The Pennsylvania State University The Graduate School College of the Liberal Arts ANATOMIES OF AUTHORSHIP: POETIC PHYSICALITY IN ENGLISH RENAISSANCE SONNET SEQUENCES A Dissertation in English by Ryan J. Croft © 2011 Ryan J. Croft Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy May 2011 ii The dissertation of Ryan J. Croft was reviewed and approved* by the following: Marcy North Associate Professor of English Dissertation Advisor Chair of Committee Linda Woodbridge Professor of English Josephine Berry Weiss Chair in the Humanities Patrick Cheney Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature Caroline Eckhardt Professor of English and Comparative Literature Norris Lacy Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of French and Medieval Studies Robin Schulze Professor of English Head of the Department of English *Signatures are on file in the Graduate School iii Abstract Between 1582 and 1621, English Renaissance writers structure their sonnet sequences around a paradigm of “poetic physicality.” This term covers three facets in the representations of poetic composition: the poet’s body; the implements of writing, which are extensions of that body; and the space where the poet writes or speaks, including the form of the sonnet itself, as well as settings such as the pastoral field or study. The body of the Renaissance sonneteer moved through a web of discourses: Galenic rather than Cartesian notions of the materiality of thought and emotion; cosmological understandings of the body as microcosm; and religious and philosophical appreciation of the hand as masterpiece of creation. Writers also had to make use of implements—the quill, penknife, ink, and paper—that were prepared and used much differently from their present counterparts. Finally, the strict form of the sonnet, as well as an actual physical setting, provided a variety of spaces for writing. By sculpting these three facets, sonneteers resolve a tension between two kinds of composition: the first, driven by the poet’s excessive imagination and passion; the second, guided by the poet’s reason and controlling hand. In resolving this tension, they discover alternative models of poetic physicality. One model, found in Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella, emphasizes spontaneous oral composition. A second model, present in Daniel’s Delia as well as other sequences, incorporates a variety of physical signs, including sighs and tears, to illustrate the effects of love’s passion. A third model, represented in Spenser’s and Chapman’s works, makes the poet’s hand into an icon that links poems within a laureate career. Finally, Shakespeare presents a unique blend of these models; in his Sonnets, the poet’s hand writes sonnets for readers to utter aloud, assuring poetic immortality. Combining critical approaches often kept separate, those addressing the body and the author, this dissertation is the first to account for the originality and potency of sonnet sequences by showing how the genre allows poets to anatomize their authorship. iv Table of Contents Introduction…………………………………………………………….………………….1 Chapter 1: From Respiring Voice to Writing Hand: An Anatomy of the English Renaissance Sonneteer……………….…...……..…………22 Chapter 2: “Enter Astrophil in pomp”: Sidney’s Private Performance of Oral Composition in Astrophil and Stella (1591)……………………………………………………………57 Chapter 3: Counter-Sidneyan Poetic Physicality in Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus (1621) and Greville’s Caelica (1633)….............92 Chapter 4: The Aging Poet’s Request for Patronage in Constable’s Diana and Daniel’s Delia (1592)……………………………………….133 Chapter 5: English Sighs and Sonnet Tears: Seeking Recognition and Distinction in a Crowded Field (1593-1619)………..............166 Chapter 6: The Public Emergence of the Poet’s Hand as an Icon of Authorship in the Sonnet Sequences of Chapman and Spenser (1595)……………………………..208 Conclusion: Shakespeare’s Sonnets (1609): The Death of the Author and the Life of the Reader………………….………………..250 Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………....271 1 Introduction The sudden and unique proliferation of sonnet sequences in the 1590s is a fact of English literary history that has long demanded explanation. The traditional response—that sonneteers were inspired to profit from Sir Philip Sidney’s example in the 1591 Astrophil and Stella—only begs the question: what was it that Sidney, other writers, and the reading public at large all found compelling about the genre? Moreover, the notion that sonnet sequences are simply derivative works taking advantage of a famous writer and the literary trend he sparked does not hold up under scrutiny. While acknowledging the influence of Sidney and others, each sonneteer seems eager to put forth his or her own very different poetic persona before readers. When one recalls that the sonnet sequence was a new, undefined mode in English literature, it becomes even more apparent why the genre was the site of such intense experimentation.1 This dissertation is the first to account for the originality and potency of