THE ART of IMITATION in the ORDER of THINGS: POETRY, RHETORIC, and the DISCURSIVE FORMATION of ENGLISH by JANICE SEWELL
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THE ART OF IMITATION IN THE ORDER OF THINGS: POETRY, RHETORIC, AND THE DISCURSIVE FORMATION OF ENGLISH by JANICE SEWELL A thesis submitted to The University of Birmingham For the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY The Shakespeare Institute School of English The University of Birmingham September 2002 2 ABSTRACT The first part of this thesis offers an analysis of Elizabethan poetical treatises, such as Philip Sidney’s Apology for Poetry, in terms of Michel Foucault’s discursive formations, and the ways in which they were instrumental in redefining the sixteenth century literary terrain of poetry, prose, drama, poetics and literary criticism. It examines the role of contributory factors such as the Puritan attack, Renaissance humanism, the Ramist reform of logic and rhetoric, increased levels of literacy and printing. It explores conflicting definitions of poetry in the early modern period and its changing role and function, and the appropriation of significant elements from other discourses, notably rhetoric, arguing that this process constituted part of the wider reorganisation of contemporary knowledges. The second part of the thesis is concerned with the work and practice of the writer George Gascoigne, author of the first poetical treatise in English and his importance as an Elizabethan poet. 3 For Molly and Tom without whose continued faith, support, and encouragement, as well as their occasional filial nagging, I should never have finished this. 4 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I should like to express my deepest thanks to my long-suffering supervisor, John Jowett, for his unstinting help and kindness, and to the librarians at The Shakespeare Institute, Jim Shaw and Kate Welch, for their endless patience. I have been supported over the years by many friends and colleagues and I should like to thank in particular Dr. Maria Jones, Dr. Sue Niebrzydowski, Dr. Paul Edmondson, Dr. Sebastian Mitchell, Dr. Mary Kehily, Dr. Kate Corr, Bernadette Collins and Tony Loveridge. 5 CONTENTS PART I: THEORY Introduction: Poetics and discursive formations 6 1 Genealogies: Causes and Effects – Protestantism and the Puritan Attack 29 The Defence of Poetry 2 Print, Literacy, Book Production, and Renaissance Humanism 60 3 The Art of Imitation 83 4 Poetry and Rhetoric 109 5 Language, Translation, Genre, and Criticism 141 PART II: PRACTICE 6 George Gascoigne – Exemplary Elizabethan Poet 183 7 Poetry 190 8 Prose 224 9 Authors and Authority 244 Conclusion: Rhetoric, Post-strucuralism and the Postmodern 268 Bibliography 281 6 INTRODUCTION POETICS AND DISCURSIVE FORMATIONS In the last quarter of the sixteenth and first decade of the seventeenth century around two dozen texts of various kinds were published on the subject of poetry in English.1 Sidney’s Apology for Poetry (1595)2 is the best-known followed by the lengthiest of the works, Puttenham’s Arte of English Poesie (1589),3 then perhaps Francis Meres’ Palladis Tamia (1598), read for the light it throws on the dating of the work of other writers, in particular Shakespeare, rather than intrinsic merit. The rest are rarely read today, but of these the most interesting are George Gascoigne’s Certayne Notes of Instruction Concerning the Making of Verse or Ryme in English (1575), William Webbe’s A Discourse of English Poetrie (1586), Abraham Fraunce’s The Arcadian Rhetoricke (1588), Thomas Nashe’s Anatomie of Abuse (1589), Sir John Harington’s Preface to his translation of Orlando Furioso, A Brief Apology for Poetry (1591), Gabriel Harvey’s Four Letters (1592), Thomas Campion’s Observations in the Art of English Poesie (1602), Samuel Daniel’s A Defence of Ryme (1603), and Ben Jonson’s Timber or Discoveries (1605). Apart from Sidney’s Apology, which I had read before, I came across the majority of these texts in G. Gregory Smith’s edition of Elizabethan Critical Essays (1904). Until that point I had thought Sidney’s was a unique work and I was surprised to 1 King James I/VI’s Ane Schort Treatise conteining some Reulis and Cautelis to be obseruit and eschewit in Scottis Poesie (1584), which is written in Scots, is included in G. Gregory Smith’s Elizabethan Critical Essays Volume I pp. 208-225 and is clearly relevant to the whole debate. 2 Sidney died in 1586. Two versions of his text were published in 1595 – Henry Olney’s An Apologie for Poetrie and William Ponsonby’s The Defence of Poesie. Geoffrey Shepherd concludes that the “likeliest date” of composition “appears to be during the years 1581 to 1583” although the manuscript circulated widely in the intervening years. 3 The Arte of English Poesie is anonymous but generally attributed to George Puttenham. It was published in 1589, but is thought to have been started, if not completed, at an earlier date, possibly as early as 1569. 