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

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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

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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.

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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). However, the sonneteer in Emaricdulfe must combine both spontaneous passion and controlled composition in one display of poetic physicality to demonstrate the effects of love’s own art on himself. He is composed as a poetic and physical subject only as he composes.

While the Emaricdulfe-poet carefully balances passionate expression and controlled composition, the other sonneteers examined in this study resolve the tension between these terms differently. In doing so, they discover alternative models of poetic physicality. Choosing one model over another has consequences for a writer’s self-presentation of himself as an author to his audience. To portray one’s literary composition as spontaneous and passionate is to highlight the role of imagination, the most mistrusted of the intellectual faculties in the Renaissance and one often associated with poetry. To emphasize the poet’s skill and control over his poetry, especially through reference to the writing hand, is to draw attention away from the imagination to memory and reason, the most exalted of the faculties. Both of these approaches have their benefits and drawbacks in terms of authorship. In the first type of model, where the emphasis is on spontaneous, passionate composition, sonneteers offer their readers ever more striking portraits of the poet-lover for public consumption. However, by stressing the role of the passions and especially the imagination that fed them, sonneteers also evoke the negative Renaissance stereotype of the poet overcome by imagination and void of reason. Moreover, they risk effeminizing the body of the poet—although this general strategy could also be part of a bid to 5 gain the attentions of readers. The second type of model moves away from these negative associations, emphasizing the poet’s reason and control over his craft, symbolized by the icon of the poet’s hand. For this reason it becomes especially attractive to poets such as Spenser, who possess laureate and national-poet ambitions. Of course, even the most passionate sonnet draws attention to the poet’s control through its strict form, while even Spenser’s sonnet sequence features sudden outbursts of affection and frustration. Clearly, then, sonnet sequences tend to fall along a continuum between these two poles. This dissertation reclassifies sonnet sequences according to this continuum, revealing how the second type of model (emphasizing the poet’s hand rather than his passions) emerges as the 1590s continue.

By analyzing sonnet sequences as “anatomies of authorship” in this way, this study combines two critical approaches often kept separate: studies of the body and of authorship.

First, responding to scholarship on the body, this dissertation considers the Galenic physiology of the humors and its pre-Cartesian notions of the materiality of thoughts and passions, the subject of work by Michael Schoenfeldt, Gail Kern Paster, and others.3 Since the poet’s hand emerges as an authorial icon in later sequences by Spenser, Chapman, and Spenser, this study also draws on Jonathan Sawday’s and Katherine Rowe’s work on the Renaissance dissection of

3 Michael Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves in Earl Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser,

Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Gail Kern Paster, The Body

Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993) and Humoring the

Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). See also her edited collection of essays, Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion (Philadelphia:

University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). 6 the hand, the body part understood as God’s masterpiece in the creation of man.4 While these and other recent studies of the body have delineated just what the historically and culturally specific experience of being-in-body was in the Renaissance, the body of the poet itself has escaped analysis for the most part. Douglas Trevor’s work on authorship and melancholic humor is a notable exception, although he focuses more on the figure of the scholar than the poet.5 Work by Katharine Craik, Nicholas Dames (in the Victorian period), and Adrian Johns, meanwhile, has centered on the physiological and psychological effects of reading rather than composition.6 This dissertation advances the critical conversation by showing how the body of the poet as he or she spoke and wrote existed in this same web of physiological discourse.

Second, responding to scholarship on authorship, this dissertation considers influence, intertexuality, symbolism, and genre in analyzing sonneteers’ models of poetic physicality. That is, I address these familiar topics anew in light of the tension between spontaneous expression and controlled composition, and through the lens of the three facets identified above. Classifying

4 Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (New York:

Routledge, 1995). Katherine Rowe, Dead Hands: Fictions of Agency, Renaissance to Modern (Stanford: Stanford

University Press, 1999).

5 Douglas Trevor, The Poetics of Melancholy in Early Modern England (New York: Cambridge University Press,

2004). For a psychoanalytic and gender-based examination of melancholia in the period that does not consider the role of the humors, see Lynn Enterline, The Tears of Narcissus: Melancholia and Masculinity in Early Modern

Writing (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995).

6 Katharine A. Craik, Reading Sensations in Early Modern England (Basingstoke, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

Nicholas Dames, The Physiology of the Novel: Reading, Neural Science, and the Form of Victorian Fiction (New

York: Oxford University Press, 2007). See also Adrian Johns’s informative essay, “The physiology of reading in

Restoration England,” in The Practice and Representation of Reading in England, ed. James Raven, Helen Small, and Naomi Tadmor (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 138-161. 7

“anatomies of authorship” in this way supplements Richard Helgerson’s categorization of writers as professionals, laureates, and amateurs or prodigals, as well as Patrick Cheney’s work on career models such as the Virgilian and Ovidian.7 For example, I find that Edmund Spenser and

William Shakespeare—Virgilian or laureate poet and professional or Ovidian playwright, respectively—both discover models of poetic physicality that emphasize the poet’s hand and eschew passionate sighs and tears. Similarly, whereas Kevin Pask has revealed the emergence of the “life” of the author as a genre in the period, I show how sonneteers charted their own aging physically within a sequence.8 Finally, while Robert Matz has discussed how poetry was attacked as immoral and defended as edifying, I suggest how the poet’s body stood at the center of these debates as sonneteers worked out the aforementioned tension between passionate, imaginative expression and controlled, reasoned composition.9

Studies that approach writing from the perspectives of psychoanalysis and gender consider the body of the poet most often, for reasons that quickly become apparent. Jonathan

Goldberg argues that Renaissance writing manuals molded the bodies of students, conforming

7 Richard Helgerson, Self-Crowned Laureates: Spenser, Jonson, Milton, and the Literary System (Berkeley:

University of California Press, 1983). Patrick Cheney, Spenser’s Famous Flight: A Renaissance Idea of a Literary

Career (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993); Marlowe’s Counterfeit Profession: Ovid, Spenser, Counter-

Nationhood (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997); Shakespeare, National Poet-Playwright (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2004).

8 Kevin Pask, The Emergence of the English Author: Scripting the Life of the Poet in Early Modern England

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

9 Robert Matz, Defending Literature in Early Modern England: Renaissance Literary Theory in Context

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 8 them to societal power structures.10 For him, the penknife symbolizes violence not only committed against the quill but against the writer’s hand, dismembered in the illustrations that accompany the manual’s instructions. Meanwhile, the mouth of the pen and its running ink suggests the phallus, making a link between writing and sexuality common in the period. The body of the writer can thus be alternately conceived as masculine or emasculated. While acknowledging the threat posed by writing to the body, my study complicates Goldberg’s conclusions by showing how sonneteers shape self-authorizing models of the poet’s hand. That is, in the face of the threat of emasculation and imaginative excess posed by passion, poets actually turn to the writing hand as an icon and make use of its association with reason to stabilize their authorial personae.

While Goldberg emphasizes the violent and sexual associations of writing, other scholars address the ways that Renaissance poets, both male and female, used female bodily experience to authorize writing. Katharine Maus discusses how figures from Sidney to Milton co-opted the space of the female womb in order to declare their own privileged interiority, a “male womb” where poetic inspiration could be imagined to take place.11 Whereas Maus discusses how male writers commandeered a bodily experience that was not theirs, I turn to aspects of physiology— respiration, the heart, the mental faculties, the hand—that all men and women were understood to share, albeit with variations depending not just on gender but also on the individual’s humoral constitution. Wendy Wall, for her part, has shown how women writers themselves used actual

10 Jonathan Goldberg, Writing Matter: From the Hands of the English Renaissance (Stanford: Stanford University

Press, 2000). See also his own collection of essays, Shakespeare’s Hand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota

Press, 2003).

11 Katharine Eisaman Maus, Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 1995), Ch. 6. 9 motherhood to authorize their writing.12 Her emphasis on book history and the materiality of writing, as in the exchange of sonnets from hand-to-hand, provides an important signpost for my own investigation. However, whereas her study focuses on the intersection of gender and sexuality through the dissemination and publication of sonnet sequences, I turn to the earlier act of composition as it was portrayed physically in these same texts.

My argument that sonnet sequences provide a special site for models of poetic physicality depends on several important characteristics of this fluctuating genre. In his recent study of the sonnet sequence and its class implications, Christopher Warley notes the critical habit of considering “the complex relation between ‘sonnet’ and ‘sequence,’ between the desires and language of particular sonnets and the broader organizations within which those desires exist.”13 As he points out, this has often meant considering the sequence on the one hand as an

“internally directed, lyric performance,” and on the other hand as “an externally direct mimeses, usually an attempt to represent a performance or character.”14 Warley turns from this traditional critical dichotomy to ask why a genre that embraces such instability becomes popular in the changing social world of Renaissance England. His explanation is that sonnet sequences become a way for authors like Michael Drayton to aspire to noble status while simultaneously undermining the old standards by which this status was assigned. My study also acknowledges the play between internal lyric and character by identifying an overlying tension between passionate expression and controlled composition, respectively. As I show, sonneteers resolve

12 Wendy Wall, The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell

University Press, 1993).

13 Christopher Warley, Sonnet Sequences and Social Distinction in Renaissance England (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2005), 9.

