The 'Nothing' Trope: Self‐Worth in Renaissance Poetry

Literature Compass 11/8 (2014): 549–559, 10.1111/lic3.12162

The ‘Nothing’ Trope: Self-Worth in Renaissance Poetry

Anthony Archdeacon* Khalifa University

Abstract The recurrence of ‘nothing’ as a topic in renaissance poetry has been explored by many critics, but little attention has been given to the particular trope which is the focus of this article: what might be called the ‘personal nothing’ trope. The article explores various possible interpretations of the trope and explanations for its appearance in English poetry at the end of the 16th century. With reference to poets such as John Donne and lesser known metaphysical poets such as John Davies of Hereford, links to contemporary theology, philosophy and medical writing are suggested, as well as to more particular biographical detail of the poets concerned. The article also considers how the trope relates to Marxist and New Historicist readings of the period. The article argues that the trope suggests something of the value systems and perhaps also the psychological states of the poets, who shared in common a privileged social status which was nevertheless dependent on patronage and preferment in the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean courts.

In 1954, Paul Jorgensen referred to a tendency of certain poets contemporary with Shakespeare – Sir John Davies, John Davies of Hereford and Fulke Greville – to express the idea that ‘temporal life and matter are essentially nothing’ ( Jorgensen 288). It was a common topic for epigrams such as John Davies of Hereford’s ‘Sic transit gloria Mundi’ which declared that ‘To nothing next, or Nothing’sliketothis’ (Davies 1605, 30). Often associated with 12th-century spiritualism, the De contemptu mundi theme had its roots in ancient Cynic philosophy which had inﬂuenced the asceticism of early Christians. The renaissance was, then, an appropriate time for it to re-emerge, particularly amongst ‘metaphysical’ poets writing at the end of the 16th century and the beginning of the 17th.Butavariantofthe‘world is nothing’ theme also had common currency amongst awidergroupofpoets– the idea that ‘man is nothing’. That metaphor was recurrent enough to call a trope in the work of a number of courtly poets, and this essay considers why. One explanation might be found in the Christian piety of these poets: Jorgensen called Sir John Davies and John Davies of Hereford ‘philosophical poets’ but both were known for their religious verses. Sir John Davies, a lawyer by profession, is best known for his long and pious work Nosce Teipsum, which warned that without the grace of God, the soul will suffer ‘a declining pronenesse unto nought’ (Sir John Davies 57). The idea of creation from nothing was well enough established in Christian theology, but Davies embellished this doctrine with the idea that the soule have been ‘twice fashioned’ from nothing, the second time after the Fall:

But Thou which didst Man’s soule of nothing make, And when to nothing it was fallen agen, To make it new, the forme of man didst take, And God with God, becam’st a Man with men. (28)

Davies wrote Nosce teipsum around 1594, towards the end of his training at the Middle Temple (Kelsey). Davies of Hereford, who had arrived in London by 1605 and became well connected in literary court circles (Finkelpearl), pursued a similar line of thought by saying that not just the soule, but mankind is nothing. In The Triumph of Death, Davies gloomily concluded that ‘We best are nought that breathe’ (Davies 1605, 248) and in Summa Totalis extended the metaphor, playing on associations of sin with nothing:

O help us weaklings, Lord of Hoasts,toﬁght, Els we to Nothing must be captive bound: For Nothing (Synne) doth nothing Day and Night But make us worse then Nothing by her spight. (Davies 1607, sig.D2r)

Worse, or less, than nothing was a common extension of the metaphor. Francis Quarles (1592–1644), the author of Divine Fancies, later used the same hyperbole in his epigram, ‘On Man’:

By nature, Lord, men worse than nothing be, And lesse than Nothing, if compared with thee; If lesse and worse then Nothing, tell me than, Where is that something, thou so boasts, proud man. (Quarles 216)

