before Marlowe

Though it would be thoroughly naturalized over the course of the seventeenth century, blank verse emerged in English specifically as a “strange” meter, advertised as such on the title page of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey’s translation of the Aeneid in 1554.28 Surrey’s unrhymed verse constitutes an early effort to create an English equivalent to Latin quantitative meters.

Surrey translates just two books of the Aeneid: Book Two, Aeneas’s narration of the fall of Troy, and Book Four, on Aeneas’s time in Carthage and ultimate abandonment of Dido. Together, these two books present the fall of one empire, Troy, and prophesy the fall of another, Carthage, and the foundation of a third, Rome. Surrey’s experiment with blank verse thus addresses not only a central text of the classical tradition, but those portions of that text most concerned with the movement and establishment of national authority, the same goals that would motivate experiments with quantitative meter.29 In blending English and Latin poetics into blank verse,

Surrey offers his verse form as a vehicle for binding the political authority of Augustan Rome to

Henrician England. At the same time, however, books two and four dwell on the losses that

28 The Fourth Boke of Virgill, Intreating of the Loue Betweene Aeneas and Dido, Translated into English, and Drawne into a Straunge Metre by Henrye Late Earle of Surrey, Worthy to Be Embraced (London, 1554). Books two and four would be published together by Richard Tottel in 1557.

29 Margaret Tudeau-Clayton, “What is My Nation? Language, Verse, and Politics in Tudor Translations of Virgil’s Aeneid,” in The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Literature, 1485-1603, ed. Michael Pincombe and Cathy Shrank (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 390. On the Aeneid and translatio imperii, see James, 14-29, and Lois Potter, “Informing Audiences: Marlowe’s Early Tragedies,” in ‘This Earthly Stage’: World and Stage in Late Medieval and Early Modern England, ed. Brett D. Hirsch and Christopher Wortham (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010): 246.

attend the forward march of empire: not only the fall of Troy but the deaths of Dido and Creusa,

Aeneas’s wife. These women’s deaths allow Aeneas to wed Lavinia and establish his empire in

Italy; in the limited context of Books Two and Four, however, Aeneas’s imperial destiny does not clearly make up for these losses. In fact, the epic, in Surrey’s translation, continually invokes the terms of complaint, a counter-genre to the epic.30

Surrey’s blank verse, unrhymed but accentual, offers a compromise between native and classical forms. For proponents of English quantitative meter, however, Surrey’s solution to the problem of versification was insufficient. Ascham praises Surrey for having “avoyded the fault of Ryming,” but nonetheless asserts that he has not “fullie hitte perfite and trew versifying,” his lines having “just number” but not “trew quantitie of sillables”—a distinction based on the difference between counting syllables in a line and hearing their length when recited aloud.31 By the sixteenth century, however, scanning lines of Latin verse had become a matter of memorizing a series of rules for counting long and short syllables, a matter of the eye rather than the ear.32

Quantitative verse, in other words, was not audible as such. As a result, the difference between unrhymed accentual verse and verse composed on the basis of quantity would be visible, and only to a scholar like Ascham, properly trained in the rules for determining syllable length. Yet even then, no single system existed for quantifying English syllables, a problem exacerbated by the unstable orthography of early modern English, which sixteenth-century classicists and poets attempted to rectify with little success.33 Ascham’s insistence upon the difference between

30 Surrey uses the generically-charged word “plaint” ten times in the two books.

31 Ascham, 181. The comment is repeated without citation by Francis Meres in Palladis Tamia: Wits Treasury (London, 1598), STC 2nd ed. 17834, sig. Nn7v.

32 Attridge 99.

33 E.g., Sir Thomas Smith, De Recta & Emendata Linguae Anglicae Scriptione, Dialogus (London, 1586).

“number” and “quantitie” disguises the uncomfortable recognition that blank verse could so easily pass as “trew versifying,” that barbarous English could go about disguised as the equivalent of civilized Latinity.

Ascham could have found an apt analogy for the dangers of such linguistic disguise in

Book Two of the Aeneid when Aeneas and a band of Trojans disguise themselves in Greek armor. This stratagem is inspired by Aeneas’s first encounter with an invading Greek soldier who “Deming vs, vnware, of that feloship: / With frendly words whom thus he cald vnto. / Hast ye my frendes: what slouth hat taried yow?”; but “When he had sayd, and heard no answer made

/ To him againe whereto he might geue trust: / finding himself chaunced amid his foes, / Mazde he withdrew his foote back with his word.”34 (The coordination of the Greek’s “foote” and

“word” suggests the terms of meter.) Once disguised in the armor of dead Greeks, however, the

Trojans find themselves in the same situation as their enemy: attempting to come to “Pallas chirch,” Aeneas reports, they are “ybatred [battered] with dartes / Of our owne feers, from the hye temples top, / whereby of vs grete slaughter did ensue, / Mistaken by our Grekish armes and crestes.”35 In the midst of this fight, moreover, the Greeks discover the Trojans’ disguise: “our fained shields and wepons then they found, / And by sound our discording voices they knew.”36

Given the fraught poetic context of Surrey’s translation, this episode offers a sort of allegory for the English appropriation of classical verse forms: though Aeneas can pass undetected in Greek armor, doing so ultimately leads to a form of self-slaughter, Trojans killing Trojans. And in any case, the discordant sound of their native language exposes their irreconcilable difference from

34 Certain Bokes of Virgiles Aeneis Turned into English Meter by the Right Honorable Lorde, Henry Earle of Surrey (London: Richard Tottel, 1557), sig B3v.

35 Ibid, sig. B4r.

36 Ibid, sig. B4v.

the Greeks.37 As an intermediate form between English and Latin poetic meters, Surrey’s blank verse likewise reveals its English nature even as it approximates Latin verse.

In the decades following Surrey’s death, English poets and rhetorical theorists continued to experiment with quantitative measures. Most ambitiously, Richard Stanyhurst attempted a translation of the Aeneid into “English Heroical Verse,” the first four books of which were printed in 1582.38 Stanyhurst observes in his preface “To Thee Learned Reader” that “thee Latins haue not beene authors of theese verses, but traced in thee steps of thee Greekes,” and asks, therefore, “why should we with thee stinges of thee Latin rules cramp oure tongue more than the

Latins doe fetter theyre speeche, as yt were wyth thee chaynes of thee Greeke preceptes.”39 In making this argument, Stanyhurst delves deeper into the historical development of unrhymed verse, going beyond the Latin usage to the Greek origin. In doing so, he places Latin and English meter in analogous positions, both shaping their own poetry in imitation of an earlier body of literature, but at the same time asserting independence by adapting the progenitor’s metrical rules to the particular usage of their own language. Drawing this analogy between the places of

English and Latin in literary history allows Stanyhurst to redefine England’s relationship to classical antiquity, turning England’s distance from the Roman Empire into a position of freedom, even as he tries to force English into the shape of Latin meter. He asserts, for example, the priority of the “natural pronountiation” of English words, against that of their Latin cognates, for “nature wyl not permit vs to fashion our wordes in al poinctes correspondent to the

37 Cf. the anecdote repeated in several classical works on rhetoric of Theophrastus being recognized as a stranger by an Athenian market woman, as a result of his accent, unchangeable no matter how long he dwelt in Athens. See, e.g., Cicero, Brutus 170-2.

38 In Smith, ed. p. 135.

39 Ibid, p. 142.

Latinistes.”40 Stanyhurst thus gets to claim that English is freed of the Roman imperium even as he claims the legacy of Roman authority by reforming English verse.

Philip Sidney likewise bases his principles of syllabic quantity on natural English pronunciation. In The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, he writes regarding “words derived out of Latin and other languages, that they are measured as they are denizened in English” for “our language hath a special gift in altering them and making them our own.”41 Sidney’s quantitative verse is especially significant, as he uses lyric, rather than epic meters. While most experiments in English quantitative verse attempted to reproduce the dactylic hexameter of the Aeneid and other epics, Sidney instead writes sapphics and other lyric forms. By approaching quantitative meter through lyric, rather than epic forms, he complicates the equation of unrhymed verse and imperial power that underlay most other experiments with classical measures. Sidney’s experiments thus anticipate Marlowe’s own theatrical use of the lyric mode.

Blank verse, meanwhile, entered drama with Gorboduc, a tragedy written by Thomas

Norton and Thomas Sackville, Earl of Dorset and performed at the Inner Temple in 1562. Like

Surrey’s Aeneid, Gorboduc uses blank verse to imitate classical Latin texts, in this case, the iambic trimeter of Seneca’s tragedies.42 In taking its matter from ancient British history, moreover, Gorboduc reaches for a time prior to the Roman occupation of Britain. By placing unrhymed verse in the mouths of Britons, Norton and Sackville set British antiquity on an even footing with classical antiquity. That is to say, Norton and Sackville present a version of ancient

40 Ibid, p. 144, 142.

41 Philip Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (The Old Arcadia), ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones (Oxford: Oxford Univeristy Press, 2008), 72.

42 Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville, Gorboduc or Ferrex and Porrex, ed. Irby B. Cauthen, Jr. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970), introduction p. xvi; Hardison 173. Like Surrey, Norton and Sackville were probably influenced by contemporary Italian uses of unrhymed verse; see Hardison 173.

Britain that speaks in a form resembling classical verse. In so doing, they wrest unrhymed verse from an exclusively Greco-Roman lineage and present the form as part of a native history.

By bringing blank verse onto the stage, Gorboduc also placed stress on the form’s aural qualities. Though the play now has a reputation for dull and lengthy declamatory speeches, the authors also achieved something of the vividness of the fall of Troy in Surrey’s Aeneid, tempered by the stately rhetorical style of the playwrights’ legal training. The result is a style that uses the structure of blank verse to organize and amplify political discourse and dramatic narrative. So, for example, we get the court lady Marcella’s report of Porrex’s murder by his mother:

O queen of adamant, O marble breast! If not the favor of his comely face, If not his princely cheer and countenance, His valiant active arms, his manly breast, If not his fair and seemly personage, His noble limbs in such proportion cast As would have wrapt a silly woman’s thought; If this mought not have moved thy bloody heart And that most cruel hand the wretched weapon Even to let fall and kissed him in the face, With tears for ruth to reave such one by death, Should nature yet consent to slay her son? O mother, thou to murder thus thy child!43

The Ciceronian repetition and extension of these lines, with increasingly long if-clauses, make use of the both the regularity of the blank verse line and its capacity for internal variation through caesura. The verse thus supports the speech’s rhetorical structure, enclosing its clauses and patterning its figures of repetition.

The clarity of Gorboduc’s style does not however, mean that it was meant to recede into the background. In contrast with the “natural pronountiation” Stanyhurst strove for, Gorboduc’s blank verse is highly artificial, a fact that should caution us against characterizing the simple

43 Norton and Sackville, Gorboduc 4.2.232-45.

stress pattern of accentual iambic pentameter as an imitation of natural English speech patterns.

As Paula Blank observes, for most of the sixteenth century, “blank verse was not intended to sound ‘natural’ or speechlike at all; it was heard as something more distant, more dignified, an echo of the classical high style. Indeed, blank verse signaled precisely a departure from native forms.”44 This powerful association between unrhymed verse and classical measure conditioned what auditors and readers would find in Marlowe’s lines. Modern readers of Marlowe have attempted to account for the effect of Marlowe’s verse form and his exuberant style, arguing that his writing exhibits a tension between his “irrepressible energy, thrilling sonorities, and dazzling verbal pictures,” and the restrictions imposed on his verse by the line as “an ordering system, an invariable and comforting rhythmic standard.”45 However, given its origins in sixteenth-century debates on versification, the containing structure of the blank verse line might not have been recognized as such, without the help of rhetorical figures such as anaphora marking off individual lines, as so often in Gorboduc. As Catherine Nicholson argues, “Absent the audible boundary inscribed by end-rhyme, the measure of Marlowe’s line proved disconcertingly elusive to the English ear.”46

On its own, this elusiveness did not condemn blank verse. Indeed, a major advantage of quantitative meter over native forms, according to its advocates, lay in the difficulty of producing and even recognizing it. Roger Ascham thus writes in The Scholemaster that in contrast to

44 Paula Blank, Shakespeare and the Mismeasure of Renaissance Man (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), 60.

45 Russ McDonald, “Marlowe and Style,” in The Cambridge Companion to Christopher Marlowe, ed. Patrick Cheney (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 56. As an entry in the Cambridge Companions series, McDonald’s essay aims to capture the widely-held critical commonplaces of Marlowe criticism. Similar passages can be found in Rhodes 71, and Patrick Cheney, Marlowe’s Republican Authorship: Lucan, Liberty, and the Sublime (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 19.

46 Nicholson, Uncommon 143.

merely counting syllables, composing quantitatively is something “onelie the learned shalbe able to do.”47 As for reading quantitative verse, Gabriel Harvey chides Edmund Spenser for having declared his own English iambics to be “precisely perfect,” for without such a bold announcement, Harvey would never have noticed the flaws in Spenser’s verse: “he might haue spared his preface, or, at the least, that same restrictiue and streightlaced term PRECISELY, and all had been well enough: and I assure you, of my selfe, I beleeue, no peece of a fault marked at all.”48 Only by systematically checking the verse against prescribed rules did Harvey notice that the lines were unmetrical.

In Marlowe’s case, however, even careful readers and auditors—trained to look for syllable length and disregard stress—would have trouble finding the rules of Dido’s and

Tamburlaine’s verse. Early allusions to Tamburlaine imply as much: Robert Greene, in the preface to his Perimides the Blacksmith (1588), coins the term blank verse to describe the prosody of Tamburlaine when, addressing “the Gentlemen readers,” Greene refuses to follow the bombastic style of such as would “dar[e] God out of heauen with that Atheist Tamburlan” and who “set the end of scollerisme in an English blank verse.”49 Thomas Nashe renews the attack in his preface to Greene’s Menaphon (1589) addressed “To the Gentlemen Students of both

Universities,” in which he complains about recent trends in theater, with “euerie mœchanicall mate” pretending to possess great learning by use of “inkhorne” terms while in reality being no more than “deepe read Grammarians, who, hauing no more learning in their scull than will serue to take vp a commoditie, nor Arte in their brain than was nourished in a seruing mans idlenesse,”

47 Ascham 179.

48 In Smith, ed., vol. 1 p. 96.

49 In Millar MacLure, Marlowe, the Critical Heritage, 1588-1896 (London: Routledge, 1979), 29-30.

who “could scarcelie latinize their necke-verse if they should haue neede.”50 In place of actual eloquence, such “tragœdians,” Nashe writes, “think to outbrave better pens with the swelling bumbast of a bragging blank verse” and the “spacious volubilitie of a drumming decasillabon.”51

For both Greene and Nashe, blank verse represents the result of bad study, with writers in the form thinking they have achieved a scholarly standard but in reality only revealing the shallowness of their learning. Nashe’s “swelling bumbast” and “spacious volubilitie” characterize blank verse as loose and baggy—we might say “mis-measured.” Additionally, while his parodic alliteration does reflect occasional tendencies in Marlowe’s verse (as noted above in the prologue), Nashe only hits upon a readily apparent principle of versification that does not accurately reflect the structure of blank verse. Accentual meter was as yet untheorized and the form closest to it did not fit.

Marlowe’s Dido

Marlowe’s two classical translations, of Lucan’s Pharsalia and Ovid’s Amores, demonstrate his investment in debates on versification. As with sixteenth-century translations of the Aeneid, the title page of Marlowe’s Lucan calls attention to the punctiliousness of its English versification, declaring the poem to be “Translated Line for Line.”52 In contrast to this promised fidelity to the Latin verse, Marlowe’s translation of Ovid’s Amores highlights the disparity between classical meter and English accentual verse forms. Ovid’s elegiac verses consist of one line of dactylic hexameter and one of pentameter, falling one foot short of proper epic meter.

50 In Smith, ed., vol. 1 pp. 307-8, 311-2.

51 In Smith, ed., vol. 1 p. 308.

52 Lucans First Booke Translated Line for Line, by Chr. Marlovv (London, 1600); see also Tudeau-Clayton, “‘What is My Nation’” 395.

Ovid’s opening poem thematizes this form, declaring his intention to write an epic and blaming his fall into erotic poetry on Cupid:

Arma gravi numero violentaque bella parabam edere, materia conventiente modis. par erat inferior versus—risisse Cupido dicitur atque unum surripuisse pedem.

[Arms, and the violent deeds of war, I was making ready to sound forth—in weighty numbers, with matter suited to the measure. The second verse was equal to the first—but Cupid, they say, with a laugh stole away one foot.]53

Marlowe, however, translates Ovid’s elegiacs into rhymed couplets in accentual iambic pentameter:

With Muse upreard I meant to sing of Armes, Choosing a subject fit for fierce alarmes. Both verses were a like till love (men say) Began to smile and tooke one foote away. (Elegies 1.1.5-8)54

Not only does Marlowe’s consistent pentameter remove Ovid’s metrical joke, but his rhymed couplets in fact make the verses more “a like” than the blank verse of his epic translation. These translations show Marlowe working through the same problems of versification as the quantitative poets and humanist writers, but with an ironic view of the issue. Rather than trying to bridge classical and modern poetics as in his Lucan, Marlowe’s Ovid translation emphasizes the distance between his own moment and Ovid’s.55

53 Ovid, Heroides; Amores, trans. Grant Showerman and G. P. Goold, rev. ed, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977), 1.1.1-4

54 Marlowe’s translation does not match the lineation of the Loeb because the former treats the four-line proem to the Amores as part of the first poem proper.

55 But cf. Joshua Scodel, who argues that Marlowe’s translation demonstrates how the pentameter couplet was “a viable English version of the Latin verse form,” able to create similar balanced effects; see “Allusions and Distinctions: Pentameter Couplets in Ben Jonson’s Epigrams and Forest,” in The Work of Form: Poetics and Materiality in Early Modern Culture, ed. Ben Burton and Elizabeth Scott-Baumann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 40.

Marlowe’s most direct response to Surrey’s versification, although it comments less explicitly upon the issue, occurs in Dido Queene of Carthage: another blank verse rendition of

Books Two and Four of the Aeneid. Where Surrey’s version uses blank verse to elevate his poem through its affinities with classical epic, Marlowe makes the form a vehicle for a wider range of tones and effects, using the same verse form for Jupiter’s dalliances with Ganymede, Aeneas’s narration of Troy’s fall, and Dido’s suicidal lament. Indeed, the move from epic to drama allows

Marlowe to incorporate a variety of genres and styles by, for example, alternating between tragic and comic scenes. And yet he writes the entire play, with its varying styles, in a single form, blank verse, where earlier plays often achieved this variety by moving between multiple forms.

This unity of form results at times in a parody of the form’s epic, Latinate associations. The play opens, for example, with Jupiter, “dandling Ganimed upon his knee” promising his boy “Vulcan shall daunce to make thee laughing sport / … / From Junos bird Ile pluck her spotted pride, / To make thee fannes wherewith to coole thy face,” among other pleasures (Dido 1.1.0.sd, 1.1.32-5).

Not only does Marlowe write the amorous scene in blank verse, he uses the same form only a few lines later in Jupiter’s debate with Venus over the fate of Aeneas, a passage closely following Virgil’s Latin.56 Marlowe’s play begins, then, by displacing the stately form to erotic and comic situations. In moving from poetry to drama, moreover, Marlowe displaces unrhymed verse from a position of high cultural authority to a low one.

Jupiter’s offer of gifts to Ganymede is an instance of what R. S. Forsythe describes as the

“invitation to love” poem, a genre epitomized in Marlowe’s own “Passionate Shepherd to His

Love”; indeed, the passage in Dido closely echoes Marlowe’s lyric, opening “Come gentle

56 On Marlowe’s occasional fidelity to Virgil in this scene, see Brammall 392-3. Brammal discusses Marlowe’s characterization of the gods, but not his meter.

Ganimed” and ending “if thou wilt be my love.”57 Indeed, as Mary Bly has shown, the costume and appearance of boy actors like the one playing Ganymede drew from the imagery of contemporary erotic lyric poems.58 This association codes the scene as a staged version of lyric love poetry. In translating the lyric’s tetrameter couplets into pentameter blank verse, Marlowe broadens the latter form’s range of uses to include lyrical effects including pleasure in artifice and suspension of time.59 Lyrical passages of this type recur at several points in Dido, producing a counterpoint to the narrative’s epic drive towards empire. When Aeneas declares his hopes of leaving Carthage for Italy, Dido offers to sumptuously outfit his ships, if only he will stay behind:

Ile give thee tackling made of riveld gold, Wound on the barkes of odoriferous trees, Oares of massie Ivorie full of holes, Through which the water shall delight to play: Thy Anchors shall be hewed from Christall Rockes, Which if thou lose shall shine above the waves. (Dido 3.1.116-21)

Dido’s descriptions here turn the ship from a means of travel into a luxury object unable to function: water will simply flow through the oars, and the brilliant anchor will become lost in the sea. In other words, Dido offers Aeneas pure ornament, though couched in a promise to help him

57 R. S. Forsythe, “The Passionate Shepherd and English Poetry,” PMLA 40, no. 3 (1925): 700.

58 Mary Bly, Queer Virgins and Virgin Queans on the Early Modern Stage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 113.

59 On the association between lyric and artifice in renaissance poetry, see Roland Greene, 218; on the “lyric present” see Dubrow 207-11. In the following section of this chapter, I address how definitions of the “lyric” are problematic in early modern, as well as contemporary literary theory, a problem that both authors cited here likewise acknowledge and reckon with. These echoes of “The Passionate Shepherd” can be compared to the closer allusion in The Jew of Malta, in which the slave Ithamore fantasizes to the courtesan Bellamira about stealing money from Barabas and living with her in luxury. Where in Dido, the passage remains in blank verse, in The Jew of Malta, Ithamore speaks or sings in rhymed couplets and ends by changing from pentameter to tetrameter for the final lines, “Thou in those groves, by Dis above / Shalt live with me and be my love” (Jew 4.2.100-1). “The Passionate Shepherd” is not attributed to Marlowe with complete certainty, though he certainly knew the poem. Even if he is alluding to someone else’s poem, however, my point about his use of the poem to experiment with “lyrical” passages in his plays stands.

fulfill his epic, imperial destiny. The lines represent a mirror image of Patricia Fumerton’s argument that “Pure ornament, pure aestheticism, always hangs around the bespangled neck of history.”60 Renaissance ornament, for Fumerton, represents the aristocratic attempt to disguise the underlying history that sustains its power. Dido, however, disguises the inutility of the ornamental ship by promising it as a means of sustaining Troy’s history into its future: the ship’s sails, after all, will display “The warres of Troy, but not Troyes overthrow” (Dido 3.1.125).

Dido’s lyrical persuasion succeeds in keeping Aeneas in Carthage, at least into act four, impeding the progress of narrative.

With the Aeneid inevitably in the background, Marlowe tends to use lyrical moments in

Dido Queene of Carthage as a counterpoint to the story’s epic context. His consistent use of blank verse leads to startling shifts in register when he moves into more epic or tragic passages, as when Aeneas forces himself to recount the fall of Troy in act two. Aeneas’s narration constitutes the entirety of Book Two of the Aeneid and the majority of act two of Marlowe’s play; the extended monologue thus brings Marlowe particularly close to Virgil’s epic. Marlowe uses this as an opportunity to challenge the preeminence of epic storytelling by having characters comment upon their responses to the speech’s style. So, despite Dido’s insistence that Aeneas

“speake like thy selfe,” Aeneas can only tell the painful story of his city’s defeat by speaking

“with Achilles tongue” and instructs his audience to listen “with Mirmidons harsh eares, / Daily inur’d to broyles and Massacres, / Lest you be mov’d too much with my sad tale” (Dido 2.1.100,

121, 123-5). Marlowe’s Aeneas uses blank verse as a form of estrangement, a way of embodying the conquerer—only by taking on his enemy’s tongue and instructing his sympathetic audience

60 Patricia Fumerton, Cultural Aesthetics: Renaissance Literature and the Practice of Social Ornament (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 22.

to take on his enemies’ ears, can he re-experience the traumatic fall of his home. Style reenacts the fall of Troy even as Aeneas narrates it. His Carthaginian audience, meanwhile, responds with a mixture of horror and fascination. At one point Aeneas breaks off mid-sentence and Dido begs him to continue, saying, “Nay, leave not here, resolve me of the rest” (Dido 2.1.160). Aeneas goes on to describe the violence of Priam’s death at the hands of Neoptolemus, who “Treading upon his breast, strooke off his hands” (Dido 2.1.242). This is too much for Dido, who pleads “O end Aeneas, I can heare no more,” but Aeneas cannot stop himself from describing the further slaughter of the royal family (Dido 2.1.243). She again asks Aeneas to end his speech some forty lines later, saying “I die with melting ruth, Aeneas leave,” but the other listeners, Anna and

Iarbus, push him to continue, asking “O what became of aged Hecuba?” and “How got Aeneas to the fleet againe?” (Dido 2.1.289-91). Even Dido, despite having said she could take no more, asks “how scapt Helen, she that causde this warre?” (Dido 2.1.292).

As a retelling of Book Two of the Aeneid, Aeneas’s blank verse speech follows the aims of the quantitative verse reformers, offering an unrhymed English equivalent of the meter of

Virgil’s heroic poem. Rather than ennobling the language or the listeners, however, Marlowe’s

Aeneas describes his speech as a violent transformation that alienates him from the Trojans’ suffering: Aeneas can only recount the traumatic loss of his city by speaking with “Achilles tongue,” such that in telling the story, Aeneas reproduces the conquest of his home in his manner of speaking. The other characters’ conflicted responses, their simultaneous desires to stop and to continue the tale, leaves the entire project of producing heroic poetry equivocal at best. The drive to continue the story harmonizes with blank verse’s capacity for continual extension; with no formal device for signaling closure, only the overwhelming affect that comes from the story and its style brings Aeneas to silence. Marlowe thus calls attention to the form and style of Aeneas’s

speech and demonstrates their affective power over the audience. Yet immediately thereafter,

Marlowe uses the same blank verse form in a seduction scene, of a sort. After Aeneas, Dido, and the rest exit, Venus enters and tempts Aeneas’s son Ascanius with gifts: “Faire child stay thou with Didos waiting maide, / Ile give thee Sugar-almonds, sweete Conserves, / A silver girdle, and a golden purse,” again echoing “The Passionate Shepherd” (Dido 2.1.304-6). Ascanius’s reaction is to fall asleep, comforted by her voice. Given the scene’s investment in modes and styles of speaking, Marlowe’s use of the same form for such radically different effects displays the capacity of the single form, blank verse, to take on epic, tragic, and lyrical styles depending on its imagery, rhetorical structure, and other formal features.

Diana Henderson describes the effect of writing the entirety of Dido—heroic narrative, seductive offer, tragic lament—in blank verse as producing a change from the lyric to the lyrical:

“By making lyricism a style rather than a form, Marlowe allows for an integrated rhetorical exchange” between voices and styles in the play.61 The distinction is subtle, but can be elucidated by comparison to George Peele’s Arraignment of Paris: like Dido, a mid-1580s play on a mythological theme performed by the Children of the Chapel. Peele’s play includes passages in blank verse, but confines them to particular oratorical situations: Paris’s trial before the court of the gods, Diana’s praise of Elizabeth, and (notably) the prologue by Ate, goddess of discord. The majority of the play is written in rhyming couplets, in both pentameter and fourteeners, with frequent songs, set off from the play by their verse form. All three rhyming forms are used at the end of act two, in which the goddesses Juno, Pallas, and Venus make their offers to Paris in exchange for the golden ball. Pallas speaks in more restrained couplets, their

61 Diana Henderson, Passion Made Public: Elizabethan Lyric, Gender, and Performance (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 126

steady beat fitting the military show of the Nine Worthies “treading a warlike almain, by drum and fife,” and Venus, in turn, presents a vision of Helen singing in Italian.62 Most interesting in relation to Dido, Juno proffers kingdoms and riches, the sheer accumulation of splendors pushing her verse from ten to twelve to fourteen syllables:

Rich robes, of sumptuous workmanship and cost, And thousand things whereof I make no boast: The mould whereon thou treadest shall be of Tagus’ sands, And Xanthus shall run liquid gold for thee to wash thy hands; And if thou like to tend thy flock, and not from them to fly, Their fleeces shall be curlèd gold to please their master’s eye …63

Peele matches the three verse forms (decasyllabic couplets, couplets in lengthening lines, and

Italian lyric) to the three goddesses and the temptations they offer (military power, opulent splendor, erotic love). Paris’s choice of Venus and her lyric pleasures leads to the conflict among the goddesses and eventually to the Trojan War. When the play closes with Diana praising

Queen Elizabeth in blank verse, Peele implicitly opposes this form to the earlier lyric.64 Peele’s use of various rhyming lines with the goddesses produces a stylistic corollary to the conflict central to the play; when the move into blank verse coincides with the turn to Elizabeth, versification signals the resolution that the queen embodies. Marlowe’s use of a single verse form throughout Dido Queene of Carthage, in contrast, disallows any resolution to the play’s conflict between lyric and epic modes.

62 George Peele, The Works of George Peele, ed. A. H. Bullen, 2 vols. “Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1888), 2.1.161.sd, 180-91.

63 Peele 2.1.132-7

64 Henderson argues that Peele’s play opposes the Petrarchan erotic lyric more specifically and demonstrates that Peele uses lyrical techniques in this closing speech, such as a blazon-like structure, as a way of reforming lyric. My reading of Peele’s blank verse conclusion as anti-lyrical differs from Henderson’s more in emphasis than substance. See Henderson ch. 2.

Tamburlaine’s Lyricism

While Marlowe explores the lyrical capacity of blank verse as a source of conflict in

Dido, with Tamburlaine, Part 1 he develops a more complicated dialogue between lyric and narrative modes. Such a lyrical speech occurs at the end of act two: Tamburlaine has just double- crossed Cosroe, the usurper of the Persian throne, by defeating Cosroe’s army shortly after helping him to seize his brother’s crown. Tamburlaine explains his actions as the result of mythological precedent, human nature, and the structure of the universe:

The thirst of raigne and sweetnes of a crown, That causde the eldest sonne of hevenly Ops, To thrust his doting father from his chaire, And place himselfe in the Emperiall heaven, Moov’d me to manage armes against thy state. What better president than mightie Jove? Nature that fram’d us of foure Elements, Warring within our breasts for regiment, Doth teach us all to have aspyring minds: Our soules, whose faculties can comprehend The wondrous Architecture of the world: And measure every wandring plannets course: Still climing after knowledge infinite, And alwaies mooving as the restles Spheares, Wils us to weare our selves and never rest, Untill we reach the ripest fruit of all, That perfect blisse and sole felicitie, The sweet fruition of an earthly crowne. (1 Tam 2.7.12-29)

The speech’s final line has occasioned an extensive critical controversy, some reading it

“straight” as a truly radical rejection of limits by a lowborn conquerer, others reading it ironically as a deflation of Tamburlaine’s intellectual pretenses revealing his poverty of imagination as one unable to see beyond the pleasure of power.65 The problem comes down to the strength of the

“Untill” in line 27 and how much it limits the restless aspiration for the infinite in the rest of the

65 For “straight” readings, see for example Rhodes, 87; for ironic readings, see for example Leech 51-4.

speech. Without arguing that Marlowe intended one reading or the other, I suggest that attending to the passage’s versification shows that he understood the problem of Tamburlaine’s ambitions as deeply integrated with the play’s poetics. As Andrew Strycharski has argued, Marlowe’s philosophical flights are supported by his open-ended blank verse that refuses to resolve into a sententious couplet fit for commonplacing.66 Instead, Tamburlaine takes the mention of “the

Emperiall heaven” as a cue to expand on cosmological symbolism not once but twice, first in the microcosm of the human breast and then in the macrocosm of the “wondrous Architecture of the world.” Such philosophical flights give rise to the polysyllabic diction mocked by Nashe.

Elsewhere, Marlowe achieves similar effects through polysyllabic proper nouns, often piled upon one another as characters name the nations from which they draw their armies or the extensive lands they have marched across. In these latter cases, Marlowe’s “overreaching” style follows as a result of Tamburlaine’s desire for an “earthly crowne,” which necessitates the exotic geographies. Blank verse can thus mimetically convey the limitlessness of Tamburlaine’s ambitions in both intellectual and political spheres.

In the lines immediately following Tamburlaine’s speech, however, Marlowe rewrites this move from metaphysics to conquest with the responses of Tamburlaine’s three companions,

Theridamas, Techelles, and Usumcasane. Theridamas takes up Tamburlaine’s analogy between the elements of the body and the shape of the heavens, proclaiming that his leader’s ambitions

made me to joine with Tamburlain, For he is grosse and like the massie earth, That mooves not upwards, nor by princely deeds Doth meane to soare above the highest sort. (1 Tam 2.7.30-3)

66 Andrew Strycharski, “‘Stronge and Tough Studie’: Humanism, Education, and Masculinity in Renaissance England” (doctoral dissertation, University of Texas at Austin, 2004), ch. 5.

Techelles follows Theridamas, saying “And that made us, the friends of Tamburlaine, / To lift our swords against the Persean King” (1 Tam 2.7.34-5). Finally, Usumcasane sums up the entire twenty-plus line passage with a pair of couplets:

For as when Jove did thrust old Saturn down, Neptune and Dis gain’d each of them a Crowne, So do we hope to raign in Asia, If Tamburlain be plac’d in Persea. (1 Tam 2.7.36-9)

By using “crowne” as the rhyme-word, Marlowe ties Usumcasane’s couplets to the limit imposed on Tamburlaine’s aspirations in the preceding speech. Usumcasane effectively summarizes the entire preceding passage from the start of Tamburlaine’s speech into four short lines, but in doing so removes the features most associated with Marlowe’s style: aside from proper nouns, Usumcasane’s language consists entirely of monosyllables, and his argument is direct and practical, rather than elevated.67 Marlowe uses style in this way to develop the tension between Tamburlaine’s lofty, potentially noble desires for the infinite and Usumcasane’s frank admission that he follows Tamburlaine in the hope of gaining some lesser kingship for himself.