14 Ibid. 10 this tension on the levels of sonnet and sequence, taking advantage of the formal qualities of each.

In his valuable history of the sonnet, Michael R. G. Spiller notes that “the sonnet, because of its brevity, always gives an impression of immediacy, as if it proceeded directly and confessionally or conversationally from the speaker, and therefore from the creator of that speaker.”15 As I show, sonneteers such as Sidney take advantage of this ability of the sonnet to suggest a spontaneous utterance, even oral composition. Nevertheless, the intricate structure of the sonnet also draws attention to the fact that the sonnet does not proceed directly but is highly controlled. Spiller quotes the sixteenth century Italian poet Francesco Bracciolini, who writes:

Come più ferve in chiusa parte il foco

dove le sue rovine ardon più strette,

calor di Febo in circoscritto loco

fulmina più da sette carme e sette…

[As the fire burns hotter in an enclosed space, from which its violence blazes

more directly, so the heat of Phoebus (i.e. poetic inspiration) in a restricted place

flashes out more from seven plus seven lines]16

Sonneteers play off both of these possibilities: at times portraying their poems as the products of spontaneous, passionate expression, of tremendous poetic inspiration; at other times drawing attention to the craft and labor that went into making the poem.

While the strict form of the sonnet provides a site for intense poetic inspiration, it also provides a space for the containment and expression of powerful emotion. In his Arte of English

15 Michael R. G. Spiller, The Development of the Sonnet: An Introduction (New York: Routledge, 1992), 5-6.

16 Ibid., 9. 11

Poesie, George Puttenham discusses how poetry can soothe human passions by incorporating them into its literary form. For Puttenham, poets play the part of the “Phisitian, and not onely by applying a medicine to the ordinary sicknes of mankind, but by making the very greef it selfe (in part) cure of the disease.”17 Poets in Puttenham’s view are not Galenists but Paracelsians, since they heal not by contraries (“contraria contrariis”) but by similarities (“similia similibus”): “one short sorrowing the remedie of a long and grievous sorrow.”18 Poets are especially apt to treat the pangs of love, since “there is no frailtie in flesh and bloud so excusable as it, no comfort or discomfort greater.”19 C. S. Lewis perhaps recalls Puttenham’s comments when he describes a good sonnet as a “good public prayer”:

The sonneteers wrote not to tell their own love stories, not to express whatever in

their loves was local and peculiar, but to give us others, the inarticulate lovers, a

voice. The reader was to seek in a sonnet not what the poet felt but he himself

felt, what all men felt.20

Despite Lewis’s view, sonneteers do seek individuality in poetic physicality so as to display both passion and a sense of their authorship in the most striking, original way possible. Furthermore, while love’s passion may have been universal, the success of treating it through poetry varied.

In John Donne’s “The Triple Fool” the speaker counts on the fact that, just as “th’earth’s inward narrow crooked lanes / Do purge sea waters fretful salt away” (6-7), so too

17 George Puttenham, The Art of English Poesy, ed. Frank Whigham and Wayne A. Rebhorn (Ithaca: Cornell

University Press, 2007), 136-37. Hereafter cited as Puttenham, Art of English Poesy.

18 Ibid.

19 Ibid.

20 C. S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954), 491,

490. 12

…if I could draw my paines,

Through Rimes vexation, I should them allay,

Griefe brought to numbers cannot be so fierce,

For, he tames it, that fetters it in verse.

(8-11)21

However, the speaker finds his grief augmented rather than restrained when “Some man, his art and voice to show, / Doth Set and sing my paine” (13-14). Puttenham and Donne together indicate the sonnet’s great potential to frame passion, since its strict rhyme scheme would seem to provide the strongest containment of grief. At the same time, Donne’s poem suggests an important intersection between writing and orality, on the one hand, and controlled composition and passionate expression, on the other, since the transformation of silent text to oral performance is what renews his speaker’s woe.

Finally, the sonnet’s rectangular dimensions could suggest a physical space for the poet’s body. Again, Donne makes perhaps the most famous equation of the sonnet with a physical space when promising his mistress in “The Canonization” that

…if no peece of Chronicle wee prove,

We’ll build in sonnets pretty roomes,

As well a wrought urne becomes

The greatest ashes, as half-acre tombes.

(31-34)

As Donne’s editors note, there is a pun here in that “stanza” means “room” in Italian. However,

21 All quotations from Donne are from C. A. Patrides, ed., John Donne: The Complete Poems, (New York:

Everyman’s Library, 1991). 13 the rectangular shape of a sonnet and its quatrains also suggests a room—or equally a tomb.

Donne wasn’t alone in picturing the sonnet as an enclosure for the poet’s body. William

Drummond records the following complaint of Ben Jonson concerning the strict form of the sonnet: “He cursed Petrarch for redacting verses to sonnets, which he said were like that tyrant’s bed, where some who were too short were racked, others too long cut short.”22 Modern writers too have found the sonnet suggestive of a physical space. In his seminal study of the English sonnet sequence, J. W. Lever quotes with approval T. Hall Caine’s description of the Petrarchan sonnet as an “acorn, separable into ‘unequal parts of a perfect organism.’”23 In the sequences I discuss, the body of the writer, his implements, and his physical environment fill this space.

While the individual sonnet provided a space for the demonstration of poetic mastery, powerful emotions, and the three facets of poetic physicality, the larger ground of the sonnet sequence provided the opportunity to track the changes in these things over time. As Carol

Thomas Neely notes, most sonnet sequences follow a familiar narrative pattern.24 The first few sonnets introduce the mistress, the occasion of the love, and the sonneteer’s dedication to writing poetry. Over the course of the sequence, the lover’s efforts to win over his beloved become more various and intense, until a turn is reached towards the end: the beloved dies, the sonneteer rejects love and turns to worldly or spiritual matters, or (very rarely) consummation of the desire is achieved. Often another, longer narrative poem follows that casts an ironic glance back at the sonnets: for example, a complaint that views love from the perspective of the female. As I discuss, these expectations of development in the sequence encourage poets to introduce or

22 Quoted from George Parfitt, ed., Ben Jonson: The Complete Poems, 462.

23 J. W. Lever, The Elizabethan Love Sonnet (London: Lowe & Brydon, 1966), vi.

24 Carol Thomas Neely, “The Structure of English Renaissance Sonnet Sequences,” English Literary History 45.3

(1978): 359-89. 14 transform models of poetic physicality later in the sequence. For example, the lover can age physically over the course of a sequence, as in Daniel’s Delia.

Of course, the change in the lover’s passion may occur in a single sonnet, revolving around the volta or turn that marks the beginning of the concluding sestet or couplet. Because of this expectation for development in both the sonnet and the larger sequence, these works have drawn the attention of critics interested in subjectivity, whether as an entire genre in Anne

Ferry’s study or as an individual case in Joel Fineman’s work on Shakespeare’s Sonnets.25

Again, the physicality of the composing poet is an important part of subjectivity that must be accounted for. By the same token, while the notion of the Petrarchan lady as anatomized through the blazon has become commonplace, the ways in which the poet-lover is also anatomized remain to be set out.26 This study addresses both of these recurrent critical concerns through models of poetic physicality.

As Heather Dubrow demonstrates, the conflict between lover and beloved often shadows a conflict between Petrarchism and other discourses, or between the current sonneteer and a predecessor.27 The paradigm of poetic physicality, I suggest, is another important arena within which these conflicts take place. For example, in his sonnet sequence Idea, Drayton rejects the sighs and tears of Petrarchism as unbefitting his “English straine.” Thus, the way that sonneteers

25 Anne Ferry, The “Inward” Language: Sonnets of Wyatt, Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 1983); Joel Fineman, Shakespeare’s Perjured Eye: The Invention of Poetic Subjectivity in the

Sonnets (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986).

26 See Nancy Vickers, “Diana Described: Scattered Woman and Scattered Rhyme” Critical Inquiry 8.2 (1981): 265-

79.

27 Heather Dubrow: Echoes of Desire: English Petrarchism and its Counterdiscourses (Ithaca: Cornell University

Press, 1995). 15 sculpt anatomies of authorship against that of a predecessor provides a literary version of the political self-fashioning discussed by Stephen Greenblatt, in which identity is constructed against a dark double.28 Moreover, Harold Bloom’s notion of the “anxiety of influence” can be seen to operate on this same intertextual level—that is, on the level of poetic physicality.29 Thus, a poet like Sidney struggles to reject the sighs and tears that accompany composition in his predecessor

Petrarch, while his niece Mary Wroth in turn smothers Sidney’s physicality of oral composition.

The existence of the sonnet sequence as material book also demands consideration.

Despite notable exceptions like Astrophil and Stella, most Elizabethan sonnet sequences were written with publication in mind. As Marcy North discusses, very few sonnet sequences circulated in manuscript, meaning that the fiction of poems written occasionally for the mistress or friends and then eventually gathered together is more often just that—a fiction.30 The fact that sonnets were composed in a concentrated period of time also explains why poets incorporated different models of poetic physicality into their sequences. In writing a stretch of a sequence at a time, poets often repeat conceits and themes to speed composition. Focusing on a particular model of physicality was another way to achieve the same end while also adding coherence to a sequence. At the same time, part of the challenge of writing a long sonnet sequence was not to be repetitive but rather to offer the reader variety: hence the inclusion of many different models or the development of one model over the course of the sequence. By constructing a heterogeneous yet coherent physicality in this way, writers provided a complex authorial persona

28 Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: from More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 1980).

29 Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973).

30 Marcy L. North, “The Sonnets and Book History,” in A Companion to Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. Michael

Schoenfeldt (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2007), 204-221. 16 for their readers to regard.

One final merit of studying poetic physicality in sonnets is that sonnet sequences were mostly written in a narrow period—the 1590s—making the transformations in poetic physicality easier to track and all the more striking. Indeed, this historical specificity supplies a rich context for analysis. As I have suggested, poets shape the poetic physicality of their sonnet sequences within a particular understanding of physiology, which began to be replaced in the seventeenth century with the discovery of the heart as a pump and the Cartesian split between mind and body.