Such prayer-like poetry of self-abasement might best be understood in the larger context of post-Reformation culture in Northern Europe. Self-abnegation by way of atonement for sins was a common impulse of Catholics and Protestants alike during the Reformation and in its aftermath: Luther taught that in a life of contrition, you should hate yourself, whilst French Catholics were equally apt to declare themselves, in penitential fervour, ‘moins que rien’ (Bargedé). This idea was more speciﬁcally Christian than De contemptu mundi, and can be traced back to medieval theology. In Book 14 of De civitate dei, St Augustine explains that man’s low position in the great chain of being is a result of the Fall:

… man did not so fall away as to become absolutely nothing; but being turned towards himself, his being became more contracted than it was when he clave to Him who supremely is. Accordingly, to exist in himself, that is, to be his own satisfaction after abandoning God, is not quite to become a nonentity, but to approximate to that. (Augustine 14.13)

Philippe de Mornay’s the Trewnesse of the Christian Religion, which Philip Sidney had been translating before his untimely death in 1586, showed the persistence of Augustinian thought, though expressing the idea slightly differently:

God almightie, to shewe us that he made all of nothing, hath left a certeyne inclination in his Creatures, whereby they tend naturally to nothing … unless they be uphild by his power (Mornay 26)

There is an absoluteness about Christian morality which was imagined at an ontological level: evil equates to non-being as God equates to full being, and people are ‘evill as in respect that they forgo their formal being, that is to say, their goodnesse’ (26). The Fall, of course, was the result of man’s pride, the original and greatest of all the sins, which points towards the other key renaissance topos relating directly to the man-is-nothing trope: omnia vanitas. Derived from Ecclesiastes 1:2 (in the Vulgate Bible, Vanitas vanitatum, et omnia vanitas: ‘Vanity of vanities, and all is vanity’), this was a theme popular in paintings as

© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd Literature Compass 11/8 (2014): 549–559, 10.1111/lic3.12162 The Personal Nothing Trope in English Poetry 1580s to 1620s 551 well as literature across Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries. In late 16th-century usage, ‘vanity’ could mean void or emptiness as well as personal pride, which became therefore by extension a form of nothingness, linking vanitas semantically to the ‘man is nothing’ trope. In a similar fashion, the same passage from Mornay about evil and nothing had made play of the words ‘nought’ and ‘naughtiness’.1 The penitent man, then, was encouraged to think of his sin, and pride in particular, as entailing a loss of being, which might set particular challenges for the self-promoting class of courtiers and intellectuals with whom we are concerned. The specifically religious usage described above overlapped with eschatological discourse in the period. Penitence and self-denial often went hand in hand with apocalyptic fears, as individuals meditated upon the second coming, the Day of Judgment, and the collective annihilation of humanity. Though the mid-17th century is commonly thought of as the era of English millenarianism, it was strong too in the late 16th century (Bauckham). In 1585, a prose work with a strong eschatological theme, ‘The Prayse of Nothing’,was published by Sir Edward Dyer, courtier to Queen Elizabeth, poet and close friend of Philip Sidney.2 Its central argument is that mankind has, through corruption and an attachment to earthly things, departed too far from the purity of the original nothingness from which we were all created. So our options were ‘eyther to returne to that of which al things were created, or to be stil endowed with the simple of the first creation’ (Dyer sig.B2r), the latter being prime matter or chaos, and the former being the originary nothingness. Harbingers of apocalypse could easily be identified in England at that time: an outbreak of plague in 1582, the war with Spain starting in 1585, and if not famine, at least frequent dearths – localized grain shortages caused by harvest failures (Sharpe 53). The outbreaks of plague in this era were devastating, returning in 1593 and 1603, when 30,000 died in London alone. John Davies of Hereford’s The Triumph of Death quoted above had the full title of The Triumph of Death, or The Picture of the Plague, as it was in Anno Domini 1603. In this context, the appearance of the literary ‘man is nothing’ theme might be seen as a microcos- mic reflection of very real fears about the world’s imminent annihilation. The mood in London might well have been affected by events in Paris at the time. English Protestant millenarianism had been embodied by John Foxe’s 1563 Acts and Monuments, which was republished in 1583 with an account of the 1572 St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in Paris added to the final chapter. The massacre of thousands of Huguenots, with whom many English Protestants were sympathetic, was one of the lowest points in the civil wars which had divided France since 1562. The next decade had seen a number of religious riots, as well as bread riots, in the capital, and 1583 saw the white-robed, penitential Processions blanches begin in Paris and throughout France, in preparation for the second coming of Christ (Crouzet 1982).3 The same year, Jean Passerat, humanist Professor of Latin at the Collège de France in Paris, published the Latin poem ‘Nihil’.4 Dyer borrowed little of either substance or style from Passerat’s satirical poem, though being closely in touch with French affairs, he appears to have been strongly influenced by the apocalyptic sub-text.5 The situation in London was not nearly as bad as that in Paris in the early 1580s, but Dyer’s essay is actually more explicitly doom-laden. Even so, there is a touch of optimism in the final lines, since the destruction of sinful mankind is not the end of the story, more a purgative stage of history:

from that time forth shall iniquitye be unhorsed, that now over-runneth the godly with many tiranies, and then shall the good people of God triumph wyth the Lambe for ever. (Dyer sig.H1v)

Apocalyptic narratives might involve annihilation, but English millenarianism tended to focus on post-apocalyptic renewal.

The Christian context does not fully explain the range of meanings which the personal nothing trope could sustain. The usage often suggests something more emotionally involved than the self-denial of asceticism but less dramatic than apocalyptic fear: self-doubt, anxiety, a deep-seated unease. This psychological rather than theological perspective can be associated with certain historical accounts whereby the renaissance marked the emergence of self-con- scious individuality amongst an intellectual elite. This theory was expounded first in the 19th century by Jacob Burckhardt in a chapter of The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy which called upon evidence from scholar poets and satirists to support the thesis. More negative rep- resentations of that phenomenon appear in Marxist accounts which focus on a capitalist phase seen in the 16th-century Italy: the rise of banking (Dobb 1946). At least since Hannah Arendt (1952) characterized it as a period of ‘world alienation’, Marxist readings of early modern history have assumed that at a time when the growth of money markets was moving capitalism into a new stage of development, alienation would have been an inevitable con- sequence.6 Then there have been psycho-analytical responses to these historical accounts which hypothesize about the impact of such cultural or socio-economic change on the individual, sometimes positing a crisis of subjectivity. The rise of colonial exploration, scientific empiricism, bourgeois individualism and political self-assertion brought with it a concomi- tant anxiety for those individuals involved. If it was a period of increased self-consciousness then, in Lacanian terms, it must surely also carry with it the uneasiness of the de-centred subject. Cynthia Marshall, for example, has used Slavoj Zizek’s Lacanian cultural analysis to help explain images of the ‘shattered self’ in sonnets and plays of the period (Marshall 2002). So established now is the idea of a fragmented, unstable early modern subject that Terry Sherwood’s The Self in Early Modern Literature (2007) was presented as a revisionist rebuttal of New Historicist orthodoxy. Sherwood suggested that the notion of a social calling which defined the self, as described by the English Calvinist William Perkins, was influential on poets and playwrights of the time. He cites Shakespeare’s portrayal of Prince Hal as an example, and explores John Donne’s sense of a ‘vocational self’, expressed in his Sermonsasthedutyto‘be somebody’(Sherwood 145). As we shall see, however, Donne the poet had a fondness for the personal nothing metaphor which suggested a less than secure sense of self. Discussion of the early modern self must include reference to Stephen Greenblatt’s theories in Renaissance self-fashioning (1980), about a group of men writing a generation or so earlier than the period on which I have focused. The painting which appears on the front cover of that highly influential book is Holbein’s ‘The Ambassadors’, which was an eccentric example of the vanitas genre, a distorted skull image dominating the foreground. By Greenblatt’s account, the self-fashioning of his chosen self-made men involved ‘submission to an absolute power or authority’ and since ‘submission and destruction are always already internalized’, this carried with it ‘some effacement or undermining, some loss of self’ (Greenblatt 9). ‘Loss of self’ was a side effect of the negotiations such men had to make with the dominant power structures of their time, whether political or religious. The writers with whom I am concerned came from that same courtly sphere of activity, so perhaps the nothing trope manifests a kind of self-negation peculiar to that class of men. An alternative psychological interpretation could be provided by what Angus Gowland has called ‘an increased prevalence of melancholy from the late sixteenth century onwards’ (Gowland 89), and not exclusively amongst the ambitious intellectual elite. The tendency for poets to call themselves nothing might be viewed as a symptom of this malady, or at least a response to its raised profile in England, where the medical doctor Timothy Bright published his Treatise of Melancholie in 1586. Interestingly, Bright had narrowly escaped being killed in the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in Paris a decade earlier, taking refuge at the

© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd Literature Compass 11/8 (2014): 549–559, 10.1111/lic3.12162 The Personal Nothing Trope in English Poetry 1580s to 1620s 553 house of the English ambassador Sir Francis Walsingham, along with Philip Sidney, who would marry Walsingham’s daughter in 1583 (Life, 2004). Furthermore, Bright published an abridged version of Foxe’s Acts and Monuments in 1589 which he dedicated in thanks to Walsingham, who had since become his patron. The idea that melancholy and English millenarianism were somehow linked in the person of Timothy Bright is an intriguing one. His experience in 1572 must have affected him deeply, not only because of the fear for his life but also, as a strong nationalist, in witnessing at first hand a country tearing itself apart. Bright’s treatment of the topic was slight in comparison to Robert Burton’s huge and expanding compendium The Anatomy of Melancholy which was first published in 1621. Burton’s highly erudite but partly facetious work seemed to be speaking, satirically, about the culture of his age. Although it drew on examples from throughout history, the prefatory ‘Democritus to the reader’ clearly situates this ‘common infirmity of the body and soul’ in the present: ‘all the world is melancholy … so universal a malady, an epidemical disease’ (Burton 120–1). Despite his suggestion that the epidemic of melancholy was quite demo- cratic, and not restricted to intellectuals, Gowland also points to currents in philosophical thought which were possible contributing factors. The neo-platonist Marsilio Ficino had seen melancholy as an almost divine condition and one associated with artistic genius (Schleiner 1991, Brill 2001, Britton 2003). So Ficino might have made the condition somewhat fashionable amongst poets, but Gowland also points to neo-Stoic philosophy engaged in ‘the humanistic search for a Christianized model of self-sufficient wisdom’ (Gowland 101). Douglas Trevor has challenged this Ficinian account, locating the melancholy of poets such as Spenser and Donne in their scholarliness (Trevor, 2004). As Adam Kitzes has observed (Kitzes 2006), the discourse around melancholy is often quite confus- ing, even contradictory, but whether it was an ailment or an intellectual fashion, it might reasonably be linked to the appearance of the personal nothing trope. So the trope belongs to a nexus of religious, philosophical and medical discourse in the period, but we only need to shift the focus slightly to include notions of cultural value in that nexus. To say ‘man is nothing’ is a kind of valuation, and in the late 16th century, it might have had a particularly economic connotation. The word ‘nothing’ in the late 16th century had begun to be conflated with a new word gaining currency specifically in the money markets: ‘zero’ (Rotman 25). An Arabic numeral representing the mysterious algebraic ‘cipher’, the figure of zero became demonized in the late medieval period because of its apparent undermining of value: a nothing which was neither positive nor negative (Murray 173). Arabic numerals in general were treated with suspicion for centuries after their introduction to the West, and famously in 1299, Florentine merchants were forbidden to use them in their accounting. But during the 16th century, the bankers not only of Florence and Venice but eventually of Northern Europe were to leave Roman numerals and the abacus behind. Thus, zero became much more common usage, and ‘naught’ (already, as noted above, carrying the moral connotations of ‘naughty’) became a synonym during the 17th century. So there was an emerging usage around ‘nothing’ whose economic meaning undermined the assuredness of Christian absolutes: the binary oppositions of being and nothingness, of something (or everything) and nothing. When Bassanio in The Merchant of Venice rates himself as ‘worse than nothing’ (2.2.255), it has none of the metaphysical, religious overtones of the phrase as it appears in the verse of Davies of Hereford or Quarles. Indeed, it might not even carry moral signification. To hear Bassanio and understand him to mean simply that he is in debt is to feel the tension between the competing value systems of Christian doctrine and the money market in the 1590s. Bassanio was in debt to the merchant Antonio (if not alienated, then at least melancholy) whose ships were lost at sea on their way to various locations, including England.7 In 1597, around the

© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd Literature Compass 11/8 (2014): 549–559, 10.1111/lic3.12162 554 The Personal Nothing Trope in English Poetry 1580s to 1620s time Shakespeare was writing The Merchant of Venice, John Donne sailed out of England with an expedition led by Essex and Raleigh to the Azores. The expedition’saimwastoplunderthe Spanish trading ‘treasure ﬂeet’, which by now challenged the supremacy of Venetian world trade. But it proved an unsuccessful venture, and the mood of failure was captured by Donne, who might have hoped for a glorious turn of fortunes by his involvement, in ‘The Calme’:

What are wee then? How little more alas Is man now, than before he was? He was Nothing; for us, wee are for nothing ﬁt. (Donne 45)

The trope appeared later in Donne’s elegiac ‘Anatomy of the World’ (1611):

Of nothing he made us, and we strive too To bring ourselves to nothing back … If man were anything, he’s nothing now. (207)

However similar these sentiments might seem to those of Davies of Hereford or Quarles, their tone is quite different from those poems addressed, prayer-like, to God. In the one poem it is perhaps misanthropic, an expression of failed trust, in the other, a conventional expression of grief. Donne re-used the conceit in his letter ‘To the Countess of Salisbury’ (1614) which, while praising the Countess, attacks what he sees as a world being destroyed by individualism:

All the world’s frame being crumbled into sand, Where every man thinks by himselfe to stand (250)

Again switching between ﬁrst and third person, Donne describes his fellow man scathingly:

All trying by love of littlenesse To make abridgments, and to draw to lesse, Even that nothing, which at ﬁrst we were. (251)

Donne’s oscillation between self-hatred and misanthropy is figured in this habitual negation of himself on the one hand, and of an externalized, objectified mankind on the other. In his later years, in the face of illness and approaching death, Donne’s language veered towards a more theological figuring of the nothing trope, in a kind of personal apocalyptic. A recurrent theme was that men were destroying themselves by their sinfulness: in his 1624 meditations on the topic of his own sickness, he says we are ‘executioners of our selves’, and in an epitaph ‘To himself’ declares:

Our souls become worm-eaten carcases, So we ourselves miraculously destroy. (236)

In a Lenten sermon from 1628, he argued that only God prevented man from being nothing: ‘thou passest through this world in a ﬂash, as a lightning of which no man knows the beginning or the ending, as an ignus fatuus in the air…’ (386) So Donne combined the traditional Vanitas theme with, if not a belief in universal nihilation, then at least, a rhetorical use of eschatological ideas at the personal level, expressed in his religious writings in terms of the self-destructiveness of sin.