And yet the two positions are not entirely separable. After all, Tamburlaine himself placed a crown at the outer limits of his aspirations. Theridamas’s speech, moreover, subtly undermines the use of blank verse for the expansive elaboration of a conceit, as the open form contributes to his lines’ ambiguous syntax, which seems to imply that Tamburlaine himself “is grosse like the massie earth.” Even though Tamburlaine’s speech marks a dramatic high point in the play,

Marlowe challenges the value of the high style as both a sign of Tamburlaine’s nobility and a spur to his actions.

67 It is worth noting that the monosyllabic character of most English was often cited as a reason it was so difficult to develop a quantitative system for vernacular poetry. See Ascham, 178; Puttenham 202 [bk. 2 ch. 13]; Gascoigne, in Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. Smith, 51.

The question of form’s efficacy—its ability to bring about actions or changes in circumstance—is especially important to this scene, as Tamburlaine’s speech of self-justification completes a narrative arc that began with Tamburlaine’s own response to an eloquent line. After defeating the Persian king Mycetes, Cosroe thanks Tamburlaine for his aid and leaves for the capitol as his lieutenant Menaphon proclaims, “Your Majestie shall shortly have your wish, /

And ride in triumph through Persepolis” (1 Tam 2.5.48-9). Cosroe and Menaphon exit, leaving

Tamburlaine alone with his three companions. Tamburlaine then muses on Menaphon’s final line with a short chiastic speech:

And ride in triumph through Persepolis? Is it not brave to be a King, Techelles? Usumcasane and Theridamas, Is it not passing brave to be a King, And ride in triumph through Persepolis? (1 Tam 2.5.50-4)

Tamburlaine’s rumination on this phrase marks a turning point in the play, prompting him to betray Cosroe and secure the Persian Empire for himself, the first of his many conquests. One might say that the remainder of Tamburlaine, Part 1 follows the effects of Tamburlaine’s response to this single line. And although he gives some attention to the opulent material

“bravery” of kingship and ceremonial triumphs, repeating the words brave and triumph calls our attention to their sound, as much as their sense. The resonant vowels of “ride in triumph” especially draw out the particular feel of these words in the ear and mouth, such that the words are made material objects of pleasure, as much as anything else in a triumph.68 Furthermore, the chiastic structure, like Usumcasane’s rhyme in the later scene, lends the speech shape and structural closure. Tamburlaine’s use of his lieutenants’ names additionally highlights Marlowe’s

68 Gina Bloom discusses the embodied physicality of the sound of language, especially verse, in the early modern period; see her Voice in Motion: Staging Gender, Shaping Sound in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 4-6 and passim.

versification. These characters—Techelles, Theridamas, Usumcasane—are Marlowe’s invention, appearing in none of his sources, and he selected their names for maximum metrical effect: each contains a different number of syllables (three, four, and five).69 Marlowe uses these names throughout both Tamburlaine plays to fill out lines with the proper exotic-sounding effects.

Clustered at the center of this short speech and with the longest two names perfectly filling out a complete line, these names show off the shape and capabilities of Marlowe’s meter. The effect of such verse on Tamburlaine furthermore implies the power of poetic form to redirect the course of history: at least according to the speech’s logic, Tamburlaine’s march of conquest follows from the line, “And ride in triumph through Persepolis.” Indeed, it not just that the line suggests the glories of conquest—it is a matter of form as much as content. The very sound of the line seems to capture Tamburlaine’s imagination, leading him to his imperial ambitions. The result is a vicious parody of the hopes of verse reformers who wished to bring England into an imperial course by the power of poetic form: rather than elevating a culture, poetic eloquence starts a destructive course of conquest.

I dwell so long on these passages because they most clearly demonstrate the stakes of

Marlowe’s verse experiments in Tamburlaine. Through patterns like the chiasmus or figures like the metonymic chain leading from one image to the next, Marlowe uses the affordances of his verse form to reflect upon the relationship of style and historical action, the role of eloquence in the fate of nations and armies. In this respect, Marlowe’s use of blank verse to articulate the motives and methods of Tamburlaine’s conquests continues a tradition that began with Surrey’s

69 Sources of Tamburlaine are collected in Vivian Thomas and William Tydeman, eds., Christopher Marlowe: The Plays and Their Sources (London; New York: Routledge, 1994), 69-168. The name Usumcasane is derived from an Usancasan, mentioned in Thomas Fortescue’s The Forest or Collection of Histories as a distant descendent of Tamburlaine’s (89).

invention of the form. However, Marlowe also challenges the alliance between unrhymed poetry and empire by making the play’s militaristic narrative just one possibility among many.

The Lyrical and Zenocrate

As in Dido Queene of Carthage, Tamburlaine, Part 1 first brings in the lyrical mode by reworking the invitation to love. Tamburlaine and Zenocrate first appear in the play’s second scene, as the conquering hero leads his captive back to his camp. Tamburlaine soon declares his desire to wed Zenocrate and offers her a series of riches and pleasures if she would consent to

“live with me” (1 Tam. 1.2.82). This phrase recalls the invitation of “The Passionate Shepherd to his Love,” and like the speaker of that poem Tamburlaine attempts seduction by allusion to material riches: “Thy Garments shall be made of Medean silke, / Enchast with precious juelles of mine owne” (1 Tam 1.2.95-6). In contrast to the eternal spring imagined by “The Passionate

Shepherd,” however, other details are decidedly wintery. He describes Zenocrate as “Fairer than whitest snow on Scythian hils” and tells her “With milke-white Hartes upon an Ivorie sled, /

Thou shalt be drawen amidst the frosen Pooles, / And scale the ysie mountaines lofty tops” (1

Tam 1.2.89, 98-100). In this, Tamburlaine’s promise of winter recalls “The Nymph’s Reply,” attributed to Walter Ralegh, which rebukes the passionate shepherd speaker precisely for ignoring the passage of time and the coming winter: “The flowers do fade, and wanton fields /

To wayward winter reckoning yields,”70 Ralegh’s nymph retorts. Tamburlaine’s vision of the impending winter, however, is not bleak; instead it links his seduction to his envisioned political triumph, when he seizes “the Persean Crowne, / Which gratious starres have promist at my birth”

70 In The New Oxford Book of Sixteenth-Century Verse, ed. Emrys Jones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 368.

(1 Tam 1.2.91-2). Indeed, the entire scene replaces the otium promised by “The Passionate

Shepherd” and other invitations to love with a life of military action. Tamburlaine envisions

Zenocrate among his army, promising, “A hundreth Tartars shall attend on thee, / Mounted on

Steeds, swifter than Pegasus” and “My martiall prises with five hundred men, / Wun on the fiftie headed Vuolgas waves, / Shall all we offer to Zenocrate” (1 Tam 1.2.93-4, 102-4). Far from being “a long lyric aria [that] halts the movement of the play,” as Judith Haber describes it,

Tamburlaine’s speech focuses on movement, specifically geographic extension and military advancement—precisely the kind of world-historical action that will occupy the rest of the play.71

Tamburlaine’s offer to Zenocrate completes the prologue’s promise to “lead” audiences

“to the stately tent of War,” a movement already manifest in Zenocrate’s arrival at

Tamburlaine’s camp. Tamburlaine enters the scene dressed as a shepherd, and Zenocrate first addresses him in a pastoral mode, saying,

Ah, Shepheard, pity my distressed plight, (If as thou seem’st, thou art so meane a man) And seeke not to inrich thy followers, By lawlesse rapine from a silly maide. (1 Tam 1.2.7-10)

Tamburlaine, however, rejects Zenocrate’s generic coding of the scene through a change of costume, removing his shepherd’s garb and declaring, “Lie here ye weedes that I disdaine to weare / This compleat armor, and this curtle-axe / Are adjuncts more beseeming Tamburlaine”

(1 Tam 1.2.41-3). Our introduction to the play’s two major characters thus stages the stylistic transformation central to the prologue’s conception of the play, the move from pastoral

71 Judith Deborah Haber, Desire and Dramatic Form in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 17.

“clownage” to epic warfare.72 Rather than simply rejecting her appellation of shepherd, however,

Tamburlaine instead frames his identity in related generic terms, telling her, “I am a Lord, for so my deeds shall proove, / And yet a shepheard by my Parentage” (1 Tam 1.2.34-5). In “proving” himself a lord, Tamburlaine alludes to a plot commonly found in pastoral romance, in which a shepherd is belatedly revealed to be the lost heir to a throne.73 In denying any noble birth, and by insisting that his nobility will be the result of his “deeds,” however, he turns the plot inside out.

Together with his lyrical speech to Zenocrate, Tamburlaine demonstrates himself, from his first entrance, to be adept at manipulating literary convention.

Tamburlaine’s literary sophistication distinguishes him from the Persian king Mycetes as much as does his powerful oratory. Tamburlaine, Part 1 opens with Mycetes declaring himself

“insufficient to expresse” his anger at Tamburlaine’s raids, “For it requires a great and thundring speech” (1 Tam 1.1.2-3). Nonetheless, he tries his hand at poetry at several points. He attempts a pastoral allusion, for example, when describing his counsellor as one “Whom I may term a

Damon for thy love,” and offers a sententious couplet when sending Theridamas on his mission to defeat Tamburlaine, saying “Returne with speed, time passeth swift away, / Our life is fraile, and we may die to day” (1 Tam 1.1.67-8). In the first case, the pastoral name suggests retreat from political life ill befitting a monarch, while the couplet’s warning of his own fleeting

72 Patrick Cheney reads the prologue and the move from pastoral to tragedy as a counter move to Spenser’s Virgilian move from pastoral to epic; see Patrick Cheney, Marlowe’s Counterfeit Profession: Ovid, Senser, Counter- Nationhood (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), ch. 5.

73 Robert Greene follows this trope in his play Alphonsus, Prince of Aragon, as well as his prose romance Menaphon, both of which show the influence Marlowe’s Tamburlaine. The former is one of the heroic tragedies that followed Tamburlaine, though with less success; see Peter Berek, “Tamburlaine’s Weak Sons: Imitation as Interpretation before 1593,” Renaissance Drama 13 (1982), 63-5; and Anne Elizabeth Ross, “Hand-Me-Down- Heroics: The Transmission of the Heroical in the Drama of the 1570s to the 1590s,” (doctoral dissertation, University of Toronto, 1993), ch. 5. Menaphon contains the only sixteenth century allusion to Zenocrate I can find outside Marlowe’s play.

existence seems ill designed to encourage Theridamas to martial success. Yet despite the gloominess of his instructions, Mycetes imagines the battle with Tamburlaine in an odd combination of gentle and violent imagery, envisioning his men returning from battle riding

these milk-white steeds of mine, All loden with the heads of killed men, And from their knees, even to their hoofes below, Besmer’d with blood, that makes a dainty show. (1 Tam 1.1.77-80)

When Tamburlaine echoes the “milk-white steeds” in the “milk white harts” of his speech to

Zenocrate in the next scene, he demonstrates his ability to manipulate lyrical style and to turn it into action: Mycetes turns the battle into a more static image, a “show” put on display for him to passively watch; Tamburlaine, on the other hand, eschews the gore of battle in his speech in favor of amorous offerings of riches, yet still manages to place Zenocrate in a more active role as part of the battle than Mycetes imagines for himself, amid the armies rather than passively watching from a distance. Tamburlaine’s blank verse, moreover, facilitates the blend of pastoral and epic modes in his speech’s combination of invitation to love and geographic expanse, while

Mycetes’s rhymes are jarring in their juxtaposition of encouragement and doom (“we may die today”) or violence and ornament (“a dainty show”).

True to his word, Tamburlaine brings Zenocrate to observe his battle with Bajazeth in act three and instructs her to engage in a verbal battle with Zabina, Bajazeth’s queen, saying, “take thou my crowne, vaunt of my worth, / And manage words with her as we will armes” (1 Tam

3.3.130-1). By analogizing Zenocrate’s “words” to his own “armes,” Tamburlaine describes

Zenocrate’s role as an active one, taking part in the conquest of Turkey and not just observing it.

Indeed, Zenocrate shows zeal for Tamburlaine’s martial deeds. Her attendant Agydas expresses disbelief that she could fall for Tamburlaine,

Who when he shall embrace you in his armes, Will tell how many thousand men he slew. And when you looke for amorous discourse, Will rattle foorth his facts of war and blood: Too harsh a subject for your dainty eares. (1 Tam 3.2.42-6)

Zenocrate, however, tells Agydas that she finds Tamburlaine’s “talke much sweeter than the

Muses song, / They sung for honor gainst Pierides” (1 Tam 3.2.50-1). Marlowe alludes here to book five of the Metamorphoses, in which Calliope sings of Persephone’s abduction by Pluto, a narrative similar to Zenocrate’s own, at least as Agydas would see it. In declaring her pleasure in

Tamburlaine’s war stories, Zenocrate not only rejects Agydas’s assumption that she would prefer

“amorous discourse,” but his entire construal of her situation.

Attending to the changes in Zenocrate’s characterization paints a different picture of the play’s narrative structure, a point often missed in critical discussions, which have found

Zenocrate difficult to integrate into schematic outlines of the play’s plot. Tamburlaine, Part 1, in most critical accounts, is built around repeated actions, as Tamburlaine and his lieutenants conquer Persia, then the Turkish Empire, and finally Egyptian and Arabian forces at Damascus.

Each of the first four acts, moreover, opens with the same basic scene: the monarch of some exotic land speaks to his councilors about this upstart ruffian Tamburlaine and plans military action against him. Doubled or tripled casting, as David Bevington shows, would underscore this repetitive plot by much of the cast taking up the same distribution of characters under slightly different names, first as Persians, then Turks, and finally Egyptians.74 Dividing the play into these parallel episodes does not, however, account for Zenocrate’s impact on the plot of part one.

Though absent for all of act two, Zenocrate’s role grows through acts three and four as audiences learn that she has fallen in love with her captor and witness her conflict of loyalties as

74 David Bevington, From Mankind to Marlowe (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962), 203.

Tamburlaine prepares to attack her father and former betrothed. Act four, in fact, relegates war to the background, introducing the Sultan of Egypt largely to prompt Zenocrate’s own conflict with

Tamburlaine. Building the military plot of Tamburlaine, Part 1 out of repeated episodes allows this line of action to carry on uninterrupted while audience attention is drawn to the rising action of Zenocrate’s internal conflict. These two lines of action directly oppose one another, not only in their aims (peace for Zenocrate, war for Tamburlaine) but in deeper structural terms.

Zenocrate’s plea for peace would require Tamburlaine to abandon the repetitive pattern of his own narrative of expanding conquests. Tamburlaine’s conquests, however, will admit no limits, his aspirations allowing for no telos to his march through Asia and Europe (a limitlessness echoing the open-ended blank verse). Both plots finally converge in the climactic assault on

Damascus in act five, in which Zenocrate bemoans her fate among the carcasses of

Tamburlaine’s enemies, only for her father and Tamburlaine to confirm peace through her marriage to Tamburlaine. Marlowe visually renders the incongruity of the two plots by staging the conventional New Comedy closure in marriage on a stage covered in the blood and bodies of

Zenocrate’s people, including her former betrothed, Alcidamas.75 Tamburlaine may instruct his lieutenants to “Cast off your armor, put on scarlet robes,” but at this point those celebratory garments have become visually indistinguishable from bloody ones (1 Tam 5.1.525).

Zenocrate’s disruptive presence within Tamburlaine matters here because Marlowe uses the character to draw in other genres and literary traditions. On the level of plot, her divided mind in the battle of Damascus recalls the psychomachic dramas Bevington sees submerged in the structure of Tamburlaine, Part 1. Tamburlaine himself seems largely unburdened by the

75 On the New Comedy ending in Tamburlaine, Part 1, see Lucy Potter, “Informing Audiences: Marlowe’s Early Tragedies,” in ‘This Earthly Stage’: World and Stage in Late Medieval England (Turnhout, Brepols, 2010), 253.

moralizing, homiletic tradition behind the play’s episodic structure, which “lives on as a theatrical method in secular drama, deprived of its original homiletic justification.”76 As

Bevington argues, Marlowe makes new use out of this old dramatic form by turning episodic scenes into a means of staging a historical “chronicle of life that exalts great deeds and presents them to be admired (and deplored) as a spectacle of greatness.”77 Zenocrate’s staging of a mental conflict recalls the earlier drama that Tamburlaine displaces. Along similar lines, Lois Potter notes how the spectacle of Bajazeth’s and Zabina’s deaths is read to different ends by Zenocrate and Tamburlaine, she treating their bodies as an emblem of the fall from fortune, he as simple evidence of his unstoppable might.78 By subjecting this single event and spectacle to divergent interpretations, Marlowe takes advantage of the visual affordances of the theater not to determine the event’s meaning but to suggests its indeterminate significance. The meaning of this history depends upon the literary conventions with which it is approached: de casibus tragedy for

Zenocrate, triumph for Tamburlaine.79 Zenocrate thus becomes the locus for Marlowe’s reflections on literary form in Tamburlaine, disrupting genre, recalling earlier forms of drama, and most importantly prompting Tamburlaine’s most lyrical speeches. In the play’s final scene, before the walls of Damascus, Marlowe makes her into a means for reflecting on literary history more specifically.

76 Bevington, 214.

77 Bevington, 214.

78 Potter 252.

79 On Tamburlaine’s subversion of the de casibus tragedy, see Gordon Braden, Renaissance Tragedy and the Senecan Tradition: Anger’s Privilege (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 191.

The Lyric at Damascus

Tamburlaine, Part 1 reaches its climax at Damascus, Zenocrate’s home city, where

Tamburlaine defeats her father and thereby gains his consent to marry her. In the center of this scene, Tamburlaine delivers his sole soliloquy, a complex passage in which he struggles with the temptation to spare the city in order to please Zenocrate. After ordering his lieutenants to execute the Damascan women who have come to plead for their city, Tamburlaine addresses the absent

Zenocrate, explaining how her beauty in mourning has affected him:

Ah faire Zenocrate, divine Zenocrate, Faire is too foule an Epithite for thee, That in thy passion for thy countries love, And feare to see thy kingly Fathers harme, With haire discheweld wip’st thy watery cheeks. (1 Tam 5.1.135-9)

Tamburlaine dwells for several lines on this image of Zenocrate, expanding upon it with elaborate conceits and mythological allusions before turning, finally, to the reason for her beautiful tears; Zenocrate’s pleas for her city wage “A doubtfull battell with my tempted thoughtes, / For Egypts freedom and the Souldans life” (1 Tam 5.1.152-3). He quickly returns, however, to his more pleasurable musings on Zenocrate’s beauty, asking, “What is beauty saith my sufferings then?” (1 Tam 5.1.160). For several lines, he tries to adequately describe

Zenocrate’s loveliness to his own satisfaction. Eventually, though, he interrupts and chides himself for becoming distracted by “thoughts effeminate and faint,” and finally resolves to carry on with the razing of Damascus (1 Tam 5.1.177).

As the play’s only soliloquy, the speech stands out from the rest of the play and effectively halts dramatic action. Unlike other passages widely discussed as “lyrical,” however, the speech at Damascus takes place on the field of battle rather than in the camp or after the

enemy’s defeat.80 The soliloquy, in fact, takes place at a particularly shocking moment: the

Damascan virgins have been killed, and Tamburlaine has ordered his men to hang their bodies on the city walls and “put the rest to the sword” (1 Tam 5.1.132-4). These lines immediately precede the soliloquy, which provides a brief respite from violent action with its aesthetic rapture at the sight of Zenocrate’s tears. As a rare moment of contemplation in the play, the soliloquy works within the temporality of the “lyric present,” a move reinforced by the passage’s other stylistic cues, such as elaborate imagery and metaphorical language. Furthermore, the most “lyrical” parts of the speech—the discourses on Zenocrate’s beauty—function as additional pauses within the speech’s own movement. Whenever his thoughts reach the problem he faces in this moment, he turns away from the difficult decision of how to act, whether to spare or slaughter Zenocrate’s city, and instead continues to elaborate upon Zenocrate’s divine beauty.

Not only does the speech as a whole pause the play’s action, but the speech’s rhetorical structure also repeatedly delays the resolution of Tamburlaine’s dilemma. Whenever he begins actually deliberating on the proper course of action, he chooses instead to extend his praise of beauty. This praise, according to renaissance literary theory, is the proper use of lyric; Philip

Sidney writes, for example, that the lyrical mode is for “singing the praises of immortal beauty: the immortal goodness of that God who giveth us hands to write and wits to conceive.”81 Such praise is theoretically meant to inspire listeners to virtuous action—yet in Tamburlaine’s soliloquy, the lyrical praise of beauty continually derails him from acting. Marlowe thus uses the speech as an occasion to interrogate the efficacy of lyric poetry, its ability to produce action.

80 The two other passages central to the play’s lyrical dimension are the invitation to love offered to Zenocrate in act one, scene two, and the “aspiring minds” speech in act two, scene seven. For discussions of these passages, see e.g. Haber, 17-8, 23-5; Leech, 56-7; Rhodes, 87-8.

81 Philip Sidney, The Major Works, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 230, 246.

Tamburlaine’s delaying tactics in the soliloquy also work through the blank verse form.

Twice, Marlowe repeats words across line breaks (the figure of anadiplosis) just as Tamburlaine approaches the problem at hand. As noted above, the speech begins with Zenocrate’s tears, and

Tamburlaine offers several lines of mythological comparisons to “Flora in her mornings pride, /

Shaking her silver tresses in the aire” (1 Tam 5.1.140-1). The line of thought nearly comes to a close when Tamburlaine returns from these grand comparisons to address Zenocrate herself and her “flowing eies”; the next line, however, begins “Eies when that Ebena steps to heaven,” and continues from there into a second set of classical allusions (1 Tam 5.1.146-7). Tamburlaine again returns to the battle of Damascus and Zenocrate’s fear for her father and seems about to consider what he must do about “Egypts freedom and the Souldans life,” only to again repeat himself in the next line: “His life that so consumes Zenocrate” (1 Tam 5.1.153-4). These repetitions allow Tamburlaine to push the speech forward just a little longer before he must confront the problem Zenocrate poses for his conquest of Egypt. The extended metaphorical description of her eyes in particular returns him to the lyrical blazon of her beauty, rather than the deliberative debate on whether or not to be merciful. The anadiplosis furthermore marks the shape of Marlowe’s blank verse lines, making his versification particularly audible. These moments thus call attention to the speech’s poetic form in the moments where Tamburlaine pushes against the narrative structure that would demand continual and repetitive imperial expansion.

The ultimate resolution of this dilemma finally comes when Tamburlaine chastises himself for allowing his love of beauty and of Zenocrate to draw away from his “discipline of armes and Chivalrie” (1 Tam 5.1.175). At this point, however, Marlowe undermines this

resolution by means of particularly heavy enjambment. Tamburlaine justifies his attraction to

Zenocrate by insisting that beauty is something

With whose instinct the soule of man is toucht, And every warriour that is rapt with love Of fame, of valour, and of victory, Must needs have beauty beat on his conceits. (1 Tam 5.1.179-82)

The turn from line 180 to 181 slides from amorous love to a properly martial “love / Of fame, of valour, and of victory.” Tamburlaine faces the challenge of reconciling his desire for Zenocrate and his desire for conquest, and he solves it by eliding the two. Marlowe’s unrhymed verse in this case deemphasizes the structure of his lines, allowing the sophistry potentially to pass unnoticed. Tamburlaine’s invocation of chivalry, moreover, recalls his declaration back in act one that “I am a Lord, for so my deeds shall proove, / And yet a shepheard by my Parentage” (1

Tam 1.2.34-5). In the earlier scene, he had subverted the romance convention of revealing shepherds to be the sons of kings, yet now Tamburlaine puts himself into that literary tradition, even alluding to the classical gods who, for love, would “feele the lowly warmth of shepheards flames, / And maske in cottages of strowed weeds” (1 Tam 5.1.186-7). Tamburlaine’s attempt at the end of the soliloquy to extricate himself from the lyrical praise of beauty only places him in an adjacent genre, one he has already rejected in the play.82

The concluding move to chivalric romance follows, in fact, from the continual discussion of literary history—reflections on where poetry originates and how it develops—throughout the soliloquy. Marlowe places himself specifically into a literary context of lyric poetry here near the end of Tamburlaine, Part 1. Tamburlaine first considers the origins of poetry when expounding

82 Kirk Melnikoff argues that the publisher of the first edition of Tamburlaine, Richard Jones, sought to place the play in the context of chivalric romance; see Melnikoff, “Jones’s Pen and Marlowe’s Socks: Richard Jones, Print Culture, and the Beginnings of English Dramatic Literature,” Studies in Philology 102, no. 2 (2005): 184-209.

upon Zenocrate’s weeping eyes, which become a sort of Helicon, a fountain of poetry. Hers is the face “Wher Beauty, mother to the Muses sits, / And comments vollumes with her Yvory pen:

/ Taking instructions from thy flowing eies” (1 Tam 5.1.144-6). As a fountain of instruction,

Zenocrate becomes a mythical source of poetry. At the same time, she clearly post-dates the works of poets: Beauty, according to the conceit, is taking notes in books already written. These temporal overlays are even more complicated, however, in that Zenocrate’s flowing eyes offer instruction that seems to supersede the extant volumes: Beauty is writing’s comment, explicating the works of earlier poets, or perhaps correcting them. It is surely significant, moreover, that instruction is being taken by the “mother to the Muses”: Zenocrate’s fountain-eyes go back beyond the source of ordinary poetic inspiration—the Muses—to the source of that source, and in doing so add the latest comments to the poems of the past.

Tamburlaine’s final digression on Zenocrate’s beauty is grounded more firmly in poetry, as he asserts that “If all the pens that ever poets held” had deepened the feeling of their poets, and all this poetry were reduced to a “heavenly Quintessence,” still it could not capture all

Zenocrate’s beauty (1 Tam 5.1.161, 165). In this section of the speech, Tamburlaine expands upon the common metaphor in works on poetics of poems as made up of flowers. This

“Quintessence” Tamburlaine imagines is that which poets “still / From their immortall flowers of

Poesy” (1 Tam 5.1.165-6). Later in this speech he refers to this distillation of poetic beauty as

“one Poem’s period,” drawing on the jargon of rhetorical structure and rhythm to suggest that even all the poets in the world could write only a fragment of a poem on Zenocrate (1 Tam

5.1.169). As with the metaphor of Zenocrate as a fountain, Tamburlaine’s conceit of the quintessence of poetry turns poetic beauty into a self-generating system. As he imagines it, poets’ pens reinvigorate poets’ feeling and inspiration. Moreover, the chemical distillation to a

quintessence suggests the production of new ink from the “flowers” of already-written poetry.

Tamburlaine’s speech thus casts Zenocrate as the product of a long tradition of encomiastic love poetry, who nonetheless surpasses the literary history that creates her.

This self-perpetuating literary system poses the same problem Tamburlaine faces in trying to act while enraptured by Zenocrate’s beauty. By drawing out his contemplation of

Zenocrate, Tamburlaine’s speech continually pulls him away from reaching a decision and thus arrests the play’s action. Similarly, the feedback-loop of poetic pleasure threatens to turn

Zenocrate’s beauty into an end in itself. Poetry, here, leads not to action, but to more poetry.

Tamburlaine manages to break out of this cycle, however, by insisting that Zenocrate exceeds what is possible to create out of the poetic past alone. Her triumph over it enables Tamburlaine’s own triumph over poetry. Tamburlaine thus turns his encounter with literary traditions in his response to Zenocrate’s beauty into a triumph akin to his military victories over various kings.

Moreover, his triumph over lyrical poetry here recalls the prologue’s claims with regard to

Marlowe’s contemporary theater, with Tamburlaine leading audiences to the “stately tents of

War.” The play is thereby framed by struggles against literary traditions, both Tamburlaine and

Tamburlaine securing victories over what has come before.

Conclusion: Re-imagining Poetic Efficacy

Where the prologue to Tamburlaine, Part 1 promises a departure from the dominant theatrical styles of the time, the prologue to Part 2 registers the success of the first play and promises more of the same: “The generall welcomes Tamburlain receiv’d, / When he arrived last upon our stage, / Hath made our Poet pen his second part” (2 Tam Pro.1-3). Like its predecessor, this second prologue situates the play within a very specific time and place, the London theaters

in the final years of the 1580s. Indeed, this second prologue is even more particular, calling attention to its status as a sequel and thus locating its play in the wake of Tamburlaine the

Great’s popular success.83 Part 2, in other words, presents itself as a reaction not just to the general conditions of English professional drama but to a single event in the theater world. The prologue goes on, moreover, to announce the two principal events in the play, the deaths of

Tamburlaine and Zenocrate: the play will show how “death cuts off the progres of his pomp /

And murdrous Fates throws al his triumphs down” as well as “what became of fair Zenocrate, /

And with how manie cities sacrifice / He celebrated her sad funerall” (2 Tam Pro.4-8). By revealing these details of the plot, the prologue instead facilitates the audience’s greater attention to matters of style, Tamburlaine’s “pomp” on the one hand and the elaborate spectacle of

Zenocrate’s funeral on the other. Finally, like the prologue to Part 1, Part 2 directs the audience to pay attention to Tamburlaine’s voice, for the details of Zenocrate’s death, “Himselfe in presence shal unfold at large” (2 Tam Pro.9).

As it happens, Zenocrate’s death inspires Tamburlaine to make a speech closely recalling his soliloquy before the walls of Damascus in part one. Eulogizing her superlative beauty, he says

had she liv’d before the siege of Troy, Hellen, whose beauty sommond Greece to armes, And drew a thousand ships to Tenedos, Had not bene nam’d in Homers Iliads: Her name had bene in every line he wrote: Or had those wanton Poets, for whose byrth Olde Rome was proud, but gasde a while on her, Nor Lesbia nor Corinna had bene nam’d, Zenocrate had bene the argument Of every Epigram or Eligie (2 Tam 2.4.86-95)

83 On the theatrical success and influence of Tamburlaine, Part 1, see Berek.

As at Damascus, Tamburlaine imagines Zenocrate and her beauty antedating and transforming poetic traditions, replacing all that came before with just herself. In this speech, he makes

Zenocrate follow his own poetic practice of filling out verse lines with names. Even as he places

Zenocrate within amorous lyrics, moreover, Tamburlaine considers these genres in terms of violence and destruction: the reference to “Olde Rome,” following on the destruction of Troy, subtly suggests Rome’s fall and associates its demise, through the connection between Greek

Helen and Roman Lesbia and Corinna, with “wanton”-ness. Amorous poetry, it seems, leads to destruction, and in this Tamburlaine prefigures his own death in his mourning for Zenocrate. The move from Homeric epic to Ovidian elegy, moreover, reflects Marlowe’s own blend of epic and lyric modes within the blank verse of his plays. By naming the women addressed by Roman lyric poets, Marlowe makes perhaps his most explicit comment on his place in literary history. The moment, however, is far from triumphant, is instead an occasion for mourning. Tamburlaine’s revision of the literary past in Zenocrate’s name is emphatically counterfactual, and his own elegy for her cannot change the past, cannot reform old Rome, nor erase the defeat of Troy.

Tamburlaine can imagine intervening in history through a poetic celebration of his love, but he acknowledges that his poetic efforts cannot change the past or redirect the course of history.

For Marlowe, on the other hand, the very inefficacy of poetic form to shape his empire’s historical destiny constitutes his intervention in literary historiography. By drawing out the different capacities of blank verse for a range of styles, Marlowe severed, or at least weakened, the tie between unrhymed verse and the translation of Roman imperium to sixteenth-century

England. By showing blank verse to be capable of more than the imitation of Latin epic meter,

Marlowe demonstrates that the forms of literary history shape, but do not limit its potential future.

Chapter 2

Michael Drayton and the History of the English Sonnet

Michael Drayton, if he is to be believed, wrote historiographic poetry in spite of himself.

This may come as a surprise, considering his prolific output of versified historical narratives, including several complaints and “Legends” of historical figures such as Piers Gaveston (1593) and Robert, Duke of Normandy (1596), the minor epic Mortimeriados (1596), later revised as

The Barons Warres (1603), the oft-reprinted Englands Heroicall Epistles in the voices of historical persons (first ed. 1597), two poems on the Battle of Agincourt (1606 and 1627), and of course the chorographical Poly-Olbion (part 1, 1612, part 2, 1622). Despite his career-long engagement with the matter of English history, however, Drayton repeatedly denies that history is his preferred subject. Thus, at the end of the second canto of The Barons Warres, he interrupts his narration of a battle in order to lament his very choice of subject:

O Bloudie Age! had not these things beene done, I had not now, in these more calmer Times, Into the search of those past Troubles runne; Nor had my Virgin vnpolluted Rimes Alt’red the course wherein they first begun, To sing these horrid and vnnaturall Crimes; My Layes had still been of IDEAS Bowre, Of my deare Ancor, or her loued Stowre. (2.545-52)1

For those unfamiliar with his other writings, Drayton helpfully clarifies in the margin that these last two lines refer to “The subject of my Sonets.” In Englands Heroicall Epistles meanwhile,

Drayton does not lament his historical matter but instead denies its primacy, even presenting the poems’ historical content as a possible source of confusion for the reader. Readers, he writes, may wonder “why I have annexed Notes to every Epistles end”; the reason, he explains, is that

1 For ease of reference, quotations of Drayton are, unless otherwise noted, taken from The Works of Michael Drayton, ed. J. William Hebel (Oxford: Shakespeare Head Press, 1961).

“the Worke might in truth be judged Braynish [i.e. heady, foolish], if nothing but amorous

Humor were handled therein,” and so “I have inter-woven Matters Historicall, which unexplained, might defraud the Mind of much Content” (p. 130).2 Thus, he provides an argument to each pair of letters to supply the poems’ historical situation and notes at the end to expand on any additional allusions to historical events. According to the preface, then, historiography is not the primary aim of the work; rather, it is a supplement intended to correct the overly passionate loves contained in the epistles themselves. As in The Barons Warres, Drayton’s anti-historical orientation in Englands Heroicall Epistles points the reader to his sonnets: starting with its third edition, “Nevvly Enlarged” in 1599, the Heroicall Epistles were accompanied by Drayton’s sonnet sequence Idea. The two works never thereafter printed separately in Drayton’s lifetime, even as he continued to revise Idea through a number of subsequent editions.3

Few critics have commented upon the relationship between Idea and Englands Heroicall

Epistles, and those who do typically either dismiss the pairing of the two works as insignificant or present the sonnets as an effort to distract from the more important political significance of the

Heroicall Epistles as a work of pro-Essex historiography.4 Ignoring Drayton’s own stated preference for his sonnets, critics have described the amorous verse as a kind of expedient ruse

2 OED, qv. “brainish.”

3 Michael Drayton, Englands Heroicall Epistles. Nevvly Enlarged. VVith Idea (London, 1599); hereafter EHE 1599 in my notes. The two works are so joined even in the several versions of Drayton’s collected Poems throughout the seventeenth century, as well as in volumes such as 1603’s The Barrons Wars in the Raigne of Edward the second, with Englands Heroicall Epistles, which does not list Idea among its contents.