They also develop an iconography of the poet during the end of Elizabeth’s reign, whose own iconography and Petrarchan politics are described by Roy Strong, Louis Montrose, and others.31

Because of this historical specificity, my investigation answers Derrida’s call in De la grammatologie for a cultural graphology, the study of which includes “problems of the articulation of graphic forms and of diverse substances (materials: wood, wax, skin, stone, ink, metal, vegetable) or instruments” by finding a moment “when a graphic system is constituted and at the moment, which is not necessarily the same, when a graphic style fixed.”32 To borrow

Derrida’s terminology, the 1590s were when models of poetic physicality were constituted and when the form of the English sonnet itself was fixed for future generations of writers.

Missing from Derrida’s cultural graphology, and largely from Renaissance scholarship as

I have suggested, is the body of the writer. In Chapter 1, then, I draw on recent scholarship on the body and a variety of primary sources to reconstruct a basic “anatomy” of the English

31 On Elizabeth, see Louis Montrose, The Subject of Elizabeth: Authority, Gender, and Representation (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 2006) and Roy Strong, The Cult of Elizabeth: Elizabethan Portraiture and Pageantry

(London: Thames and Hudson, 1977).

32 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, tr. Gayatri Chakrvorty Spivak (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press,

1976), 87. 17

Renaissance sonneteer, an anatomy illustrative of the tension between passionate excess and controlled composition. Taking my cue from the Emaricdulfe sonnet, I begin with the heart and lungs that expel sighs and words, before moving to the brain that hosts the three faculties of imagination, reason, and memory. Like actual Renaissance dissections in the anatomy theatre, I end with the hand, which becomes an icon of poetic control in later sonnet sequences. By following this order, then, I also chart out the direction of my remaining chapters.

Chapters 2 and 3 address the sonnet sequences of the Sidney circle, who arguably began and ended the development of poetic physicality in the English Renaissance sonnet sequence. In

Chapter 2, I disclose how Sidney in Astrophil and Stella develops a model of poetic physicality around oral composition, which replaces the sighs and tears of Petrarch. Sidney organizes his depictions of oral composition around the octaves, sestets, and especially the voltas that mark decisions to write. The resulting account of poetic composition carries a charge of erotic frisson, for, while portraying orality as preceding writing, Astrophil also links sexual consummation to this chain of physicality, a chain that Stella severs by asserting her own respiring voice.

Ultimately, Sidney shapes a theatrical poetic persona that engages an intimate audience of family and friends who can notice the overlap between Astrophil’s physicality and Sidney’s own personal characteristics and writing habits. The model of oral composition introduced thus becomes a key piece of evidence for Astrophil’s passion and Sidney’s own obsession with writing as pleasurable act.

Chapter 3 demonstrates how two of Sidney’s family and friends, Mary Wroth and Fulke

Greville, respond to Sidney’s poetic physicality by constructing models in their sonnet sequences that contradict his. In Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, Wroth revises Astrophil’s poetic physicality of oral composition through her female sonneteer Pamphilia, who finds herself unable to speak 18 or write like Astrophil because of her great passion. At the same time, Wroth explores hand- centered models of physicality that assert her own poetic control. Greville, for his part, emphasizes the tenuousness of writing in Caelica through the image of blotting, fashioning a model that befits his skepticism towards the body and Sidney’s poetic project. In short, while

Wroth eventually comes to emphasize the writer’s control over language, Greville ceaselessly questions it. Published in 1621 and 1633, respectively, Pamphilia to Amphilanthus and Caelica were the last English Renaissance sonnet sequences to be published. Thus, they fittingly revise

Sidney’s seminal work at the point when the English Renaissance experimentation with the genre draws to a close. In this way, too, Chapters 2 and 3 set the boundaries for the remainder of the investigation.

Chapters 4 and 5 examine the first half of the 1590s vogue for sonnet sequences that followed the pirated publication of Astrophil and Stella in 1591. Chapter 4 shows how Henry

Constable and Samuel Daniel address the tension between passionate excess and controlled composition through complementary notions of the aging poet and the guiding patron. While

Constable uses the organization of his poems, their titles, and numerology to represent the sonneteer as aging, Daniel portrays aging more viscerally by describing how love poetry drains the writer’s moist humors. Meanwhile, by creating a space for patronage, both writers look past love poetry to the higher genres they intend to undertake as maturing poets. In sonnets to King

James and Queen Elizabeth, Constable creates a link between himself and the sovereign through a passionate poetic physicality, whereas in other sonnets he makes the lady’s hand into a religious icon that forecasts his writing to Catholic female saints in the Spiritual Sonnets.

Alternatively, Daniel associates the lady’s hand with the genre of epic, while also acknowledging her as the ultimate source of his poetry, whose physicality, like Sidney’s, he describes as oral. 19

These moves, I argue, open up a space for his female patron, Mary Herbert, to insert her own supporting hand.

Chapter 5, in two halves, discusses how poets after Daniel and Constable use poetic physicality to seek both recognition and distinction in a crowded field of sonneteers. On the one hand, by incorporating the poetic physicality introduced by Sidney and Daniel, sonneteers such as Thomas Lodge and Barnabe Barnes seek identification with these preceding sonneteers. That is, they use previous models so that their audience can recognize their sequences as belonging to a group of texts. Poetic physicality thus becomes something of an authorial signature. On the other hand, by making more and more heightened conceits out of the sighs and tears that Sidney eschewed, as well as by seeking variety in their poetic physicality, sonneteers such as Giles

Fletcher the Elder (and Barnes too) attempt to put forward distinctive pictures of passion that can also attract readers. Whereas the first half of this chapter examines the sequences of Lodge,

Fletcher, and Barnes, the second half of this chapter focuses on Drayton’s revisions of his sonnet sequence Idea, first published in 1594. Like the sonneteers in the first half of this chapter,

Drayton initially makes large use of sighs and tears. However, as he revises his sequence for the

1599 edition and afterwards, he moves away from this Petrarchan physicality, stressing variety but in a different way from Fletcher and Barnes. For Drayton, variety in poetic physicality becomes not just a sign of originality but of Englishness, and eventually, too, of personal passion. However, this is not the passion as experienced in the present of the poem—rather it is passion viewed from the vantage point of old age and successful, longstanding authorship.

Drayton, then, also revises the portrait of the aging sonneteer found in Constable and Daniel.

Chapter 6 and my conclusion consider the sonnet sequences written later in the 1590s that put the poet’s hand at the center of their models of poetic physicality. In Chapter 6, I turn to 20

George Chapman’s Ovid’s Banquet of Sense and Edmund Spenser’s Amoretti, both published in

1595. For Chapman at the beginning of his career, the male hand must be sanctified by contact with an oral poetic physicality gendered as female before it can begin the task of writing a sonnet sequence and working in the higher dramatic genres or in epic. Even more than Drayton,

Chapman in his short sonnet sequence purifies his poetic physicality of Petrarchan sighs and tears, asserting the importance of the poet’s reason over his passion in a corona woven by the poet’s hand. Spenser, in comparison to Chapman, works backwards, subjecting the poet’s hand to a rigorous critique at the end of Book III in The Faerie Queene, before continuing to test it in

Amoretti and Epithalamion. Ultimately, like Chapman, Spenser finds stability in the body of the poet, especially his hand, but unlike Chapman this arises within the spirituality of the English

Protestant marriage ceremony. In this chapter alone I consider the relation of the sonnet sequence to other genres in a poet’s career, to show how the models of poetic physicality that

Chapman and Spenser shaped speak to their public identities as authors.

This dissertation concludes with an analysis of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. As critics have noted, Shakespeare’s is an anomalous sequence for many reasons. As I show, it is especially anomalous for its mixed model of poetic physicality. More than any other Elizabethan sonneteer, Shakespeare reveals a keen awareness of how death focuses attention on the physicality of the poet’s literary art. But Shakespeare is also interested in the physicality of literary fame: that is, the way in which the breaths of readers resurrect the poet’s poetic physicality after his death. Shakespeare thus responds to the physicality of oral composition sketched out by Sidney in Astrophil and Stella with his own physicality of oral reception, which nevertheless draws attention to the poet’s hand. Shakespeare’s sequence is a reminder that developments in the physicality of composition involved the living bodies of writers whose 21 deaths in some sense placed the final seal on the physical and literary personae they constructed.

Or, to put it another way, only in death can the anatomy of authorship begun by a writer be completed by his readers. It is with this notion of the death of the author as a contributor to modern notions of poetic physicality that this study closes. 22

Chapter 1: From Respiring Voice to Writing Hand:

An Anatomy of the English Renaissance Sonneteer

To reconstruct the body of the sonneteer and the tension between passionate expression and controlled composition it mediates, I draw on recent scholarship on Renaissance physiology, as well as on many types of primary sources, including anatomical works, philosophical and religious texts, books on the art of memory, rhetoric and handwriting manuals, and especially sonnet sequences themselves. From literary works that are not sonnet sequences, I select

Microcosmos (1603) by John Davies of Hereford and the Castle of Alma episode from Spenser’s

The Faerie Queene (1590). These are well-known texts dealing with physiology; moreover,

Davies and Spenser are sonneteers who sketch anatomies of the poet both here and in their sonnet sequences. Davies was also a writing master, responsible for the presentation copy of the

Sidney Psalms and a guide to handwriting, Writing Scholemaster (1631), which was published posthumously.1 As both sonneteer and professional scribe, he was well equipped to comment on the physicality of poetry and did so quite profusely.

I

The heart was probably the most over-determined organ in the physiology bequeathed to the Renaissance by Galen, the 1st century C.E. Greek anatomist.2 On the one hand, the heart

1 See Goldberg, Writing Matter, 127-30, 224-5.

2 My discussion of the heart is particularly indebted to the following studies. Of special importance, since it deals with the same period, is William W. E. Slights’s recent study The Heart in the Age of Shakespeare (New York:

Cambridge University Press, 2008). Cf. Heather Webb, The Medieval Heart (New Haven: Yale University Press,

2010). The Heart, edited by James Peto and published by Yale University Press in 2007 with magnificent illustrations, contains a number of informative essays on the Renaissance heart, in addition to pieces on the heart in 23 provided heat and vital spirits to the rest of the body, including the brain. On the other hand, the heart was the seat of the soul’s irascible faculty and the passions in general. These pulmonary and emotional functions were intimately connected, forming the cor of the spontaneous, passionate expression that poets depicted in their sonnet sequences.