If one way that Donne used this trope was to express a strong moral value system, there are certainly other ways we can read it. In his earlier verse, Donne’s calling himself nothing could be simply a polite rhetorical ﬁgure to be used on close friends such as Christopher Brooke in the opening of ‘The Storme’: ‘Thou which art I (’tis nothing to be soe)’ (42). But there were often undercurrents which ran deep. John Carey observed that ‘Donne’s ambitious nature contained within it … contradictory seeds: of self-assertion and self-negation’ (Carey 1981, 62), whilst Terry Sherwood has claimed that Donne’s sense of his own nothingness issued from ‘a psychology of loss, separation and depression.’ (Sherwood 152)8 From the evidence of his letters during 1607 and 1608 at Mitcham, Donne was clearly was deeply unhappy, but for an explanation perhaps, one need not to go much further than his desperate ﬁnancial situation at that point, recalling the economic connotations of ‘nothing’ and ‘zero’ mentioned above. Whilst modern accounting was introducing a new, relativistic, kind of nought value, there was a more established and more absolute moral devaluation of the ‘undeserving poor’ at this time. For beggars to be referred to as nothings was not uncommon, as evidenced in an epigram from John Davies of Hereford refuting the proverb, ‘Naught hath no savour’ with an uncharitably scathing attitude to the least fortunate:

Nought hath no savour. That I deny Some are stark naught that smell most ﬁlthily. (Davies 1610, 148)

Interestingly, Dyer’s essay on nothing had put a Christian twist on the association of poverty and nothingness. Following a biblically-inspired onslaught upon the iniquities of the wealthy, a contrastingly sanguine view of poverty is proffered:

The afﬁnitie which hath beene ever betweene nothing, and the poverty of men, maketh the one hardly to be discerned from the other in the possession of their owners: the effectes of both, being the cause of good arts, and invention of some newe matter proﬁtable to the world. (Dyer E2r)

Dyer’s argument seems to be that poverty has the beneﬁt of making you work hard to get out of it: in this way, it is a productive kind of nothingness. This was following a conventional Christian dictum that the poor could be happy not to have the temptations and distractions of worldly wealth.9 Matthew’s Gospel has Christ relating the difﬁculty of a rich man entering heaven, and Luke’s version of the Beatitudes begins with ‘Happy are the poor, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven’ (Luke 6:20). Such contradictory and perhaps hypocritical attitudes to poverty did not go unnoticed at the time: Robert Burton in his Anatomy of Melancholy was sharply ironic on the topic:

Poverty, although (if considered aright, to a wise, understanding, truly regenerate, and contented man) it be a donum Dei, a blessed estate, the way to heaven, as Chrysostom calls it, God’s gift, the mother of modesty, and much to be preferred before riches … yet as it is esteemed in the world’scensure,itisa most odious calling, vile and base, a severe torture, summum scelus, a most intolerable burden … the fountain of all other miseries, cares, woes, labours, and grievances whatsoever. (Burton 346)

The notion of being happy to be, or to have, nothing expresses a deliberately paradoxical conceit. It might seem disingenuous or complacent for well-to-do poets to be rehearsing this argument, but it suggests much about the realities of being a self-made man in early modern society: being ‘something’ in society brought its own risks. Edward Dyer’s case proved the point: in spite of a substantial inheritance of land and property, and being a well respected statesman, he spent much of his working life in a cycle of borrowing and debt to ﬁnance

© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd Literature Compass 11/8 (2014): 549–559, 10.1111/lic3.12162 556 The Personal Nothing Trope in English Poetry 1580s to 1620s his position at court. In 1579, the queen had lent him £3000, which he never managed to repay, and in 1582 a Spanish agent at court had described Dyer as ‘that bankrupt poltroon’.10 There is a fascinating irony in the fact that Dyer studied, under John Dee, the arts of alchemy, especially since alchemy was used by Passerat as a metaphor for mankind’s self-destruction, in satirizing men who (in his own French translation) ‘par inﬁnies nuitz reduisent tout a rien’ (through endless nights reduce everything to nothing).11 Like Dyer, John Donne knew about the fear of poverty: having squandered his own inheritance as a young man, he was often of the verge of poverty in his 30s. Many years later, having established himself in the secure position of Dean of St Paul’s, Donne would explain absolute nothingness in terms of the relative nothingness of poverty:

First Erimus, we shall have a being. There is nothing more contrary to God, and his proceedings, than annihilation, to be nothing, do nothing, think nothing. It is not so high a step to raise the poor out of the dust, and to lift the needy from the dunghill, and set him with princes; to make a king of a beggar is not so much, as to make a worm of nothing. (Easter sermon of 1630, Donne 310)

Donne is clearly articulating here the distinction from which we began, between an economic zero value and an absolute nothingness imagined as much worse than the needy nothings of the dunghill. And yet, the analogies of beggars and kings, dunghills and princes are telling: poverty and beggary are his chief reference point for the notion of personal nothingness. From the time he wrote his mocking epigram ‘A Lame Beggar’ (33) to his sermon of May 8, 1625 where he refers to beggars as vermin (363), Donne appears to have shown contempt rather than sympathy for those who fell into beggary. There is something quite awkward about the tone of that sermon, putting a rich-friendly gloss on the Beatitudes and claiming that beggars are ‘further away from all ways of goodness, than the corruptest rich man is.’ (362–3) Despite his evident fear of poverty, happiness was not provided either by money or preferment for Donne. Sherwood claims that Donne’s depression at Mitcham was about his exclusion from society on account of having no patron. The support he had been receiving from Sir Henry Goodyer had dried up in 1606, and now “he became a ‘nothing’ without preferment” (Sherwood 172). So patronage was enough to fulfil Donne’s sense of a ‘vocational self’. Yet this is clearly over-simplification, since Donne’s use of the image suggested that patronage itself makes him feel himself a nothing, and there is a particularly uncomfortable feel when the figure takes on economic connotations, as in the poem to his noble patron the Countess of Bedford: ‘Nothings, as I am, may / Pay all they have, and yet have all to pay’ (187). The metaphor of unlimited payment surely betrays conflict: despite the mannered surface politeness, it implies that his role is one of infinite self-abasement. In March 1607, he had asked a would-be patron to accept his nothingness: ‘There is some of the honour and some of the degrees of a Creation to make a friendship of nothing’, he writes. He goes on in painful self-deprecation:

Yet, not to annihilate myself utterly (for though it seem humbleness, yet it is a work of as much almightiness to bring a thing to nothing as from nothing) … (Gosson 181)

There is no sense here that patronage gives him a feeling of self-worth. Later in his 1625 sermon, he would damn ‘expert beggars’ who ‘teach others what they shall say, how they shall look, how they shall lie, how they shall cry’ (Donne 362–3). Surely he must have been aware on some level that his own expertise in rhetoric 20 years earlier had been employed similarly, in the letters pleading for preferment at court and poems ﬂattering would-be patrons.