sonnet sequences by showing how poets wrote them around a paradigm neglected by modern criticism, that of “poetic physicality.” I argue that English sonneteers discovered in the sequence new ways of representing poetic composition in its manifold physical aspects. Although each sonneteer engages the paradigm of poetic physicality—and thus his or her literary persona—differently, they all make use of common facets in their depictions of composition. In a sonnet from one of the forgotten sequences of the 1590s, Emaricdulfe (1595), 1 The term “sonnets in sequence” was used by George Gascoigne, but not in the same way as modern critics. Gascoigne used the term to refer to three poems written for an occasion and linked by extra half-lines with conjunctions such as “for” and “but.” For the modern sense of a large collection of poems telling the story of a love, Elizabethans preferred the term “centurie” and metaphors such as “arbor” or “mirrour.” See William T. Going, “The Term Sonnet Sequence,” Modern Language Notes 62 (1947): 400-2, and “Gascoigne and the Term ‘Sonnet Sequence,’” Notes and Queries (1954): 189-191. 2 an anonymous poet crystallizes two essential facets of poetic physicality in his poem’s quatrains and introduces a third and final one in his concluding couplet: If ever tongue with heaven inticing cries, If ever words blowne from a rented hart, If ever teares shed from a Lovers eyes, If ever sighes issued of griefe and smart, If ever trembling pen with more than skill, If ever paper, witnes of true love, If ever inke, cheefe harbenger of will, If ever sentence made with art to move, If all of these combinde by Cupids power, My long borne liking to anatomise: Had but the art, with art for to discover What love in me doth by his art comprise. Then might the heavens, the earth, water and ayre, Be witnes that I thinke thee onely fayre.2 Despite the repetitive anaphora of “If ever,” this poem presents a strikingly complex image or “anatomy” of the poet and his authorship. The first quatrain sculpts the body of the poet: his tongue; his heart that blows its thoughts in words through the lungs; his sighs that, along with his tears, attempt to cool his heart. The second quatrain, in turn, displays the material objects 2 E. C., Esquire, Emaricdulfe (London, 1595), sig. Cv. In this dissertation I silently modernize “u” and “v,” “i” and “j” throughout. In poems cited from original texts, I indent lines to highlight the rhyme scheme or volta; otherwise, I adopt the indentations of the modern edition I am using. 3 outside of the poet’s body: the implements of pen, paper, and ink with which he inscribes his poem. While the first quatrain, then, presents an oral physicality, the second presents a manual one, as the metonymy of “trembling pen” points to the writer’s trembling hand. As the third quatrain makes clear, both oral and written expression are poetic here, a combination achieved by love and the poet’s own habit of anatomizing. Finally, the couplet states that if the sonneteer’s literary art could only reveal his love through this combined physicality, then the world would witness his constancy. This is the Renaissance world composed of the four elements, with the last element, fire, represented by the pun on “fayre”—in other words, by his lady. Thus, in addition to the poet’s body, and the implements that are extension of that body, the reader is aware of a place within which the poet both speaks and writes. Besides the world introduced in the couplet, the poet makes use of the space of the sonnet itself, which provides rigid scaffolding for these three facets: the body, writing, and additional physical spaces. Like the Emaricdulfe-poet, the sonneteers in this study work with these three facets, shaping them into depictions of poetic physicality that underscore a tension between two notions of composition. On one side of this tension, they place the sonneteer’s passion. In addition to the poet’s body itself, this passion is the subject of the first quatrain in the Emaricdulfe sonnet. Here the words that are “blowne from a rented heart” emerge just as spontaneously from the sonneteer’s breast as his “heaven inticing cries,” “teares,” and “sighes issued of grief and smart.” However, these passionate outbursts alone would not convince the beloved and his wider audience of his love. On the other side of this tension, then, sonneteers place a complementing notion of poetic self-control, identified in the second quatrain by the words “skill” or “art.” The Emaricdulfe sonnet associates the former term with the “trembling pen” held by the writer’s equally trembling hand; the latter, with the actual “sentence” that pen inscribes. Meanwhile, the 4 poem identifies the ink that enables this move from pen to paper as the “cheefe harbenger of will.” Whereas the first quatrain presents a spontaneous poetic physicality centered on the body, the second depicts a more considered approach to composition, involving the material implements of writing, as well as techniques and intentions, both literary and erotic (“will” often has a sexual connotation in the period).