Hesperidean Herrick, the Two Figures Cannot Be Regarded As Identical
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ROBERT HERRICK’S SELF-PRESENTATION IN HESPERIDES AND HIS NOBLE NUMBERS A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS of RHODES UNIVERSITY by LIONEL FAULL February 2010 2 i Abstract Literature has tended to be cut from the moorings of its authorial origins under the influential literary criticism of the past forty years. This thesis is an attempt to re-moor a work of literature to its authorial origins; particularly a work of literature in which the author-poet‘s self-referential markers are so overtly and persistently present as is the case in Hesperides and His Noble Numbers. Although there is a significant overlap between the real-life Herrick and the Hesperidean Herrick, the two figures cannot be regarded as identical. Instead, Herrick‘s deployment of specific genres and not of others, his chosen conventions for ordering a collection of miscellaneous poems, and his adoption of certain conventional poetic stances provide him with a semi-fictionalised way of declaring who he understands himself to be and how he wants himself to be understood. At the same time, the rich classical mythological associations of Herrick‘s title, Hesperides, declare his status as an inheritor of the classical literary tradition, whose hallmark during the Renaissance was the melding of classical, Christian and secular associations into new and complexly polyvalent literary works. For example, Herrick‘s appropriation of the classical mythological figure of Hercules provides him with both a narrative way and an allegorical way of reconciling the so-called secular, or profane poetry of Hesperides with the so-called religious, or divine poetry of Noble Numbers. In Noble Numbers, Herrick reveals new facets of his self-presentation to the reader, whilst also making explicit the theological congruencies between the two works. Herrick‘s religious self-presentation demonstrates his expansive scholarly interests, as well his instinct to include, rather than to exclude, the religious beliefs of others within his syncretistic sense-of-self. Finally, the placement of Noble Numbers after Hesperides is not a signal that Herrick privileged the ii former, or took his religion less seriously than he did his love for classical poetry, but rather that in Herrick‘s understanding of his world, man‘s fleeting glimpses of God in the secular sphere give way to a fuller comprehension of Him in the divine sphere. (336 words) iii Table of contents List of short titles/cue titles ……………………………………………………. iv List of tables, figures, illustrations, plates …………………………………….. iv Acknowledgements ……………………………………………………………. v Introduction ……………………………………………………………………. vi CHAPTER ONE: The ‗real Herrick‘ and the ‗Hesperidean Herrick‘ ………… 1 CHAPTER TWO: Herrick‘s self-presentation as a poet ……………………… 18 CHAPTER THREE: Herrick‘s classical self-presentation ……………………. 80 CHAPTER FOUR: Herrick‘s religious self-presentation …………………….. 134 Conclusion …………………………………………………………………….. 191 Select bibliography ……………………………………………………………. 194 General index ………………………………………………………………….. 202 iv List of short titles/ cue titles The Bible: Authorized Version (Bible) The Booke of common prayer, and administration of the sacraments. And other rites and ceremonies of the Church of England (BCP) The Loeb Classical Library Series (Loeb) – NB. Not all Herrick‘s classical sources are available in Loeb translations, see bibliography. The Oxford Classical Dictionary (OCD) The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (ODCC) The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography online (ODNB) The Oxford English Dictionary online (OED) The Princeton Encyclopaedia of Poetry and Poetics (Princeton Encyclopaedia) List of tables, figures, illustrations, plates Fig. 1: Frontispiece engraving, Hesperides (1648) ................................................... 13 Table 1: Distribution of major classical sources across Hesperides.......................... 104 v Acknowledgements I wish to acknowledge, and thank, the Mandela Rhodes Foundation, who provided me with a two-year Mandela Rhodes Scholarship to undertake this study. The Foundation also sponsored my trip to Buckfast Abbey, near Robert Herrick‘s vicarage of Dean Prior, in Devon, where I participated in a Herrick conference entitled ―‗Lords of Wine and Oil‘: Community and Conviviality in the work of Robert Herrick and his contemporaries‖ in July 2008. vi Introduction Literature has tended to be cut from the moorings of its authorial origins under the influential literary criticism of the past forty years. My thesis is an attempt to re-moor a work of literature to its authorial origins; particularly a work of literature in which the author-poet‘s self-referential markers are so overtly and persistently present as is the case in Hesperides and His Noble Numbers. 