4 Tom Parker insists on the separation of Idea from Englands Heroicall Epistles, largely on the evidence of the print layout, which separates the two using, for example, decorative borders. See Tom W. N. Parker, Proportional Form in the Sonnets of the Sidney Circle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), ch. 6. I might suggest instead that seeing Idea as integral to Englands Heroicall Epistles would trouble his book’s larger claim that sonnet sequences are structured by internally-consistent numerological harmonies. In any case, while Idea and the Heroicall Epistles are sectioned off from one another, Drayton gestures across this line, as my reading will show. Jean Brink describes the sonnets as an attempt to disguise the book’s politics in Michael Drayton Revisited (Boston: Twayne, 1990), 60-1.

allowing Drayton cover to make a number of dangerously politically-charged historical arguments in the Heroicall Epistles.5 Drayton himself described the sonnet form as a profound commitment: a form to which he would return from The Barons Warres, the grand finale to

Englands Heroicall Epistles. According to a number of his critics, however, these sonnets were merely a deviation in his career.

Even his most admiring commentator, Richard Hardin, suggests that “historical poetry and other long narrative kinds […] ought to have lured him away from writing sonnets.”6

Drayton, according to this argument, should have followed the major trends of English literary culture, and abandoned any interest in the sonnet sequence after the 1590s. In Hardin’s words,

“The sonnet vogue was virtually defunct by 1599, so that by 1619, when the finest sonnets appear, the fashionable set in London must have thought them terribly dated.”7 In writing sonnets, Hardin and others argue, Drayton writes in a pointedly Elizabethan form, expressing nostalgia for that past era and declaring his distance from the Jacobean court.8

Idea, however, is neither a feint nor a relic; instead, the juxtaposition of the Heroicall

Epistles and the sonnet sequence constitutes Drayton’s effort to create, and comment upon, the aims and methods of literary history. In the most recent sustained treatment of Drayton’s sonnets,

Christopher Warley has claimed that Idea stands out within the poet’s 1619 folio collection for

5 Brink 62-5, and Andrew Hadfield, “Michael Drayton’s Brilliant Career,” Proceedings of the British Academy125 (2004): 124.

6 Richard Hardin, Michael Drayton and the Passing of Elizabethan England (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1973), 23.

7 Hardin, 23.

8 David Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance, rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), ch. 8; Curtis Perry, The Making of Jacobean Culture: James I and the Renegotiation of Elizabethan Literary Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), ch. 2.

its lack of historicity; while most of the works therein include prefaces on their form or genre by

“Drayton the pedantic literary historian,” the sonnets alone lack such a preface, and are thus unmoored from literary history.9 This only appears to be the case, however, because Warley is looking for literary history in the wrong place, and defining it in the wrong way. The combination of Englands Heroicall Epistles and Idea in 1599 is accompanied by Drayton’s addition of new letters to the Heroicall Epistles themselves with the exchange between the poet

Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey and Geraldine, his supposed love. Drayton’s Surrey / Geraldine poems stand out from the rest of the Heroicall Epistles as the only pair in which neither imagined writer is of royal blood, nor are they concerned in their letters with wars, court intrigue, or other affairs of state. Instead, the poems directly take up questions of the sources and uses of poetry. Moreover, by addressing these metapoetic concerns in the person of the Earl of Surrey— well-known as the originator of the English sonnet, thanks to the oft-printed miscellany Songes and Sonnettes, Written by the Right Honorable Lorde Henry Haward Late Earle of Surrey and

Other—Drayton signals their special significance for his own sonnets at the end of the book.

Drayton’s 1599 volume thus offers in outline a literary history of the English sonnet, from its origin in Surrey’s contact with Italian poetry through the end of the 1590s when the form reached its apex of popularity.

The literary history Drayton constructs in his 1599 volume goes well beyond identifying a sequence of poets who first introduce the sonnet to English and then raise it to prominence however. As I have argued in the foregoing pages, practices of literary history in the English renaissance were not limited to retrospective accounts of poetic traditions, lines of influence, or

9 Christopher Warley, Sonnet Sequences and Social Distinction in Renaissance England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 1-4.

the development of particular forms and genres. Some early modern poets, like Drayton, created history by means of the structures of poetry itself, with implications reaching beyond strictly

“literary” matters. In Drayton’s case, combining Englands Heroicall Epistles and Idea produces a series of formal and figural echoes between and within the works, which in turn become a means of structuring historical relations between disparate temporal moments.

Why Sonnets

Sonnet sequences are particularly fitting for Drayton’s literary-historical project for several reasons. First, the sonnet is, even in the 1590s, still a fairly new literary import to

England, and would retain its associations with Italianate decadence well into the seventeenth century.10 The form’s novelty in England figures centrally in scholarly arguments about its function; for example, Warley argues that sixteenth-century sonnet sequences provided a means of articulating “new social positions before there existed an explicit vocabulary to define them,” in other words that the form’s lack of an established tradition allowed it to signify similarly novel class positions.11 Yet by the 1590s, sonnets and sonnet sequences did have a literary history of some decades in England, and an even longer history on the continent. The form’s ambiguous temporality, simultaneously new and old, allows Drayton to use the sonnet’s literary history in order to address the recent past. Indeed, common readings of Idea as an expression of nostalgia for the Elizabethan era inevitably look backwards from the sequence’s final version in 1619, thereby failing to account for Drayton’s work on the sonnets before the queen’s death.12

10 Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 39; William Kennedy, The Site of Petrarchism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 165-74.

11 Warley 3.

12 The addition of Idea to the end of Englands Heroicall Epistles also constitutes the first reappearance of the sonnets since Drayton first published a sonnet sequence under the title Ideas Mirrour in 1594. The Idea of 1599, 75

The recent past defined by the sonnet’s literary history is, more specifically, the post-

Sidney past. Like all sonneteers in the 1590s, Drayton writes in the wake of Philip Sidney’s death in 1586. Though well-regarded as a writer and courtier during his life, Sidney’s early death

(and the efforts of his friends and next of kin, including the Earl of Leicester) propelled him to the status of literary and political hero. The confluence of these two legacies—poetic and political—produced the conditions of Drayton’s literary history by allowing Sidney and his writing to stand for a particular moment of historical possibility that supposedly passed with him.13 For example, criticism of Elizabeth’s reticence to provide military support to continental

Protestants was expressed through poems mourning the late Sidney, his death becoming an emblem for his age’s lost chances; military-political and poetic possibilities are implicitly entwined and both set in an irrecoverable past. Thus, the “dolefull lay” by “his sister …

Clorinda” in Spenser’s Astrophel declares that “Woods, hills and riuers, now are desolate, / Sith

however, represents a thorough transformation of the sonnet sequence, the new version retaining only 31 of the original 51 sonnets (many with substantial alterations), adding 28 new poems, and changing the order of the sequence. The changes, as critics have long recognized, alter the basic character of the sequence, the revised Idea being much more satirical and referential to contemporary culture than Ideas Mirrour had been. Drayton would continue to add to, delete from, and otherwise change both individual sonnets and the entire sequence in successive editions until 1619, but never to the same degree. As a result, Ideas Mirrour and Idea are best considered as separate works, the one printed in 1594, the other existing in several versions, as is the practice of the 1961 Works of Michael Drayton, now the standard edition. For a detailed look at the changes Drayton made between 1594 and 1599, see F. Y. St Clair, “Drayton’s First Revision of His Sonnets,” Studies in Philology 36 (1939): 40-59.

13 The politics of Sidney’s poetry and reception have been the topic of many, many studies, prominent among them Richard McCoy’s Sir Philip Sidney: Rebellion in Arcadia, (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1979); David Norbrook’s Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984, rev. 2002); and Blair Worden’s The Sound of Virtue (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996). Annabel Patterson takes up the issue of Sidney’s posthumous readers directly in chapter 1 of her Censorship and Interpretation, (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984). These studies focus on the Arcadia; readings of the politics of Astrophil and Stella, including Arthur Marotti’s “‘Love Is Not Love’”, tend to focus on Sidney’s fraught position as a courtier frustrated in his search for office, rather than on the political ideals of the so-called Sidney-Essex faction or the Protestant League. Lisa Klein examines the “heroic image” (21) of Sidney as a politically active figure in the poetry of the 1590s; see her The Exemplary Sidney and the Elizabethan Sonneteer (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1997).

he is gone which them all did grace: / And all the fields do waile their widow state.”14 The wailing fields here combine the pastoral landscape of poetic creation and the martial “field and forest far away” where Astrophel/Sidney fought and died.15 Both fields are now abandoned, and the hero, called the “Shepheards hope neuer like againe to see,” has left little possibility of his legacy being properly carried on in this world.16 By writing Sidney’s poetic persona Astrophil into his political role in England’s support of the Dutch rebellion, the elegist makes Sidney’s poetry distinctly historical in its ties to specific past events and circumstances.

Sidney’s reception in the 1590s figured his death as the end of an era, yet his profound influence on the decade’s poets tied writers to his past moment. Gavin Alexander has recently described this odd temporal relationship between Sidney and his poetic followers, writing,

“Sidney was ahead of his time as a writer, and he died before his time. And his time, in the event, was the 1590s.”17 My reading of Drayton implies the reverse of Alexander’s proleptic Sidney: for Drayton, and indeed for many writing sonnets in the 1590s, Sidney’s influence made their own writing belated. The imagined time of sonnet-writing, that is to say, was not the 1590s, but was instead a period that had ended years ago. Poets’ lateness with respect to Sidney was matched, moreover, by English poetry’s perceived lateness with respect to Italian verse. As a number of studies have shown, English poets throughout the Elizabethan era were deeply

14 Edmund Spenser, The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser, William Oram, ed. (New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 1989), “Astrophel” ll. 214, 211; “The Lay of Clorinda” ll. 25-7. There is some debate as to whether “The Doleful Lay of Clorinda” is in fact by Sidney’s sister, Mary, Countess of Pembroke, or by Spenser.

15 Spenser, “Astrophel” l. 81.

16 Spenser, “Lay of Clorinda” l. 54. For a more extended treatment of Spenser’s Astrophel, see chapter 5 of Klein, The Exemplary Sidney, which argues that Spenser’s poem ultimately rejects the active political life that lead to Sidney’s death.

17 Gavin Alexander, Writing after Sidney (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), xix.

concerned with establishing a body of English poetry on par with the literature of Italy and classical Greece and Rome, and the veneration of Sidney figured centrally to this national project. The combined Italian and Sidneian traditions of the English sonnet made the form central to developing a literary history of the belated 1590s.

In addition to its complex position in English cultural history, the formal characteristics of sonnets and sonnet sequences are particularly open to the kinds of literary history I examine in this dissertation. As a number of critics have argued, sonnet sequences exhibit a tension between lyric and narrative impulses; each individual poem seems to stop time, while the sequence as a whole moves the reader along.18 More recent scholarship, especially from the direction of book history, has argued that our sense of sonnet sequences as unified works is anachronistic and that sonnet sequences are more miscellaneous collections than complete stories.19 All critics might agree, however, that in every sonnet sequence we find suggestive formal repetitions that create a kind of unity that may or may not correspond to a temporal narrative: images and metaphors that echo between individual poems, frequent returns to rhetorical modes like the blazon and the

18 The most significant recent work on lyric vs. narrative tendencies in sonnet sequences include Roland Greene’s Post-Petrarchism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), which describes a Petrarch’s legacy as a combination “ritual” and “fictive” modes in long sequences of lyric poetry; see esp. 1-21 and ch. 2 on Philip Sidney and the English renaissance context. Heather Dubrow’s analyzes the tensions in terms of gender in Echoes of Desire (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 28-35 and passim. Though she doesn’t delve into the sonnet sequence, Dubrow’s reassessment of the lyric / narrative conflict in chapter five of The Challenges of Orpheus (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008) is excellent.

19 On Shakespeare, see Zarnowiecki, ch. 5; on Astrophil and Stella, see Joel B. Davis, The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia and the Invention of English Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), ch. 2. Arthur Marotti describes the transformation of sonnets from separate, occasional poems to unified sequences as an effect of the transition from manuscript to print of Sidney’s and Daniel’s sonnets, which provided the model for the later sequences; see Marotti, Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 228-33. Thomas Roche also rejects what he calls the “narrative fallacy,” though for very different reasons, in Petrarch and the English Sonnet Sequences (New York: AMS Press, 1989), x.

palinode, and of course the repetition of the sonnet form itself.20 We can see this kind of non- narrative, or para-narrative structure in Englands Heroicall Epistles and Idea. As such, the literary history Drayton constructs differs markedly from more familiar arguments about the fictional, constructed, and ideological nature of history.21 Drayton does not offer an overarching meta-narrative of progress or providence. Instead, he develops more provisional connections between past and present moments.

Finally, the sonnet’s rhetorical structure around a turn or set of turns, from octave to sestet or final quatrain to couplet, makes the form especially suitable for a structure of problem and solution. Sonnets can thus emphasize acts of interpretation, the poem’s final section offering the speaker’s response to or reading of a situation presented in the first part. Similarly, Drayton’s poetic historicism represents his effort at interpreting the past, rather than stating what happened.

He is ultimately less concerned with speaking to the truth of what happened in the past than with understanding how the past might be made significant for the present.

Exemplary (Rhetorical) Figures in Englands Heroicall Epistles

In terms of subject matter, Englands Heroicall Epistles resembles many English history plays and poems written in the 1590s, covering such events as the wars of Edward II, the deposition of Richard II, and the Wars of the Roses that were also taken up by Shakespeare’s and

Marlowe’s plays and Samuel Daniel’s Civil Wars. The work’s epistolary form, however, leads

Drayton to subordinate the narration of historical events to the representation of his imagined

20 Patricia Phillippy describes the palinode, a recantation of love, as a figure in Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella as both producing narrative and the blurred distinction between the real Sidney and the fictional Astrophil; see Phillippy, Loves Remedies (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1995), ch. 4.

21 E.g., Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1973).

letter writers’ thoughts and passions.22 As a result, critics have had trouble integrating all of the poems in the Heroicall Epistles into a unified work of narrative history or a coherent argument about political sovereignty or the providential guidance of England’s kings.23 Rather than offering a unified historical narrative, Drayton explains that the poems in Englands Heroicall

Epistles are connected through their shared “amorous humor.” Furthermore, as he suggests in his notes to the letter from King John to Matilda, the Epistles are “much more Poeticall then

Historicall, making no mention at all of the Occurrents of the Time, or State, touching onely his love to her, and the extremitie of his Passions forced by his desires” (p. 152).24 In allying the letter’s “poeticall” qualities with its amorous content, Drayton further separates the Heroicall

Epistles from conventional history writing; “Occurents” and matters of “State”—the historian’s proper sphere—are unnecessary for the poetic expression of passion that is the letter’s real concern.25

Drayton’s separation of the amorous and the historical leads to an alternative mode of structuring and interpreting history, not through an analysis of cause and effect, or through the representation of great men and women, but rather through the use of poetic figuration—images,

22 Barbara Ewell attributes the interiority of Drayton’s characters to his experience writing for the theater between his earlier legends and the Heroicall Epistles in her article, “From Idea to Act,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 82.4 (1983): 515. On the impact of Drayton’s playwriting on Englands Heroicall Episltes, see also Kristen Deiter, “Locating Lady Jane Grey” Philological Quarterly 89.4 (2010): 435-56.

23 This is especially true as regards the early letter exchanges between Rosamond and Henry II, and Matilda and King John. Hardin must leave out these poems in order to argue that “The general plan of the Heroical Epistles, at least from Mortimer and Isabel on, is to show divine Providence guiding England through a troublesome past into a glorious present under Elizabeth,” (48, emphasis mine).

24 Similarly, Edward IV’s letter to Jane Shore lacks such historical matter as “Battels betwitxt the Lancastrian Faction and him, or other Warlike Dangers” (p. 252). Drayton explains this choice by writing that such matter would not suit the occasion of a love letter, being “more like to Plautus boasting Souldier, then a Kingly Courtier” (p. 252).

25 On the proper subjects of early modern historiography, see Daniel Woolf, The Idea of History in Early Stuart England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), 3.

metaphors, and other tropes. While pairs of epistles are often separated by large temporal gaps that hinder any causal connection between events, these poems are connected by shared figures, which cause the imagined writers to unknowingly echo one another. The verse letters thus comment upon one another through the mobility of their poetic figures that, deployed in changing contexts, affect each other’s meanings across the gaps of time separating each letter exchange. Each pair of letters represents a particular historical moment that, but for these poetic echoes, remains isolated from the others. Only by reading for poetic figure, rather than historical action, can we produce a unified past out of Englands Heroicall Epistles. The work thus offers the clearest examples of the historical implications of Drayton’s literary-historical methods, overcoming the isolation of the past by poetic means.

Drayton’s literary history in this regard resembles the uses of history familiar to those educated in humanist reading practices. In addition to interpreting the causes and effects of past events, readers approached history writing with an eye to present application, searching for exemplars of moral or political virtue or using the course of past events in order to plan their own strategies for the present.26 At the same time, early modern writers on history increasingly expressed doubt about the usefulness of applying past events to present circumstances, arguing that events are too dependent on particular circumstances for the past to be any reliable guide to

26 In this discussion of practices for reading and using history, I draw from a number of studies by historians and literary scholars. The seminal sources on the topic include D.R. Woolf, The Idea of History and Reading History in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), esp. ch. 2; on exemplarity, Timothy Hampton, Writing from History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990); on reading history as preparation for action, Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton, “‘Studied for Action’: How Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy,” Past and Present 129 (1990): 30-78; on history and poetry as similar sources of political counsel, Blair Worden, “Historians and Poets,” in The Uses of History in Early Modern England, ed. Paulina Kewes (San Marino: Huntington Library, 2006): 69-90.

the future.27 Drayton touches on these debates through his approach to the shifting significance of poetic figures, for while shared tropes produce correspondences between distant historical moments, the change in context leads to a change in the figure’s meaning. Yet by exchanging poetic figures for historical persons or events as the unifying structure of history, Drayton’s model of literary history allows for a more dynamic relationship between temporally-distant moments. Changed circumstances, for Drayton, do not lead to an isolation from the past but rather enable one to open the past to a greater range of interpretations.28

The most prominent instance of these poetic echoes in Englands Heroicall Epistles occurs across the letters of Rosamond, Matilda, and Alice of Salisbury, three women pursued by adulterous princes whom their letters attempt to put off. Each of these women thinks of her own predicament in terms of historical exemplarity: Rosamond, the earliest of the three, worries about her own potential to become an example of sin, while Matilda and Alice both cite Rosamond’s example in their efforts to put off their pursuers. Rosamond’s own meditation on her future reputation begins with her encounter with an image of Lucrece, an example of virtuous womanhood. Writing from the fortress-prison where Henry II has hidden her from his queen, she relates how she was brought to shame for having assented to be his mistress when she and her maid passed a tapestry in which, “The silly Girle at length hapt to espie / Chast Lucrece Image, and desires to know, / What shee should be, her selfe that murd’red so?” (96-8). This encounter with a figure of exemplary chastity leads her, later in the poem, to lament her own future reputation:

27 D.R. Woolf, “From Hystories to the Historical,” in The Uses of History in Early Modern England, ed. Paulina Kewes (San Marino: Huntington Library, 2006: 31-68.

28 On the isolation from history as a literary topos in the renaissance, see Thomas M. Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), ch. 2.

Rose of the World, so doth import my Name, Shame of the World, my Life hath made the same. And to th’unchaste this Name shall given be, Of Rosamond, deriv’d from Sinne and Me. (129-32)

Rosamond’s premonition proves correct. In the next pair of epistles Matilda, writing from the convent to which she had fled King John’s advances, thinks of her predecessor:

Had Rosamond (a Recluse of our sort) Taken our Cloyster, left the wanton Court, Shadowing that Beautie with a holy Vale, Which she (alas) too loosely set to sale, She need not, like an ugly Minotaur, Have beene lock’d up from jealous Elenor. (165-70)

Alice of Salisbury, finally, cites both Matilda and Rosamond in her epistle to Edward, the Black

Prince, drawing out an analogy between their situations and her own, besieged by the wooing prince:

Let John and Henry, Edwards instance be, Matilda and faire Rosamond for me; Alike both woo’d, alike su’d to be wonne, Th’one by the Father, th’other by the Sonne: Henry obtayning, did our Weakenes wound, And layes the fault on wanton Rosamond; Matilda chaste, in life, and death all one, By her denyall, layes the fault on John: By these we prove, Men accessarie still, But Women onely Principals of Ill. (49-58)

Although Alice uses Matilda and Rosamond as contrasting examples, the structure of her double analogy renders their stories functionally equivalent. The first four lines establish the comparison with parallel clauses. After recounting the women’s different responses to the kings’ advances,

Alice draws a single conclusion from both examples: “By these we prove.”

Within Englands Heroicall Epistles, Rosamond thus becomes exactly what she had feared, a warning to future women to hold to their chastity and beware wooing princes. Their condemnation of her, though, is not the only available reading of the Heroicall Epistles.

Alongside these direct citations of one another, the letters also share a set of metaphors and images associating writing with sin. Rosamond opens her poem by turning her letter’s black ink into a representation of herself:

If yet thine Eyes (great Henry) may endure These tainted Lines, drawne with a Hand impure, (Which faine would blush, but Feare keeps Blushes backe, And therefore suted in despairing Blacke) … This scribbled Paper which I send to thee, If noted rightly, doth resemble mee: As this pure Ground, whereon these Letters stand, So pure was I, ere stayned by thy Hand; Ere I was blotted with this foule Offence, So cleere and spotlesse was mine Innocence: Now, like these Markes which taint this hatefull Scroule, Such the blacke sinnes which spot my leprous Soule. (1-19)

Matilda’s epistle makes the same metaphorical connection between black ink and sin in describing John’s letter: “Thy blamefull Lines bespotted so with Sin, / Mine Eyes would clense, ere they to read begin” (17-8). In Alice’s case, the figure appears not in her letter but in the letter sent by her pursuer, Edward the Black Prince. He repeats Rosamond’s conceit of the blushless ink, though now praising it as a better instrument of wooing than his own presence would be, for

“This cannot blush, although you doe refuse it” (9). With each repetition of the metaphor,

Drayton shifts its meaning from Rosamond’s self-accusation to Matilda’s charge against John’s writing, to Edward’s praise of the ink’s self-control.

Unlike their explicit citation of exemplars of sin and chastity, the imagined historical writers of these poems do not recognize the metaphor’s precedent in an earlier historical moment. Their ignorance, though, allows the black ink more easily to suggest interpretations the imagined letter writers would rather avoid. Most obviously, Edward’s praise of ink should strike readers as ironic, the amorous prince unaware of the figure’s sinful implications in a letter of

seduction.29 The relationship between Rosamond’s and Matilda’s letters is more complex.

Rosamond (who carries the conceit furthest) forcefully ties not just the appearance of writing, but the act of writing with sin. Henry has written upon her, and by writing in response, she presents herself as committing the same sort of act with her own “Markes which taint this hatefull Scroule[.]” Rosamond’s conceit reflects how her own writing is produced by Henry’s control of her, for had she not submitted to him, she would never have had occasion to write.

This broad attack on the very act of writing undercuts Matilda’s effort to describe only John’s lines as “bespotted so with Sin[.]” At the same time, Matilda’s desire that “Mine Eyes would clense” John’s letter can inform our reading of Rosamond’s request that Henry try to “endure /

These tainted Lines.” Matilda presents her own writing as an act that attempts to erase John’s letter to her; Rosamond presents her letter as a shameful thing that Henry cannot easily dismiss.

By giving Rosamond and Matilda this shared conceit, Drayton suggests that Matilda has more in common with Rosamond than her scornful summary of Rosamond’s story would allow.

Furthermore, Matilda’s own response to John’s letter may help the reader to see a more strident accusation of Henry within Rosamond’s complaint.

A similar effect can be found in Drayton’s blending of historical fact and poetic figure in his references to Rosamond’s prison, a labyrinth in which Henry hid her from Queen Ellinor.

Rosamond is the first in the text to see this building as a metaphor, writing to Henry “Well knew’st thou what a Monster I would be, / When thou didst build this Labyrinth for me, / Whose strange Meanders turning ev’ry way, / Be like the course wherein my Youth did stray” (87-90).

Drayton’s notes to the lines do more, though, than draw a comparison. After summarizing the

29 Raphael Lyne argues that Drayton’s characters similarly use mythological allusions as though unaware of the catastrophic implications of the stories and thus “unwittingly embrace disaster masked by the appearance of a hopeful story”; see Raphael Lyne, Ovid’s Changing Worlds (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 155.

tale of the Cretan Minotaur, he offers some reflections on the ancient structure that refuse to settle on whether or not it was factual:

Some have held it to have beene an Allegory of Mans Life: true it is, that the Comparison will hold; for what is liker to a Labyrinth, then the Maze of Life? But it is affirmed by Antiquitie, that there was indeed such a Building; though Dedalus being a name applied to the Workmans excellencie, make it suspected: for Dedalus is nothing else but, Ingenious, or Artificiall. Hereupon it is used among the ancient Poets, for any thing curiously wrought. (p. 139)30

What seems to be an assertion of the Labyrinth’s basis in historical fact is instead only a way to get from one metaphor to another, for the ancient authors’ affirmation “that there was indeed such a Building” itself makes use of an apparent poetic figure, Dedalus, as nothing more than an allegory for ingenuity. The passage works as a series of caveats—some think the Labyrinth is allegorical, but it is held as true by ancient authors, though this claim itself is “suspected”— casting greater doubt at each step. As a result, the allegorical interpretation is the most “true” thing about the Labyrinth.

When Matilda considers Rosamond’s labyrinth, then, the effect is similar to the other echoes between the two verse letters.

As noted earlier, Matilda redirects Rosamond’s metaphor of black ink as sin, applying it not to her own writing but to her pursuer’s. Likewise, in these lines she attempts to distance herself

30 Anne Prescott offers a related argument about John Selden’s notes printed in the first part of Drayton’s Poly-Olbion. These notes, she argues, do not simply delineate true history from Drayton’s poetical fictions. In fact, Selden himself frequently draws information from poetry, even while acknowledging its fictionality. See Anne Prescott, “Drayton’s Muse and Selden’s ‘Story’” Studies in Philology 87.1 (1990).

from her fallen predecessor who gave in to the temptations of court life rather than retreat to a convent. Yet as the ambiguous parenthetical “(a Recluse of our sort)” suggests, the distinction does not entirely hold. Like Rosamond, Matilda has been forced into confinement by her lascivious monarch. The convent may be a place of separation from the court, but so is the labyrinth. This doubleness in Matilda’s response to Rosamond, both identifying with and distancing herself from her, is compounded by the Labyrinth’s ambiguous historicity in

Drayton’s note. Read as an allegory for the “Maze of Life,” retreat to the order of a convent is a retreat from life in the world, the labyrinth imprisoning Rosamond. Read as a real-world structure, the labyrinth, like the convent, is a place of confinement to female society, threatened by the incursions of the king.

The repetition of poetic figures between these epistles create relationships between these women and the historical moments they occupy—relationships that would be impossible if

Drayton confined himself to recounting the causes and effects of events and actions from the past. More than this, Drayton’s construction of history out of poetic figuration offers a preferable history to what would be available if restricted to the narration of events. Resonances between the two letters’ poetic figures provide access to a more sympathetic reading of Rosamond than what Matilda explicitly offers. Through this contrast between direct, exemplary citation and a history built out of poetic figuration, Drayton makes the case for poetic form as a means of structuring and interpreting history.

Readers of Englands Heroicall Epistles in the 1590s would be prepared to look for the effects of Rosamond’s reputation thanks to Samuel Daniel’s poem, The Complaint of Rosamond, printed with the first edition of his own sonnet sequence, Delia, in 1592. Daniel’s poem begins with Rosamond approaching him, asking that he help her secure “lovers’ sighs, on earth” so that

her soul may cross to Elysium.31 Rosamond, Daniel writes, seeks his assistance in telling her story on the basis of his skill in love poetry. As such, she is intimately tied to love poetry and the sonnet form in particular, a fact which, as some have argued, undermines her efforts to secure a more virtuous reputation.32 Daniel’s Rosamond was highly popular, going through several editions in the 1590s and receiving commendations from the likes of Thomas Nashe, Francis

Meres, and even Drayton himself.33 Drayton even calls attention to the fact that Daniel has preceded him in writing of Rosamond by introducing the epistle (the first in the volume) as coming “after all the admired wits of this excellent age, which haue laboured in the sad complaints of faire and vnfortunate Rosamond.” Rosamond’s first context in Englands Heroicall

Epistles is thus the poetry of the 1590s, rather than the sources in the chronicles or other historical records, and the same could probably be said for most of Drayton’s readers in 1599.

Drayton’s combined Heroicall Epistles and Idea of 1599 is thus framed by allusion to some of the most fashionable poetry of the decade. Between Rosamond and Idea, though, Drayton goes back to the origins of the English sonnet, with the letter exchange between Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, and his love, Geraldine.34

31 Daniel, “Complaint of Rosamond,” line 14. All citations of Daniel’s works are to Selected Poetry and a Defense of Rhyme, Geoffrey Hiller and Peter Groves, eds. (Asheville: Pegasus Press, 1998).

32 Stephen Guy-Bray, “Rosamond’s Complaint,” Renaissance Studies 22.3 (2008): 338-50. Add other sources?

33 For Nashe’s comments in Pierce Pennilesse, see The Unfortunate Traveller and Other Works, J.B. Stearne, ed. (New York: Penguin, 1972), 90; for Meres, see Palladis Tamia (London, 1598), STC 17834: sig. Nn8v; for Drayton, see Matilda, lines 29-35.

34 The Surrey / Geraldine exchange is the penultimate pairing in Englands Heroicall Epistles. The final letter exchange, between Lady Jane Gray and Lord Guilford Dudley, follows the Surrey / Geraldine letters on the basis of chronology; however, this sequence has the additional effect of hindering an easy separation of more “historical” matter and more “poetic” matter that might occur were the Surrey / Geraldine letters immediately followed by the sonnets.

Origins of the English Sonnet

Drayton situates Surrey’s letter to Geraldine in the earl’s journey through Europe, after he had “determined to see that famous Italy, the source and Helicon of all excellent Arts” and especially “Florence, from whence the Geralds challenge their descent.”35 Surrey’s letter relates something of his travels, but for the most part the letter consists of his defense of English poetry against the supposed superiority of Italian verse and his defense of his own worthiness as a suitor for Geraldine, even though she traces her lineage to Italy, the font of all arts and beauty. In reply,

Geraldine writes a letter that, while modestly confessing her love for Surrey, nonetheless challenges the virtue of poetic language, rejects Surrey’s account of her family’s Italian origins, and satirizes travelers who take on fashionable foreign affectations. The two letters thus offer very different accounts of the value and power of poetry, as well as its relationship to history.

Even in their basic premise, Drayton’s Surrey / Geraldine poems have a problematic relationship to history, for Surrey, in fact, never travelled to Italy.36 Instead, Drayton takes his account of Surrey’s travels from Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), in which the narrator Jack Wilton journeys for a time with Surrey, even trading identities with the earl for a stretch.37 Indeed, Drayton’s use of Nashe extends well beyond the basic premise of Surrey’s

35 EHE 1599, sig. M8v. Hebel’s edition prints Drayton’s later verse argument to each epistle, rather than the prose arguments found in earlier editions.

36 William Sessions, Henry Howard, the Poet Earl of Surrey: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 130.

37 Surrey’s reputation as a reformer of English verse, an achievement attributed to his imitating Petrarch, had already led George Puttenham to imply that Surrey had been to Italy, writing in The Art of English Poesy that under Henry VIII there “sprung up a new company of courtly makers, of whom Sir Thomas Wyatt the elder and Henry, Earl of Surrey were the two chieftains, who, having traveled into Italy and there tasted the sweet and stately measures and style of the Italian poesy … they greatly polished our rude and homely manner of vulgar poesy”; see Puttenham, The Art of English Poesy, ed. Frank Whigham and Wayne A. Rebhorn (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007), 148. Nonetheless, the extent to which Drayton draws from Nashe demonstrates that The Unfortunate Traveller was a direct source.

being in Florence; nearly all the incidents he has Surrey report to Geraldine come directly from

The Unfortunate Traveller. These include major set-pieces such as the magician Agrippa producing for Surrey a vision of Geraldine, and the challenge Surrey issues in Florence to a joust in defense of Geraldine’s beauty, this latter episode an extended parody of the Iberian jousts in book two of Philip Sidney’s (new) Arcadia. These events, however, only provide a general context and a few allusions in Drayton’s poem, while the bulk of the letter consists of a discussion of poetry that has no basis in Nashe. Indeed, it might seem strange that Drayton apparently goes out of his way to draw on Nashe’s narrative when these events are mostly unnecessary to the poem’s literary arguments. By incorporating these particularly parodic episodes into Surrey’s letter, Drayton calls attention to his source material and thereby to his poem’s context in 1590s literary culture, much in the same way his allusion to Daniel’s

Complaint of Rosamond opened Englands Heroicall Epistles with recent poetry, rather than medieval history, as its primary context.38 The poem thereby challenges the claims to historical truth Drayton has made throughout the Heroicall Epistles, as the letter’s occasion is not only fictional but ostentatiously so.

Drayton elaborates the problem of making historical claims on a poetic basis with the notes to his Surrey poem, which rely almost exclusively on the real Surrey’s poetry. The first note is keyed to a reference to Florence in the poem’s opening line and explains that the city

“was the originall of the familie out of which this Geraldine did spring, as Ireland the place of her birth, which is intimated by these verses of the Earle of Surreys,” then quoting the opening of

Surrey’s sonnet on Geraldine:

38 For a more thorough reading of Nashe’s Unfortunate Traveller, see Alex Davis, Renaissance Historical Fiction (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2011), ch. 4.