The survival of the body in the Renaissance’s Galenic system depends on the “innate heat” and “vital spirits” maintained by the heart and circulated by the blood. Blood itself originates from food processed by the liver, the site of the “concupiscible” or “vegetative” faculty that provides nourishing “natural spirits” to the rest of the body. When blood reaches the left ventricle of the heart, the heart heats it and adds vital spirits by mixing in air from the lungs.

Propelled by the pulse, this energized blood travels into the greater artery, eventually reaching modern medicine and culture. See especially Louisa Young, “The Human Heart: An Overview,” 1-30, which focuses on the ancient heart in Egypt and Greece but also takes a broader historical scope; Jonathan Miller: “The

Anatomised Heart: Understanding the Pump,” 39-62, which also sums up the Greek and Galenic traditions while explaining why the discovery of the circulation of the blood was so long in coming; Francis Wells, “The

Renaissance Heart: The Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci,” 70-94; Emily Jo Sargent, “The Sacred Heart: Christian

Symbolism,” 102-114; and Fay Bound Alberti, “The Emotional Heart: Mind, Body and Soul,” which traces the moving of passions from the heart to the brain after the work of Harvey and Descartes. For more on the heart in the literature of the 17th century and into the middle of the 18th, see Robert A. Erickson, The Language of the Heart,

1600-1750 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997). On the notion of the heart as a book, especially in medieval literature and religion from Augustine onward, see Eric Jager, The Book of the Heart (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 2000). On heart cannibalism in mythology, religion, and literature, see Milad Doueihi,

A Perverse History of the Human Heart (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). On the history behind the curious, non-anatomical shape of the heart in popular culture, see Pierre Vinken, The Shape of the Heart

(Netherlands: Elsevier, 2000), and on the connection between this image and the idea of love, see Doris Bietenholz,

How Come This ♥ Means Love? A Study of the Origin of the ♥ Symbol of Love (Saskatoon, Canada: D. Bietenholz,

1995). 24 the rest of the body to warm and animate it. A third kind of spirit, “animal spirit”—the clearest and thinnest of the spirits—is rarified through a combination of vital spirits and air thinned out by the twisting channels that connect the nose to the skull cavity, as described by the Italian

Renaissance anatomist Andreas Vesalius.3 These animal spirits provide the material for the brain’s thoughts and commands, which run through the nerves to the rest of the body.4 All thoughts and actions, then, including the thoughts of poets when they compose verse or command their hands to write, have air and the vital spirit from the heart as their substance.

Praising Henry, Prince of Wales, in the dedicatory poem to Microcosmos, Davies of Hereford declares: “I feele the warm bloud runne / From hart, to braines, to heate invention” (19).5 In another place Davies similarly states that “heate proceedes from bloud, as doth my rime / From braines; where no heate were, if bloud were not, / And bee’ing too cold they would my sense besot” (31). Although Davies portrays poetic creation as an act of the brain, he acknowledges that inspiration also depends on the heart’s vital spirits and heat.

While the heart was pictured as a sort of furnace that heated the blood, the lungs were

3 See Andreas Vesalius, On the Fabric of the Human Body, ed. William Frank Richardson and John Burd Carman

(Novato, CA: Norman Publishing, 2009), 5:161-2. Hereafter cited as Vesalius, On The Fabric of the Human Body.

This notion of “brain breathing” is perhaps the most curious aspect of the Renaissance account of respiration, one that was inherited from Galen and ancient pseudo-Hippocratic Greek texts, in particular De Morbo Sacro (The

Sacred Disease), a treatise on epilepsy. See David J. Furley and J. S. Wilkie’s introduction to their Galen On

Respiration and the Arteries (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 11-14.

4 Vesalius, On the Fabric of the Human Body, 5:161-2.

5 Quoted from Alexander B. Grosart, ed., The Complete Works of John Davies of Hereford, vol. 1 of 2 (New York:

AMC Press, Inc., 1967). All quotations from Microcosmos are taken from this edition and cited parenthetically by page number. 25 seen as a sort of bellows that fanned the flames of the heart by providing air for spirits.6 The lungs were also responsible for eliminating the smoky waste given off as the murkier blood from the liver was heated. These three functions of the lungs—providing air for the vital spirits, refrigerating the heart, and expelling smoky vapors—are repeatedly mentioned in the numerous anatomical treatises of the Renaissance, which invariably add that the lungs are also responsible for producing the voice.7 Thus, the lungs were sometimes termed the “orator” of the heart, since they could express its passions through words.8

Depending on the balance between all these different responsibilities of the heart and lungs, the rate of a person’s respiration would change, including that of the sonneteer. In what

Vesalius calls “natural” or “normal” respiration (we might say “relaxed” respiration) a large

6 Galen, influenced by Aristotle’s view on the heart, argues that “Every flame, therefore, requires the surrounding air to be cold in due proportion, for the excessively hot, by making its outward motion out of proportion, and the excessively cold its inward motion, both quench it. Immoderate fanning presses the flame against the matter, just as the cold does; but excessive motion scatters it, just as the hot does.” Furley and Wilkie, Galen On Respiration and the Arteries, 105. For a summary of Aristotle’s teaching, see 14-17.

7 As Robert Burton explains, the lungs are closely aligned with the heart, “the seat and fountain of life, of heat, of spirits, of pulse and respiration,” because they are “the instrument of respiration, or breathing; and its office is to cool the heart, by sending air unto it, by the venosal artery, which vein comes to the lungs by that aspera arteria, which consists of many gristles, membranes, nerves, taking in air at the nose and mouth, and by it likewise exhales the fumes of the heart.” The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Holbrook Jackson (New York: Everyman’s Library,

1964), 1:153. See also John Banister, The historie of man sucked from the sappe of the most approved anathomistes

(1578), 91r and Stephen Batman, Batman uppon Bartholome his booke De proprietatibus rerum,” (1582), 54r.

8 Robert Burton, for example, notes that: “the lungs is a thin, spongy part, like an ox-hoof (saith Fernelius), the town-clerk or crier (one terms it), the instrument of voice, as an orator to a king; annexed to the heart, to express his thoughts by voice.” The Anatomy of Melancholy, 1:153. 26 portion of air passes from the nostrils to the back of the throat and down the trachea to the heart.9

In “unnatural respiration,” breathing occurs through the mouth as well, either because nasal breathing alone is insufficient to maintain the innate heat or because the person is engaged in other uses of the lungs, such as in speaking, singing, or even whistling. The passionate speech that sonneteers often utter is another example of this unnatural respiration, which places more demands on the heart and lungs. Sighing is the most common form of unnatural respiration and so the preeminent sign of love’s passion. Like regular breaths, sighs fan or cool the heat of the heart while supplying more vital spirits to the poet. However, being more intense than regular breaths, they could use up too much blood from the liver, as Barnabe Barnes indicates when he has his lover, Parthenophil, fear that “the sighes which from [his] liver smoake” may mark the end of his “lives date” (Sonnet LVI, lines 8-9).10 Sonneteers also alluded to the smoky wastes that were expelled by respiration in referring to their sighs as “incense” or “smokes.” Faced with scorn from his sonnet mistress Parthenophe, Parthenophil rages defiantly: “Burne on sweet fier, for I live by that fewell / Whose smoake is as an incense to my soule” (Sonnet LXXXVII, 1-4).

The more the sonneteer sighed, then, the greater the heat of passion in his heart. Not surprisingly, sonneteers competed with each other to see who could produce the most abject poetic physicality involving sighing. In the anonymous Zepheria (1594) the poet-lover boasts

Yet none shall equall me in my demerit,

Though happier (may it fortune) he may court it:

Nor shall more faithfull love his suite enherit,

9 Vesalius, On the Fabric of the Human Body, 1:24.

10 Quoted from Victor A. Doyno, ed., Parthenophil and Parthenophe (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University

Press, 1971). All quotations from Parthenophil and Parthenophe will be from this edition and cited parenthetically. 27

Ne paynt like passion, though he shew more wit.

Admit he write, my quill hath done as much:

Admit he sigh, that have I done and more:

Admit he weepe, these eyes have wept even such

Their teares as heartie, and in greater store:

Yet nearer may he presse, and sweare he dyes,

Jove (thinks he) smiles at lovers jurament:

Prove him, then shalt thou finde he falsely lyes:

Many so threaten death, that nil experiment;

Repulst, then will he sue to doe thee service:

Sayd not I well now, that falsely lyes?11

For the Zepheria-poet, sighs and tears are bodily signs that accompany the act of writing in order to demonstrate passion. Of course, sighs and tears have been an oft-remarked aspect of

Renaissance love poetry. More recently, however, criticism has examined the physiological and religious discourses that provide a context for understanding these common love symptoms.12

Whereas sighs are caused by the heart’s demand for air, tears are caused by an overabundance of fluid in the brain. Medieval and Renaissance authorities disagreed amongst themselves over what caused this overabundance. According to the authorities Mary Carruthers quotes, including

11 Canzon 31. Quoted from Margaret Christian, “Zepheria: (1594; STC 26124): A Critical Edition,” Studies in

Philology 100.2 (2003): 177-243.