1 This study aims to recover the notion that a poem and its poet are indivisible, that poetry is an essential part of what poets do in constituting their identity, and that poetry cannot exist without the author‘s intention to write poetry in a particular context, under particular conditions and with a particular outcome in mind. When one reads Hesperides one is made aware of a figure, a presence if you will, with an engaged life, who has directed the material one reads in such a way as to make one aware of his existence, and whose poetic conduct cannot be understood without reference to that life, without ever being identical with it. In each of the chapters which follow, I shall attempt to show, by focussing on four main aspects of Herrick‘s life in turn, how and why he is able to make us aware of his presence as an agent shaping and directing his work. Taken together, these chapters will provide a holistic understanding of Herrick‘s poetic project which helps to make sense of much that has been misunderstood about him and his work. In the first chapter, I shall sketch Robert Herrick‘s biography briefly, before proceeding to discuss the autobiographical elements in Hesperides. Even though it remains the richest primary source of biographical details we possess about Herrick to this day, however, I shall argue that Hesperides is not an autobiography. The chronology of Herrick‘s life is disrupted to a great extent by the arrangement of his poems. The most that can be said about Hesperides is that it is a manifestation of Herrick‘s conduct as a poet, and therefore contains autobiographical traces, while always remaining a fictional 1 Combined under the title Hesperides, and hereafter both subsumed under the one title in my discussion, except when I am explicitly referring to Noble Numbers. References to specific poems in this thesis provide the poem number in J. Max Patrick‘s 1968 Norton edition (e.g. H-1), followed by the page number in L.C. Martin‘s 1956 Clarendon edition (e.g. 5), and followed by the line number in the poem, when appropriate. Each reference is separated by the slash/virgule, as in the following example: ―The Argument of his Book‖, (H-1 / 5 / 1-2). vii construct. Nevertheless, it is between the interstices of fact and fiction that Herrick is able to present himself both as what kind of person and poet he understands himself to be, and as what kind of person and poet he aspires to be. By rejecting the notion that Hesperides is autobiographical, one can move away from making simple, reductive and misleading one-to-one equivalences between the ―real Herrick‖ and his Hesperidean persona. In the second chapter I shall argue that Herrick‘s poetic practices – his deployment of specific genres and not of others, his chosen conventions for ordering a collection of miscellaneous poems, and his adoption of certain conventional poetic stances – are manifestations of his poetic conduct. They enable him to declare who he understands himself to be and how he wants himself to be understood as a poet. Genre theory is a particularly revelatory entry point to Herrick‘s self-presentation, because genres constitute a mutually comprehensible code of communication between poet and reader. However, genres constantly shift and change, which requires that we study the constituent genres of Hesperides within their seventeenth century context, and within what we know about Herrick‘s biographical context, as far as is possible. On their own, genres provide the reader with minimal understanding about what the poet is attempting to say. As such, genres cannot be considered apart from the contexts and purposes in which they are used. In a second, related, section of Chapter 2, I shall outline the ways in which Herrick guides his reader through Hesperides, using generic signals, literary conventions and a persona who is a poet grappling with the challenges of creating such a large work. At the same time, Herrick creates a sense of place (the partly-mythological, partly-allegorical Hesperidean isles) and a sense of time passing (the poet gets older, for example, and historical events intrude) to heighten the impression that he and the reader have both embarked on a poetic journey towards an increasingly distinctive and defined destination. The destination is not only the end of the work, but also the point at which Herrick fulfils his aspirations as a laureate poet, and is acknowledged as such by the reader. In the third chapter, I shall discuss Herrick‘s self-understanding as a Renaissance humanist inheritor of the classical tradition. Having lost the thoroughgoing classical education of the Renaissance, modern critics are wont to either understate or overstate the extent to which poets like Herrick