From Tuscan came my Ladies worthy race, Faire Florence was sometime her ancient seate, The Westerne Isle, whose pleasant shore doth face Wilde Cambers Cliffes, did giue her lively heat.39

“Which Sonnet,” Drayton explains, “beeing altogether a description of his love, I do alledge in diverse places of this glosse, as proofes of what I write.”40 No other set of notes in Englands

Heroicall Epistles offers lyric poetry as a source of evidence, and by quoting this and other poems of Surrey’s under the “Notes of the Chronicle Historie,” Drayton grants the sonnet status as a historical document equal to that of the chronicles.

Yet with Geraldine’s response to Surrey, Drayton undermines the validity of the sonnet as a source of historical evidence. “My House from Florence I doe not pretend, / Nor from those

Geralds clayme I to descend” she writes, “Nor crave I other forraigne farre Allies, / Then

Windsor’s, or Fitz-Gerald’s Families” (69-70, 77-8). In the notes to Geraldine’s poem, Drayton then offers an alternative genealogy for the Fitzgeralds which runs counter to what he had claimed in the Surrey epistle and notes. He explains that the family’s “originall was English, though the Branches did spread themselves into distant Places and Names nothing consonant” (p.

293). Not only do Surrey’s and Geraldine’s epistles make contradictory claims, but Drayton— both as the actual writer of the poems and in his own person as annotator—endorses both versions of Geraldine’s lineage. Between the two poems, then, Drayton first asserts the truth- value of Surrey’s sonnet as a historical source, then rejects it as a fabrication. Geraldine’s response to Surrey implicitly warns readers to be wary of understanding history through love poetry.

39 Drayton cites this poem of Surrey’s in the notes on page 284 of the Hebel edition. For Surrey’s complete sonnet, see Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, Selected Poems, ed. Dennis Keene (New York: Routledge, 1985)

40 EHE 1599 sig. N3r.

The controversy regarding Geraldine’s ancestry also picks up on the discussion concerning the merits of English poetry that Drayton has Surrey and Geraldine carry on in their letters. The description of Geraldine’s family having “spread themselves into distant Places and

Names nothing consonant” ties their leaving England to a loss of acoustic harmony, a claim that contrasts with what Drayton writes in Surrey’s epistle. At the start of that poem, Surrey apologizes for writing from Italy to an Italian in English, asking

Yet let not Tuscan thinke I doe it wrong, That I from thence write in my Native Tongue, That in these harsh-tun’d Cadences I sing, Sitting so neere the Muses sacred Spring; But rather thinke it selfe adorn’d thereby, That England reades the prayse of Italy. Though to the Tuscans I the smoothnesse grant, Our Dialect no Majestie doth want. (5-12)

Surrey distinguishes English from Tuscan poetry by contrasting his language’s roughness from the other’s flowing musicality.41 Later in the epistle, however, he describes the use of his own poetry at court: “By Princes, my immortall Lines are sung, / My flowing Verses grac’d with ev’ry Tounge” (107-8). Surrey’s “flowing” poetry suggests that he has already absorbed some of the “smoothnesse” of Italian, the apparent reason for his travel, as Drayton writes in the argument, being “to see that famous Italy, the source and Helicon of all excellent Arts,” and to complete the transformation of his rough English into Italianate grace.

As she does with Surrey’s claims about her lineage, Geraldine counters Surrey’s desire to absorb Italian arts. Towards the end of the epistle, Drayton has her offering a satire against travelers who take on continental style in an effort to appear fashionable:

41 Complaints about the English language’s roughness were commonplace in the sixteenth century; see Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 22-3; Sean Keilen, Vulgar Eloquence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 16; and Catherine Nicholson, Uncommon Tongues (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), passim.

Some travell hence t’enrich their minds with skill, Leave heere their good, and bring home others ill: which seeme to like all Countries but their owne, Affecting most where they the least are knowne. Their leg, their thigh, their back, their neck their head, There form’d, there fetch’d, there found, there borrowed. In their attire, their jesture, and their gate, Fond in each one, in all Italionate. Italian, French, Dutch, Spanish altogether, Yet not all these, nor one entirely neither. So well in all deformity in fashon, Borrowing a limme of ev’ry severall Nation, And nothing more then England hold in scorne, So live as strangers whereas they were borne.42

Geraldine quickly withdraws, assuring Surrey that he, certainly, will not lose his Englishness. It is hard, though, not to apply the passage to Surrey’s travel, especially as shortly after these lines, she goes on to warn him against having too high of hopes in court, for “wealth and Poets never can agree. / Few live in Court that of their good have care” and “Some praise thy Worth (that they did never know,) / Onely because the better sort doe so, / Whose judgement never further doth extend, / Then it doth please the greatest to commend” (142-3, 145-8). Geraldine here shows that what Surrey represents as his poetry’s fashion at court, being “grac’d with ev’ry

Tounge,” is in fact built on unsteady ground. Moreover, Drayton has her suggest that what

Surrey presents as a journey that will improve his poetry’s musicality may only give him “all deformity in fashon.”

These intertwining arguments concerning lineage and poetics that Drayton stages between Surrey and Geraldine produce two contrasting histories of English poetry. In the former case, poetry originates in Italy, home of the Muses and of Surrey’s personal muse, Geraldine.

Poetry in England, at a great distance from this Helicon, has devolved and can only be reformed

42 EHE 1599 sig. N6r. I quote from the 1599 edition because the version in Drayton’s 1619 Poems, which is the basis of Hebel’s edition, differs substantially from 1599.

by Surrey’s journey back to the source. In the Geraldine letter, however, poetic merit might be found at home, and the drive to adopt Italianate forms is instead degenerate, mere affectation with no substance. Additionally, where Surrey presents his poetry as a return to ancient origins,

Geraldine characterizes such stylings as a novelty and fashionable import. Surrey’s poetry may have wide circulation, sung by princes, “ev’ry Tongue,” and even by “little Children” who

“when they learne to goe, / By painefull Mothers dadled to and fro, / Are taught my sugred

Numbers to rehearse, / And have their sweet Lips season’d with my Verse” (109-12).

Geraldine’s warning to court poets, however, implies that such popularity may be short lived.

Geraldine’s critical response to Surrey is especially pertinent to the status of the English sonnet at the end of the 1590s. Literary scholars have long seen the decade’s poetry as part of a national project of defining an English identity, and thanks to the profound influence of Philip

Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella, the sonnet became a particularly important form for writers seeking to establish a modern tradition of English verse.43 As Richard Helgerson rightly reminds us, however, using the sonnet to defend the merits of English verse is “to invent history,” for both sonnets and rhyme itself were relatively new to English poetics.44 By 1599, when Drayton adds the Geraldine letter to Englands Heroicall Epistles, the sonnet’s novelty was noticeably wearing thin, and a number of writers were associating the form with an affected, overwrought style. By challenging Surrey’s deference to Italy, Drayton’s Geraldine brings such criticism to bear on the very source of the English sonnet. Having Geraldine correct Surrey about her

43 Chapter one of Helgerson’s Forms of Nationhood has become the locus classicus of this argument, but see also Claire McEachern, The Poetics of English Nationhood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). For a recent and compelling revision of arguments concerning the development of English eloquence, see Catherine Nicholson, Uncommon Tongues. For a comparative examination of sixteenth-century Petrarchism and national identity in Europe, see William Kennedy, The Site of Petrarchism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003).

44 Helgerson, Forms of Nationshood 39.

lineage, moreover, lets Drayton turn the real Surrey’s sonnet into a false history that locates

Geraldine (a symbol of poetic inspiration) in Italy; by extension, the familiar story of English poetry’s inferiority—an accepted literary history in the sixteenth century—is likewise false.

Occasion and Convention in Astrophil and Stella

Englands Heroicall Epistles displays Drayton’s mode of literary history both as a structuring force—the letter exchanges are united by shared poetic figures, rather than through events and causality—and an interpretive mode, allowing readers to see, for example, a different relationship between Matilda and Rosamond than an account of their actions would suggest. The same is true of Idea, in which poetic forms and figures both shape the 1590s as a historical period in the sequence and facilitate Drayton’s interpretation of it. With the sonnets, however,

Drayton faces the additional challenge of historicizing the recent past—that is to say, of defining and interpreting the recent past as a distinct historical period, separate from the present. The letters in Englands Heroicall Epistles end before Elizabeth’s reign and before Drayton and most other prominent poets in the 1590s were born. With Idea though, he attempts to understand the

1590s as a historical era even before the decade is actually over. Drayton manages the feat in large measure thanks to the late Philip Sidney. Sidney influenced Drayton’s writing of literary history both through his own practice of linking poetic conventions to real-world events and by his reception in the 1590s.

At several points in Astrophil and Stella, Sidney refers, directly or obliquely, to actual biographical and political events as the occasions which prompt his persona Astrophil to write.

By intertwining the conventions of amorous poetry, particularly in the Petrarchan tradition with what we might call current events, Sidney both situates common forms and figures as part of the

present social world and suggests that present occasions may have at root conventional and traditional forms. Sidney’s sonnets thus develop in practice a theory of lyric occasion, trying to work out how amorous lyrics and real-world contexts affect one another—and effect one another, for Sidney suggests that a real-world occasion may be shaped by lyric conventions at least as much as a poem’s form is shaped by its social and political contexts. To call such poems

“occasional,” then, we must be prepared to consider a combination of poetic occasions with the cultural occasions historicist literary criticism has taught us to seek out.45 In Sidney, then,

Drayton would find an approach to intertwining “real-world” events, and poetic forms and figures. Where Sidney’s sonnets are set within an ongoing present set of circumstances, though,

Drayton uses similar approaches to set this relationship between world and poem in the past, developing more complex literary histories.

Sidney’s reconsideration of poetic occasion is joined by his comments, in Astrophil and

Stella and the Defense of Poesy, on the timeliness of the tropes and conventions of amorous poetry. Throughout Sidney’s writings runs a conflicted association of figuration with both novelty and tradition. During his brief discussion of “that lyrical kind of songs and sonnets” in the Defense of Poesy, he accuses contemporary writers for their deadening reuse of the moves from earlier amorous poetry, “so coldly they apply fiery speeches, as men that had rather read

45 My reading of Astrophil and Stella seeks to expand upon recent scholarship on “the occasional character of Renaissance lyric verse.” In his highly influential book, Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric, Arthur Marotti argues that most sixteenth and seventeenth century English lyrics should be understood as the ephemeral products of social life, particularly in the universities and at court. Until print became a major venue for poetry at the end of the sixteenth century, readers and writers generally held an “association of lyrics with specific social occasions: people perceived such pieces as ephemeral artifacts, rather than as enduring literary monuments to be preserved in print.” See Marotti, Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 3, 210. As I will argue however, Sidney’s sonnets don’t simply take their meaning from specific occasions. Instead, we can see him in these poems reflecting on practices of occasional poetry and playing against our expectations regarding it. The poems are thus reflections on the process by which occasional poetry is written as much as they are occasional poems.

lovers’ writings … than that in truth they feel those passions” (246).46 The poets’ language is all taken second- or third-hand, thereby precluding the expression of present passion. (Sidney’s mockery is underscored by the suggestion of that Petrarchan arch-cliche of freezing fire) Within

Astrophil and Stella, though, this criticism is sometimes reversed, with the bad poets’ figural language mocked as too new, rather than too old. So, in sonnet 3, Astrophil mocks other poets for “Ennobling new-found tropes with problems old” (6): the particular figures they use are novel, but the matter to which they are applied is thoroughly old hat.

As Heather Dubrow argues, this paradox of attacking the tropes and conventions of love poetry within an amorous sonnet sequence characterizes the Petrarchan tradition as a whole.47

Nonetheless, Sidney’s attacks on derivative poets make this (conventional) paradox far more specific by focusing on the temporal conditions of conventionality itself. In his analyses of love poetry, both in the Defense and Astrophil and Stella, Sidney describes weak poets in terms of their dependence on predecessors and of their obsession with elaborate poetic figures. Sonnet 15, for example, mocks those who seek Parnassus and “every flower, not sweet perhaps, which grows / Near thereabouts, into your poesy wring,” and a few lines later, “You that poor

Petrarch’s long-deceased woes / With new-born sighs and denizened wit do sing” (3-4, 7-8). His suspicion of Petrarchism’s foreign origins—newly “denizened” by Italianate and Frenchified

Englishmen—picks up from sonnet 3’s comparison of figures with foreign imports: “Or with strange similes enrich each line, / Of herbs or beasts, which Ind or Afric hold” (7-8). Such

“strange things,” Astrophil declares, “cost too dear for my poor sprites” (3.11). The ostentatious

46 Unless otherwise noted, quotations of Sidney are taken from The Major Works, ed. Katherine Duncan- Jones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).

47 Heather Dubrow, Echoes of Desire (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995). Dubrow’s book addresses this paradox throughout, but see especially, page 11, in which she provides the term “diacritical desire” to describe Petrarchan poetry as expressing a drive to make distinctions.

use of every poetic figure, associated with the opulence of foreign goods and degeneracy of the continent, lets Sidney characterize elaborate figuration in amorous poetry as a fashionable and suspect novelty, even while accounting for its long tradition in Italy and elsewhere.48

Sidney’s treatment of tropes is directed at the court, and particularly at courtly modes of speech and fashion.49 Nor is he alone in describing the simultaneous novelty and antiquity of figuration as a particularly courtly phenomenon. When George Puttenham, in his Art of English

Poesy, gives English translations to the Greek names in his catalogue of the figures of speech, he feels it necessary to explain this as a historical and linguistic necessity: the Greeks, coming first and having a sufficiently flexible language, were able

to invent any new name that they listed … So, among other things, did they to their figurative speeches devise certain names. The Latins came somewhat behind them in that point, and for want of convenient single words to express what the Greeks could do by cobbling many words together, they were fain to use the Greeks’ still, till after many years that the learned orators and good grammarians among the Romans … strained themselves to give the Greek words Latin names, and yet nothing so apt and fitty.50

In other words, the Greeks invented and named all the tropes and figures, which the Romans could only attempt to translate into their own language. Puttenham repeats this process for

English, inventing new names in order to denizen old tropes. Hence their novelty, which

Puttenham acknowledges, apologizing for having “devised a new and strange model of this

48 William Kennedy reads Astrophil and Stella along these lines, seeking to explain how “At a time when England’s elite was asserting the nation’s own religious and political sovereignty, its literary avant-garde turned to models of Petrarchism and other cultural forms associated with the decadence, corruption, and depravity of Catholic Europe”; Sidney’s sonnets, he argues, attempt to use Petrarchism’s “refined diction and elegant style … as models to facilitate and improve public discourse, [while] he nonetheless reproves its voluptuous luxurience”; see Kennedy, The Site of Petrarchism, 165, 174.

49 Sidney’s relationship to the court is the subject of a vast number of studies. Three significant takes on the problem from the past 25 years are Patricia Fumerton Cultural Aesthetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), ch. 3, on sonnets and miniature portraits; Kennedy, The Site of Petrarchism, ch. 8 on continental culture at court; Alison Scott, Selfish Gifts (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2006) on Shakespeare’s sonnets.

50 Puttenham, The Art of English Poesy, 241 [bk. 3 ch. 9]

art.”51 Yet he defends his new terms, writing that “I pray that the learned will bear with me and to think the strangeness thereof proceeds but of novelty and disacquaintance with our ears, which in process of time and by custom will frame very well.”52 Novelty, moreover, might be an advantage to his system, Puttenham “seeking by my novelties to satisfy not the school but the court, whereas, they know very well, all old things soon wax stale and loathsome, and the new devices are ever dainty and delicate.”53 Puttenham’s defenses run to cross-purposes, time both accommodating his neologisms to customary English use, and wearing their novelty thin and drawing them out of fashion at court. Moreover, the only things that change, for Puttenham, are the names of the figures, not the figures themselves. A new name provides a novel appearance to an ancient technique, further ornamenting the rhetorical ornament. Comparing these discussions of poetics at court with Drayton’s Geraldine poem in Englands Heroicall Epistles shows

Sidney’s influence on Drayton with particular clarity. Like Sidney, Drayton associates poetry, novelty, and foreignness with the fickle nature of courtly status and esteem. Sidney’s approach to

Petrarchan conventions and occasional verse is thus joined in their concern for the immediate present, that is to say, for what is happening now, in poetry and in politics. Because these poetic conventions work as a fashion, though, it is not a far stretch for Drayton to move from Sidney’s present to a historical past.

Sidney stages a conflict between political occasion and amorous poetry most clearly in

Astrophil and Stella 30, in which Astrophil describes his disengagement from court

51 Puttenham, 243.

52 Puttenham, 242.

53 Puttenham, 244.

conversations about the major political and military conflicts in Britain and on the continent.

Though he has presence of mind enough to reply, the thought of Stella dominates his mind:

Whether the Turkish new moon minded be To fill his horns this year on Christian coast; How Pole’s right king means, without leave of host, To warm with ill-made fire cold Muscovy; If French can yet three parts in one agree; What now the Dutch in their full diets boast; How Holland hearts, now so good towns be lost, Trust in the pleasing shade of Orange tree; How Ulster likes of that same golden bit Wherewith my father once made it half tame; If in the Scottish court be welt’ring yet; These questions busy wits to me do frame. I, cumbered with good manners, answer do, But know not how, for still I think of you.

Besides stating that Stella keeps him from caring about these major political crises, this poem also shows Astrophil using the sonnet’s characteristic tropes in order to reshape contemporary political events into distinctly Petrarchan terms. Starting with the first line, the Turkish “new moon” points to the sequence’s very next sonnet, “With how sad steps, O moon, thou climb’st the skies”; line four’s “warm with ill-made fire cold Muscovy” invokes the Ur-cliche of burning ice and freezing fire; questioning “How Holland hearts” suggests the common conceit of love as a siege upon the lover’s heart; turning William’s leadership of the Dutch into “the pleasing shade of Orange tree” transfers the war with Spain into a pastoral setting, something like Song 8’s “In a grove most rich of shade.” In short, sonnet 30 both announces Astrophil’s disengagement from his political world and recasts these political circumstances in the terms of amorous poetry.

The apparent conflict Astrophil faces between political and amorous demands on his attention has been read by many scholars as an expression of Sidney’s frustrated ambitions.

Instead of trying to advance himself by taking part in discussions of the most pressing events facing the English state, Astrophil is entirely concerned with advancing himself in Stella’s eyes.

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By doing so, Sidney makes Astrophil an ironic self-image, rejecting the ambitions he most holds, while also using love as a metaphor in which to express his own political frustrations.54 Many insightful readings of this sort have shown how a range of cultural conflicts impinged upon

Sidney’s aspirations and his transformation of them into amorous discourse.55 In my own approach to these poems, rather than trying to decode Sidney’s amorous, Petrarchan poetics for its political significance, I am interested in something like the reverse movement. That is to say,

Sidney is able to write his political frustrations into amorous discourse because he recognizes these political circumstances as already having an analogous structure to the conventions of

Petrarchan poetry.

In sonnet 30, this underlying similarity works out through the poem’s language of time.

Fittingly for a poem brimming with real-world topical references, sonnet 30 is the most self- evidently autobiographical poem in Astrophil and Stella, thanks to the reference to “my father” subduing the Irish. The allusions can be grounded even more specifically: as William Ringler demonstrates in his edition of Sidney’s poetry, the political troubles Sidney describes place the sonnet sometime in 1582.56 To Sidney’s readers in the 1590s, however, the poem might look far less specific. The Turkish threat, Dutch conflict with Spain, and the subjection of Ireland were as much present concerns in 1591—the year Astrophil and Stella was first printed—as in 1582. As a result, the poem’s deictic language with reference to time—“this year,” “yet,” “now”—insists

54 See esp. Marotti’s discussion of this poem in “Love Is Not Love,” ELH 29.2 (1982): 400-1.

55 Heather Dubrow, for example, describes Astrophil’s efforts at self-distinction as based in the problems of submission and dependence, especially for a male courtier under Elizabeth; see Echoes of Desire, 100-19. Christopher Warley analyzes Astrophil and Stella in terms of Sidney’s position between the nobility and the rising middle class—and between a social system based in inherited status and one based in achieved class—in chapter four of Sonnet Sequences and Social Distinction in Renaissance England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

56 William Ringler, ed., The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962) 470-1.

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upon its setting in a particular and passing moment, but does so with words that shift significance with context. The sonnet thus strikes one not so much for the specificity of its topical reference but for how its topical reference is both insistently specific and temporally mobile. Concern for

Turkish ambitions “this year,” for example, lets the opening lines point as well to the moment of a reading in the 1590s as to its (likely) composition in 1582.

All of this contrasts with the final address to Stella, “for still I think of you.” Still makes

Astrophil’s thoughts an enduring condition in contrast to the passing circumstances of now.

Furthermore, the stasis of still reinforces Astrophil’s inaction in the face of political crises.

Finally, Stella’s appearance in the last line shifts the poem from a conversation with “busy wits” to a later moment in which Astrophil recounts these past conversations to Stella. In short,

Astrophil interprets specific topical events through the same endlessly-repeatable Petrarchan tropes as his love. By the 1590s, though, the seemingly endless problems with Turkish, French,

Dutch, and Irish wars would make topical allusion to them likewise endlessly-repeatable and trope-like. This language also allows Sidney to sap the urgency from the questions of the “busy wits.” If “this year” can functionally be any year, then the insistence on action now is unwarranted, and the supposedly exigent occasions have more in common with Astrophil’s stillness.

Sidney’s treatment of Petrarchan convention throughout his writings grounds Astrophil’s disengagement from political conversation in sonnet 30 back within the court he has supposedly rejected. Even when distractedly reshaping topical political conversations into the language of love sonnets, he still remains perfectly within fashionable style of the court; though not speaking to the political matter of the present moment, he still speaks in the presently stylish courtly manner. And though the “still” language of love seems, for Astrophil, opposed to the urgent

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here-and-now, Sidney doesn’t allow such a clear divide: amorous convention are traditional and an of-the-moment novelty, topical circumstances are momentary and repeatable tropes. Sonnet

30 both situates Astrophil and Stella historically, in the context of the early 1580s, and makes that historical context something generic, an occasion for conventional love poetry much like any other.

Where in sonnet 30 Sidney places Astrophil’s amorous poetry in the context of a wide range of highly topical political circumstances, sonnet 41 is instead a direct response to a specific court occasion, one of the elaborate tilts performed for Queen Elizabeth in which Sidney took part:

Having this day my horse, my hand, my lance, Guided so well, that I obtained the prize, Both by the Judgment of the English eyes, And of some sent from that sweet enemy, France; Horsemen my skill in horsemanship advance; Towns-folk my strength; a daintier judge applies His praise to sleight, which from good use doth rise; Some lucky wits impute it but to chance; Others, because of both sides I do take My blood of them, who did excel in this, Think nature me a man of arms did make. How far they shoot awry! The true cause is, Stella looked on, and from her heavenly face Sent forth the beams, which made so fair my race.

The presence of the French suggests that the sonnet refers to an entertainment during the late stages of marriage negotiations between Elizabeth and the Duke of Alençon; editors have pointed particularly to the Triumph of the Four Foster Children of Desire, performed during

Whitsuntide, 1581, in which Sidney had a role and which he may have in part written.57 Rather

57 Katherine Duncan-Jones discusses several other likely contributors to the entertainment, but suggests that its overall themes and imagery “seems clearly to mark the ‘fore-conceit’ of the Triumph as his”; see Sir Philip Sidney: Courtier Poet (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 207. Alan Stewart is more hesitant to attribute the Triumph to Sidney, noting its significance as another in a series of his literary self-presentations but making no 103

than celebrating the occasion itself or commenting on its political significance in an especially contentious moment in Elizabeth’s reign, Sidney has Astrophil turn the performance into a tribute to Stella.58 Though judged worthy by the French, Astrophil does not attribute his success to a desire to overcome a political enemy and, furthermore, denies that it had anything to do with his lineage, his sovereign, or any other force shaping Sidney’s political fortunes or the tilt’s occasion. Instead, he explains the achievement by an amorous poetic conceit, Stella’s eye-beams.

Indeed, by prefacing the couplet with “The true cause is,” Sidney uses the sonnet’s form to give the poem the structure of a puzzle and solution. Neither politics nor lineage nor training can provide the correct interpretation of Astrophil’s performance; only Stella can unlock the puzzle.

With this move from political to amorous contexts, Sidney reverses the interpretive practices of both early modern viewers of jousts and modern readers of sonnets. Contemporary accounts of Sidney’s jousting frequently dwell on the complex “devices” used by him and other participants. A printed account of the Four Foster Children of Desire comments on the difficulty of interpreting the tilters’ accoutrements, “every one with his sundry invention, which, for that some of them be mystical and not known to many, I omit therefore for brevity’s sake to speak of any.”59 The joust then ends with a speech by one of the knights, offering their submission to

Elizabeth, but requesting that she “give some token to those knights … who by his device hath

claims to his authorship in a stronger sense. See Stewart, Philip Sidney: A Double Life (New York: St. Martins, 2000), 237.

58 Sidney’s notorious letter to Queen Elizabeth arguing against the marriage was one of the most widely- circulated manuscript texts of the English renaissance; see Woudhuysen, Sir Philip Sidney and the Circulation of Manuscripts (Oxford: Claredon Press, 1996), 385. Sidney’s conflict with the Queen becomes a centerpiece of Fulke Greville’s Dedication to Philip Sidney, see The Prose Works of Fulke Greville, ed. John Gouws (Oxford: Claredon Press, 1986), 194-6.

59 Henry Goldwell, A Declaration of the Triumph showed before the Queen’s Majesty and the French ambassadors on Whitsun Monday and Tuesday, included as Appendix A in Duncan-Jones, ed. Sir Philip Sidney: The Major Works, 304. The text is later incorporated into the 1587 edition of Holinshed’s Chronicles.

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come in best sort in this desirous strife.”60 Speaking specifically of Sidney’s skill in devising devices, Edmund Molyneux, his father’s secretary, writes in his memorial of Sidney that “as time wrought alteration in his deepe and noble conceipt, at justs, torneis, and other such roiall pastimes (for at all such disports he commonlie made one) he would bring in such a livelie gallant shew, so agreeable to everie point, which is required for the expressing of a perfect devise

(so rich was he in those inventions).”61 Though these descriptions emphasize the difficulty of interpreting the tilts, they agree in the importance of fitting device to occasion, in the first case,

Elizabeth rewarding the knight whose device was “in the best sort in this desirous strife,” in the second, Molyneux commenting on Sidney’s ability to create inventions adapted to the moment

(“as time wrought alteration”) and unified in meaning (“agreeable to everie point”). Modern scholarship on court pageantry moreover has shown how tilts such as Sidney took part in were interpretable as topical political allegories and how courtly performance of love and desire for

Elizabeth was recognized as a mode of veiled political negotiation and action.62 In transforming a tilt into a sonnet, however, Sidney inverts this line of reading. Love, according to sonnet 41, is not the puzzle but the answer, and the political circumstances that criticism has sought to uncover is exactly what fails to offer the right interpretation.

60 Ibid. 311.

61 Excerpted in Garrett, ed. Sidney: The Critical Heritage (New York: Routledge, 1996), 112-4.

62 See esp. Louis Montrose, “Celebration and Insinuation,” Renaissance Drama 8 (1977): 3-35; this article specifically addresses Sidney’s tilts and entertainments for Elizabeth. Classic New Historicist statements on amorous discourse at Elizabeth’s court include Montrose’s “‘Shaping Fantasies’” Representations 1.2 (1983): 61-94; and Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), ch. 4.

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The Decline and Fall of the Sonnet Sequence

In the final sonnet of Idea, the dedicatory poem to Sir Anthony Cooke, Drayton thanks his patron for enabling his poems to “come abroad now in these glorious times” (59.3).63 Far from a historicizing look into the past, the line seems to insist upon its belonging to the immediate present, marking its temporality with a punctual “now.” The problem, though, is that in 1599, the sonnet’s “now” is about five years old: the dedication to Cooke opened the earlier version of the sonnets, Ideas Mirrour, in 1594. The sonnet’s temporal situation is further complicated towards the end of the poem, where Drayton criticizes poets who are too derivative of continental Petrarchism, “A fault too common in this latter time” (59.12). These two moments—“these glorious times” and “this latter time”—form the beginning and end of

Drayton’s literary history of the sonnet fashion, rapid transition from the one to the other figuring the fashion’s brevity, over almost as soon as it began. Furthermore, the contrast between

“glorious” and “latter” offers a familiar historical structure of rise and fall. Drayton’s “latter time” is not just late, it is decadent.

In this final section of the chapter, I argue that Drayton actively produces this familiar account of the sonnet fashion’s passing in the late Elizabethan period. While several writers in the late 1590s satirized sonnets, Drayton is distinct in presenting the culture of sonnet writing as part of a past era. Nonetheless, his historicizing treatment of the sonnet draws from treatments of the form by earlier writers of that decade, as early as 1592 with Samuel Daniel’s Delia, the first sequence to follow Astrophil and Stella into print. Indeed, Daniel’s sonnets follow Sidney’s quite immediately after Astrophil and Stella, first appearing as a set of 27 sonnets at the end of the

63 Quotations of Idea are taken from EHE 1599. Citations will be given in the text by sonnet and line numbers.

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1591 Sidney quarto. In contrast to the 1590 Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, Sidney’s first printed work, Astrophil and Stella had been produced without the sanction of Sidney’s close circle or next of kin. As such, the publication caused a minor scandal—or at least Daniel acts as though it did.64 Thus, when an authorized edition of Delia appears in 1592, Daniel includes a prefatory letter of dedication and apology to Sidney’s sister, Mary, Countess of Pembroke, in which he explains that he had nothing to do with the sonnets’ coming into print in 1591: “I rather desired,” he writes, “to keep in the private passions of my youth from the multitude as things uttered to myself and consecrated to silence, yet seeing I was betrayed by the indiscretion of a greedy printer and had some of my secrets bewrayed to the world uncorrected, doubting the like of the rest, I am forced to publish that which I never meant.”65

By calling Delia an expression of “the private passions of my youth,” Daniel situates the sonnets firmly in the past, both in terms of his own lifetime and more broadly in the 1580s, when

Daniel was in his 20s and Sidney was writing his own sonnets, thereby mapping biographical and generic immaturity onto one another. These sonnets, he goes on to imply, ought to have stayed in the past, never meant to be read but simply to pass away into silence. In contrast, he makes Sidney’s sonnets a historical monument, “registered … in the annals of eternity.”66 They too are a part of the past, but in a form accessible and relevant in the present. Moreover, Daniel describes Pembroke’s patronage in terms of history, and particularly of antiquarianism: while

64 The first quarto was soon recalled, though a second edition by the same printer quickly followed, lacking the prose prefaces of the first edition, as well as the additional verse by Daniel and others that made up the last section of the volume. Joel Davis, in his recent monograph on Sidney’s print publication through the 1590s, has argued that we have no real evidence that the recall had anything to do with Pembroke or any of the Sidney coterie, as earlier critics claimed. See Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia and the Invention of English Literature, 80-5. What matters here, however, is simply that Daniel acts as though the publication outraged Pembroke.

65 Daniel, “To the Right Honorable the Lady Mary, Countess of Pembroke” 1-6.

66 Ibid, 10.

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Astrophil’s lines are “holy relics,” Daniel’s poetry will “remain the monuments of your

[Pembroke’s] honorable favor”; Pembroke’s patronage of arts is “hereditary to your house” and acts as protection against the forces of “oblivion and barbarism.”67 With the threat of barbarism,

Daniel implicitly offers a set of historical periods within which to position the sonnets: a golden age for Sidney, the fall and ruin of civilization for the rest of us. The barbarians are coming, he warns, and Pembroke can only preserve the remnants of a previous age as relics and monuments.68

Drayton’s own contrast of “these glorious times” and “this latter time” thus draws from discussions of the sonnet’s place in English literature and Sidney’s reception throughout the

1590s. Where Daniel, in the first post-Sidney sonnet sequence, treats his own works as belated with respect to Sidney, Drayton’s literary history of the sonnet fashion considers the poetry of the 1590s itself as part of the past. In doing so, Drayton constructs a literary history which allows him to reconceive the relationship between Sidney’s age and the sonnet fashion as connected, rather than disjunct. He does so, moreover, by means of poetic techniques, rather than overt thematics. Much as poetic figures could tie Rosamond and Matilda in Englands Heroicall

Epistles, despite their temporal and narrative differences, the sonnet fashion’s reuse of Sidneian forms and figures, in Drayton’s writing, enables him to reinterpret the 1590s as a part of Sidney’s legacy, rather than as a passing fad. Drayton is concerned, I argue, with the historical meaning of his own period and not only with his own fame.

67 Daniel, “To the Right Honorable” 8, 20, 15, 16. On antiquarianism and its position vis-a-vis historiography in early modern England, see Woolf, Idea of History 13-21.

68 Moreover, barbarity was a key term in the sixteenth century for thinking through the problem of English vernacular literature, for though classical Roman texts disparaged Britain as beyond the bounds of civilization. See, however, Catherine Nicholson’s perceptive argument that this periodized narrative was later contested by Daniel himself in the Defense of Rime a decade after Delia; see Nicholson, 157-62.

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Drayton’s debt to Sidney is most clearly expressed in the dedicatory poem addressed to

Cooke (Idea 59). The sonnet’s octave thanks Cooke for protecting these poems as they enter the world, “VVearing your name their gracious liuery” (59.8). In the sestet, Drayton describes the literary scene the sonnets are entering and asserts his own independent position within it. Where other sonnet writers are too derivative and too dependent on Continental models, Drayton declares that he will not “trafique further then this happy Clime, / Nor filch from Portes nor from

Petrarchs pen, / A fault too common in this latter time” (59.9-12). Instead, he steals a line from

Sidney for his closing couplet: “Diuine Sir Phillip, I auouch thy writ, / I am no Pickpurse of anothers wit” (59.13-4). The poem’s final line, taken from Astrophil and Stella 74, encapsulates

Drayton’s dependence on others in both poetic and material terms for his ability to write poetry.