12 Most recently, Michael A. Winkelman has approached sighs and tears in the poetry of Donne from the perspective of evolutionary psychology, in which Donne’s ironic employment of these clichés is a kind of “costly signal” illustrating intellectual fitness. “Sighs and Tears: Biological Signals and John Donne’s ‘Whining Poetry,”

Philosophy and Literature 33.2 (2009): 329-44. 28

St. Gregory of Nyssa and medieval books of medicine, a wrenching in the stomach pushes moisture from the lungs and interior organs into the brain, which excretes this moisture as tears.13 In her monograph on weeping in the Renaissance, Marjory E. Lange cites Timothy

Bright, author of the 1586 Treatise of Melancholy, who states that tears are actually caused by the contraction of the heart affected by passion: vapors rise from the heart to the brain, which expels them as tears.14 Keeping in mind, then, that the physiological explanations for tears could vary, I follow the Zepheria-poet in considering how tears along with sighs are incorporated into models of poetic physicality. Like Lynn Enterline, I focus on tears as an accompaniment to composition, although I pay more attention to the humoral physiology thought to underlie the production of these tears.15 Furthermore, while Enterline attends to the characters within Tasso’s

Gerusalemme Liberata, I analyze this physicality as developed in the lyric personae of sonneteers.16

In this regard, Petrarch’s Rime Sparse contains the seminal model of poetic physicality incorporating sighs and tears.17 Whereas English sonneteers often refer to sighs and tears simply as physical phenomena, Petrarch treats these marks of physicality more figuratively. For

13 Mary Carruthers, “On Affliction and Reading, Weeping and Argument: Chaucer’s Lachrymose Troilus in

Context,” Representations 93 (2006): 8.

14 Marjory E. Lange, Telling Tears in the English Renaissance (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1996), 21-38.

15 Lynn Enterline, The Tears of Narcissus: Melancholia and Masculinity in Early Modern Writing (Stanford:

Stanford University Press, 1995), 133-45.

16 On tears in the poetic miscellanies of the same period, see Lange, Telling Tears, 55-107.

17 In a very recent study, Federica Anichini discusses how sighing is incorporated into the poetic language and rhythm of Guido Cavalcanti’s Rime, while also contrasting his use physiological use of tears with that of Dante in

La Vita Nuova. Voices of the Body: Liminal Grammar in Guide Cavalcanti’s Rime (München: Martin Meidenbauer,

2009). However, it seems that Petrarch’s use of sighs and tears was the best known to English sonneteers. 29 example, Petrarch both begins and ends his sequence with symbolic acts of respiration: his first sonnet imagines his poems as scattered sighs—“O you that hear in scattered rhymes the sound /

Of those sighs that I used to feed my heart” (1-2)—while his final song calls for God to gather up the poet’s final breath.18 In the first quotation, Petrarch does invoke the physiological notion, discussed above, that sighs (“sospiri”) fan the flames of the heart and supply spirits. But sighing in Petrarch has a figurative meaning too, owing to his continual play on Laura’s name: “L’aura” or the “breeze.” That is, each time Petrarch sighs, he respires under the cover of Laura’s name.

Weeping is the other half of poetic physicality in the Rime Sparse; Petrarch associates tears with the expenditure of ink, but also, like his sighs, sometimes renders his tears more figuratively. After Laura dies two thirds of the way through the sequence, writing and weeping increase exponentially: in Sonnet 313, Petrarch laments, “Passed too is she for whom I wept and wrote, / But, truly, pen and tears she left behind” (4). Many more examples of Petrarchan sighs and tears could be offered, but I will simply use one of his key thematic sonnets as an example of how he renders these physical marks in a figurative way.19 In Sonnet 228, Love plants in

Petrarch’s heart the laurel tree, which both puns on Laura’s name and symbolizes his quest for poetic fame. In the poem, Petrarch, like the anonymous writer of Zepheria, links sighing, weeping, and writing together in one overarching model of poetic physicality:

18 Quoted from James Wyatt Cook and Gianfranco Contini’s bilingual edition, Petrarch’s Songbook: Rerum

Vulgarium Fragmenta (Binghamton: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies-State University of New

York, 1995). All quotations of Petrarch are taken from this edition and cited parenthetically.

19 In the canzone of 129, for example, Petrarch is “shaped like a man who thinks and weeps and writes” (52). In

Sonnet 347, ink is mentioned with the tears he spent for love of her (“per ch’io tante versai lagrime e ‘nchiostro”), while in Sonnet 354 Love tells Petrarch to record his dictation on Laura’s beauty: “In tears I say it, and in tears you write.” 30

With his right hand on my left side Love unsealed,

And there, amidst my heart, a laurel tree

He planted, one so green that every hue

Of emerald it conquered and made dim.

With pen for plow, with heartfelt sighs and with

This downpour of sweet humor from my eyes—

So nurtured, then, its fragrance spread to heaven;

If ever other boughs’ did, I know not.

Ah, Honor, Virtue, Gracefulness, and Fame,

Chaste beauty clothed in celestial garb—

Of that illustrious plant these are the roots.

A burden glad I find it in my breast

No matter where I am; in virtuous prayer

I bow, adore it as a sacred thing.

However, whereas sighs and tears are the primary ways for the Zepheria-poet to paint passion in competition with other poet-lovers, for Petrarch they became ingredients in a less visceral, more elegant model of poetic physicality that seeks laureate status. The world of the Zepheria-poet is material, that of Petrarch, allegorical, as Love opens his side and plants Apollo’s tree there.

Petrarch waters his laurel tree with his tears, or the “sacred humor” that he sheds, while his heartfelt sighs accompany his caring for the plant. The pen, meanwhile, is abstracted through the metaphor of plowing and gardening. Together sighs, tears, and the pen support the poet’s quest for Fame and Honor, inspired by the Grace and Virtue of Laura. 31

When Elizabethan sonneteers portrayed themselves as weeping and sighing while writing, then, they were attempting to update and often intensify a very old, familiar model of poetic physicality.20 Sighs became more and more violent winds; tears became rain, then rivers, then oceans. Nevertheless, this use of sighs and tears inevitably opened up the poet-lover to charges of insincerity and unoriginality, thus undermining the very aim of painting striking images of passion. In response to this foreseen danger, writers such as Sidney eschewed sighs and tears and chose alternative ways of making passion both physical and poetic. The lover’s symptomatic difficulty in breathing and controlling his spoken language, as discussed by Carla

Mazzio in Loves Labours Lost, provided one such alternative.21 As Mazzio notes, “love melancholy was diagnosed in terms of a kind of romantic arrhythmia or cardiac arrest, irregular or neglected breathing produced sighs, stutters, broken speech, and silence.”22 But this physicality too, like sigh and tears, presented two drawbacks for authorial self-representation.

First, loss of control over the voice, like sighs and tears, threatened to effeminize the body of the poet. As Gina Bloom shows in her work on voice, full control of the lungs and voice are an important marker of adult masculinity in the Renaissance, while women’s voices, like their humoral constitutions, are seen as more unstable.23 Second—and perhaps more importantly—any mark of physicality that displays passion emphasizes the role of the imagination, the most

20 On English sonneteers and their taking over the morality of the Petrarchan tradition, see Thomas P. Roche, Jr.,

Petrarch and the English Sonnet Sequences (New York: AMS Press, Inc., 1989).

21 Carla Mazzio, The Inarticulate Renaissance: Language Trouble in an Age of Eloquence (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvannia Press), Ch. 4: “Acting in the Passive Voice: Love’s Labour’s Lost and the Melancholy of Print.”

22 Ibid., 143.

23 Gina Bloom, Voice in Motion: Staging Gender, Shaping Sound in Early Modern England (Philadelphia:

University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007). 32 mistrusted of the mental faculties and the one predominantly associated with poetry, to the detriment of poets.

II

In his popular treatise The Passions of the Mind, the Jesuit priest Thomas Wright explains one, the bodily effects of passions, and two, the way they are sparked by the imagination. First, he locates passions in the heart based on several pieces of evidence:

…who loveth extremely and feeleth not that passion to dissolve his heart? Who

rejoiceth, and proveth not his heart dilated? Who is moiled with heaviness, or

plunged with pain, and perceiveth not his heart to be coarcted? Whom inflameth

ire, and hath not heart-burning? By these experiences we prove in our hearts the

working of Passions, and by the noise of their tumult we understand the work of

their presence.24

For Wright, the location of passions in the heart corresponds to the presence of the senses in the brain.25 Since the “softness and moisture” of the brain allows it to “receive the forms and prints of objects for understanding,” a topic to which I turn in a moment, then the heart, “endued with most fiery spirits, fitteth best for affecting.”26 Here Wright links the vital spirits and the passions.

He concludes his case with another piece of bodily evidence: “Lastly, for what other reason in fear and anger become men so pale and wan but that the blood runneth to the heart to succor

24 Thomas Wright, The Passions of the Mind in General, ed. William Webster Newbold (New York: Garland

Publishing, 1986), 114. Hereafter cited as Wright, Passions of the Mind.

25 Because “sensitive apprehension hath her seat in the brain (for we all prove that in understanding we especially bend the force of our soul to the former part thereof), so the affections and passions, in proportionate manner, must have some corporal organ and instrument; and what more convenient than the heart?” (114).

26 Ibid. 33 it?”27 When passions become too strong, the heart must summon the blood with its spirits to preserve itself, explaining why sonneteers are often as pale as the paper on which they write.