There is certainly something in Sherwood’s view that vocational work strongly influenced Donne’s sense of self, but it is doubtful that dependence on patrons counted as vocation. Only once Donne had an independent career could he feel he had fully escaped social nothingness. His view of annihilation in the 1630 sermon, ‘To be nothing, do nothing, think nothing’, sounds like a negation of the whole project of renaissance self-fashioning: having no desire to think, to do, is to deny your own being. Such inactivity is the opposite of divine creativity,andhishorroratthisideaperhaps shows how far in his later years he took to heart the Protestant imperative to make something of yourself. The same theme had infused ‘The Calm’ back in 1597: the misery of being helplessly becalmed, having ‘no power, no will, no sense’ (46). One of Donne’s sermons from 1628 dwells on the theme that ‘however honourable his station be, he must do his day’slabourinthe day’ (385). He preached that the man who ‘sofarfromhavingdonehiserrandhere … knows not, considers not what his errand was’ might as well have been left uncre- ated, ‘amongst privations, amongst nothings.’ Whether Donne’s attitude was intellectual or emotional, arising from faith or self-doubt, or simply the rhetoric of the preacher, is difficult to say. As a young man, he had even been able to think of his love as an angelic ‘glorious nothing’ (101), and ‘nothing’ in ‘Negative love’ had been a mystical intensifier, not an absence or privation. Status, power, wealth, health, happiness, sinfulness and salvation are all involved in the economies of personal worth surrounding the nothing trope as it developed from the 1580s to the 1620s. Donne’s body of poetry alone contains sufficient contradictory usage for us to say that this was a fluctuating economy, in which value is no longer always absolute but can be negotiated and renegotiated. In this respect, the ‘personal nothing’ metaphor is an indicator of turbulent times – not just religious and political but also social, cultural and economic. In the verses of metaphysical poets, the trope had clear philosophical and theological antecedents, but it took on new meanings in an age of humanism and individualism, of capitalist development and political disorder, and seems to give us an insight into the uncertainties and fears of the privileged class of men who wrote them. Nothingness could suggest either the purity of the soul or poverty, an originary precursor of the Golden Age or the disintegration of society, a worthy selflessness or a fearful loss of identity. Self-negation could therefore be a fear or an aspiration, a sign of despair or desire for renewal, but ultimately, it was a valuation, a signifier of self- worth. The writers I have cited showed self-worth to be influenced, and threatened, by many factors. However, much of the existence of the trope might reflect cultural currents or the circulation of ideas on a societal level; the implications of its usage are often quite circumstantial and particular to individual poets. In this sense, the power of the trope is often less in any putative socio-cultural significance than in the poignant resonance of poets’ personal insecurities and fears.

Short Biography Anthony Archdeacon is currently Assistant Professor in Academic English at Khalifa University, UAE. He previously worked for 30 years in a range of roles relating either to English Studies or to UK Education. He holds a BA in English and Philosophy from Manchester University, an MPhil in Medieval Literature from Cambridge University and a PhD from Southampton University. He is interested in the relationship between philosophy and poetry in the renaissance, and in notions of value in early modern poetry and thought.

Notes

* Correspondence: Khalifa University – Humanities and Social Sciences, Sharjah Campus PO Box 573, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates. Email: [email protected]

1 See also Fulke Greville, Sonnet 81: ‘Beauty grown sick, nature corrupt and nought.’ 2 Dyer was a pall-bearer at Sidney’s funeral in 1586 and Sidney books were divided between him and another close friend, Fulke Greville. Dyer was clearly also friendly with John Davies of Hereford, who refers to him in the preface to Microcosmos (1603) and dedicates a sonnet to him. 3 See also Crouzet 1990. 2: 326. 4 Passerat was a moderate Catholic who wanted political settlement with the Huguenots and later criticized the Catholic League via the Satire Menipée (1594). There are no verse imitations of Passerat in English until the Earl of Rochester’s ‘Upon Nothing’ almost a century later. 5 Dyer was a regular correspondent of a French ambassador in Paris (see May). 6 The contemptus mundi theme has itself been seen as evidence of this Renaissance world alienation: see Howard, in Kinsman, 47–76. 7 Claire Jowitt has even suggested that Shylock’s remark about Antonio’s argosies being at risk of piracy might have been an allusion to the Essex-Raleigh expedition (Jowitt 2010, 127). 8 See also Kitzes, op. cit, 105–122, characterizing Donne as a melancholic on the basis of his Devotions. 9 The Church’s difﬁculty with this topic had a long history: St Augustine had said that the love of money is the root of all evil, and yet the doctrine of the poverty of Christ and his apostles was declared heresy in 1322. 10 See May, who also records that at his death Dyer had more than £11,000 of debt. 11 Passerat, 1587; compare epigrammatist Robert Hayman’s ‘Alchymists’ Folly’: ‘God at the ﬁrst nothing all things wrought: / Our alchymysts reduce all things to nought.’ (Hayman Bk.4, No.132).

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