In addition to the irony of quoting another poet in order to assert his own wit’s independence, he does so in the midst of a poem expressing gratitude to a patron.69 The monetary metaphors throughout the poem—trafique, Pickpurse—only underscore the inseparability of poetry and moneymaking for a career poet of Drayton’s station.70

The sestet to Idea 59 is only one of several passages in the sequence that represents the

1590s literary scene and the place of sonnets within that moment. Many of these passages do so through metaphors evoking aspects of the material text, such as sonnet 31’s rejoinder to

Drayton’s critics:

Think’st though my wit shall keepe the pack-horse way, That euery dudgen low inuention goes? Since Sonnets thus in bundles are imprest, And euery drudge doth dull our satiate eare,

69 Dubrow, Echoes of Desire, 70.

70 Warley reads Drayton’s citation of Sidney and his patronage sonnets as part of a larger conflict within the 1599 sequence (and the English sonnet more generally) between a system of inherited status and one of achieved class; see Sonnet Sequences and Social Distinction, 160-2.

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Think’st thou my loue, shall in those rags be drest That euery dowdie, euery trull doth weare? (31.7-12)

The opening lines present the poet’s work in manuscript as “some crooked Mimick” reads over

Drayton’s shoulder and “Turning my papers, asks what haue we here?” (31.1,3). But the poem soon moves on to print and the literary market, with sonnets packed up in bundles for distribution and sale. In yet another metaphoric turn, Drayton describes these mass-produced texts as “rags” in which he disdains to clothe his love. Bundles of sonnets like his own, he suggests, are ephemeral and disposable, quickly decaying back into the scraps of fabric their pages were originally made of.

Drayton’s use of Sidney in Idea 59, however, shows with particular clarity the historical dimension of his effort to constitute the sonnet fashion. More than just imitating or quoting

Sidney’s standards for literary invention, Drayton more specifically rehearses what he calls

Sidney’s “writ”: a term associated more with official papers or old documents than with lyric poetry. Moreover, this “writ” is something he will avouch, a legal term that refers to the citation of reliable precedent. Heather Dubrow has called our attention to the legal valences of “avouch” in her reading of the poem; I want to stress the word’s further temporal implications.71 To turn

Sidney’s poem into a “writ” that a poet might “avouch” is to situate Sidney definitively in the past, rendering his poetry part of that past’s written record.

The opposition of “glorious” and “latter” times also expresses the contrast between

Sidney’s moment and Drayton’s, as is visible in the contexts of the repeated line. In its original context, the line concludes a series of mythological references:

I never drank of Aganippe well, Nor ever did in shade of Tempe sit; And muses scorn with vulgar brains to dwell;

71 Dubrow, Echoes of Desire, 70.

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Poor layman I, for sacred rites unfit. Some do I hear of poet’s fury tell, But (God wot) wot not what they mean by it; And this I swear, by blackest brook of hell, I am no pick-purse of another’s wit. (74.1-8)72

For Sidney, “pick-purse” is a bathetic deflation of the conceit that poetry is a divine gift. In

Drayton, by contrast, the line is placed within a larger context of commercial transactions licit and illicit. Moreover, by moving the line from the sonnet’s octave to its couplet, Drayton turns what was an expression of a problem—Astrophil’s lack of inspiration—into a statement of the solution: Drayton’s wit and irony are what allow him to produce new poetry fit for his declining times. The repeated line’s shift in significance thus exemplifies Drayton’s literary history, as it both defines the historical structure of Idea—the difference in its use charting the changes in the sonnet’s status across the decade—and permits new interpretations of that history. Where treatments of Sidney by Daniel and others present a divine Sidney set apart from the present debased age, Drayton’s reuse of the “pick-purse” draws out Sidney’s own attitude of belatedness in Astrophil and Stella. In Idea 59, Drayton thus forges a connection between Sidney and his own 1590s moment that his own biography and Sidney’s death would deny.

Drayton’s divided description of the sonnet fashion’s literary moment is present throughout Idea, and is particularly notable in the contrast between sonnets 2 and 3 which, following the transitional sonnet bridging Englands Heroicall Epistles and Idea, open the sequence proper. Like the closing dedication to Sir Anthony Cooke, both these sonnets describe the 1590s literary scene and Drayton’s place within it. However, while sonnet 2 presents

72 Drayton’s theft from Sidney has not been well-regarded by twentieth-century critics. Thomas Roche describes it as mere “surface imitation,” while Anne Ferry writes that Drayton “appears not to have understood the crucial multiplicity of meanings in Sidney’s language”; see Roche, Petrarch and the English Sonnet Sequences (New York: AMS Press, 1989), 243 and Anne Ferry, The “Inward” Language (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 173.

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Drayton’s writing as perfectly in keeping with the times—“My active Muse is of the worlds right straine / That cannot long one fashion entertaine” (2.13-4)—sonnet 3 declares Drayton’s disregard for currently fashionable literary modes: “Like me that lust, my honest mery rimes /

Nor care for Criticke, nor regard the times” (3.13-4). As with sonnet 59, sonnet 3’s description of

“the times” makes it clear that Drayton is attempting to periodize his moment, to place it into a historical system in which the present time is culturally distinct from the past. And, as with the contrast between “glorious” and “latter” times in sonnet 59, Drayton’s two versions of his relationship to the current fashions threaten to collapse his being in and out of fashion into a single moment.

The couplet concluding sonnet 2 explains how this is possible by defining the contemporary moment in terms of its very brevity and susceptibility to fashion. At such a moment, being in requires never being the same, and being able to vary with the times. Indeed, the rest of that sonnet predicates Drayton’s being “of the worlds right straine” on his leaving the sonnet fashion behind:

Into these loues who but for passion looks, At this first sight, here let him lay them by, And seeke elsewhere in turning other books, VVhich better may his labour satisfie. No far-fetch’d sigh shall euer wound my brest, Loue from mine eye, a teare shall neuer wring, Nor in ah-mees my whining Sonets drest[.] (2.1-7)

This description of his volume implies that the “ah-mees” of “whining Sonets” are what a book- buyer browsing available wares in 1599 would be looking for. Yet it also suggests that Drayton’s work will be more fashionable, more up-to-date, by leaving belated sonnets conventions behind.

More generally, the book-buying situation the sonnet imagines is patently contrafactual. For one thing, as a poem occurring within gathering P of the book, sonnet 2 is rather unlikely to be what

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a browsing reader would find “At this first sight.” The promise that “No far-fetch’d sigh shall euer wound my brest, / Loue from mine eye a teare shall neuer wring” is disproved by the immediately facing poem in which we find “Redoubling sighs, the accents of my griefe” and

“liquid Christall teares” (4.12, 9). For all his emphasis on the material book as a commodity and as an object which can shape a reader’s practices, the actual book in hand disputes the sonnet’s claims.

Sonnet 3 takes a different approach, situating Drayton’s sonnets with regard not to a forward-moving fashion but to his predecessors. He begins by acknowledging the sheer number of sonneteers who have written in the past decade: “Many there be excelling in this kind, /

VVhose well-trick’d rimes with all inuention swell” (3.1-2). He then lists the most prominent

Elizabethan sonnet writers as possible favorites for his readers, some preferring “Sidney,

Constable, some Daniell” (3.4). After this deferential quatrain, however, the sonnet goes on to declare Drayton’s disregard for maintaining a unified voice or tradition as the “many” sonneteers apparently do: “My wanton verse,” he declares, “nere keeps one certaine stay, / But now at hand; then, seekes inuention far” (3.9-10). This line, in fact, demonstrates the very inconstancy it describes, for in just the previous sonnet Drayton had rejected “far-fetch’d sighs,” and, as we have already seen, the final sonnet claims he will never “trafique further then this happy Clime.”

We can make sense of these internal contradictions at least in part by reading them as Drayton’s effort to self-periodize. The tears and sighs that appear in sonnet 4, after having been rejected in sonnet 2, come from the 1594 Ideas Mirrour, as does the self-limitation to “this happy Clime.”

In presenting these rapid changes, and in tying them to the “times” and to his own earlier work,

Drayton sets up a history of the sonnet fashion that emphasizes its trajectory from popular style to cliche and the speed with which one turns into the other.

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As for the foreign “trafique” in sonnets, Drayton reorients his poems’ travels away from the Italianate dangers described by his Geraldine in the Heroicall Epistles, directing them instead outward into the rest of the British Isles. Sonnet 25 opens with a complaint that “The Southerne

Nations relish not our tongue,” and so instructs his verse, “bounded thus to Scotland get you forth” (25.2, 5). As others have shown, Drayton’s writings in the last five years of Elizabeth’s reign make several overtures to James VI of Scotland, arguing that such gestures demonstrate

Drayton’s concerns regarding Elizabeth’s approaching death and the succession crisis.73

Drayton’s turn to Scotland in sonnet 25, therefore, places his sonnets in the context of the waning

Tudor dynasty. The sonnet’s description of the Scottish north does more, though, than look into the political future. In the couplet, he declares, “when my flowing numbers they rehearse / Let

VVolues and Beares be charmed with my verse” (25.13-4). Drayton’s animal audience not only pushes Scotland beyond the bounds of civilization but casts him as Orpheus within one of poetry’s major origin myths.74

Furthermore, both Scotland and these animals echo parts of the Surrey poem in Englands

Heroicall Epistles—what we might consider Drayton’s origin myth for sonnets. In the verse letter Drayton has Surrey recall, as proof of his nobility, his involvement in a battle against the

Scots led by Henry VIII, at which “Scottish Bloud discoulour’d Floden field” (98). Drayton’s notes to the line, which comes in a passage on Surrey’s heraldic emblems, go on to cite Surrey’s

“Elegie which he writ of her [Geraldine], refusing to dance with him, which he seemeth to allegorize under a Lion and a Wolfe” (p. 285). Idea 25 creates a temporal palimpsest, with

Drayton looking forward (to his poetry’s future reputation and his nation’s likely future

73 Warley, 162-9; Brink, 38-64.

74 On the Orpheus myth as origin of poetry, see Nicholson, 1-11.

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monarch), and backward (to poetry’s ancient origins as a civilizing force and to the English sonnet’s origins in Surrey). Drayton thus builds the sonnet out of intertwining literary and political histories that combine origins and futures out of the same gestures. The sonnet both presents the limits of this period—between Surrey and Drayton, between Henry VIII’s battles with Scotland and James VI’s anticipated succession—and, by linking these limits with a single set of allusions and figures, implies that this period can best be described through a unified set of poetic techniques.

Towards the end of Idea, Drayton describes this circular temporality in which beginnings and endings meet. Sonnet 54 opens, “When first I ended, then I first began”; sonnet 58, to Lady

Anne Harington, states that his praise of her is frustrated by his admiration of her own wit, such that “where it should begin, it there is ended” (54.1, 58.12). Placing the opening poem of Ideas

Mirrour at the end of Idea completes this circle. As a literary history of the sonnet fashion, it is only fitting that Idea end by reincorporating Drayton’s old opening sonnet as an artifact of that history. The final sonnet—hence the final word of the 1599 Heriocall Epistles and Idea—ends, moreover, not with Drayton’s own verse but with a line from Sidney, whose sonnets initiated the fashion in the first place. Through this cyclical structure, Drayton’s literary history brings together an account of the sonnet’s fall from fashion with a chance to reinterpret the relationship between that late moment and the sonnet sequence’s origins with the heroic Sidney.

Drayton’s Idea presents sonnets as a passing fad that his own work can only resist through an ironic stance with respect to his moment’s literary culture. The poetry with which

Drayton crafts this literary history, however, also presents the ephemeral fashion as something more than a passing moment, disconnected from what came before or after. Drayton may express mostly scorn for his sonnet-mad contemporaries and their derivative poetry. Nonetheless, his

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literary history leaves open the hope that later readers will be able to reinvigorate the post-Sidney period of the 1590s by interpreting its reuse of old forms and figures (coldly applying well-worn fiery speeches, to paraphrase Sidney) as something better than a long decline from greatness.

* * *

Although Drayton has always held a minor place in literary histories of the English sonnet, we can better understand the 1590s sonnet fashion thanks to Idea. Bibliographic research does, certainly, reveal a substantial increase in the number of printed sonnet sequences following the appearance of Astrophil and Stella in 1591, as well as a drop-off in production starting in around 1596.75 Yet the exact timeline of the sonnet fashion is hard to pin down, to the extent that one critic describes the printing of Ideas Mirrour in 1594 as occurring both “at the height of the sonnetteering vogue” and at the point when the fashion had mostly run its course, such that the sonnets “were even by 1594 rather lacking in novelty.”76 Critical interpretations of Drayton’s sonnets repeatedly dwell on the fact that he continued to work in the form long past its fashion, his datedness a sign of nostalgia and political resistance to the Stuarts.77 As my reading of the

1599 Idea demonstrates, however, the end of the sonnet fashion does not simply determine the character of the later iterations of Drayton’s sequence. Instead, we can see Drayton in 1599 actively making the sonnet a thing of the past, declaring the fashion to be over and his own continued work in the form a stance of intentional belatedness. Our understanding of the sonnet

75 Thomas Roche attempts to catalogue all the English sonnet sequences printed up to 1650. His list does show a noticeable increase in production starting in 1592 (the first year to feature more than one sequence) and a decrease after 1596 (after which most of the texts are reprints or revised versions of earlier sequences). See Roche, appendix A. However, individual scholars are likely to reach different counts of sonnet sequences based on their own standards of definition.

76 Parker, Proportional Form, 206, 198.

77 Perry extends such readings of the sonnets to Drayton’s pastoral poetry; see Perry 67-73.

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fashion should not be determined by bibliographic data about circulation and print runs. What made the sonnet fashionable is the fact that writers like Drayton wrote about the form as though it were fashionable.

The fact that Drayton is, as I argue, the key figure in constituting the sonnet fashion should also lead us to reevaluate our methods of writing literary history. Drayton is and was a minor literary figure. Despite his “laureate ambitions” placing him in the category of Spenser or

Milton, he never really achieved that sort of recognition in his own day and is more of an “also- ran” for the status of national poet.78 For critics more interested in coterie writing, Drayton’s poems do not have a wide manuscript circulation; indeed, he claims to scorn manuscripts as a medium for poetry.79 Drayton had no major connections in high society. Unlike Spenser or

Daniel, Drayton could claim no actual connection to Philip Sidney or his circle. His effort to tie himself to Sidney is thus an act of will rather than a fact of history, much as he uses his sonnets to create the sonnet fashion as a fact of literary history. Drayton’s minor status thus makes him a better place to witness the construction of literary history out of poetic style.

78 Richard Helgerson, Self-Crowned Laureates (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 16, 48.

79 In “To My Most Dearly-Loved Friend Henry Reynolds.”

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Chapter 3

Ben Jonson and the History of the Epigram

Early in the Epigrams, one of two collections of verse first published in the 1616 folio

Works, Ben Jonson offers a number of self-justifications that imagine and indict bad reading. In epigram two, “To My Book,” for instance, Jonson envisions readers who might expect a book of epigrams to “be bold, licentious, full of gall, / Wormwood, and sulphur; sharp, and toothed withal,” whereas his own volume possesses a “wiser temper” (Epig 2.3-4, 11).1 In “To My Mere

English Censurer,” he imagines a reader to whom “my way in epigrams seems new,” when in fact “it is the old way and the true” (Epig. 18.1-2). Jonson criticizes his unnamed critic for preferring the work of “[John] Davies, and [John] Weever,” two writers whose epigrams first appeared in the 1590s (Epig. 18.4). In regarding Davies and Weever as representatives of the

“old” way, and considering Jonson’s epigrams to be inappropriately “new,” the Censurer traces the genre back only as far as his status as a “Mere English” reader allows him; unlike the

“Learned Critic” addressed in the previous epigram, the Censurer lacks access to the Greek and

Latin epigrams of classical antiquity that would let him recognize Jonson’s “way in epigrams” as a revival of the truly old style.

With these opening lines of “To My Mere English Censurer,” Jonson produces a literary- historical narrative in much the same way Christopher Marlowe and Michael Drayton do in the introductions to Tamburlaine and Idea: announcing his own stylistic difference from (near-

)contemporaries and contrasting old and new ways of writing in a genre. But whereas Drayton and Marlowe present themselves as the true innovators, with their rival poets lagging behind the

1 Unless otherwise noted, quotations from Jonson are taken from The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson, ed. David Bevington, Martin Butler, and Ian Donaldson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), and are cited by line number.

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times, Jonson aligns himself with the older modes, implicitly describing the work of his contemporaries as merely faddish, and placing his own work in a literary tradition that stretches back further than that of both the sonnet and the commercial theater. The shifting values of “old” and “new” in the poem establish three distinct moments in literary culture: the present (1616) when Jonson’s “way in epigrams” appears “new” to the Censurer; the recent past (1590s) when

Davies and Weever produced what the Censurer takes to be the old style; and the distant past

(classical antiquity) when the true “old way,” unknown by the Censurer and now revived by

Jonson, first thrived. Jonson thus invokes the literary history of the epigram in order to place his poetry in the proper temporal scale, taking the long view rather than the short.

Yet the remainder of the poem does not bear out Jonson’s claim of allegiance to an ancient tradition of epigrammatic style. Indeed, reading the “old way” only as a classicizing move would not fully distinguish Jonson from Weever, who includes a number of translations from Martial in his 1599 book of epigrams. Instead, rather than instructing the Censurer in the literary history of the epigram and extolling the Latin or Greek “old way,” Jonson asks the

Censurer to return to the habits of judgment he used just twenty years ago, and to “use thy faith as thou didst then, / When thou wert wont t’admire not censure men,” (Epig. 18.7-8). The problem with the Censurer is not just that he mistakes Davies and Weever’s “new” epigrams for

“old,” but that he has lost sight of the middle period of the recent past. The poem thus opens by calling attention to Jonson’s possession of superior literary-historical knowledge, but refuses to impart his greater understanding to the uninitiated reader. Instead of returning to the classics, “To

My Mere English Censurer” reaches only as far back as the 1590s.

This chapter takes its cue from the complexity of the literary-historical context articulated in “To My Mere English Censurer” in order to argue that Jonson uses the epigrammatic mode as

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a way of calibrating the scale of history down to the more precise terms of the recent past.

Jonson’s willingness to occupy the short scale of English literary history, even while invoking the long scale of a Classical tradition, is a particularly overt instance of the tension between long and short historical perspectives, a tension which, I argue, is characteristic of the Epigrams as a whole. Studies of Jonson’s sense of history have been divided between describing his admiration of history as that which outlasts mere transitory things and his denigration of history as itself subject to the vicissitudes of fortune; in either case, critics have agreed that Jonson prefers that which endures through time and requires virtuous individuals to transcend merely transitory concerns.2 I argue, however, that there is nothing “mere” about the merely transitory, not even for Jonson. “To My Mere English Censurer,” in fact, demonstrates Jonson’s willingness to periodize in terms of years and decades as well as ages and centuries. Rather than reading “To

My Mere English Censurer” as a clear statement of Jonson’s classicism, and specifically his indebtedness to the Roman epigrammatist Martial, this chapter instead insists on Jonson’s commitment to both long and short timescales, and on his efforts to make fine distinctions among recent moments, to imagine a history of the short duree.3

2 Studies of Jonson’s Roman plays tend to take the former position, as for example Bruce Boehrer, “The War on History in Jonson’s Sejanus,” Studia Neophilologica 66 (1994): 209-21 and Brian Patrick Chalk, “Jonson’s Textual Monument,” SEL 52, no. 2 (2012): 387-405. Those writing on Jonson’s poetry tend to take the latter point of view as does Achsah Guibbory, who writes that “Jonson typically moves away from the temporal world to that which is not subject to change, and thus … reveals an antihistorical impulse”; see The Map of Time (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 106. Richard Peterson similarly notes that “Jonson pays his subjects the high compliment of showing them exempted from this impersonal Tacitean rhythm of rise and fall”; see Imitation and Praise in the Poems of Ben Jonson, 2nd ed. (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2011), 43.

3 Major studies of Jonson’s classicism include Kathryn McEuen, Classical Influence upon the Tribe of Ben (New York: Octagon Books, 1968); Thomas Greene, The Light in Troy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), ch. 13; Katharine Eisaman Maus, Ben Jonson and the Roman Frame of Mind (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984); Victoria Moul, Jonson, Horace and the Classical Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); and Brian Vickers, “Ben Jonson’s Classicism Revisited,” Ben Jonson Journal 21, no. 2 (2014): 153-202.

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The small temporal scale in Jonson’s Epigrams complements the form’s investment in small matters, both literally (epigrams were historically inscribed on small objects) and figuratively (epigrams frequently dwell on minor social occasions, such as a traded insult or a dinner invitation). The characteristic brevity of epigrams further situates them as a thoroughly minor form in the genre-system of renaissance poetics; epigrams frequently come last in the catalogues of poetic kinds included in many sixteenth-century treatises on poetics, well behind epic and tragedy, the genres most closely associated with history-writing.4 In short, the epigram is uniquely unsuited to the long-scale understanding of history Jonson seems to demand at the start of “To My Mere English Censurer.” By writing about literary history in epigrams, Jonson thus commits himself to a history of small things—of minor occasions, and historical periods defined on the short scale—even as he works towards the long scale of the classical and enduring. As with the other texts I examine in this dissertation, the “literary history” produced in

Jonson’s Epigrams differs from more familiar versions of renaissance history writing as primarily concerned with wars, monarchs, and the affairs of state. Instead, Jonson’s Epigrams asks what it would look like if we thought of history as made up of gossip, of everyday social interactions, or private jokes among friends, rather than as narrating the grand deeds of great men.

4 See, for example, George Puttenham, The Art of English Poesy, ed. Frank Whigham and Wayne A. Rebhorn (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007), chs. 10-27. On the epigram’s minor status in the Classical period, see Victoria Rimell, Martial’s Rome: Empire and Ideology in the Epigram (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 6, and Kathryn J. Gutzwiller, Poetic Garlands: Hellenistic Epigrams in Context (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 2. I take the term “genre-system” from the first chapter of Rosalie Colie’s The Resources of Kin: Genre Theory in the Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973).

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The occasional nature of the epigram makes the form exemplary of the occasional nature of renaissance poetry more generally.5 As noted in chapter two, scholarship over the past twenty years has increasingly come to understand renaissance poetry as deeply embedded in micropolitics, specific social and political occasions, and topicality. In addition to illuminating the particular occasional contexts of both canonical and obscure poetry, much of this work has considered the mechanisms by which writers transform current events into verse, or how writers and readers signaled and uncovered the presence of disguised topical implications in texts.6

Where my consideration of Sidney in chapter two examined the relationship between poetic topoi and political topicality, this chapter looks at the poetic techniques by which Jonson signals the existence of broader topical contexts for his epigrams—yet often leaves that context obscure.

Epigrams, more than other forms of poetry, are especially dependent on their contexts; as Gideon

Nisbet puts it, “The brevity of each text makes concerns of context especially important to the interpreter—but that same brevity can appear to offer little guidance on what kinds of contexts to seek out or to disallow.”7 Jonson’s work in the epigram, therefore, approaches political topicality as a problem of poetics, not just a problem of historiography. Reading Jonson in context means attending to the poetic construction of that context. Though many of the epigrams are eminently occasional poems, Jonson’s poetic techniques—under which I would include his gathering and

5 Arthur Marotti, Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 2-10. On the occasional nature of the classical epigram, see William Fitzgerald, Martial: The World of the Epigram (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 3.

6 For examples, see Annabel Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), and Julie Crawford Mediatrix (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

7 Gideon Nisbet, Greek Epigram in the Roman Empire: Martial’s Forgotten Rivals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 1.

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publication of the Epigrams—orient the poems to future readers, thereby turning present occasions into historical events and circumstances.

This chapter thus reads Jonson’s Epigrams as a literary history not just because it invokes past epigrammatists such as Davies and Martial, but because it represents Jonson’s effort to use the poetics of the epigram as a mode of historiography. And just as Jonson expresses a multitude of time-scales, so he eschews a singular set of techniques in order to do so. This diversity is, in fact, a distinctive formal feature of epigram collections from the classical period on. As Julius

Caesar Scaliger writes in his Poetices libri septem (1561), “There are as many kinds of epigrams, as there are things.”8 In what follows, I trace three interrelated sets of poetic techniques that appear scattered throughout the Epigrams: figuration of epigrammatic inscription, allusion to earlier poets and representations of intertextuality, and topicality—or rather the topicality effect produced when poems aggressively position themselves within a specific contemporary moment.

These clusters of poetic techniques and effects are, moreover, intertwined with one another: the materiality of the epigram is foregrounded by its poetic tradition stretching back to antiquity, and the contextualizing work of topicality shares much with the inscriptive material contexts that epigrams continually reflect upon. Together, these techniques constitute a poetics invested in tensions between histories of the large and small scale.

Inscription, Conversation, and the Epigram

In order to understand the epigram’s vision of history, we must first look to the history of the epigram, which is characterized by a persistent tension between the monumental and the

8 “Epigrammatum autem genera tot sunt, quot rerum.” Julius Caesar Scaliger, Poetices Libri Septem, ed. Anton F. W. Sommer, facsimile ed. (Wien: Im Selbsverlag, 2005), 170. My translation.

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ephemeral. The term “epigram” derives from the Greek for “writing upon,” and was used to refer to a form of written, as opposed to oral poetry.9 The earliest epigrams, as found inscribed on buildings or collected in ancient anthologies, are thus characterized primarily by their status as inscription, rather than any particular tone or subject matter; the genre’s brevity derives less from a particularly pithy type of wit than from the spatial limitations of the writing surface.10 The later, largely satirical epigrams of the first century, most prominently those of the Roman poet

Martial, make new use of the genre’s distinctive brevity: as a short form, the epigram affords both simplicity (with room for a single, pointed observation) and complexity (through its compression of conceit and syntax). These features become key to the later epigram tradition by facilitating the display of sophisticated wit and brief, biting jokes. By the first century, then, the epigram genre included poems that represent themselves as inscription as well as those that instead foreground their participation in urbane social discourse, and especially the witty persona of the speaker. In practice, of course, the two are not so decisively split. Nonetheless, these two tendencies, which we might call inscriptive and conversational, can help us understand the fundamental tensions within the epigram genre.

As inscriptions, the earliest epigrams depend on their immediate material context for a large part of their meaning: they are written on a grave, or on an item given as a gift, or sent in a letter. Their materiality also allows inscriptive epigrams to endure for long periods of time; much of the value claimed by these epigrams rests in their ability to outlive their writers or subjects and communicate with posterity. Victoria Rimell describes epigrams as “hard, unshiftable

9 Hoyt H. Hudson, The Epigram in the English Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947), 8; Ann Baynes Coiro, Robert Herrick’s Hesperides and the Epigram Book Tradition (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 45; Gutzwiller, 1; Tatjana Schaefer, The Early Seventeenth-Century Epgiram in England, Germany, and Spain: A Comparative Study (Frankfurt am Main: P. Lang, 2004), 19.

10 Schäfer 23-4.

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inscriptions that triumph over corporeal mutability.”11 This is especially true of epitaphs, the sub- genre of epigrams marking graves, in which the longevity of the inscription is contrasted with the fleeting human life. Antiquarian work in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England attests to the success of such efforts to communicate across the expanse of time, as antiquaries like

Camden collected inscriptions of epigrams and epitaphs along with coins and other material remains of the distant past.12 The epigrammatist John Weever himself turned antiquary in the seventeenth century, writing a treatise on and compiling a collection of grave inscriptions,

Ancient Funerall Monuments (1631).13 In the preface to this work, Weever compares the longevity of graves and epigrams, observing that one “Varus Tribune of Rome hath beene and will be longer remembered by Martials Epigram, lib. 10. ep. 26 then euer hee could haue beene by any funerall monument.”14 Weever’s comment is part of his larger lament for the defacement and destruction of monumental graves throughout Great Britain, occasioned by neglect and, at times, iconoclastic purges. The disappearance of these monuments prompts Weever to transfer grave inscriptions into his book, understood as a more durable form of text than the actual inscription in stone.

Weever’s antiquarian work helps to illuminate the complex temporality imparted to the epigram by its inscriptive origins. On the one hand, the epigram’s originary status as carving in stone underwrites the genre’s ability to last through the ages and inhabit the long scale of history;

11 Rimell 51.

12 On antiquarianism as collecting, see Marjorie Swann, Curiosities and Texts: The Culture of Collecting in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), ch. 3.

13 For an overview of Weever’s antiquarian work, see Graham Parry, The Trophies of Time: English Antiquarians of the Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), ch. 7.

14 John Weever, Ancient Funerall Monuments (London, 1631), sig. B1v.

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on the other hand, by dwelling on their own materiality, epigrams call attention to their liability to erosion. As Juliet Fleming reminds us, writing practices associated with inscription, far from ensuring a text’s longevity, could strike early modern readers as particularly subject, to wear, covering, and other forms of erasure.15 The epigram’s inscriptive aspect can at once claim longevity and acknowledge its ultimately ephemeral nature. Rather than simply describing the material circumstances of some epigrams, the genre’s inscriptive usage shapes the way individual epigrams figure their temporality.

Take, for example, the following anonymous epitaph on Prince Henry:

Reader, wonder thinke it none Though I speake and am a stone. Here is shrinde caelestiall dust, And I keepe it but in trust. Should I not my Treasure tell, Wonder then you might as well, How this stone could choose but breake, If it had not learnt to speake. Hence amazd, and aske not mee, Whose these sacred ashes bee. Purposely it is conceald, For if that should be reveald, All that reade would by and by, Melt themselves to teares, and dy.16

The epitaph opens by emphasizing its inscriptive status via the figures of apostrophe and prosopopoeia: first, it invokes an anonymous reader who has encountered the poem, and second, it represents the poem as the first-person voice of the material surface upon which it is written (“I speak and am a stone”). This inscriptive situation is purely a matter of poetic figuration, as the poem is not actually carved on Prince Henry’s grave; as Camden notes when he includes the

15 Juliet Fleming, Graffiti and the Writing Arts of Early Modern England (London: Reaktion, 2001), 51-3?

16 William Camden, Remains Concerning Britain, ed. R. D. Dunn (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984), 354-5.

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epitaph in his Remains Concerning Britain, this is just one of “many excellent Epitaphs [that] were composed every where extant.”17 As Kathryn Gutzwiller puts it, with the displacement of an epigram from the site of its original inscription to a book, “The poem is no longer an

‘epigram’ in the original sense of an inscription but a representation of such an ‘epigram.’”18 The poem continues by playing on the supposed permanence which inscription lends to epigrams.

Where one might expect the hardness of the stone to ensure the permanence of the poem and the

Prince’s memory, it is in fact the poem itself that grants permanence to the stone, which otherwise could not “choose but breake.” And rather than ensuring the longevity of the prince’s name, the poem refuses to identify the grave, for if readers knew who was commemorated here, they would “Melt themselves to teares.”

In contrast to this inscriptive mode, the conversational mode of epigram is insistently of- the-moment, speaking to contemporaries about highly local and topical interests. The conversational epigram emerged in the early Hellenistic era, as readers and writers began collecting epigrams in books, granting the form a more “literary” status19. Martial’s epigram 2.67 can serve as an example:

Occurrins quocumque loco mihi, Postume, clamas Protinus et prima est haec tua vox “Quid agis?” hoc, si me decies una conveneris hora, dicis: habes puto tu, Postume, nil quod agas.

[In whatever place you meet me, Postumus, you immediately cry out—and this is your first remark—“How d’ye do?” This if you meet me ten times in a single hour you say. You have, I think, Postumus, nothing “to do.”]20

17 Camden 354.

18 Gutzwiller 7.

19 Gutzwiller 53.

20 Martial, Epigrams, trans. Walter C. A. Ker, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961). Further citations of Martial are to this edition.

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Like many conversational epigrams, this poem addresses a particular person and concerns the confrontation between his and the speaker’s personalities. As such, the poem redirects the central figures of the inscriptive epigram: apostrophe now addresses a specific person, rather than a generalized reader happening upon the poem, and prosopopoeia concerns the construction of the speaker’s persona, rather than the voice of the object written upon.21 The epigram’s topic is of minor importance, reduced to the speaker’s annoyance at a two-word phrase. It is, moreover, a poem about conversation, and itself a part of a conversation—a quip delivered in response to

Postumus’s greeting. The difficulty the speaker has in avoiding Postumus also helps to create a social context for the poem, evoking the dense urban environment of Rome, rather than a material context in stone or on paper.22

The confrontation of the epigram’s ephemeral and memorializing impulses can be seen in the opening epigram of Martial’s first book, which closes by declaring

cui, lector studiose, quod dedisti viventi decus atque sentienti rari post cineres habent poetae.

[To him, studious reader, while he lives and feels, you have given the glory that poets win but rarely after they are dust.]23

On the one hand, Martial evokes the eternizing power of poetry, its ability to preserve the poet’s life long after his death. In this respect, the poem alludes to the epigram’s inscriptive tendencies, and its consequent resistance to human ephemerality. On the other hand, by claiming poetic

21 On prosopopoeia as character-creating, see Gavin Alexander, “Prosopopoeia: The Speaking Figure,” in Renaissance Figures of Speech, ed. Sylvia Adamson, Gavin Alexander, and Katrin Ettenhuber (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 96-112.

22 Cf. Rimell, ch. 1.

23 Martial 1.1.4-6.

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glory (“decus”) in life rather than after death, Martial insists that he is a poet of his own moment, and this of-the-moment persona depends on his mastery of the occasional, conversational epigram. He describes his epigrams as libella, little books, the diminutive deflating any claims to high status. The epigram’s final line—“rari post cinares habent poetae”—reflects in epitaphic manner on the body’s return to dust, rather than envisioning any lasting memorial achievement.

This refusal of memorialization lends an irony to the poem’s opening line, “Hic est quem legis ille, [here is he whom you read],” which recalls the opening of many epitaphs, “hic iacet [here lies].” The opening of Martial’s epigrams suggests the oblivion of the grave, even as it celebrates his present, living fame: Martial is “toto notus in orbe [known throughout the whole world].”

Later Greek and Latin epigrammatists continued to blend inscriptive and conversational modes. In the post-classical period, however, the epigram is represented mostly through epitaphs and the moral or proverbial saying. This mode remained dominant through the middle ages and characterizes the renewed interest in the genre in the early Tudor period, first in the neo-Latin humanist circle around Thomas More, and later in English through the work of John Heywood

(c. 1497-c. 1580).24 Throughout the 1540s and 50s, Heywood composed hundreds of epigrams in couplets, typically consisting of a proverb in one line and a mildly satirical or bemused commentary in the other. Mary Thomas Crane has described this body of poetry as a counter- tradition to more aristocratic modes of amorous lyric, producing “a version of authorship that was collective instead of individualist, published instead of private, inscriptive instead of voice- centered, and aphoristic or epigrammatic instead of lyric or narrative.”25 In this account of Tudor

24 Oxford Dictionary of the Middle Ages, ed. Robert E. Bjork (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), q.v. “epigram.”