Having confirmed the location of passions in the heart, Wright proceeds to explain how they are aroused there through the force of the imagination and the assistance of the humors:

First, then, to our imagination cometh by sense or memory some object to be

known, convenient or disconvenient to Nature; the which being known (for Ignoti

nulla cupido) in the imagination, which resideth in the former part of the brain (as

we prove when we imagine anything), presently the purer spirits flock from the

brain by certain secret channels to the heart, where they pitch at the door,

signifying what an object was presented, convenient or disconvenient for it. The

heart immediately bendeth either to prosecute it or to eschew it, and the better to

affect that affection draweth other humours to help him; and so in pleasure concur

great store of pure spirits in pain and sadness, much melancholy blood; in ire,

blood and choler; and not only, as I said, the heart drawth, but also the same

should that informeth the heart, rising in other parts, sendeth the humours unto the

heart to perform their service in such a worthy place.28

Of special interest is Wright’s aside that anyone who imagines can feel this activity in the front of his head. This statement testifies to the common belief that the mental faculties lay in particular parts of the brain. While the Renaissance located the imagination or fancy in the front of the brain, it located the other two faculties of reason and memory in the middle and back respectively, as in the famous illustration from Robert Fludd’s encyclopedic Utriusque Cosmi

27 Ibid.

28 Wright, Passions of the Mind, 123. 34

(1619).29 As Fludd and other books on the ars memoria declare, sensory impressions are received by the sensitive part of the mind, or common sense, in the very front of the brain, and then presented to the imagination. The imagination can make creative use of these impressions or pass them on to the reason through a vermis (“worm”) for deeper reflection. The brain can then transfer these impressions to the memory for preservation. Whenever the mind needed to consider the past, the reason or imagination could recall this information from the memory.

Thus, Wright speaks of the “object to be known” to the heart and the passions as either coming directly from the common “sense” or returning to the imagination from memory. Similarly, in his erotic sonnet sequence Wittes Pilgrimage (1605?), John Davies of Hereford addresses his

“Memorie” as “the Relicke of my Sence” that makes him “A Relike of my Fancies fowle offence” (Sonnet 34, 1-2), “fancy” again being another term for the imagination.30

The “purer spirits” that Wright describes carrying the “object to be known” from the imagination to the heart are the aforementioned animal spirits. The heart reacts to the object these spirits carry by drawing humors that manifest the appropriate passion. Thus, an angry passion would draw choler from the gall bladder, while a sad passion would draw on the

29 See Robert Fludd, Utriusque cosmi, tomus II (1619), Tract. I, Sect. I, Lib X, p. 117: De triplici animae in corpore visione. Long before Fludd, Vesalius had strenuously objected to this three-fold mapping since it contradicted the division of the brain into right and left that he observed in dissection. But Vesalius’s objections were ignored.

Vesalius, On the Fabric of the Human Body, 5:163-4. As Vesalius shows, while the cerebellum is in the back, the cerebrum is divided between right and left, not the front and the middle, and these two halves actually join together.

Vesalius himself declined to locate the faculties in the very different arrangement of the brain he had uncovered through dissection.

30 All quotations from Wittes Pilgrimage are taken from Alexander B. Grosart, ed., The Complete Works of John

Davies of Hereford, vol. 2 of 2 (New York: AMC Press, 1967) and are cited parenthetically by my own line numbers. 35 melancholy spleen. The sensitivity of the imagination and one’s basic humoral complexion together determine how quickly and strongly this process takes place:

…for if the imagination be very apprehensive it sendeth greater store of spirits to

the heart and maketh greater impression; likewise, if the heart be very hot, cold,

moist, tender, choleric, sooner and more vehemently it is stirred to Passions

thereunto proportionated. Finally, if one abound more with one humour than

another, he sendeth more fuel to nourish the Passion, and so it continueth the

longer and the stronger.31

By portraying certain passions over others, then, the sonneteer could suggest both the strength of his imagination and his basic humoral composition.

In Sonnet L from Parthenophe and Parthenophil, Barnes’s poet-lover anatomizes his poetic physicality along these lines:

So warble out your tragique notes of sorrow

Blacke harpe of liver-pyning melancholie

Blacke humor patrone of my fancies folie,

Meere folies which from fancies fier borrow,

Hot fier which burnes day, night, midnight, and morrow,

Long morning which prolonges my sorrowes solie

And ever overules my passions wholie:

So that my fortune where it first made forrow

Shall there remaine, and ever shall it plowe

The bowels of mine hart, mine harts hot bowells:

31 Wright, Passions of the Mind, 123. 36

And in their sorrowes sow the seedes of love,

Which thou didst sow, and newly spring up now

And make me write vayne wordes, no wordes but vowels,

For nought to me good consonant would prove.

Parthenophil declares that the black melancholic humor he suffers from is a result of the fire and folly of his “fancy” or imagination.32 Fire spreads to the heart, heated by the passion of love, which overrules all other affections. Significantly, this humoral and cardiac complex lies behind

Parthenophil’s at once oral and manual poetic physicality, his warbling and writing. Unable to produce any sounds besides vowels, Parthenophil will utter and write only sighing “ahs.”

For Barnes, then, as well as for Wright and sonneteers such as Spenser and Davies of

Hereford, the heart is a kind of mirror—albeit one curved by the passions—a mirror, then, that not only reflects the mind but also reshapes what is reflected. In the Castle of Alma episode from Book Two of The Faerie Queene, Arthur and Guyon journey through the castle of the body to the “parlor” of the heart. There they find the wall decorated with “nothing pourtrahed, nor wrought / Not wrought, nor pourtrahed, but easie to be thought” (II.ix.33.8-9).33 Guyon and

Arthur are seeing the images sent to the heart by the imagination to provoke passions, whose personifications they shortly meet and converse with. In Microcosmos, Davies explains how these passions contribute to the formation of the will:

Now, for the Hart fraile life first intertaines,

And is the last part that from it departes,

32 On the common link between melancholic humor and scholarly writing in the Renaissance, see Douglas Trevor,

The Poetics of Melancholy in Early Modern England (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

33 All quotations from The Faerie Queene are taken from A. C. Hamilton’s edition (New York: Pearson-Longman,

2001), and are cited parenthetically by book, canto, stanza, and line numbers. 37

(Without which, dull were reason, dead the braines)

It’s taken for the part which power impartes

To Wit and Will, whereby they play their partes;

So as it’s held the Mirrour of the minde:

For, when the Minde unto her selfe converts

The Hart is interposd, where shee doth finde

Her feature fowle, or faire, cleere-eied, or blinde.

(27)

Here Davies reiterates the notion that the mental faculties—even reason—depend upon the vital spirits and heat of the heart. Moreover, since the heart reacts either positively or negatively to the images provided by the brain, the heart can rightly be said to form the soul’s desires and will in combination with imagination and reason.

Although the heart and reason might be at odds in their opinion of what is seen, ideally they worked together to foster careful action and speech, especially in matters of love. As

Davies explains in Microcosmos:

And, for th’ Affections from the hart proceede

(Which is the Seate of loue to God and Men)

If then the hart and Minde be wel agreed.

The hart with flames of lasting love will bren,

And fire out forward Passions from their den:

Then wil the Tongue from hart’s aboundance speake

God’s highest laudes till they report agen;

Then love twixt Tongue & Hart shal marriage make, 38

To bring forth naked Truth, which love doth seeke.

(26)

Here the love in question is love of God, but presumably the same agreement between mind and heart occurs in other kinds of love as well—such as in the sonneteer’s passionate outbursts.

Elsewhere in this poem, Davies states that writing too proceeds from this agreement between head and heart:

Then, for the Hart is such a powerful thing,

My hart desires to touch it feelingly:

And, for the Hart doth paine and pleasure bring,

The paine is pleasure, when Head properlie

Makes hand describe the Harte’s hart handsomly.

(27)

Although the heart contributes to the will to write, the head is rightly said to make the hand describe the heart, since the brain is responsible for sending the animal spirits that direct motion.

Meanwhile, the heart mitigates the pain of the hand by experiencing a pleasant passion that outweighs the strain of writing. This passage indicates the mind and the heart’s different responsibilities, as well as showing how complex the depictions of composition put forward by

Renaissance poets could be.

If the heart and reason were to fall into conflict, the view of moral philosophy was that the former was in error and should give way to the latter. In his Hymnes to Astrae, Sir John

Davies praises Queen Elizabeth for realizing this ideal:

B ut since she hath a hart, we know

E ver some passions thence do flow, 39

T hough ever rul’d with Honor;

H er Iudgement raignes, they waite below,

A nd fixe their eyes upon her.34

The physical position of the heart in relation to the brain is important here. That is, the brain’s position at the top of the human body reflects the greater authority of its judgment, another name for reason. The heart with its lower, affective faculty should thus bow before this higher one.

Reason’s exaltation over the passions and even the other faculties went beyond location, of course, since it was held to represent the image of God in man and was denied to the animals.

Fludd’s famous diagram of the faculties illustrates how reason places man “a little lower than the angels”: God and the different orders of angels hover above the center of the “Understanding,” which is further divided into the “Mens” (mind), “Intellectus” (intellect), “Ratio” (judgment, reckoning), “Cogitativa” (reflection), and “Æstimativa” (appraisal, assessment).35 While reason is connected to the heavenly realm in the diagram, imagination remains bound to the world through the five senses, a source of human weakness. That is, because the imagination has the first chance to respond to sensory information, it can reach conclusions faster than the reason can process them and so lead to error and distracting passions. This, in fact, was the skeptical

34 Cited in William Slights, The Heart in the Age of Shakespeare, 64. See his discussion of this passage.

35 See Robert Fludd, Utriusque cosmi, tomus II (1619), Tract. I, Sect. I, Lib X, p. 117: De triplici animae in corpore visione. See also Psalm 5:4-6: What is man, that thou are mindfull of him? and the sonne of man, that thou visitest him? For thou hast made him a little lower then the Angels; and hast crowned him with glory and honour. Thou madest him to haue dominion ouer the workes of thy hands; though hast put all things vnder his feete.” KJV (1611).