7 discover that, on the contrary, he was only one among a number of Elizabethans concerned with contemporary writing practices. I was intrigued by the way that these texts were concerned with similar issues, even when they disagreed with each other. I was curious as to how it was that they came to be written in the first place and why they should have been written at that time, what their function was and where their ideas had come from. The purpose of this thesis is to provide answers to these questions, putting the texts in their historical, intellectual and literary contexts. Smith had identified the most important of these texts dealing with fundamental literary questions of the age, but there was related material to be found in other works, especially in introductory material such as prefaces. In fact, it seemed the norm for Elizabethan writers to analyse and discuss the state and constitution of contemporary writing and poetic practice in the introductions to their published work. I read as much of this material as I could, analysing it in terms of content and drawing upon it as and when it appeared relevant. In the most recent collection, English Renaissance Literary Criticism, Brian Vickers has even included snippets of critical material scattered throughout Shakespeare’s plays. My thesis focuses though on the longer, better known works, which are generally more detailed and more comprehensive. Smith’s edition is still the outstanding work of scholarship in this area to which all subsequent scholars have been indebted. In his Introduction, Smith argues that “it was at this time in England, and hardly earlier in renaissance Europe, that criticism per se first laid claim to rank as a literary ‘kind’ in the vernacular.”4 J. W. H. Atkins also regards the texts as constituting “the foundation of modern criticism.”5 This collection of texts includes Arts, Apologies, Abuses, Anatomies, Prefaces, and letters, and performs a number of 4 Smith 1904, I: xii. 5 J. W. H. Atkins, English Literary Criticism: The Renascence (London: Methuen, 1947), p. v. 8 different functions. It both attacks and defends poetry, as well as analysing and (re)defining it. It is also engaged with formal elements such as lexis, diction, orthography, prose, verse, rhyme, metre, genre, figures of speech, and translation. It is concerned with what to write and how to write, and also how to read, with interpretation and exegesis, as well as attending to what would today be considered the more usual domain of literary criticism, assessing the merits of a variety of classical and contemporary texts. Despite its heterogeneous constitution, it appears to represent a body of work dealing with issues of contemporary significance. It is engaged in an ongoing Elizabethan debate concerned with all aspects of contemporary writing practices. Given these factors and the specific time frame, I came to think of these texts in terms of what Michel Foucault calls a “discursive formation” - the term on which he eventually settled after rejecting more conventional ways of grouping together material relating to the same topic, what he calls the “Unities of Discourse,” such as “tradition,” “influence,” “spirit,” and even “book” and “oeuvre”, as inadequate in their vagueness or implications of a “background of permanence.”6 Foucault’s own definition of this term suggests that Whenever, between objects, types of statement, concepts, or thematic choices, one can define a regularity (an order of correlations, positions and functionings, transformations), we will say, for the sake of convenience that we are dealing with a discursive formation.7 Taken as a whole these texts clearly represented “types of statement”, dealing with “concepts” which constitute a “regularity”. In many cases writers were responding directly to one another – Thomas Lodge’s Defence of Poetry is an angry riposte to 6 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge translated by A. M. Sheridan Smith (London; New York: Routledge, 1972), pp. 21-23. 7 Foucault, 1972: 38. 9 Stephen Gosson’s Schoole of Abuse; the Harvey/Nashe quarrel spills over into mutual abuse of each other’s prose style and use of inkhorn terms, as well as the defensibility of the hexameter. Samuel Daniel’s Defence of Ryme is a thoughtful, wide-ranging answer to Thomas Campion’s condemnation in Observations in the Arte of English Poesie. Foucault seemed to offer a potentially challenging analytical model because he was interested in the different ways cultures think historically and in trying to analyse the fundamental basis of the change in ways of thinking over time. This was obviously relevant for my research as I came to realise that the texts I was considering effectively reorganised and redefined poetry and the terrain of, what might be termed anachronistically,