25 Mary Thomas Crane, Framing Authority (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 4.

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humanist poetry, Crane dissociates the epigram’s inscriptive character from the material circumstances of the text by using the term to account for the poetry’s basis in humanist writing practices of commonplacing and training in classical rhetoric. That is to say, she reminds us that

“inscriptivity” can be a rhetorical position, as much as a material fact.

Humanist scholars also link moral epigrams to the historical past via their interest in proverbs. Erasmus, the most important renaissance theorist of the proverb, defines the proverb as

“a saying useful in the conduct of life, with a certain degree of obscurity,” and elsewhere “a manner of speaking which wraps up in obscurity an obvious truth.”26 Erasmus explains this paradox as an effect of proverbs’ origins deep in the past. His extensive project in the Adagia of collecting proverbs from the classical corpus and providing commentary is thus a historiographic endeavor, seeking to explain the cultures of antiquity by making clear its proverbs that have since become obscure. Lawrence Manley goes so far as to describe the Adagia as “an archaeological adventure” and comments that “Unfolding the figure of a proverb was for

Erasmus … a matter of reconstructing cultural contexts, of tracing allusions that were in theory oral commonplaces before they were written mysteries.”27 As a supposed manifestation of the vox populi, proverbs provide access to a part of the past lost to narrative histories of major events. Moral epigrams take part in this historiographical project by interpreting and updating proverbs rendered “obscure” by the passage of time, as in the following by John Heywood:

Nought venter [venture] nought haue, and ventryng of much May haue a lyttle, ventryng is now such.28

26 Desiderius Erasmus, Adages, trans. Margaret Mann Phillips (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982), 3.

27 Lawrence Manley, “Proverbs, Epigrams, and Urbanity in Renaissance London,” English Literary Renaissance 15, no. 3 (1985): 251.

28 John Heywood, Two Hundred Epigrammes (London, 1555), sig. B2r

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This epigrammatic explication takes the timeless wisdom of the proverb and applies it to the present: “ventryng is now such.” Heywood’s epigram both registers and collapses the distance between the contemporary moment and the supposed time immemorial from which the proverb derives.29 Heywood’s epigram also illustrates the tension between the impersonal voice of the inscriptive epigram, which seems to speak from the distant past, and the witty persona conjured by the conversational epigram, which announces itself as the reader’s contemporary. Moreover, the proverb, as Crane argues, sits unstably between speech and writing.30 By combining the proverb’s traditional inscriptive voice with the epigrammatist’s witty persona, the moral epigram demonstrates how the inscriptive tendencies of the genre inform its sense of history and contemporaneity.

The 1590s brought a turn to sharper contemporary satire in the epigrams of Davies and

Weever, along with Sir John Harington, John Donne, and other writers associated with the Inns of Court. As many have demonstrated, poetry produced around the Inns of Court was particularly subject to rapid changes in fashion. Weever himself acknowledges this in the preface to his

Epigrammes in the Oldest Cut, and Newest Fashion (1599), in which he apologizes for the text coming out when it does, for “Epigramms are much like unto Almanacks serving especially for the yeare in which they are made”; his own poems, however, “being for one year pend, and in another printed: are past date before they come to the press.”31 Here, Weever characterizes the epigram as the preeminent genre of the short temporal scale. A similar comparison is made by the anonymous compiler of a manuscript copy of Sir John Davies’s epigrams, who headed the

29 Cf. Lawrence Manley, who writes that Heywood's epigrams anchor a free-floating commonplace by providing a “culturally-specific interpretation" (260).

30 Crane 92.

31 John Weever, Epigrammes in the Oldest Cut, and Newest Fashion (London, 1599), sig. A7r.

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poems “English Epigrammes much like Buckminsters Almanacke, serving for all England, but especially for the Meridian of the honorable cittye of London calculated by John Davis of Grayes

Inne gentlemen Ano 1594 in November.”32 As Adam Smyth notes, “almanacs became synonymous with transience” for early modern readers, as the annual editions were worn away with use, or simply discarded after the year was out.33 In their content as well, almanacs were bound to the current year, containing calendars, weather predictions, astrological charts, and other items pertaining specifically to the year specified in their titles.34 Weever’s opening quip plays upon the almanac’s status as ephemera by splitting his poems into their moment of composition (when “pend”) and that of their mass production (when “printed”). Literary fashions, he suggests, have begun to out-pace even the speed of print.

The English epigrams of the late 1590s emphasize the ephemeral side of the genre. Often, these poems turn to fashion in clothing as a metaphor for the rapid changes in literary fashions, as with the title of Weever’s epigram collection (Oldest Cut, and Newest Fashion). Weever also plays on the association of literary and sartorial fashions in several of his poems, including epigram seven, “De Epigr. Suis,” which finds the speaker in search of a printer when a friend recommends one who will “Print with a warrant both gainst wind & wether,” only for the speaker to find “I am gulld, he printeth onely hose.”35 While the clothier promises his fabrics’ prints will endure harsh conditions, no printer can keep Weever’s epigrams from wearing thin.

32 John Davies, The Poems of Sir John Davies, ed. Robert Krueger and Ruby Nesmer (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 377.

33 Adam Smyth, “Almanacs and Ideas of Popularity,” in The Elizabethan Top Ten: Defining Print Popularity in Early Modern England, ed. Andy Kesson and Emma Smith (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2013), 127.

34 Smyth, 125-7.

35 Weever, Epigrammes sig. B2v.

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The emphasis on printing in Weever reworks the epigram’s inscriptive tendency for the age of the printing press, and as such alters its temporality. Rather than ensuring the longevity of the text, print material, as conceived by Weever, is especially ephemeral, wearing out faster than fashionable clothing. Weever’s sense of the epigram’s rapid move from new to old, such that the two times are united in a single book, anticipates Jonson’s more complex handling of the genre’s temporality. Weever uses the language of fashion to satirize the fickle tastes of the reading public; for Jonson, this mercurial temporality becomes a means for thinking about the recent past as a historical moment.

As this literary-historical overview shows, the epigram’s origin in inscription has implications beyond the merely material. Inscription shapes the temporality of the epigram in both its enduring and ephemeral aspects, creating a tension between the power of inscription to preserve a text through time and the ephemerality of the social exchange. The overlap of material and social contexts, and of endurance and ephemerality in the inscriptive epigram is amply demonstrated in an epigram by John Davies of Hereford (printed 1611), written “Upon the making of one friends face on the bord where anothers was made; the first being put out with coulor, for the second thereon to bee painted.”36 The poem plays on graffiti as defacement, as the speaker’s “bad face defaces my good Friends” by being drawn on top of the friend’s portrait. The palimpsest then becomes an emblematic “Tomb,” with the speaker’s face en-grave-ing his friend’s and standing as his friend’s funeral. Davies concludes the poem, however, by imagining a future in which the top portrait has been eroded, so that “If Time consuming mine, as the

Monument, / T’will meete with his then, kept from wracke in mine” and “our Faces shall / Out- face Times brazen face.” Inscription here both preserves a past moment, the friends’ “earnest

36 John Davies of Hereford, The Scourge of Folly (London, 1611), sig. A8v.

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Passe-time,” and disappears as a result of the passage of time. The inscription in this poem marks a casual social interaction between friends, an event that is no more than a “Passe-time.” The poem thus reflects upon different scales and uses of time and the way an epigram can turn a professedly idle moment into an event of long duration. What the inscription marks, then, is an act of minor importance, even for the friends themselves, who seek only to entertain themselves for a short while. And this minor interpersonal exchange, the speaker claims, will remain legible after the long passage of time, even when eroded, for its eroded state still represents their friendship and this moment.

From Martial to Heywood to Weever, the inscriptive epigram demonstrates the confrontation of ephemerality and durability central to the genre as a whole. Davies of

Hereford’s poem demonstrates the way inscription can be understood to give lasting material form to a passing moment, as well as the way that material form is itself subject to decay.

Epigrams in the earliest instance are dependent on their material contexts, but that material to a large extent comes to stand in for a more ephemeral social context—the particular occasions and relationships that give rise to epigrams.

Inscription, History, and Context

In the work of the late-1590s epigrammatists, the epigram’s inscriptive aspect turns from a potential source of longevity to a sign of its ephemerality in a disposable print culture; in these same years, however, antiquarian writings were beginning to use epigrams as a source of historical evidence, attesting to the genre’s continued involvement in the long scale of history. In

The Advancement of Learning (1605), Francis Bacon describes antiquarian writing as “history

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defaced, or some remnants of history which have casually escaped the shipwrack of time.”37

Bacon’s description of antiquarianism combines the long timescale of ancient relics and the short timescale of the ephemeral into a vision of the past as both enduring and lost. The point of antiquarian work, in this vision, is to use that which remains from the past in order to reconstruct the lost contexts of these fragments, rebuilding the ship from the shipwreck. Though Bacon does not list epigrams among the sorts of fragments available for such study, other writers used the genre in just this way: John Speed cites epigrams in his Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine, as does Jonson’s tutor, William Camden, in his antiquarian chorography, Britania, as well as his

Remains Concerning Britain.38 Antiquarians like Camden sought to illuminate the past by collecting, arranging, and explaining old texts and the material remains of the distant past. The results are what Arthur Ferguson influentially describes as a form of social and cultural history, opposed to the centrally narrative works that make up the main body of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century history writing.39 Given their status as both text and object, epigrams offered early modern antiquarians a storehouse of useful information about the past.40

In their departure from narrative historiography, antiquarians struggled to find new forms through which to order their accounts of the past. Angus Vine comments on the difficulty antiquarians had in arranging their materials to satisfy the discipline’s encyclopedic impulses, writing that “Tudor antiquarian texts often appear uncontrolled, sprawling collections of

37 Francis Bacon, The Major Works, ed. Brian Vickers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 179.

38 E.g., John Speed, Theatre of the Empire of Great Britain (London, 1612), sig. B1v; William Camden, Britain, trans. Philemon Holland (London, 1612), sig. F1v.

39 Arthur Ferguson, Clio Unbound: Perception of the Social and Cultural Past in Renaissance England (Durham: Duke University Press, 1979), ch. 2.

40 Swann 109.

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fragments and remains that lack the singularity of purpose or focus properly to bridge the gap between past and present.”41 And yet miscellaneity is precisely what gives antiquarian texts their distinctively non-teleological means of bringing the past into the present. Rather than presenting a linear account of past events, these works are organized by other principles than temporal ones:

Britannia and John Stow’s Survey of London are arranged geographically, for example, while

Camden’s Remains Concerning Britain is arranged by type of material collected—epigrams, coins, names, etc. The discontinuous nature of antiquarian writing is thus both a result and a reflection of the fragmentary nature of antiquities themselves. The arrangement into descriptive categories rather than interpretive narratives shows the multiple contexts that surround any object or piece of writing. By representing the materials of the past as miscellaneous remains, antiquarian texts suggest the greater whole of which they should be a part. The antiquarian use of epigrams is important because it demonstrates the deep connection of epigram with both material and social contexts—material, in that epigrams were collected as actual artifacts from the past, and social, in that they were taken as a means to illuminate the culture of a past historical moment. Additionally, the antiquarian use of epigrams reflects the tension between endurance and ephemerality in the genre, as such poems both survive the long passage of time and remain as only fragments of the past.

Epigrams’ value as historical evidence, for both modern and early modern readers, inhere in both their inscriptive and conversational aspects. Martial’s epigrams, Victoria Rimell writes,

“are Flavian Rome, for us”—are, more than any other sort of text, the way we come to

41 Angus Vine, In Defiance of Time: Antiquarian Writing in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 19. Cf. Marjorie Swann, Curiosities and Texts: The Culture of Collecting in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), ch. 3.

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understand the lived world of the first-century city.42 This understanding is an illusion, for of course “there can be no transparent, unmediated access to the ‘real’ late first-century Rome”; what is remarkable about the epigram is its ability to produce this illusion by creating within the poetry a sense of the “space” of the ancient city.43 Like modern readers, early modern historians were alive to the sense that classical epigrams offer a window onto ancient Roman culture, citing epigrams as sources of historical evidence in various kinds of writing. Georgias Alexandrinus

Merula, Martial’s earliest renaissance editor (ca. 1470), writes that from Martial “we also gather

… extraordinary and useful knowledge of Roman times, which contributes a good deal to the understanding of a great many books over which one otherwise labors in vain.”44 Jonson himself cites Martial in Sejanus as a source for his description of, for example, Roman cosmetics.45 The importance of such cultural contexts for Martial is also attested by Mattaeus Raderius, who, in his bowdlerized edition of Martial (1599) writes that his notes necessarily include “some excursions both into the customs and rituals of the ancients.”46 These passages demonstrate the close relationship perceived between Martial and the cultural details of his historical period to renaissance readers. The epigrams were used as a means of elucidating the small-scale features of remote historical periods that escape or remain obscure in the more dominant narrative historiographies.

42 Rimell 20.

43 Rimell 20, 9. Cf. Fitzgerald 1-2

44 In Martial: The Classical Heritage, ed. J. P. Sullivan (New York: Garland, 1993), 78.

45 Ben Jonson, Sejanus, His Fall, ed. Philip J. Ayres (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), 115.

46 In Martial: The Classical Heritage 97.

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In addition to their inclusion of epigrams, antiquarian writings, by their non-narrative arrangement of materials, resemble the formal features of the epigram book. Collections and anthologies of epigrams, like antiquarian writings, pull together discontinuous materials under a provisional, rather than necessary arrangement. Epigrams, like the individual items collected by an antiquary, are presented in books as gathered from a number of other sites of inscription or moments of social interaction, rather than as parts of a unified whole. William Fitzgerald comments, “Since the epigram is the most closed of forms, the notion of a book of epigrams is paradoxical”47 because the epigram formally stands on its own. The epigram is a “closed” genre, what Babara Herrnstein Smith describes as “pre-eminently a teleological poem,” driven inexorably to the witty turn at its end.48 Within the epigram book, however, this teleology is reduced, surprisingly, by its continual repetition, which makes each closure a small part in a potentially endless and rearrangeable collection. Lawrence Manley argues that the epigram’s closure reflects “first, an impulse to define the indefinite or fix the elusive in formulas; and second, an impulse to be definitive by inscribing that formula literally or metaphorically ‘on’ the matter defined.”49 Gathered together, however, epigrams appear less definitive as a result of their multiplicity. Like antiquarians’ remains of the past, the epigram’s apparent solidity becomes only a part of a fragmented whole.

Epigrams served as historical evidence for early modern writers but presented that past as a lost context rather than a known story, only pieces remaining to be gathered and interpreted.

Antiquarian practices in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century offered a way of reading

47 William Fitzgerald, Martial: The World of the Epigram (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 2.

48 Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Poetic Closure (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 197.

49 Manley 260.

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these poems as both carriers of their cultural context and fragments broken off from that historical context. Jonson, I argue, brings together this mode of literary history and the fashion- consciousness of Davies, Weever, and others in order to develop an approach to the recent past as a historical period.

Epitaphic Inscription in Jonson

Where antiquarians used epigrams as evidence for constructing histories of the distant past, and 1590s satirists like Davies and Weever used the genre to comment on, and participate in, contemporary ephemeral fashions, Jonson’s own epigrams develop a history of small things: a history on the short timescale, concerned with minor matters, and composed in compact form.

Inscription figures into this history in several ways. Verse epistles like the two “To Lucy,

Countess of Bedford,” one of them “with Master Donne’s Satires,” record minor social events such as the exchanging of gifts. As verse letters, these poems are inscriptive in that they emphasize their proper context as a different material site—the manuscript papers accompanying gifts, rather than the printed pages of the folio Works—much as the epitaph “belongs” on a grave, rather than in a book. Transferring such poems into the collected Epigrams turns such verse into a lasting literary work that preserves the momentary exchange. Similarly, the opening epigram “To the Reader” casts the collection of poems it introduces as a separate object from the folio Works: addressing the reader “that tak’st my book in hand,” the epigram represents its material consubstantiation as a much slimmer volume than the heavy Works, a difficult book to hold open in a single hand (Epig. 1.1). The injunction, moreover, comes too far in the folio to properly advise the reader, who is unlikely to encounter the poem on first opening the Works. In

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all these cases, Jonson takes the epigram’s history of inscription and uses it rhetorically, suggesting that the poem’s proper material context is something other than the present book.

In other poems, for example “On Margaret Radcliffe,” Jonson evokes specifically epitaphic epigrams in order to contrast the firmness of inscription with the small length of a life.

The poem is an acrostic, the first letter of each line spelling out Ratcliffe’s name; as such, the poem emphasizes its written form, the arrangements of its letter on the page (or as imagined on the marble grave). At the same time, the poem presents itself as an address to the grave, opening with the injunction, “Marble, weep, for thou dost cover / A dead beauty underneath thee” (Epig.

40.1-2). This ambiguity between voice spoken to the grave and inscription written on the grave urges reflection on the poem’s media and its means of preserving the brief life. Ratcliffe is described as living a life “whose grief was out of fashion / In these times,” her biography distancing her from mere fashion. The epigram, in short, inscribes Margaret Ratcliffe epitaphically in order to separate her from the world of ephemeral history.

Many of the features of epigrams considered thus far—inscription, conversation, and a complex relationship to temporality and history—combine in Jonson’s “To Fine Lady Would-

Be.” Addressing a court lady, the poem’s speaker accuses her of taking abortifacients: “The world reputes you barren; but I know / Your ’pothecary and his drug says no” (Epig. 62.3-4).

The poem progresses through a litany of questions that suggest an ongoing conversation:

Is it the pain affrights? That’s soon forgot. Or your complexion's loss? You have a pot That can restore that. Will it hurt your feature? To make amends you’re thought a wholesome creature. What should the cause be? (Epig. 62.5-9)

In the closing lines, however, Jonson moves into the inscriptive mode, instructing Lady Would- be to inscribe her own epigram on her body: “Write, then, on thy womb / ‘Of the not born, yet

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buried, here’s the tomb’” (Epig. 62.11-2). This epitaphic final line takes to an extreme the epitaph’s usual temporal reflections on the brevity of life and the enduring memory offered by poetry. The closing epitaph also contrasts with the description of Lady Would-Be’s place in the ephemeral fashions and pleasures of the court: “you live at court,” Jonson writes, “And there’s both loss of time and loss of sport / In a great belly” (Epig. 62.9-11). The enjambment of these lines renders the “there” of line ten ambiguous, seeming at first to refer to the place of the court and only with line eleven referring to the circumstances of pregnancy. Epigrammatic compression allows Jonson to imply that not only would Lady Would-Be lose her chance for more court pleasures if absent due to pregnancy, but that the court is itself a space of “loss of time.” Inscription is also implicit in the poem’s heavy use of caesura, carving the lines in two, an image picked up in the final line’s imagined carving on Lady Would-Be’s womb—a caesarean section that produces not a child but an epitaph. In closing with this epitaph, Jonson inscribes one epigram within another, the epitaph within the satirical epigram. In this light, “To Fine Lady

Would-Be” becomes a metapoetic poem about the production of topical epigrams: rather than producing a child, Lady Would-Be’s “love to make” results in the present poem (Epig. 62.2).

In a recent article Colleen Rosenfeld has argued that the poem’s interest in “counter- factuals”—Lady Would-Be’s subjunctive name, her non-existent child, the speaker’s series of countered questions—derives from Jonson’s engagement with Philip Sidney’s Defense of

Poesy.50 Where Sidney grounds poetry’s superiority to history in its ability to deal in “what may be, and should be” rather than the historian’s “what is,” Jonson instead advances a poetry invested in the “indicative of the [real] social world.”51 According to Rosenfeld, then, “this poem

50 Colleen Ruth Rosenfeld, “Poetry and the Potential Mood,” Modern Philology 112, no. 2 (2014): 336-57.

51 Rosenfeld 355.

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suggests that the potential mood derives from a refusal that the epitaph casts as the annihilation of history.”52 “To Fine Lady Would-Be,” in this reading, stages a conflict between history and possibility as the basis of poetry, with Jonson standing on the side of historical reality, against

Sidney. As we have seen, the epigram was, indeed, associated with historical fact for early modern readers, providing evidence for antiquarian and other historiographic works. However, I would dispute Rosenfeld’s argument that the epigram’s historicity is fundamentally separate from, or opposed to Lady Would-Be’s “making” of counter-factuals. Instead, I would suggest that Jonson’s epitaph-within-the-epigram memorializes Lady Would-Be’s activities as themselves historical matters, albeit on the small scale. The entire epigram arises from the speaker’s access to privileged knowledge in the form of gossip: “I know, / Your pothecary and his drug, says no” (Epig. 62.3-4). By adducing a form of knowledge particularly tied to its social context, the poem places Lady Would-Be in that same context: precisely the kind of small-scale cultural context valued by early modern readers of Martial’s epigrams. The point of the poem, in short, is that Lady Would-Be’s acts, and the speaker’s knowledge of them, are far more than time-wasting activities of small importance. The poem’s closing epitaph entails a change both in voice, from the individual gossip to the impersonal grave, and in addressee, from Lady Would-

Be to the anonymous reader of the epitaph. This shift registers on a formal, poetic level the changes that take place when a present-oriented conversational epigram becomes an inscriptive artifact of the past. Jonson here imagines, I would argue, future readings of his satirical epigrams at a moment when his own present culture has become historical.

The epitaph “On My First Daughter” does similar work with voice, though in a straight, rather than satiric mode and with a highly personal, rather than social context. In addition to the

52 Rosenfeld 355.

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title’s possessive pronoun “My,” the epigram locates the daughter’s death at a particular moment in Jonson’s biography: she is “Mary, the daughter of [his] youth” (Epig. 22.2, my emphasis). As many have pointed out, the poem also hints at Jonson’s years as a Catholic in its reference to

“heaven’s queen, (whose name she bears)” (Epig. 22.7).53 Other features of the poem, however, resist these autobiographical hints by distancing the poem’s voice from Jonson’s own. The proper speaker of the poem, after all, is not Jonson but the grave itself, as indicated by the familiar opening phrase “Here lies” (Epig. 22.1). Unlike the majority of the Epigrams, “On My

First Daughter” is composed in tetrameter rather than pentameter couplets, almost entirely end- stopped, its formal restraint contrasting with the “loose” lamentation of “On My First Son”

(Epig. 45). Though companion pieces of a sort, these two poems employ different voices, the epitaph for his son more clearly autobiographical in its first-person voice and use of the name

“Ben Jonson” in line ten.54 Together, the autobiographical elements and restrained, de- personalized voice of “On My First Daughter” at once signal the importance of a highly particular moment on the scale of an individual’s life and allows that small-scale context to recede, replaced by the future-oriented voice of the epitaph. The contrast of small-scale life and large-scale future is also present in the detail that “At six months’ end she parted hence” and the expectation of bodily resurrection at the end-times in the declaration that “while that [her soul] severed doth remain / This grave partakes the fleshly birth” (Epig. 22.10-1).

The autobiographical aspect of “On My First Daughter” is further displaced by the closing line, “Which cover lightly, gentle earth,” which closely paraphrases Martial’s epigram

53 Robert S. Miola, “Ben Jonson, Catholic Poet,” Renaissance and Reformation 25, no. 4 (2001): 109.

54 Cf. Mary Thomas Crane, “’His Owne Style’: Voice and Writing in Jonson’s Poems,” Criticism 32, no. 1 (1990): 34-5.

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5.34, “nec illi, / terra, gravis fueris” [nor be thou heavy upon her, O earth] (Epig. 22.12). The farewell to his daughter, in other words, takes place in and through another’s words, another’s voice. Jonson thus subsumes himself into literary history, allowing an ancient text to speak to his present circumstances. Rather than simply bridging the temporal divide between Flavian Rome and Jacobean England, however, the allusion registers the changes that have taken place in the world since Martial’s time by its references to Christianity, particularly the doctrine of the resurrection: a belief that fundamentally changes the nature of the borrowed line by making the condition of lying under “earth” only temporary. Innumerable studies have elaborated on the way allusions like this in “On My First Daughter” simultaneously bridge the gap of time between periods and register that distance.55 Even so, Jonson’s allusive practices in the Epigrams have been misunderstood by critics who focus on the relationship he establishes with Martial and the

Classical authors.56 Instead, I wish to understand Jonson’s epigrammatic practice in terms of his more recent literary contexts, particularly the intertextual habits of Inns of Court poetry in the

1590s. These contexts reveal a Jonson engaged with, rather than dismissive of small-scale and ephemeral literary fashions.

Intertextuality, moreover, becomes a matter of poetic form for Jonson, significant not just for the specific allusions or shared content but for the different kinds of intertextual engagement he practices. Jonson is interested, that is, in the forms that intertextuality can take, such as quotation or imitation or parody. The epigram, as I have argued, is a form deeply dependent on its contexts, whether material or social. Jonson’s intertextual practices situate his poetry in both

55 Thomas Greene’s The Light in Troy comes immediately to mind. Also note studies of the relationship between particular authors, like Shakespeare and Ovid.

56 E.g. Moul.

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ancient and near-contemporary literary contexts (at once material and social). As a result, intertextuality in the Epigrams underlines the form’s dual temporality, both enduring and ephemeral.

Epigrammatic Allusion and Literary Fashion

Imitation and allusion have been practices of epigram writing since the rise to prominence of self-consciously “literary” epigrams in the Hellenistic period, during which time writers sought to establish a tradition for the genre as well as a present culture of literary competition.57 With the revival of literary epigrams in the sixteenth century, allusion again became central to the genre as writers established literary communities or coteries through intertextual relationships among their epigrams. Mary Thomas Crane has shown how early

Tudor humanists like Thomas More used epigram collections as ways to present themselves as part of a shared intellectual communities, “as members of a group engaged in a common project, informed by common texts.”58 More important to Jonson is the second burst of epigram writing in England between 1595 and 1600, mostly associated with members of the Inns of Court

“coteries” described by Arthur Marotti and others.59 Writers in these coteries produced highly intertextual works, frequently citing each other by name or appropriating lines and conceits from one another, often for derision.60 Though not resident at the Inns himself, Jonson began his

57 Alexander Sens, “One Thing Leads (Back) to Another: Allusion and the Invention of Tradition in Hellenistic Epigrams,” in Brill’s Companion to the Hellenistic Epigram, ed. Peter Bing and Jon Steffen Bruss (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 373-90.

58 Crane, Framing Authority 142.

59 Arthur Marotti, John Donne, Coterie Poet (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986);

60 Marotti, Manuscript, Print… 135-208.

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career as a writer in these same literary circles, ultimately dedicating the folio edition of Every

Man Out of His Humour to the Inns.61 In his early comedies especially, Jonson stages the circulation of literary texts and their use by fashionable and would-be fashionable young men.

This late-1590s context matters for our understanding of Jonson’s allusive practices not because the Epigrams date from these years, nor because he continually alludes to or reworks particular poems from the decade. Instead, I argue that the literary culture of the 1590s Inns of

Court provides Jonson with an alternative way of conceiving the temporality of allusion. Where classically-oriented studies of renaissance intertextuality necessarily bridge the distance between widely-separated periods of history, 1590s writers work on a much smaller scale, articulating the passage of time in terms of fashions, rather than periods. In alluding to one another’s poems, epigrammatists at the end of the sixteenth century do not simply treat one another as contemporaries. Instead, they register the passage of time between a poem’s original composition, later reading, and even later reuse or reworking. Specific quips and conceits from

1590s epigrams circulate at a pace characteristic of shifting fashions, going in and out of style, and allusions mark time by tracking these shifts. Even allusions to Martial in these years are as much about current fashions in poetry as about a deep classical tradition. John Donne thus writes an epigram on Matthew Rader’s 1599 sanitized edition of Martial: “Why this man gelded

Martiall I muse, / Except himself alone his tricks would use.”62 Donne’s quip depends on the current fashion for imitating Martial, contrasting poets’ literary imitation with Rader’s more active imitation of the poems. The pace of fashion, I argue, provides Jonson with a model for short-scale temporality taken up in the Epigrams.

61 O’Callaghan 35.

62 John Donne, The Complete English Poems, ed. C. A. Patrides (New York: Knopf, 1991).

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The link between fashion and epigrammatic poetry among poets of the 1590s can be seen in Sir John Davies’s “In Cripium,” which describes one Cripius who “still the newest fashion … doth get, / And with the time doth chaunge from that to this, / He weares a hat now of the flat crowne-blocke, / The treble ruffes, long cloake, and doublet french.”63 Davies apparently separates literary fashions from clothing, as the poem ends by observing, “Yet this new fangled youth, made for these times / Doth above all praise old George Gascoignes rimes.”64 The fashionable young man’s outdated literary tastes ultimately reasserts the link between clothing and poetry, however, by placing Gascoigne at the end of the catalogue of fashionable accoutrements that make up most of the poem. Cripius’s poor (or at least outdated) taste in poetry mars the picture he wishes to project and only differs from, say, wearing the wrong doublet in that his reading habits are not immediately visible. The speaker’s knowledge of whom

Cripius reads—and more importantly, whom Cripius should be reading—offers him a more exclusive access to fashion, but not one that differs greatly in kind from knowledge of good dress.

Davies’s epigram articulates a generational temporality, differentiating Gascoigne’s

1570s verse from his own 1590s poetry. The epigram might therefore confirm influential studies of the 1590s by Richard Helgerson and Heather Dubrow which argue for a significant sense of generational identity among writers in this decade.65 However, I would argue that the 1590s epigrams push us towards even finer distinctions between past and present by registering shifting tastes across the decade. As Dubrow herself argues, we must pay attention to the difference only

63 Davies, Poems p. 138.

64 Ibid.

65 Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 1; Heather Dubrow, Echoes of Desire (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 53.

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a few years might make to the status and meaning of any particular style or set of conventions.66

Cripius’s taste in clothes indicates such small-scale distinctions in describing how Cripius “with the time doth chaunge from that to this,” shifting clothes at a pace more rapid than the cycle of generations. When, in the final couplet, Davies declares Cripius “made for these times,” the poem contrasts the generational scale into which Cripius is born with the faster scale in which his clothes are made and discarded; “these times” are not just the 1590s, but the ephemeral present of fashion.

A particularly interesting case of both inter- and intra-generational intertextuality in

1590s epigrams surrounds a short poem of Davies’s, “In Heywoodum.” Though dead some twenty years by the 1590s, John Heywood remained a prominent poet throughout the century; his Works—including hundreds of epigrams upon proverbs—was printed in five editions between 1562 and 1598. Strikingly, when Davies presents himself triumphing over Heywood, he does so in similes that predict that his own popularity will quickly pass out of taste as readers return to the more weighty (in more than one sense) epigrams associated with humanist learning:

Heywood which did in Epigrams excell, Is now put down since my light Muse arose: As buckets are put down into a well, Or as a schoole-boy putteth down his hose.67

The two similes have widely contrasting tones, but both figure Heywood’s book as something set down only to be taken back up soon. In the first, readers set Heywood aside for a short time so that they may take more profit from him upon returning to his book, like a bucket filled with water; in the second, readers place him aside in order to briefly expel their vulgarity, figured as

66 Dubrow 206.

67 Davies 141.

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urine, that they may then return to their profitable lessons. The two similes are furthermore connected by the overarching conceit which suggests Davies has drunk Heywood as water only to urinate out his own epigrams. Davies’s poem resembles Jonson’s “To My Mere English

Censurer” in presenting his own poetry as a triumph over an earlier generation. The multivalent conceit, however, displays no aspirations to a lasting triumph. The poetic construction of the ephemeral in “In Heywoodum” depends primarily on the structure of its double simile, which produces the drinking metaphor by the move from well waters to urine but without explicitly connecting the two. By doubling the simile, Davies allows the first to linger only briefly before replacing it with another. The similes, moreover, reproduce the differences between Heywood’s proverbial epigrams (household similes) and Davies’s satirical ones (body humor). As a result, the poem dispatches with the sententious style in epigrams in a manner that undercuts

Heywood’s implied endurance as reading material, immediately displacing his mode with

Davies’s.

Davies’s poem on Heywood, in turn, elicited a poetical response by Thomas Bastard.

Bastard describes Davies’s triumph as short lived, not because Heywood will return, but because being put down is the ultimate fate of any epigrammatist:

Heywood goes down saith Davis, sikerly, And downe he goes, I can it not deny. But were I happy, did not fortune frowne Were I in heart, I would sing Davy downe.68

“In Heywoodum” is also quoted by Jonson, but with more temporally-complex results. In

Cynthia’s Revels, the foolish Asotus uses Davies’s final couplet in an attempt to contribute to a quipping conversation, only to be cut off before “hose” by Crites ordering him to “Trusse up

68 Thomas Bastard, Chestoleros, Seuen Bookes of Epigrames (London, 1598), sig. D2v.

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your simile” (Cyn. 5.4.212). Intertextual moments of this sort locate these writers as part of the same moment, even as they imagine Davies passing out of his current popularity. Whereas

Davies places Heywood in a past superseded (at least temporarily) by the present, Bastard simply corroborates Davies’s opinion of his own success: Heywood has “gone down” to Davies, and though Bastard may imagine a moment when he will himself displace Davies, his own epigram still occupies the same time as Davies’s. Jonson’s use of the poem, meanwhile, starts to suggest that the joke has become so well-known as to lose its punch; Crites knows what is coming well enough to offer a rejoinder to “hose” in his own “Trusse up,” even without the hose being explicitly mentioned. The recirculation of these literary jokes demonstrates how Inns of Court writings actively produce for themselves a literary currency that constructed present fashions in poetry as short-lived.

Jonson rarely alludes so explicitly to other English poets, and when he does, as in “To

My Mere English Censurer” or “To Lucy, Countess of Bedford, with Mr. Donne’s Satires,” it is to works of the 1590s rather than his own more immediate contemporaries. That Jonson eschews such allusions to his 1610s contemporaries tells us several important things. First, it encourages

Jonson’s readers to think in terms of differences between his style and others’ across time, even the short span separating the late Elizabethan period from the early Jacobean. Secondly, it suggests that Jonson’s practice of allusions has less to do with imitating or reworking particular poems and more to do with the reading practices Jonson associates with these texts. “To

Lucy…with Mr. Donne’s Satires” celebrates those who “Dare for these poems, yet, both ask and read / And like them too,” rather than praising Donne’s own abilities as a writer of satire (Epig.