The Geneva Bible (1587) says that man was made “a little lower than God.” The author of Hebrews interprets this verse in regards to Christ’s Incarnation (Hebrews 2:6-9). 40 explanation in the period for why people saw ghosts or received visions.36

Imagination’s dependence on the senses and its ability to overwhelm the reason through the passions posed a special problem for poets, whose vocation was commonly seen— negatively—as imaginative. Furthermore, while as Michael Schoenfeldt shows, the control of one’s humors was of paramount importance for health, the sonneteers we have looked at so far repeatedly present themselves as humorally imbalanced.37 The image of the poet overcome by imagination, passion, and his humors was one that writers repeatedly tried to surmount in arguing for a higher place for poetry in English Renaissance culture. For example, in his Art of

English Poesy, George Puttenham defends the poet from the charge of being a “fantastical,” that is, a light-headed person overwhelmed by fantasy or imagination. To mount his defense, he makes a distinction between the “busy and disordered fantasies” produced by an “evil and vicious disposition of the brain,” on the one hand, and the “beautiful visions” on the other, which are necessary for the creations of lawmakers, engineers, artificers, and philosophers—persons to be termed not phantastici but euphantasiote.38

36 Adrian Johns, “The physiology of reading in Restoration England,” in James Raven, Helen Small, and Naomi

Tadmor, eds., The Practice and Representation of Reading in England (New York: Cambridge University Press,

1996), 138-161.

37 Michael Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser,

Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Schoenfeldt’s overarching argument is that the humoral system offered a way to discipline the body and achieve some stability in line with the freedom Foucault found in the ancient “care of the self.” Schoenfeldt refers here to the third volume of The History of Sexauality: The Care of the Self, tr. Robert Hurley (New York: Random House-Vintage Books, 1986).

38 Puttenham, Art of English Poesy, 109-110. 41

Similarly, one way Renaissance poets themselves responded to the suspicion of the poet’s imagination was to stress the hard work that poetry demanded. This was the strategy of Ben

Jonson, who famously insists in his elegy to Shakespeare that “he, / Who casts to write a living line, must sweat. … / For a good poet’s made, as well as born. / And such wert thou” (58-59, 64-

65).39 In plays like Everyman in his Humor and Poetaster, Jonson distances himself from those who cannot control their humors or poetic expression. Satire in general offered Jonson and others an alternative physicality to the sonneteer, emphasizing not just scatology but the fire of choler as opposed to the fire of the heart in love—not to mention the effusions of sighs and tears.

Jonson quite pointedly refused to write a sonnet sequence, parodying the genre in “A Celebration of Charis” and explaining “Why I Write not of Love.” As Bruce Boehrer reveals in his study of

Jonson, the center of his poetic physicality was the stomach and digestion.40 Yet even the wizened Ben Jonson was unable to escape the suspicion of the poet’s imagination. At the end of

Conversations with Drummond, the Scottish poet William Drummond laments that Jonson is

“Oppressed with fantasy, which hath over-mastered his reason, a general disease in many poets.”41 As Richard Helgerson comments, in Jonson’s “generation a reputation for excessive imagination could no longer serve as the basis for a laureate poet’s self-presentation.”42

39 Cited from George Parfitt, ed., Ben Jonson: The Complete Poems (New York: Penguin Books, 1996), 265.

40 Bruce Thomas Boehrer, The Fury of Men’s Gullets: Ben Jonson and the Digestive Canal (Philadelphia:

University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997).

41 Cited from George Parfitt, ed., Ben Jonson: The Complete Poems (New York: Penguin Books, 1996), 480.

42 Richard Helgerson, Self-Crowned Laureates, 120. “Jonson admits [here] to having a hyperactive imagination, but he keeps it at a safely ironic distance in the vicinity of his great toe. Drummond was less impressed by the distance then by the imagination...[If Drummond is correct, this overactive imagination] was one of those ‘ill parts’ that

Jonson was careful to dissemble.” 42

Although Jonson was from a later generation that most sonneteers, poets such as Edmund

Spenser still faced the same dilemma when confronted by the sighing, weeping, and passionate poet-lover in other 1590s sequences. What was needed was another part of the poet’s anatomy upon which to focus—one capable of stability and associated with reason. As later chapters show, the poet’s writing hand eventually emerged in alternative models of poetic physicality as the solution to this difficulty. I suggest two reasons for this emergence: first, the hand was uniquely positioned between the three faculties; second, the hand was already glorified in the

Renaissance as God’s masterpiece of design and the “instrument of instruments.”

III

The hand was and is a symbol for the sense of touch, and thus linked to the imagination that received such sense impressions.43 In Fludd’s illustration of the faculties in Utriusque cosmi, a line connects the hand with touch while also showing how this sense and the other four are incorporated into an elemental hierarchy.44 In a connected sphere labeled “Mundus sensilibus,” or “the world within reach of sensation,” “Tacitus,” or touch, is the basest sense, being affiliated with “terra,” the earth. “Gustus,” or taste is ranked only slightly higher, being affiliated with

“aqua” or water. With “Odoratus,” or the sense of smell, and “Auditus,” or hearing, one begins to rise in the hierarchy of the elements, to the “Aer grossus” and “Aer tenuis,” respectively (the thick or coarse and thin or delicate air). Finally, with “Visus,” or seeing, one reaches the highest element, “Lux Seu Ignis,” light or fire. This same elemental hierarchy is present in the “Mundus

43 The anatomist Helkiah Crooke explains in his Microcosmographia that this is because “we do more curiouslie and exquisitely feele and discerne both the first and second qualities which strike the Sense in the Hand then in other parts.” Helkiah Crooke, Mikrokosmographia a description of the body of man (1615), 730.

44 Robert Fludd, Utriusque cosmi, tomus II (1619), Tract. I, Sect. I, Lib X, p. 117: De triplici animae in corpore visione. 43

Imaginabilis,” or imaginative world, figured to the upper right of the sensitive world, reiterating the fact that the imagination depends on the world of the senses.

This ladder of the senses determined the structure not only of anatomical treatises but also of Renaissance works of art and literature.45 To go down this ladder was to indulge in a

“Banquet of the Senses” that often ended with sexual intimacy, seen as an important extension of the sense of Touch.46 George Chapman and Edmund Spenser both employ this motif as a powerful way to shape the poetic physicality of the sonneteer—that is, by revealing the sensory experiences that inform his imagination. For example, in Spenser’s Amoretti LXIIII, the poet enjoys a kiss he compares to “a gardin of sweet flowres,” as each part of the lady’s body becomes a different type of plant delighting his third lowest sense, smell. Sonnet LXXVII is an even more traditional poem of the senses, as the lady’s body becomes a banquet:

Was it a dreame, or did I see it playne,

a goodly table of pure yvory:

45 In his treatise Microcosmographia, Helkiah Crooke follows the same order of the senses in his discussion of them.

However, he attempts to defend Touch by mentioning how St. Thomas and other figures from Scripture used this sense to confirm their faith. Mikrokosmographia a description of the body of man (1615), 649. Hereafter cited as

Crooke, Microcosmographia. Crooke explains the elemental order of the senses on page 661, and more or less follows it in the discussion of the senses that follows.

46 A famous engraving (c. 1596) by Jan Pietersz Saenredam, based on drawings of the five senses by Hendrick

Goltzius, illustrates this point. For a reproduction and discussion of this engraving, which is held by the National

Gallery of Art in Washington, DC (Rosenwald Collection, 1943), see the Trout Gallery, Dickinson College exhibition catalogue Writing on Hands: Memory and Knowledge in Early Modern Europe, ed. Claire Richter

Sherman and Peter M. Lukehart (Seattle: University of Washington Press), 136-137. In seeking to defend Touch,

Crooke in Microcosmographia acknowledges this connection—ironically as evidence in favor of Touch’s dignity

(648). 44

all spred with juncats, fit to entertayne

the greatest Prince with pompous roialty?

Mongst which there in a silver dish did ly

twoo golden apples of unvalewd price:

far passing those which Hercules came by,

Exceeding sweet, yet voyd of sinfull vice,

That many sought yet none could ever taste,

sweet fruit of pleasure brought from paradice

By love himselfe and in his garden plaste.

Her brest that table was so richly spredd,

My thoughts the guests, which would thereon have fedd.

The poet first sees the apples that represent the lady’s breasts, before his thoughts proceed to descend to the senses of taste and touch. However, by insisting that her bosom is void of sinful vice and also by forbidding “one sparke of filthy lustfull fyre” (1) to threaten her later in Sonnet

LXXXIIII, Spenser suggests that the lover’s senses have been purified, including that of touch.

Indeed, as I show in Chapter 6, Spenser has already by this point in the sequence turned the hand into an icon of authorship rather than sensuality.

This turn is possible because the hand was also connected to the faculties of memory and reason. Because of their many divisible parts, hands were often employed as a mnemonic device just like the buildings in the ars memoria discussed by Frances Yates.47 For instance,

47 See Frances A. Yates’s classic study The Art of Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966). For more on memory as practiced in the medieval period, see Mary J. Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in

Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 45

Renaissance schoolchildren learned to use the joints of their fingers to memorize the notes of the musical scale.48 But the writing hand was also linked with memory physiologically. In Fludd’s diagram, memory lies behind the reason at the back of the skull next to the sphere of “Motiva,” or motion, which connects to the spinal column.49 As Bruce Smith notes, this location also meant that the memory was responsible for communicating the brain’s orders to the rest of the body.50

Thus, when the poet directs his hand to write, the animal spirits pass through the memory.

The memory’s primary function, of course, is to receive the imprinting or inscription of sense impressions—a function that further links it with the hand. The comparison of memory to a wax tablet reaches back to Aristotle, who argues that a sensory stimulus “impresses a sort of likeness of the percept, just as when men seal with signet rings.”51 Aristotle uses this analogy to explain why the ability to remember depends upon the age and temperature of the individual.