94.12-3). Similarly, “To My Mere English Censurer” instructs its addressee to

use thy faith as thou didst then, When thou wert wont t’admire not censure men.

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Prithee believe still and not judge so fast: Thy faith is all the knowledge that thou hast. (Epig. 18.7-10)

Rather than alluding to some particular poem of Davies’s or Weever’s, Jonson directs his attentions to the practices of readerly judgment used by the Censurer. Jonson’s pejorative use of the language of religious controversy casts the Censurer as a sectarian, thereby associating him with poor readers of scripture and of religious controversy.

“On Poet-Ape” is typical of Jonson’s representations of intertextuality in the Epigrams, dealing mostly in plagiarism. The epigram mocks one who “would pick and glean” from “old plays” and “makes each man’s wit his own” (Epig. 56.5-6, 8). Confronted with his plagiarisms,

Poet-Ape scoffs,

Tut, such crimes The sluggish, gaping auditor devours; He marks not whose ’twas first: and after-times May judge it to be his, as well as ours. (Epig 56.9-12)

Already, the epigram acknowledges the possibility of future readers, in addition to current audiences for the play—this despite the current auditor “devour[ing]” the stolen fragments, an apt metaphor for the kind of literary consumption that tears a text in pieces. In the course of the poem, Jonson imagines the decay of poetic texts twice over, first “pick[ing] and glean[ing]” of texts by other poets and again by lay audiences, who will remember the bits and pieces without regard for their original composer. “On Poet-Ape” closes, however, with the speaker’s rebuttal:

“Fool, as if half-eyes will not know fleece / From locks of wool, or shreds from a whole piece”

(Epig. 56.13-4). Jonson asserts, in other words, that a fragmented text is distinguishable from one that retains its integrity. Even should the original context of any particular scrap be lost, it will, as a scrap, indicate its belonging to a lost context. The separate locks are manifestly remains of a once-integral fleece, even if that fleece is no longer extant.

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In what seems a deliberate irony, Jonson’s rebuke to the plagiarist is itself drawn from

Martial. In book one, epigram fifty-three, Martial accuses Fidentinus of stealing his poems:

“there is one page of yours, Fidentinus, in a book of mine—a page, too, stamped by the distinct likeness of its master—which convicts your poem of palpable theft.” According to Martial, the incongruity of style in the book Fidentinus wishes to pass off as his own betrays him; since

Fidentinus’s likeness is so manifest in his one page, the poems on that page stand apart from the rest of the book, which is properly Martial’s. Martial goes on to employ a textile metaphor that anticipates Jonson’s discussion of fleece and locks, writing “So, when set among them, a

Lingonian cowled cloak defiles with greasy wool the violet-purple robes of the town.” Where

Jonson’s epigram uses the fabrics to distinguish part from whole, Martial’s metaphor distinguishes on the basis of low versus expensive fabric. Nonetheless, the two poems share an interest in textile as a metaphor for text and as a means of describing the effects of plagiarism.

Jonson’s transformation of Martial’s conceit, significantly, drops the cultural specificity of “a

Lingonian cowled cloak” and “the violet-purple robes of the town,” effectively hiding the historical distance separating his poem from Martial’s conceit. The allusion to Martial incorporates classical material more fully into Jonson’s own poem, in contrast to his plagiarist’s use of scraps from Jonson’s plays. “On Poet-Ape” demonstrates Jonson’s particular practice of intertexuality in the Epigrams. Where classical allusions recede into the background, Jonson’s adaptation of more contemporary texts calls attention to the ways in which any textual “present” is fractured into moments of composition, reading, and reuse. Returning Jonson to the fashionable intertextuality of the 1590s helps to illuminate the stakes of intertextual allusion in the Epigrams. Rather than tracing back specific allusions or borrowed conceits, we should

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instead attend to the way that allusive practices themselves mark texts temporally on both short and long scales.

Topicality and the Topicality Effect

As with his literary allusions, Jonson’s topical allusions to real-world persons and events in the Epigrams delineate both short- and long-scale historical periods, while also reflecting on the form’s conflicted temporality. Topical passages in these poems set the epigrams in a specific historical moment while also prompting Jonson to reflect on the (un)timeliness of the epigrams’ references, which can seem simultaneously up-to- and out-of-date. Along with inscription and intertextuality, topicality becomes, for Jonson, a way of understanding of historical events and periods via poetic form. The epigram’s affordances, particularly its characteristic brevity, produce in the Epigrams a historiography on the small scale, marking the importance of minor events and the brevity of major ones.

In the prose dedication of the Epigrams to William, Earl of Pembroke, Jonson disclaims any topical significance or hidden references to specific individuals. In writing such satirical epigrams, he insists, “I had nothing in my conscience, to expressing of which I did need a cipher” (Epig. Ded.6-7). Jonson does not, however, entirely divorce his Epigrams from the book’s historical context. While his poems may not (he claims) be topical, the practice of topical reading is itself characteristic of his specific moment in time. Describing those who would find hidden personal attacks and other “ciphers” in the Epigrams, Jonson writes that he has “fallen into those times, wherein, for the likeness of vice, and facts, everyone thinks another’s ill deeds objected to him” (Epig. Ded.7-9). Topical readings of the Epigrams, in other words, are a product of a culture in which certain vices and deeds (“facts”) are so widespread that any attack

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on vice in general can be taken personally by any reader. The suspicion that a satiric epigram has a specific target, in other words is a symptom of “those times” in which Jonson is writing.

Jonson thus turns our attention from topicality to what I would describe as the topicality effect of epigrams. By this I mean the ways in which these poems suggest the presence of some hidden topical meaning, even while leaving that meaning obscure. Jonson’s assurance to Pembroke that

“I have avoided all particulars, as I have names” teases readers by implying that there are particulars to avoid (Epig. Ded.19). However, the “likeness of vice” further hampers specific topical readings by suggesting that any de-coded meaning could be as plausible as another. There is no point, Jonson implies, in finding particular topical references in the satirical epigrams because at the present moment the same description of vice could apply to any number of individuals.

Jonson’s perfection of the topicality effect can be seen in one of his shortest poems, epigram 10 “To My Lord Ignorant”:

Thou call’st me poet, as a term of shame: But I have my revenge made, in thy name. (Epig. 10)

As with many of the epigrams, the poem centers on the importance of titles—both titles of honor, and titles of poems—with Jonson’s identity as “poet” on the one hand, the addressee’s status as

“Lord” on the other. Jonson suggests that his status as poet in fact permits him the privilege of titling both his poem and his target, not by disclosing his identity but by dubbing him “Ignorant.”

Yet Jonson’s joke falls a little flat: simply calling some minor aristocrat “Ignorant” seems well beneath Jonson’s abilities as a satirist. This very weakness of wit, I would argue, urges readers to look for additional layers of signification in the poem. Epigram 10 occurs at a prominent early place in the Epigrams as the first satirical poem directed to a specific (if unnamed) individual after the laudatory epigram four, “To King James,” on the facing page. Epigram nine, moreover,

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is addressed “To All to Whom I Write” and advises them to not take offense at the order in which their “scattered names” appear (Epig. 9.1). Jonson’s reference to “names” in this epigram encourages us to hunt for some privy meaning in the “names” of the subsequent one; the joke would be much funnier, after all, if we could determine exactly why “Ignorant” is a particularly apt attack on Jonson’s target. Jonson’s refusal to name his target in a poem entirely about naming strongly suggests the existence of some information that could answer these questions, but refuses to offer it.

Crucial to this poem’s strategy, then, is not so much the identity of Lord Ignorant but

Jonson’s manner of implying that there is a real-world Lord Ignorant to identify. By leading us to think that the Lord could be identified, if only we had a little more information, the poem provides an especially clear instance of how the characteristic concision of epigrams might evoke their larger context—in this case, through excising this context. The impossibility of identifying Lord Ignorant implicitly situates the epigram in its particular time and place—the poem demands to be read with reference to a particular social or cultural milieu—while simultaneously making readers aware of how much of that historical context is liable to disappear with time. As I have suggested, by collecting the Epigrams as part of his Works Jonson presents the poems as displaced from their original sites and presented to posterity; the publication of the Epigrams thus orients the poems to future readers. The missing topical context of “To My Lord Ignorant” calls attention to the fact that it belongs in a historical moment that is not the reader’s own.

Jonson depicts readers who hunt for topical readings in “The New Cry,” an epigram which presents for sale “Ripe Statesmen ripe” and gives a description of such would-be political figures trading in what they think of as privy knowledge of state affairs (Epig. 92.3). These

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men’s habits of topical reading are indicated by the conjunction of classical and modern histories: “They carry in their pockets Tacitus, / And the gazetti, or Gallo-Belgicus” (Epig.

92.15-6). By 1616, Tacitus had for decades been a particularly charged classical author, read and used to make arguments for political action; even allusion to Tacitus became, by the end of

Elizabeth’s reign, enough to signal a factional alignment.69 By carrying Tacitus along with modern newsbooks, the statesmen depicted in “The New Cry” signal their interest in current events and politics. Jonson mocks these readers, however, for the very conventionality of their gesture; in signaling their political savvy through Tacitus, the statesmen demonstrate their dependence on now familiar, rather than privy codes. The conjunction of Tacitus’s Roman history with the news pamphlets furthermore offers an instance of the clash of long and short historical scales in the Epigrams. The conventional topicality of Tacitus again returns Jonson to a middle scale of the recent past: Jonson, that is, alludes to the recent history of Tacitus’s English reception, dating from the 1590s translation by Henry Savile, praised just three poems later in the

Epigrams.

The whole of “The New Cry” is concerned with timeliness, implicit from the governing conceit of the poem, the new cry of “Ripe Statesmen” joining the chorus of fruit sellers in

London: as ripe fruit, these young men are perfectly fit for their moment—and on the verge of rotting. Like several of the epigrams discussed above, Jonson ties these men’s timeliness to fashion: “Ripe are their ruffs, their cuffs, their beards, their gait” (Epig. 92.6). They are, moreover, “the almanacs / For twelve years yet to come,” Jonson invoking, again, a genre closely associated with the epigram (Epig. 92.13-4). Calling these men twelve-year almanacs

69 Annabel Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), 54-6.

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satirizes their foolishness in thinking they can predict that far ahead. Again, Jonson is playing with temporal scales, contrasting the statesmen’s desire to stay current with the ephemerality that such currency entails; as current almanacs, they cannot hope to be relevant twelve years into the future. Their desire to access secretive knowledge likewise betrays them when they “Keep a Star

Chamber sentence close, twelve days: / And whisper what a proclamation says” (Epig. 92.19-

20). The concern Jonson shows for such details of timing calls our attention to the speed at which the latest news and information travels, and the consequent rapid changes in its value. These would-be statesmen exist in a world of ephemeral fashions in clothes, reading material, and gossip; by the end of twelve days, the news of the latest Star Chamber proceedings would no longer be valuable. The concern with timing of information comes to the most particular point with Jonson’s declaration that “of the powder plot, they will talk yet” (Epig. 92.32). An event ten years old by 1616, the would-be statesmen’s continued conversation on the event shows how outdated they are, despite their efforts to stay current.

This accusation is ironic, however, for Jonson himself praises William, Lord Monteagle earlier in the Epigrams for his role in uncovering the Gunpowder Plot, calling him “saver of my country” (Epig. 60.10). One explanation for the difference is that the two poems represent themselves as belonging to two different moments. Jonson praises Monteagle, he would have us presume, shortly after the events of the Gunpowder Plot, when doing so was appropriate; the would-be statesmen of “The New Cry,” in contrast, continue to whisper about the plot ten years after it had been revealed and thwarted. (We might compare this satirical point with Henry

Fitzgeoffrey’s 1617 satire, which mocks those who would still publish writings about the powder plot, saying that they “from some Gowries practice, Powder plot, / Ot Tiburne Lectur’s all their

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substance got.”70) In any case, by parodying those who “yet” talk of the Gunpowder Plot, Jonson defines those events as past the date of their relevance, and thus establishes a temporal gap between appropriately relevant political writings and those hopelessly out of date. In reading over the Epigrams, readers are thus made to recognize the passage of time as something that separates the moment of ten years ago from the present moment.

“To William, Lord Monteagle” is itself interesting from the perspective of the historicity of epigrams. Even as he refers to Monteagle as “saver of my country,” Jonson provides no other details of the aristocrat’s achievement. Instead, the poem concerns the proper mode of commemorating that achievement:

Lo, what my country should have done (have raised An obelisk, or column to they name, Or, if she would but modestly have praised Thy fact, in brass or marble writ the same) I, that am glad of they great chance, here do! And proud, my work shall outlast common deeds, Durst think it great, and worthy wonder too, But thine, for which I do it, so much exceeds! My country’s parents I have many known; But saver of my country thee alone. (Epig. 60)

The poem opens by proposing that Monteagle’s deeds are worthy of truly monumental celebration, the construction of an obelisk or at the very least inscription on a memorial plaque.

In calling his own work a chance to do this same thing his country should have done, Jonson draws on the origins of the epigram genre in inscription on walls and other structures. In either of the cases—what the country should have done and what Jonson does do—the proper reward for

Monteagle is an epigram. However, the poem is only really about the absence of the epigram: not only has the country produced no inscription, but the call for an inscription is itself only

70 Henry Fitzgeffrey, Satyres: And Satyricall Epigrams with Certaine Obseruations at Black-Fryers (London, 1617), sig. A8r.

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expressed in a pair of parenthetical clauses. Moreover, Jonson only writes his epigram because the proper epigram does not, in fact, exist. To a certain degree, then, Jonson’s insistence that “my work shall outlast common deeds” is ironic, for a monumental structure like an obelisk seems more lasting than a poem on paper. Furthermore, the epigram we do get is hardly about

Monteagle’s deeds at all. Instead, we have a poem about how great Jonson is for having written a poem. Monteagle is the subject of only one line: “thine, for which I do it, so much exceeds!”

Even here, Jonson intervenes himself in the middle of the line, largely eliding Monteagle. As a result, the epigram does not so much memorialize the uncovering of the Gunpowder Plot as

Jonson’s own act of memorializing it. Without further contextual information, which Jonson does not provide, we are left only with a poem that preserves the fact that there was something of great moment, but does not grant us access to the knowledge of what that thing was. In this respect, it is similar to “To My Lord Ignorant,” which strongly implies that there is a person to identify behind the poem, but does not grant us enough information to discover who that person was. Once again offering an epigram with the context only faintly visible, Jonson’s topicality effect arrests literary history in the middle of its disappearance.

Conclusion: Inviting a Friend to Supper

Jonson, I have been arguing, uses the form of the epigram to articulate a history at the small scale: a history of small events, small items, and small timespans. Rather than a diachronic historical narrative of major events, the Epigrams present a synchronic cultural history of

Jonson’s own moment. In closing, I turn to one of Jonson’s most celebrated epigrams, “Inviting a

Friend to Supper.” Literary history, in the narrow sense of intertextuality and allusion, has long been central to critical commentary on this poem, as Jonson here translates and paraphrases

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several Martial epigrams. In Thomas Greene’s influential reading, Jonson’s poem belongs to the larger renaissance experience of alienation from classical antiquity; by incorporating Martial into his poem, Greene argues, Jonson models a receptivity to the classical past that recognizes both historical difference and imitative intimacy.71 Victoria Moul instead stresses Jonson’s blending of multiple inheritances from past writers, combining a Horatian ethos of liberty with close imitation of Martial’s more licentious poems.72 As I have argued throughout this dissertation, however, literary history inheres not only in direct allusion to past poems and styles but in the historiographic work accomplished by elements of poetic form. By examining Jonson’s use of inscriptivity, intertextuality, and topicality in “Inviting a Friend to Supper,” I demonstrate that

Jonson’s poem works by building historical contexts and relationships, while moving unsteadily between long and short scales of history.

Jonson’s use of Martial provides an entry point for this reading. Rather than translating a single poem, Jonson draws from several of Martial’s epigrams, borrowing small phrases or a couple of lines here and there. Two passages of close translation from Martial are used to phrase the speaker’s enticement of the addressee: “It is the fair acceptance, sir, creates / The entertainment perfect, not the cates” follows Martial’s “vinum tu facies bonum bibendo” [you will make the wine good by drinking it]; “I’ll lie, to make you come” translates Martial’s

“mentiar ut venias” (Epig. 101.7-8, 17).73 In both cases, Jonson disguises one thing as another, bad food made good by the guest, a lack of food hidden in the speaker’s lie. This also, of course, works on a metapoetic level, with Jonson hiding Martial’s poems within his own. Indeed, food

71 Thomas M. Greene, The Light in Troy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 278-86.

72 Victoria Moul, Jonson, Horace and the Classical Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 62.

73 Martial, 5.78.16, 9.52.13

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and literature overlap in the poem as Jonson’s speaker offers a selection of edibles (“An olive, capers, or some better salad”) and readings (“a piece of Virgil, Tacitus, / Livy or some better book”) in the same syntactic pattern (Epig. 101.10, 21-2). The analogy between food and text can be extended to Jonson’s work with Martial, breaking apart his poems, digesting them, and incorporating them into his own work.74

Jonson’s most interesting adaptation of Martial is found in the selection of specific foodstuffs to be consumed. Martial’s epigram 5.78, which lies behind the lists of foods in

“Inviting a Friend to Supper,” specifies goods from throughout the Roman empire: Cappadocian lettuce (Cappadocae), pears from Syria (pira quae ferunt Syrorum), Neapolitan chestnuts (quas docta Neapolis creavit / … castaneae), Picenean olives (oliuae / Piceni modo qual tulere rami)75.

Jonson’s own offerings are less geographically specific, aside from the “rich canary wine, /

Which is the Mermaid’s now, but shall be mine” (Epig. 101.29-30). Sack imported from the

Canary islands was a newly fashionable commodity around the turn of the seventeenth century, and combined with the highly local reference to a particular tavern, Jonson’s lines situate his invitation in the specific time and place of London around 1600.76 Similarly, the promised

“partridge, pheasant, woodcock” and “larks” are all English fowl for which, according to

Camden, there are no Latin equivalents.77 Both poets use these lists of foods to situate themselves within a particular time and place—that is to say, in a particular historical context.

74 Cf. Joseph Loewenstein, “The Jonsonian Corpulence; or, the Poet as Mouthpiece,” ELH 53, no. 3 (1986): 491-518.

75 Martial 5.78.4, 13-4, 19-20.

76 On the popularity of Canary wine, see Barbara Sebek, “Canary, Bristoles, Londres, Ingleses: English Traders in the Canaries in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” in A Companion to the Global Renaissance, ed. Jyotsna G. Singh (London: Blackwell, 2013), 279-93.

77 Robert Cummings, “Liberty and History in Jonson’s Invitation to Supper,” SEL 40, no. 1 (2000): 110.

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Jonson’s transformation of Martial’s poem thus registers the historical distance between their periods by pointing to apparently small points of difference: where wines are imported from, what sort of game bird is eaten. Though temporally on a large scale of centuries, history is marked by Jonson through pointedly small matters.

The poem’s depiction of textual circulation likewise grounds the poem in Jonson’s specific cultural moment. Jonson assures his addressee, “I’ll profess no verses to repeat: / To this, if aught appear, which I know not of, / That will the pastry, not my paper show of” (Epig.

101.24-6). The transference of texts from leftover sheets of Jonson’s unsold verse to the pastry represents the fragmentation of texts in the particular terms of both the foodstuffs and the technology of Jonson’s moment, as distinct from Martial’s.78 Here, the very mode by which inscription in print makes the text unstable at the same time embeds Jonson’s own material culture in the poem. The same is true for changes in book vending and circulation: Jonson would have found in Martial the materials to mentally reconstruct the book trade of Martial’s time, prompting him to consider his own culture’s practices in similar historicizing light.79

Jonson’s allusions to Martial are subtly historiographic; his citations of the Roman historians Tacitus and Livy are more overtly so. These references to Roman historians, Tacitus especially, are more than simply classicizing gestures. More specifically, they point Jonson’s readers to topicality and topical modes of reading. As we recall, Tacitus had current political significance in late Elizabethan and early Jacobean England, and Jonson seems to acknowledge that in his promise that of these authors “we’ll speak our minds, amidst our meat” (Epig. 101.23).

78 Loewenstein argues persuasively that these lines describe the actual transfer of ink from page to pastry as a result of the fats used, rather than just referring to the pastry’s wrapper; see “The Jonsonian Corpulence” 497.

79 On Jonson’s use of Martial in conceiving of the book trade, see Joseph Loewenstein, Ben Jonson and Possessive Authorship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 124-32.

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This conversational agenda is elaborated a little later by the promise that “we will have no Pooly, or Parrot by; / Nor shall our cups make any guilty men” (Epig. 101.36-7). As Joseph

Loewenstein has shown, these two figures suggest particular notable spies and Catholic-hunters of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods.80 The promise, therefore, is that the dining companions will be able to speak freely about potentially dangerous political matters, without fear of espionage. I would argue, therefore, that the chance to “speak our minds” about Tacitus and Livy represents the chance to apply these Roman historians to current topical issues. These passages are concerned with the way the short-scale history of present occasions and the long-scale history of ancient annals intersect with one another.

Jonson’s poem ends with the shortest timescale he offers in the Epigrams, promising his guest “liberty,” but only for “tonight” (Epig. 101.42). At the same time, his proposed readings belong to the large scale of history, the massive annals of the Roman historians. Indeed, the dinner party becomes, in the latter half of the poem, an occasion for thinking through the intersection of long and short scales of history: this reading brings the long-scale historiography of the text into the short-scale of the reading’s particular moment. Early modern writers and readers were, as Chloe Wheatley has shown, deeply concerned with the ways that historiographic practices reduced the past into more easily digestible form.81 In this case, the limited time of

“tonight” requires that the guests only consider “a piece” of one of the proposed historians, reducing the texts’ scale in order to make room for the party to “speak our minds.” By attending to reading practices, in addition to textual forms, Jonson considers the historiographic work done

80 Loewenstein, “Jonsonian” 499-501.

81 Chloe Wheatley, Epic, Epitome, and the Early Modern Historical Imagination (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011).

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in acts of reading and use, not just writing and narration. This poem moreover demonstrates

Jonson’s understanding of how any historiographic work is conditioned and constrained by the circumstances of its own historical moment, a problem he returns to throughout his career.

As an epigram, though, “Inviting a Friend to Supper” does more than demonstrate the constraints placed on historiography in early modern England: it offers an alternative, literary history of the period. If we focus on the large-scale histories of Tacitus and Livy, we might come away with the impression that only politically-momentous events count as matter for historiography. Indeed, Jonson’s insistence that “at our parting, we will be, as when / We innocently met” disclaims any historical significance for the dinner: it is precisely a non-event, producing no action and no effect on the wider world. Instead, Jonson imagines the enduring effects of the supper party in terms of lyric verse, not historiography. His guests, he promises, will have wine “Of which had Horace or Anacreon tasted, / Their lives, as do their lines, till now had lasted” (Epig. 101.31-2). In these lines, the poem seems to offer poetic immortality as an alternative to action on a historical scale. But the form of the epigram shifts the historical scale down to the level of a social invitation. Throughout the Epigrams, Jonson has articulated the historicity of gossip, compliment, and the minor occurrences of quotidian life, all of which accumulate small details into a vision of a historical moment, a “thick description” of a past cultural context. Jonson’s promise to read history, not to make it, is belied by the literary history of the form in which he works.

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Chapter 4

George Herbert and Literary History

George Herbert concludes The Temple (1633) with “The Church Militant,” a long poem narrating the progress of the true Church, followed closely by Sin, from antediluvian times to the eschatological future. Over the course of the poem, the Church gradually moves westward, from the near east to America. Sin, however, comes close at the Church’s heels, undoing the work the

Church has done at each stage of its journey. “The Church Militant” is Herbert’s one overtly historiographic poem, but within it he contains not only the entirety of human history but several contrasting models of historical change. As Robert Appelbaum puts it, “Herbert in effect combines all three basic models of history available during the early modern period, seeing it as at once cyclical, progressive, and degenerative.”1 “The history of the world,” he continues,

“repeats itself; but it also progresses toward a culminating goal; and in both repeating itself and progressing it ultimately degenerates, being smothered by sin and declining toward annihilation.”2 Herbert is not alone among early modern writers in combining, or at least moving freely between different models of history.3 Nonetheless, “The Church Militant” stands out for its poetic handling of these intertwined temporalities. Herbert’s rhyming couplets, for example,

1 Robert Appelbaum, “Tip-Toeing to the Apocalypse: Herbert, Milton, and the Modern Sense of Time,” George Herbert Journal 19, no. 1 (1995): 33-4. These three models of history are defined as such in Achsah Guibbory, The Map of Time: Seventeenth-Century English Literature and Ideas of Pattern in History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), ch. 1.

2 Appelbaum 33-4.

3 Rather than producing a conflict over the “true” structure of history, early modern writers and readers turned to the different models as they suited their purposes in any particular text; see D. R. Woolf, The Idea of History in Early Stuart England: Erudition, Ideology, and the ‘Light of Truth’ from the Accession of James I to the Civil War (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), 5

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both produce brief recursive patterns suggesting cyclical time, and push the poem forward with their steady beat.

Poetic form, that is to say, not only reflects various models of historical change; it works by offering multiple temporal readings at once. The refrain, for instance changes contextually, the same words—“How deare to me, O God thy counsels are! / Who may with thee compare?”— celebrating the Church’s spread in the first two instances, but accepting as God’s will Sin’s temporary triumphs in the last three.4 Where formally the refrain promises repetition and continuity, this constancy in the speaker works by setting him apart from the vicissitudes of history. Early in the poem, the refrain can celebrate how “Such power hath mightie Baptisme to produce / For things misshapen, things of hightest use. / How deare to me, O God, thy counsels are!” (45-7). Later, the same words lament the lapse of Christianity in Greece and Egypt, which

“are given over, for their curious arts, / To such Mahometan stupidities, / As the old heathen would deem prodigies. / How dear to me, O God, thy counsels are!” (152-5). Repetition thus establishes an unchanging position for the speaker, directly opposed to the historical change that the poem narrates. And yet by breaking the poem into five movements, the refrain builds the history it recounts into periods. In the poem’s eschatological context, this periodization recalls the work of church historians like John Foxe, who defined historical time in a way that mapped to the seven seals of Revelation onto periods of ecclesiastical history.5 In this respect, the refrain sets the speaker in a position standing apart from the flow of history and able to make sense of its shape from this outside perspective. The complex function of the refrain as a formal technique—

4 Unless otherwise noted, all quotations of George Herbert’s work, along with the preface to The Temple, are taken from The English Poems of George Herbert, ed. Helen Wilcox (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), and are cited by line number.

5 Avihu Zakai, “Reformation, History, and Eschatology in English Protestantism,” History and Theory 26 no. 3 (1987): 310.

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both shaping history and removing the speaker from it—demonstrates Herbert’s tendency to draw multiple temporal possibilities out of a single technique.

In this chapter, I argue that Herbert used poetic form as a means of thinking historically; as with other poets, I show how Herbert uses the affordances of specific poetic forms to preserve, recount, and interpret the past. Underlying these literary histories, however, are recurrent moments in which Herbert finds the limits of poetic form’s capacity for historiographic work.

Towards the end of “The Church Militant,” for example, a triple rhyme figures the very circular movement of the Church and Sin the poem describes, which, “when they haue accomplished the round, / And met in th’east their first and ancient sound, / Judgement may meet them both & search them round” (267-9). A few lines later, mid-line repetition of the rhyme-words “east” and west” tightens the circle as the speaker writes that “as the Sunne still goes both west and east; /

So also did the Church by going west / Still eastward go” (274-6). As rhyme and repetition draw closer and closer circles, the lines grow more like the simultaneous east-west movement of history; in this way, the poem works to suggest a vision of the entirety of history in a single moment. Rather than ending on this vision, though, the poem closes with the “time and place, where judgement shall appeare”—an end to history, rather than a cycle (277). Herbert thus refuses to preserve the atemporal vision of the whole of history, instead insisting on his place within history, anticipating its end. In passages like this, Herbert brings multiple temporalities into conflict, rather than a harmonious unity. In this, his poetry both exemplifies and challenges the claims I have made in the course of this project.

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Time and temporality are at the center of influential discussions of Herbert’s poetry, with critics noting its “multitemporal” character.6 For many critics, Herbert’s poetry works through these temporal schemes in order to bring the human experience of mortal time in line with a godly sense of eternity.7 From a liturgical perspective, this alignment takes place by integrating readers into a ritual experience of cyclical time.8 More theological approaches emphasize

Herbert’s wrestling with the temporality of doctrinal concepts of salvation and grace.9 Theology becomes a matter of history in Jonathan Gil Harris’s recent Hegelian reading, in which

“typology’s teleological schema” produces “a constitutive anachronism” by making a past event contingent upon its future fulfillment.10 Martin Elsky and Hannah Eagleson likewise draw on typology as a means of grounding theological temporalities in human histories, Elsky writing that “Biblical types are fulfilled in the spiritual lives of individuals who live between the partial and final fulfillment of the promise of redemption.”11 Both Harris and Eagleson turn to materiality as a central concern of Herbert’s sense of history. Eagleson in particular stresses the importance of the material text, and the reader’s encounter with the text as a temporal experience. “History,” she writes, is [for Herbert] seen as a theological narrative experienced

6 For “multitemporal,” see Jonathan Gil Harris, Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 3.

7 See esp. Martin Elsky, “The Sacramental Frame of George Herbert’s ‘The Church’ and the Shape of Spiritual Autobiography,” Jornal of English and Germanic Philology 83, no. 3 (1984): 313-29.

8 For liturgical readings, see esp. Ramie Targoff, Common Prayer: The Language of Public Devotion in Early Modern England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), ch. 4.

9 See Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 15-24; ch. 9 passim..

10 Harris 49.

11 Elsky 313. Cf. Lewalski’s comment that “Herbert's use of typology is characteristically Protestant in its focus upon the individual Christian as referent for the types”; Lewalski 311.

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through texts in both intellectual and material terms.”12 In this chapter, I pursue this connection between reading and the experience of history through poetry’s formal features, both material and not.

As Eagleson recognizes, Herbert’s poetry negotiates the relationship between text and time through readers and acts of reading. A key example comes early in “The Church Porch,” the long didactic opening to The Temple. Herbert instructs his “studious” readers to “copie fair, what time hath blurr’d; / Redeem truth from his jawes” (86-7). Figuring time as the edax rerum,

Herbert sets his scholar the task of textual editor, restoring obscured historical texts and preserving them for the present and future. Yet the “blurr’d” condition of the copy text challenges the “truth” recovered by the studious copyist: in the process of correcting the obscured text, the copyist transforms the text even as he preserves it. These lines offer in compact form a process that Herbert will return to throughout The Temple, in which readers discover new forms of legibility out of a given text. Indeed, reading and writing, for Herbert, always leave both person and text transformed. Moreover, this passage from “The Church

Porch” foregrounds the temporal, indeed historical dimension of such encounters. Acts of reading and writing preserve the past, but transform it in the process. Recent work in book history and literary criticism has called attention to the transformational effects of reading on texts.13 Particularly pertinent to George Herbert are the gospel harmonies produced at Little

Gidding, the religious community led by Nicholas Ferrar, texts built by cutting and pasting

12 Hannah Eagleson, “The Texture of Time,” Renaissance and Reformation 32, no. 2 (2009): 93.

13 E.g., Adam Smyth, “‘Rend and Teare in Peeces’: Textual Fragmentation in Seventeenth-Century England,” The Seventeenth Century 19, no. 1 (2004): 36-52; Matthew Zarnowiecki, Fair Copies: Reproducing the English Lyric from Tottel to Shakespeare (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2914); William Sherman, Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), ch. 1.

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together biblical texts and images.14 More broadly, studies of renaissance poetics have also revealed the degree to which readers and writers regularly transformed poems, even when ostensibly copying a single text.15

This process of reading and (re)writing becomes most clearly a matter of literary history in a set of poems that closely imitate the work of earlier poets. In what follows, I begin with these close intertextual engagements, arguing that Herbert uses imitative poetic form not only to place himself with a tradition but also to think through the literary-historical narratives implicit in acts of imitation. These direct responses to earlier poems are the clearest examples of

Herbert’s interest in literary history; I go on, however, to argue that Herbert’s other poems, especially in his more idiosyncratic forms, likewise reflect on the historiographic claims of literary form. In these poems, I argue, Herbert continues to challenge assumptions about how poems are composed and read. These poems move in multiple directions at once, much as

Herbert’s most imitative poems disrupt linear, unidirectional ideas of imitation. Finally, I turn to

Herbert’s use of poetic form to preserve and interpret the past and to otherwise do history, before concluding with “Church Monuments,” a poem in which Herbert’s use of and challenge to literary history is most pressing.

Herbertian Intertextuality

14 For the Little Gidding harmonies, see Joyce Ransome, “Monotessaron: The Harmonies of Little Gidding,” The Seventeenth Century 20, no. 1 (2005): 22-52; for Herbert in the context of Little Gidding, see “‘Shred of Holinesse’: George Herbert, Little Gidding, and Cutting up Texts in Early Modern England,” English Literary Renaissance 42, no. 3 (2012): 451-81.

15 Zarnowicki; Arthur Marotti, Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric (Ithaca: Cornell Unversity Press, 1995).

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In contrast to Jonson’s aggressively social Epigrams, The Temple appears an intimate book, its “Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations” representing private colloquy with God, occasionally joined by an unnamed “friend.” The preface by the printers calls attention to the book’s lack of textual sociability, noting the absence of dedicatory or commendatory poems, the

“addition either of support or ornament” one would expect in a book of poems (preface, l.7).

Presenting Herbert as a solitary poet unconcerned with literary fame, involved in neither coterie circulation nor print publication, The Temple’s prefatory material sets Herbert apart from the kind of intertextual engagements so important to the literary-historical works I have addressed in previous chapters. For Ann Herndon Marshall, this represents a deliberate strategy on Herbert’s part, avoiding the competitive imitation of earlier poets in order to follow God’s timeless language, writing, “Perhaps the Christian poet never completely frees himself from the anxiety of competition, but the imitation of God is at least not plagued by the demand for historical decorum; God is the one master whose work is not subject to the demands of history.”17 Modern literary scholarship however has done much to resituate Herbert within his contemporary literary circles.18

Nonetheless, his few direct citations of non-biblical poetry stand out as exceptional.

Take, for instance, “A Parodie,” a title that signals the poem’s intertextual engagements; specifically Herbert imitates a song by William Herbert, 3rd Earl of Pembroke (1580-1630),

Herbert’s distant cousin and sometime patron. Pembroke’s poem is a valediction, assuring a lover that though the speaker must depart, their souls will remain united. It begins,

17 Anne Herndon Marshall, “Godly Decorum: Anglican Approaches to History, Imitation, and the Arts in the Sermons of John Donne and Selected Works of George Herbert,” doctoral dissertation, University of Virginia, 1987, 269.

18 Jeffrey P. Powers-Beck, Writing the Flesh: The Herbert Family Dialogue(Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998).

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Soules joy, when I am gone, And you alone (Which cannot be,

Since I must leave my selfe with thee, And carry thee with me)19

The first stanza of “A Parodie” closely follows Pembroke:

Souls joy, when thou art gone, And I alone, Which cannot be, Because thou dost abide with me, And I depend on thee (1-5)

Placed side-by-side, the two poems speak directly to one another, the first spoken by the person taking his leave, the latter by the one left behind. In this respect, “A Parodie” works as an answer poem, in the manner of Walter Ralegh’s “Nymph’s Reply” to Marlowe’s “Passionate Shepherd.”

Herbert does more, though, than reverse the direction of address in Pembroke’s song: he exchanges Pembroke’s amorous discourse for devotional, addressing God and no (human) lover.

The poem thus represents one of Herbert’s most direct acts of “sacred parody,” taking the forms and tropes of secular amorous poetry and turning them to divine use.20

The paradigm of sacred parody is itself a literary-historical narrative, implicitly offering a narrative in which the flowering of devotional poetry in the seventeenth century emerges out of the robust secular tradition of the late-Elizabethan period.21 More than a modern critical

19 In The English Poems of George Herbert, p. 634, ll. 1-5.

20 On “sacred parody,” see Rosamond Tuve, “Sacred ‘Parody’ of Love Poetry, and Herbert,” Studies in the Renaissance 8 (1961): 249-90, Louis Lohr Martz, The Poetry of Meditation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962), 184-93 and passim, and Michael Schoenfeldt, Prayer and Power: George Herbert and Renaissance Courtship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 257. For a critique of the exclusion of sexuality implicit in the concept of “sacred parody,” see Richard Rambuss, Closet Devotions (Durham N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998), 5-7 and passim.

21 Ramie Targoff, Posthumous Love: Eros and the Afterlife in Renaissance England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014): 94. Martz 184-93

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narrative, this image of devotional poetry as redeeming and redirecting profane love verse appears throughout renaissance writing. Robert Southwell, for instance, writes that as a result of the age’s “passion, and especially this of love,” it is “now more needefull to bee intreated … how to direct these humors unto their due courses, and to draw this floud of affections into the righte chanel.”22 Writing over fifty years later, Henry Vaughan complains of the “vain and vicious subjects” of his contemporaries’ verse, and celebrates Herbert as “The first, that with any effectual success attempted a diversion of this foul and overflowing stream.”23 These calls for devotional verse set forth a version of English literary history in which divine poetry succeeds profane verse.

Yet “A Parodie” belongs to a much more complex intertextual network that resists this commonplace critical narrative. In the first place, Pembroke’s poem draws from several poems by John Donne, most obviously the “Valediction: Forbidding Mourning.”24 Not only do the two poems mark similar occasions, both mock lesser lovers for their dependence on bodily presence.

Pembroke disdains “Fooles [who] have means to meet, / but by their feet,” a gesture similar to

Donne’s “Dull sublunary lovers love, / Whose soul is sense.”25 Along similar lines, Pembroke claim that his love will “This wonder to the vulgar prove / Our Bodyes, not wee move,” recalls similar scenes in “The Canonization” and “The Relique,” in which the laity learn and gaze in wonder at the speaker’s love. Noting the Donnean resonances of Pembroke’s poem places

22 Qtd. in Martz 185.

23 Henry Vaughan, The Complete Poems, ed. Alan Rudrum (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), pp.141-2.

24 Cristina Malcolmson, Heart-Work: George Herbert and the Protestant Ethic (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 54-5.

25 Pembroke, ll. 21-2; John Donne, The Complete English Poems, ed. C. A. Patrides (New York: Knopf, 1991), ll. 13-4.

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Herbert’s “A Parodie” in a longer imitative lineage, creating an intertextual chain that both advertises Herbert’s place in the Sidney-Pembroke coterie and informs Herbert’s account of

God’s presence and absence from the speaker. As a response to the valediction, “A Parodie” surprisingly casts God as the departing lover temporarily abandoning the speaker, and not the other way around: the speaker pleads, “Ah Lord! do not withdraw, / Lest want of aw / Make

Sinne appeare” (16-8). God’s apparent departure leads the speaker to sin, rather than the speaker’s sin distancing him from God.

Furthermore, Herbert’s poem replies to Pembroke and Donne by drawing on the translation of Psalm 88 by Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke and William Herbert’s mother.26 Psalm 88 offers “A grieuous complaint of the faithfull … Being as it were left of God without any consolation.”27 The Countess of Pembroke translates the psalm into a meter strikingly similar to that used by Herbert and Pembroke, with its distinctive short second and third lines:

Who did know me, whom I did know, Removed by thee Are gone from me: Are gone? That is the best: They all me so detest, That now abroad I blush to go.28

Echoes between “A Parodie” and this Psalm are particularly clustered in this stanza: the figure of repetition in the stanza’s opening line resembles Herbert’s complaint that “Thou and alone thou

26 Herbert almost certainly know the Sidney Psalter, which has been cited as a source for a number of other poems in The Temple; see for example Wilcox’s headnotes to “Easter” and “The Invitation” in The English Poems of George Herbert. For an extended comparison of Herbert’s and the Sidneys’ devotional poems, see Martz 273-82.

27 The Whole Booke of Psalms, Collected into English Meter, trans. Thomas Sternhold and John Hopkins (London, 1565), p. 119.

28 Philip Sidney and Mary Sidney Herbert, Coutess of Pembroke, The Sidney Psalter, ed. Hannibal Hamlin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), ll. 31-6.

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know’st” in both form and diction; both poems conceive of God’s presence or absence in terms of movement “abroad” (25, 9). Elsewhere, the Countess of Pembroke writes of being “Where lightning of thy wrath / Upon Me lighted hath, / All overwhelmed with all thy waves,” imagery imitated in Herbert’s “No stormie night / Can so afflict or so affright, / As thy eclipsed light”

(13-5).29 As with the influence of Donne, Herbert’s use of the Sidney Psalter does more than play up his participation in a particular literary circle. With the turn to the Psalms, Herbert implies, in good Protestant fashion, that reformed poetry is nothing new but instead a return to poetry’s original use.30 Moreover, as translations the Countess of Pembroke’s psalms are themselves influenced by sixteenth-century amorous poetry: the sequence of appositives at the start of Psalm

88, “My God, my Lord, my help, my health,” resembles the apostrophes of many late-

Elizabethan love poems.31 Indeed, the phrasing “My God, my Lord, my help, my health” recalls the Song of Solomon’s “my heart, my sister, my spouse” and similar verses, further tangling sacred and amorous poetry.32 As a result, “A Parodie” resists the literary-historical narrative of sacred parody, in which Herbert takes the profane tropes and conventions of secular love poetry and turns them sacred. Instead, I would suggest that we read the poem as a reflection on this narrative of poetry’s sacred history. Herbert foregrounds the poem’s derivative nature, thereby

29 The Sidney Psalter 88.28-30.

30 The idea that poetry originated in praise of God[s] was relatively commonplace in the English renaissance; see eg. Puttenham 119,

31 The Sidney Psalter 88.1. The phrase “My love, my life, my…” appears in Michael Drayton, Ideas Mirrour (London, 1594), sig. G1v; William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, et al. , 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 2008), 3.2.246; Edmund Spenser, “Daphnaïda,” in The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser, ed William A. Oram, et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), l. 160.

32 KJV 4.9, 10. See Noam Flinker, The Song of Songs in English Renaissance Literature: Kisses of Their Mouths (Rochester: D. S. Brewer, 2000).

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situating it in a conventional literary history of influence and imitation; but tracing that literary history reveals roots in an earlier poetic discourse of worship.

“Jordan [2]” likewise has a Sidneian background; the poem does not declare itself to be an imitation, but its connections to Astrophil and Stella 1 are unmistakable. The poem begins with a similar situation, the attempt to write a proper poem in praise of a beloved: Astrophil

“sought fit words” to make his petition to Stella, while Herbert’s speaker “sought quaint words, and trim inventions” for the praise of “heav’nly joyes” (3, 1).33 Both poems’ speakers run through various strategies and sources of inspiration; Astrophil telling of “Studying inventions fine, her wits to entertain; / Oft turning others’ leaves, to see if thence would flow / Some fresh and fruitful showers upon my sunburnt brain.”34 Herbert, meanwhile, writes of the “Thousands of notions [that] in my brain did runne, / Off’ring their service” (7-8). Lastly, both speakers are interrupted in the final lines: in Sidney, with “‘Fool,’ said my muse to me; ‘look in thy heart and write”; in Herbert the speaker hears “a friend / Whisper, How wide is all this long pretense! /

There is in love a sweetnesse readie penn’d: / Copie out onely that, and save expense” (15-8).35

Herbert’s turn to Sidney is implicit in the friend’s command: the “love” he looks into is, it appears, Sidney’s amorous poetry. The poem, in a sense, originates in Herbert’s reading of

Sidney, and ends with the speaker’s return to that source.

Herbert’s beloved is no earthly lover, though, which may prompt us to find the “love” he should copy in scripture, such as Herbert’s speakers find in “The Posy” or “A True Hymn.” But

“Jordan [2]” is surprisingly reticent about its subject, never clearly identifying it as God: the

33 Philip Sidney, The Major Works, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 153.

34 Sidney p. 153.

35 Sidney p. 153.

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closes it comes is the end of the second stanza, where the speaker declares “Nothing could seem too rich to clothe the sunne, / Much less those joyes which trample on his head” (11-2). The

“sunne,” of course, is Christ, the son of God—but only for a line. In the following verse, “Much less” reduces the “sunne” from Son to sun, as the “joyes” of heaven surpass the brilliance of the sun. If the sun cannot be clothed in adequate rhetoric, God, who so surpasses the sun, surpasses the speaker’s stylistic capabilities all the more. By being so indirect, Herbert accentuates the poem’s roots in secular love poetry.

The allusion to Sidney is, in one respect, ironic: Astrophil’s problem in Sidney’s poem is his over-dependence on imitation: “Oft turning others’ leaves, to see if thence would flow / Some fresh and fruitful showers upon my sunburnt brain.”36 Herbert’s “friend,” meanwhile, directs the speaker to “Copie.” Moreover, Astrophil’s instruction to “look in thy heart” contrasts with the speaker’s realization in Herbert that he “did weave my self into the sense” (14).37 Sidney’s poem can be read as a warning against excessive imitation, while in “Jordan [2]” the solution to the speaker’s writing trouble is a proper imitation of “love.” All of this matters because Herbert is using poetic form to reflect on the historiographic claims of poetic form. He does this by turning the writer’s task into one of copying, making the poem a secondary, derivative work. The speaker aims for “invention”—the classical rhetorical practice of discovering one’s subject— finding, rather than creating something new. By framing his own text as a problem of good and bad imitation, Herbert challenges simple narratives of imitation, in which one poet follows another. Instead, all the speaker’s writing comes second hand, only changing its source from one love to another.

36 Sidney, p. 153.

37 Sidney, p. 153.

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Herbert continues his interest in the literary-historical relationship of secular and sacred verse in a pair of sonnets written as a new year’s gift to his mother. The poems directly confront the problem of their form, the first asking “Why are not Sonnets made of thee?” (5). By the time

Herbert was writing, there were, of course sonnets made to God. But though other poets had written holy sonnets before Herbert, none of them show the same preoccupation with the legitimacy of doing so. Barnabe Barnes, in his Divine Centurie of Spirituall Sonnets (1595), exposes the conventional pains of the Petrarchan lover as representatives of hell: “For Cupids darts prefigurate hell’s sting. / His quenchlesse Torch foreshows hell’s quenchles fire, / Kindling mens wits with lustfull laies of sinne.”38 Declaring “No more lewde laies of Lighter loues I sing,” he dismisses the amorous roots of the sonnet form but does not dwell on the propriety of doing so.39 For Barnes, it seems the problem is not with the sonnet form itself, but the conventional images and metaphors used therein. Donne does comment on the holy sonnet’s connection to the amorous form, but more obliquely, as in “What if this present were the worlds last night,” in which he persuades God to grant mercy by speaking “as in my idolatrie / I said to all my profane mistresses.”40 Herbert takes on the problem of amorous poetry’s relationship to devotional verse much more directly. In poem after poem, Herbert defends—or rejects—the use of the forms and conventions of amorous poetry in a divine context.

Where Barnes dismisses the heat of Petrarchan convention as hellish, Herbert instead embraces the fires of love as he turns to God. The sonnet begins by making literal the fires that burn Petrarchan lovers: “My God, where is that ancient heat towards thee, / Wherewith whole

38 Barnabe Barnes, A Divine Centurie of Spirituall Sonnets (London, 1595), sig. A4r.

39 Barnes sig. A4r

40 Donne ll. 9-10.

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showls of Martyrs once did burn, / Besides their other flames” (1-3). The martyrs’ sacrifice turns in the second quatrain to “layes / Upon thine Altar burnt,” (5-6). Over the course of the poem, then, fire is both figurative and literal, both the passion inspiring sacrifice and the means of that sacrifice. In this poem, writing poetry is an act of making the fire of inner feeling into something literal, akin to the burning faith of the martyrs. The poem goes on to ask “Why are not Sonnets made of thee?” treating God as not just the subject but the matter of devotional verse. In the final lines, the poem contrasts this substance with women as the matter of poetry: “Why doth that fire, which by thy power and might / Each breast does feel, no braver fuel choose / Than that, which one day, Worms, may chance refuse” (12-4). After the image of the martyrs, this description of women’s bodies as “fuel” is not comfortably metaphoric; the violence of the image, along with the final line, presents amorous poetry as not only irreligious but grotesque. The second sonnet ends similarly by imagining the dead body of the subject of amorous poetry: “Open the bones, and you shall nothing find / In the best face but filth” (12-3). This image is opposed to the common use of flowers to blazon the beloved: “Roses and Lillies speak thee,” Herbert writes,

“and to make / A pair of Cheeks of them, is thy abuse” (6-7). Herbert’s rejection of the (female) body in these two poems is not accompanied by a rejection of the burning passions inspired in bodies. In this second poem, “poor invention burns in their [amorous poets’] low mind / Whose fire is wild, and doth not upward go / To praise”; again, the problem is not the fire itself, but the direction it takes (9-11).

The language of burning bodies in these poems brings together a conventional sentiment in amorous poetry with historical acts of martyrdom. The martyrs in this early sonnet’s opening lines would likely recall those in John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments. As fire fluctuates between literal and figurative, the poem moves between poetic convention and historical reality. By

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ending on images of death, the two poems bring the amorous sonnet to the devotional perspective of the memento mori. Looking back to historical martyrs, the poem’s new use of the amorous image of burning love is in fact the older meaning, a return to the divine love that inspires sacrificial acts of devotion.

These poems show Herbert writing literary history through an engagement with earlier writers and texts. In this respect, Herbert does literary history in the conventionally-understood way, showing his place within a literary tradition. At the same time, Herbert is writing literary history in the terms set by this dissertation, by challenging the narrative of literary history in which a secular form is redeemed to sacred use, in the case of “A Parodie,” and the narrative in which inspiration comes from within, a sui generis form. In the following section, I look at a number of poems that are less explicitly involved in literary history, arguing that in fact they are so involved. The following readings show poems in which form does history in a number of ways: through genre, through lineation, through metaphor. Most importantly, however, these poems reflect on the claims of literary form to historicity.

Herbert’s Formal Histories

Herbert’s approach to intertextuality in “A Parodie” and “Jordan [2]” demonstrates a tendency in his poetry generally to challenge readers’ expectations of order and linearity in literary history. Beyond these explicitly imitative texts, Herbert’s poetry, especially in his most idiosyncratic forms, does similar work. In the poems that follow, I argue that Herbert uses poetic form to construct temporal texts and experiences that question the historiographic power of literary form. Turning our attention away from poems that directly engage with a literary tradition, this section shows how Herbert’s experiments with poetic temporality engage with the

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claims poetic form makes to historical use. This is especially true of the epigram. As I argue in chapter three, inscriptive epigrams call attention to the material substance, real or imagined, supporting the poem; in doing so, they prompt readers and writers to consider the durability of the text, as well as its subjection to the erosive effects of time. John Weever’s Ancient Funerall

Monuments (1631), for example, presents a collection of epigrammatic inscriptions taken from church monuments in order to counteract the danger of their defacement and erosion. As I have argued, Jonson draws on the epigram’s particular relationship to materiality, invoking durability and erosion in his poems as a way of getting at the small scale of secular history. Herbert, by contrast, brings the problem of divine temporality to the epigram’s concern for textual persistence and erasure, thereby fracturing the form.

Take, for instance, “The Altar.” Shaped poems like “The Altar” are found in both ancient and early modern poetry, with most critics and editors of Herbert citing The Greek Anthology

(the primary source for the short poetry of ancient Greece) and Joshua Sylvester’s translation of

Du Bartas.41 Shaped poems were in dialogue with these antiquities through the early modern period. For example William Slayter, in his poetic History of Great Britain (1621), pairs an image of Hengist’s arms with a poem in the shape of a column describing his conquest of Kent.

The two visual works complement each other much in the manner of image and text in emblems.

Like the altar poems it resembles, the column shows interest in such structures as non-Christian artifacts, writing of how “Brytaine fell / to th’Pagan force.” Indeed, most of the English altar poems before Herbert’s in fact are decidedly non-Christian.42

41 Wilcox, ed., The English Poems of George Herbert, p. 19.

42 On paganism and altar poems, see Reuben Sánchez, Typology and Iconography in Donne, Herbert, and Milton: Fashioning the Self after Jeremiah (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 102.

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Francis Davison’s “An Altar and Sacrifice to Disdain” (1602), for example, is offered to a quasi-pagan deity. Davison’s poem is outlined with a double border, providing a visual surface on which the poem stands.43 The central column of dimeter couplets in Davison’s poem is made up of conventional Petrarchan oppositions: “Long Sutes in vaine, / Hate for Good will: / Still- dying paine, / Yet liuing still.”44 The effect is to expurgate the tropes of love poetry, sacrificing them on the altar he builds. A novel visual figure thus displaces worn-out lexical figures. In contrast, Herbert’s central column describes the altar itself:

A HEART alone Is such a stone As nothing but Thy pow’r doth cut. Wherefore each part Of my hard heart Meets in this frame, To praise thy name. (5-12)

Herbert here turns the words into parts, coming together to create the frame—the visual shape

Davison instead provides in outline. Herbert, that is, builds the altar out of himself—his own heart—rather than out of well-worn Petrarchan language. “The Altar’s” shape, moreover, is audible, as well as visual, with its short dimeter couplets in the central lines standing out from the pentameter and tetrameter base and cap. This is in contrast to other 1630s shape poems that retain pentameter couplets, only making their shape by breaking up lines, as in Nathanael

Richards’s “The Pyramid of Paradice” (1630) (fig. 2), which opens “B / lest, / Blest, / O Blest. /

Be that Di- / uinity, Three / Sacred Persons / GOD in Vnitie.”45 Breaking up words in this way is

43 Francis Davison, A Poetical Rapsody (London, 1602), sig. I3v.

44 Davison sig. I3v.

45 Nathanael Richards, The Celestial Publican (London: 1630), sig. D1r.

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similar to the inscriptions on many ancient monuments. Richards thus links his novel form with ancient practice. “The Altar” participates in both the ancient monuments and modern novelties that together formed the epigram in early modern England.

“The Altar” is not, properly speaking, a lapidary epigram: the poem neither reproduces actual inscriptions in stone, nor does it claim to. Nonetheless, the poem engages, like Jonson’s

Epigrams, with the ongoing work of seventeenth-century antiquarian writers, who wrote extensively on antique inscriptions found throughout Britain. Renaissance antiquarian writing is rife with discussion of inscribed altars and other monuments, many of which are reproduced as images in printed books. Often, little other detail of the monument is illustrated; only the inscriptions are reproduced, as with an “Altar to the goddess Suria” in John Speed’s Historie of

Great Britain (1611).46 Speed encloses the inscription in a plain rectangle, rendered in two dimensions, with cap and base in a generic print border, suggesting the paramount importance of the text in these accounts. A more unusual example is provided by William Camden’s Britain

(1610), which includes the image of a cross bearing an inscription supposedly identifying it as marking the grave of King Arthur.47 Although the cross is given three-dimensional depth by means of shading, Camden nevertheless focuses on the appearance of writing on the surface, noting the “Gothish Character” of the lettering.48 The distortion of the text, bending to fit the prescribed shape, displays, again, an interest in the relationship of text to surface in the study of inscribed artifacts.

46 John Speed, The History of Great Britaine (London, 1611), p. 222.

47 William Camden, Britain, trans. Philemond Holland (London, 1610), p. 228.

48 Camden Britain p. 228.

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Like Jonson, Herbert draws on the work of antiquarians in order to situate his poems within the long literary history of the epigram. Yet at the same time, “The Altar” refuses to abide by the form of the inscriptive epigram, as the poem challenges its material substantiation, rather than affirming it. The poem’s shape may call attention to the physical text but the altar it supposedly represents is more elusive than we might expect. Critics have argued about the ontological status of the altar, some positing two altars, “the altar in the poem and the alter that is the poem.”49 After all, Herbert’s speaker claims to offer “A broken ALTAR,” yet in the poem’s shape, the altar stands complete; the speaker “rears” it, but the poem-altar is already “reared”

(1).50 I would instead emphasize the way that the image of the altar is built by the poem’s words rather than being represented as a carving upon a surface. Where inscriptive epigrams are, at least supposedly, written on a surface, “The Altar” only makes the imagined surface visible by and through the text itself, unlike Davison’s outlined altar. Take away the text, and there is no altar to write upon. Despite the poem’s reference to “this frame,” “The Altar” is not outlined; the shape is visible only through the arrangement of the text (11). Instead, the speaker “reares” the altar, erecting it out of words, “These stones” (13). In other words, the poet makes the altar by writing the inscription on that very structure. This reverses the process of the inscriptive epigram, which nominally begins with the surface inscribed upon, moving from material to text, rather than from text to material.

49 Stanley Fish, Self-Consuming Artifacts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 209; cf. Richard Strier, Love Known: Theology and Experience in George Herbert’s Poetry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 191.; and Stanley Fish, The Living Temple: George Herbert and Catechizing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 140.

50 Anthony Low, Love’s Architecture: Devotional Modes in Seventeenth-Century English Poetry (New York: New York University Press, 1978), 93

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With no background surface to write upon, we might imagine Herbert’s altar to be built of words, as by bricks, as the poem describes the “parts” of his heart as that which enters the

“frame.” Constructing an altar in this way would necessarily work from the bottom up, rather than the top down. That is to say, the poem represents itself as a kind of monument, built of words in the place of stones. An actual altar, however, would necessarily be built from the ground up, reversing the order of the poem’s lines. This reversal is reflected thematically in that the opening four lines of the poem describe the construction of the altar, while the final four lines describe its use:

A broken ALTAR, Lord, thy servant reares, Made of a heart, and cemented with teares: Whose parts are as thy hand did frame; No workmans tool hath touch’d the same. … That if I chance to hold my peace, These stones to praise thee may not cease. Oh let thy blessed SACRIFICE be mine, And sanctifie this ALTAR to be thine. (1-4, 13-6)

Herbert thus presents us with a poem built in two directions at once, reflecting on foundations at the top of the altar and sacrifices at the bottom. “The Altar” works by challenging the reader’s sense of how the poem is composed, as text and icon work in opposing orders. “The Altar” makes particularly visible inscriptive tendencies that mark the whole of Herbert’s poetry.

Herbert’s abiding interest in the physical text has great theological and devotional potential, marking the meeting place of human and divine.51 When placed within the literary history of the epigram, however, Herbert’s inscriptive poems take on the same tensions between endurance and ephemerality that Jonson’s do: the altar recedes from view, the order of inscription breaks down,

51 Kimberly Johnson offers a persuasive account of the materiality of the divine in Herbert’s physical texts, as well as useful, if polemical, critical history in Made Flesh: Sacrament and Poetics in Post-Reformation England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), esp. 5-6.

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and the durability of language becomes a rhetorical fiction. In short, Herbert’s poem reflects the epigram’s status as historical artifact, as elusive as it is explanatory.

Like “The Altar,” “JESU” reflects on the epigram form. The poem’s central image is an engraving: the poem opens, “JESU is in my heart, his sacred name / Is deeply carved there” (1-

2). The poem is related to emblems circulating in the seventeenth century, that depict the very same image.52 Herbert immediately complicates that image, however, writing “but th’other week

/ A great affliction broke the little frame” (2-3). This return to the language of framing, following that in “The Altar,” sets the poem in the context of epigrammatic writing. The lines also shift from present to past tense—and a very particular past tense at that.53 Turning to “th’other week,”

Herbert’s speaker suddenly grounds a highly allegorical image in the temporal scale of daily life.

His broken heart leaves the speaker to gather up the separated letters: “And first I found the corner, where was J, / After, where E S, and next where U was graved” (5-6). Once the letters are gathered together, the speaker discovers, “That to my broken heart he was I ease you, / And to my whole is J E S U” (9-10). As with shape poetry, antiquarians also dealt in reconstructing broken texts, as with Camden’s depiction of an altar to Marcus Aurelius.54 In this case, reassembling the texts reveals a new message not immediately visible in the whole inscription.

The transformation of “J” to “I” in line seven is precluded by the consonantal use in the name

Jesu. Herbert may have picked up the orthographic transformation from anagrammatists of the early seventeenth century, who likewise adjust letter forms at will. This connection again links ancient and modern practices with respect to the material letter. The poem thus leaves ambiguous

52 Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Protestant Poetics and the Seveneenth-Century Religious Lyric (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 203-4.

53 Fish, Living 31.

54 Camden, Britain, p. 638.

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the temporal status of the hidden message, at once ancient artifact and modern novelty, as well as there being a tension between oral and graphic readings.

When the speaker’s broken heart cracks the code, the text thus transforms from an old to a new meaning, such that the reading “I ease you” is untimely, not clearly ancient or modern.

The poem exemplifies a tendency in many of Herbert’s poems to ask readers to consider the effect of reading on the text at hand. The shifting tenses— “to my broken heart he was I ease you, / and to my whole is JESU”—make the engraving into something that changes over time (9-

10). With the confrontation of timescales in the poem, Herbert considers the inscription in terms of literary history, mapping the text’s available meanings to the temporal moments it inhabits.

Epigrammatic writtenness calls to mind the time elapsed between writing and reading and makes the poem a piece reflecting on literary history.

The broken name of God in “JESU” asks us to consider what happens to texts in time and how their material history affects their meaning. The same is true in “Coloss. 3.3.” The poem describes how “Life hath with the sun a double motion,” the body moving to the earth, the soul to

God (2). Reading diagonally, the poem includes a message, adapted from Paul’s epistle, declaring “My life is hid in him that is my treasure.” As an acrostic, of a sort, the poem like other epigrams of Herbert’s bridges ancient and novel forms. The poem might seem to hide this message, only making it apparent when readers learn to look with a “double motion.” However, the poem challenges its temporality by making the diagonal message not something found in the given text of the poem, but actually the primary, not secondary reading: the diagonal is prior to the rest of the poem, in that it is likely the first part written. A poet writing this kind of verse would most likely start with the hidden message, then build the rest of the poem around this spine, just as an acrostic begins with the vertical ordering of the name or phrase that is the basis

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of the poem. At the same time, the diagonal message requires multiple readings of the poem, each only partial. Holding both in mind at once precludes the reader from “reading” the text: either one reading is attended to or both are held in mind while gazing at the poem as at an image. Herbert is thus interested in playing with the temporality of the poem, with what is read and written first and last.

Conclusion: “Church Monuments”

Herbert turns to the literary history of the epigram in order to reflect on the tension between the genre’s durability and ephemerality. In these poems, he sets up a poetics of literary history like Jonson’s, playing with the inscriptive nature of the genre as a means of reflecting on the passage of time and the ability of the past to remain in the present. “Church Monuments,” however, presses Herbert’s poetics to the breaking point. Like “JESU,” the poem is about epigrammatic inscription, more than an epigram itself. In this poem, the speaker places himself among the funerary monuments within a church, with the intention of praying there before the mementos mori. Rather than meditating on any particular grave, Herbert’s speaker observes that the monuments themselves will one day crumble, leaving the dust of long-decayed bodies to mingle indiscriminately. Herbert, I argue, develops a poetics of literary history by pushing the epigram’s play with the past to the point where it dissolves completely. By looking beyond death to the distant future in which the present graves will become ruins, “Church Monuments” argues that epigrammatic inscription is not sufficient to sustain the epigram’s relationship to eternity.

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Criticism of “Church Monuments” has dwelt on the poem’s enjambed lines and stanzas, which mimic the dissolution of the monuments described in the poem.55 The poem’s habit of running over line breaks is matched by heavy use of caesura in lines, especially in the last two stanzas. Pronoun confusion also contributes to the poem’s challenging syntax: the poet’s soul and body are gendered differently, and the poem abounds in thats and theses.56 As the poem’s lineation crumbles, then, so too does the sense of the poem, becoming more confusing so that what had begun as a “firm sense of time and place” is “progressively eroded.”57 Enjambment of this sort is uncharacteristic of the epigram, the genre marked most of all by closure. By breaking up the poem in surprising ways, moreover, Herbert makes the text of “Church Monuments” resemble crumbling inscriptions like those studied by antiquarians. Herbert’s work with verse form thus pits the tendencies of the epigram against one another. On the one hand, monumental inscription bears the past into the present, on the other hand its ruination ultimately makes the monument smaller and more difficult to read, like the epigram, despite the poem’s length.

In the third stanza, Herbert imagines a distant future in which the present monuments

“shall bow, and kneel, and fall down flat / To kisse those heaps,” that is, the bodies the monuments contain (15-6). What begins as a meditation on the speaker’s own mortality is projected into the future which shall look back on Herbert’s own moment as part of the deep past. Ultimately, the speaker does not quite get the lesson. The poem ends with him instructing himself to “Mark here below / How tame these ashes are, how free from lust” (22-3). Such

“Mark[ing]” may be an instruction to take notice, but the word also carries a graphic sense,

55 Joseph H. Summers, George Herbert: His Religion and Art (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1954), 132-3.

56 Summers 133. Cf. Fish, Self-Consuming 168

57 Fish, Self-Consuming 165.

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making a mark—the sort of mark that the entire poem dismisses as dust. The lesson drawn, to be

“free from lust,” furthermore draws a rather simple moral from such a complex meditation.

Instead, the speaker ought to consider how the graves themselves will need markers when they crumble. Herbert places the particular moment of the speaker’s devotion into the larger context of human history, marked out by generations of grave sites.

What is left behind when the graves shall crumble is what Herbert describes as the “good fellowship of dust” (13). In contrast to stately monuments, such “fellowship” describes a genial gathering of friends. More particularly, the sociability that “Church Monuments” imagines for the dust of the dead is that also celebrated in the conversational epigrams of Martial, Jonson, and others. Dust and earth “Laugh at Ieat and Marble,” further suggesting the conviviality of the dead. Other terms suggest such sociability: the “spoiled” meeting might first be suggestive of the rotting flesh of the dead, but instead it refers to the more abstract “spoiling” of the gathering, making it go off poorly.

This sociable spirit is directly contrasted with the function of funerary monuments, which instead serve to divide bodies. Distinction of this kind is emphatically class-based, as the speaker instructs his flesh to “find his birth / Written in dustie heraldrie and lines” (7-8). Heraldry would only serve to distinguish the gentry and aristocracy. But as “dusty heraldrie,” the image takes on greater significance. In the first place, it refers to the actual inscriptions of heraldic images and lines of text, the material text covered in dust. At the same time, the speaker’s birth is itself the

“dust,” the “written” text instead a metaphor for finding meaning in the dust itself.

This poem matters because it gradually undoes the work of the more epigrammatic poems addressed above. This is Herbert putting pressure on the epigram’s historical origins in funerary inscription and the abiding tension of its literary history between inscriptive and

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conversational modes. Herbert takes the formal characteristics and techniques of the epigram genre and uses them to construct a literary history, in which the epigram’s tension between endurance and ephemerality preserves the circumstances and small-scale historical conditions of the past. In “Church Monuments,” however, Herbert puts more pressure on these features, carrying them to their logical conclusions, which are the ultimate dissolution of the epigrams themselves. The poem attempts to prepare the speaker for death, and its consideration of the problem of dust points towards the resurrection. The poem thus puts us in the framework of divine time—God’s perspective on mortal life and the ultimate destiny of bodies. From this vantage, the epigram’s promises of preservation are shown to be false.

Herbert, among the writers I study, takes the longest view of history, stretching in “The

Church Militant” from the beginning to the end of time. The future he imagines, though, is not limited by this eschatological frame. In “Church Monuments,” he envisions the eventual destruction of the monuments to dust—a vision of how the site will look in the distant future, when time has completely eaten away at the stone. Within this expansive perspective on time, any historical marker, like the monuments, shrinks into nothingness. The poetics of literary history work, in Herbert, not so much to narrate or interpret the past, but to change the stakes of such historiography. On the one hand, he raises history to the highest level of a divine perspective of eternity; on the other, he shows mortal history receding from significance. By using literary form as a challenge to historiography, Herbert closes this dissertation with a transformed sense of what poetic temporality can do.

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