The memory tablets of the aged are too hard, so that sense impressions do not penetrate, while the young are in a state of flux and so cannot hold impressions. Similarly, there are those, too quick-witted, whose memories cannot hold an impression because they are too moist.52

Memory was also imagined as the site of inscription, as it was often visualized as a place

48 For a discussion, see Susan Forscher Weiss, “The Singing Hand,” in Sherman and Lukehart, Writing on Hands.

49 Robert Fludd, Utriusque cosmi, tomus II (1619), Tract. I, Sect. I, Lib X, p. 117: De triplici animae in corpore visione. The text notes: “Et hæc virtus fundatu in extrema Cerebri parte et in Spinali medulla.”

50 Bruce R. Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-factor (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 1999), 109.

51 Quoted from Parva Naturalia, “On Memory and Recollection,” 450a-450b, in W. S. Hett, tr., Aristotle: On the

Soul, Parva Naturalia, On Breath (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964).

52 Ibid., 450b. On this notion of the wax tablet, as well as Classical memory techniques, see Jocelyn Penny Small,

Wax Tablets of the Mind: Cognitive Studies of Memory and Literacy in Classical Antiquity (New York: Routledge,

1997). 46 where documents could be gathered—in other words, as a library.53 Memory’s cell in Spenser’s

Castle of Alma is just such a place:

His chamber all was hangd about with rolls,

And old records from auncient times derivd,

Some made in books, some in long parchment scrolls,

That were all worm-eaten, and full of canker holes.

(II.ix.57.6-9)

These rolls, read by Guyon and Arthur, will provide the story for the next canto of Spenser’s poem. Similarly, the “immortal scrine” that Memory contributes to recalls “the antique rolles” that Spenser calls on the Muse to “lay forth” from her “everlasting scryne” at the beginning of his epic (I. Proem 2.3-4). Spenser, then, suggests a link between memory and the poet—indeed, suggests that the poet through his writing can act as the memory of his culture. In De usu partium (On the Usefulness of the Parts of the Body), Galen praises the hand with this notion of cultural preservation in mind. With his hands, Galen says, Man

writes laws for himself, raises altars and statues to the gods, builds ships, makes

flutes, lyres, knives, fire-tongs, and all the other instruments of the arts, and in his

writings leaves behind him commentaries on the theories of them. Even now,

thanks to writings set down by the hand, it is yet possible for you to hold converse

with Plato, Aristotle, Hippocrates, and the other Ancients.54

Renaissance anatomist Helkiah Crooke echoes Galen’s praise of the hand almost verbatim in his

53 Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England, cites Pierre de La Primaudaye, who refers to Memory as the “Register & Chancery Court of all the other senses,” 109.

54 Quoted from Margaret Tallmadge May, Galen: On the Usefulness of the Parts of the Body (Ithaca: Cornell

University Press, 19868), I:69. 47 famous Microcosmographia, except he emphasizes the use of the hands in oral communication instead of writing—“By our hands we promise, we call, we dismisse, we threaten, we intreate, we abhore, we feare, yea and by our hands we can aske a question”—alluding to the use of the hand in the rhetorical art of delivery.55 In sonnet sequences, as I show, the poet’s hand most often writes, as the poet beseeches the beloved (and his literary audience) to remember what he is inscribing. In Sonnet X of Parthenophil and Parthenophe, Barnes’s lover is haunted by the deed to his heart that he signed over to his mistress:

Ah me! since mercylesse she made that chartyre,

Sealed with waxe of steadfast continence,

Sign’d with those hands which never can unwrite it,

Writ with that penne, which by preheminence

To sure confirmes whatsever was inditit.

(5-9)

As the primary agent of both reason and memory, the hand confirms intent and will, and thus

Parthenophil is unable to secure the release of his heart, despite his pleadings.

Besides being an enabler of memory, communication, and the arts, the hand was also widely known in the Renaissance as the “instrument of instruments” and the part of the body most reflecting man’s divine-given reason. When Aristotle gave the hand the title of “instrument of instruments” (“ὄρϒανόν τι πρὸ ὀρϒάνων”) in Parts of Animals, he seems to have meant that the hand is an instrument that can make many instruments, although the sense that it is the

55 Crook, Microcosmographia, 729. On the art of delivery, see John Bulwer’s 1644 Chirologia: or the Natural

Language of the Hand and Chironomia: or the Art of Manual Rhetoric, ed. James W. Cleary (Carbondale: Southern

Illinois University Press, 1974). Bulwer promised a book on Cephalelogia, or gestures of the head, but never delivered. 48 instrument par excellence was also understood in the Renaissance.56 In De Anima, Aristotle explains the abilities of the soul through comparison with the hand: “the soul, then, acts like a hand; for the hand is an instrument which employs instruments, and in the same way the mind is a form which employs forms, and sense is a form which employs the forms of sensible objects.”57 Aristotle’s Renaissance followers interpreted this praise of the hand from a Christian point of view. Thus, Crooke speaks of the hand and reason as the two gifts God gave to man at his creation:

Man, who is the crowne and pride of Nature, that bold and confident worke-

Mistrisse, him I say, God on his birth day, did cast upon the dust of the earth,

naked, unarmed, and welring in his bloud, to enjoy or rather to deplore an

inheritance of sorrow and misery. Yet notwithstanding because he is sent into the

world to be a combatant and not a sluggard, he hath armed him with two

wondrous weapons, which he hath denied to all other living creatures, Reason and

the Hand.58

Katherine Rowe has shown how the religious dimensions of the hand that Crooke expresses here were revealed during dissections.59 While Jonathan Sawday has argued for the chaotic element in dissections and the sense of the uncanny that they could foster about one’s own body, Rowe

56 Parts of Animals, tr. A. L. Peck (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), IV, x, 687a: “now the hand would appear to be not on single instrument but many, as it were an instrument that represents many instruments.”

57 On the Soul, 432a, quoted from W. S. Hett, tr., Aristotle: On the Soul, Parva Naturalia, On Breath (Cambridge,

MA: Harvard University Press, 1964).

58 Crooke, Microcosmographia, 729.

59 Katherine Rowe, Dead Hands: Fictions of Agency, Renaissance to Modern (Stanford, CA: Stanford University

Press, 1999), Ch. 1. 49 suggests that the hand retained traditional notions of agency and teleology.60

Sonneteers sometimes use similarly heightened rhetoric to elevate their writing hand or to indicate a secret power behind their authorship. For example, both Sidney and John Davies of

Hereford credit the movement of their hands to some higher power, rather than their own reason.

In Sonnet 90 of Astrophil and Stella, Astrophil assures Stella that he does not seek fame through his poems to her. Neither does he take any inspiration from other poets (“plumes from others’ wings,” (11)): “Since all my words thy beauty doth endite, / And love doth hold my hand, and makes me write” (13-14).61 Here the love god Cupid takes control of the sonneteer’s hand, making it the instrument of his will rather than the poet’s. Davies’ Sonnet 8 from his sequence

Wittes Pilgrimage (1605?) clearly responds to Sidney’s. In his poem, Davies explains how some

“wonder how so well I write, / … Sith Art, my skill, of Theft cannot indite” (1, 3). They do not understand “That wonder, sith an Angell guides my hand” (14). Here God has given the poet not only his reason and his hand but also extraordinary spiritual assistance (with the obvious play on the lady as the angel).

The attention and reverence paid to the hand in Renaissance dissections was matched by esoteric and religious discourses that turned the hand into an oracle or a religious symbol. For example, the hand was thought to be the only part of the body containing an equal balance of all four elements, as Davies of Hereford explains in Microcosmos:

Whereof ther’s but one thing of Nature’s choise

60 Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (New York:

Routledge, 1995). For more on the Classical and Renaissance reverence for the hand, see Martin Kemp, “The

Handy Worke of the Incomprehensible Creator,” in Sherman and Lukehart, Writing on Hands, 46-59.

61 Quoted from William A. Ringler, ed., The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962).

All quotations from Astrophil and Stella are from this edition and will be cited parenthetically. 50

Wherein shee made the mixture thus precise:

(As Galen’s tract of Tempers testifies:)

Which, of each hand, is the interior skin:

And hence we may thus fitly moralize;

That Nature to the Hand so good hath bin,

That it might temper what the Mouth takes in.

(30)

In defining the hand as the only part of the body with a perfect mixture of the four elements,

Davies explains both the hand’s role as caretaker of the body and its existence as another microcosm of the four elements within the microcosm of the human body. Because it was just such a mini-microcosm, many attempted to read the hand as astrologers tried to read the stars, by focusing on the lines of the palm.62 Known as chiromancy, a division the physiognomy that attempts to read the whole body in this way, this art drew the attention of the book-buying public. Joannes Indagine’s (d. 1537) Chiromantia, translated into English by Fabian Withers and published in 1558, was quite popular, being printed in 1575 and 1598, then periodically in the seventeenth century.63 The Epistle to the Reader advertises the benefits of chiromancy:

For hereby though shalt perceive and see the secret workes of nature, how aptly &

necessarily she hath compound and knitt ech member with other: giving unto the

62 For a discussion and explanations, see Brian P. Copehaver, “A Show of Hands,” in Sherman and Lukehart,

Writing on Hands, 46-59.

63 Crooke deplored such divination, preferring a more philosophical and scientific understanding of the hand: “I list not to commend the Hand from that superstitious Art or Imposture, rather of such as call themselves

Chyromantickes, whose idle speculations are not fit to bee mingled with our serious discourse.” Crooke,

Microcosmographia, 729. 51

hand (as unto a table) certain signes & tokens whereby to discerne and knowe the

inward motion and affections of the mind and heart, with the inwarde state of the

whole bodye: as also our inclination and aptness to all our externall actions.64

In sonnet sequences, the hand often signifies the poet’s thoughts and passions by its trembling and other actions, as when Thomas Watson’s lover in Hekatompathia finds that his “letters tell in what a case I stand, / Though full of blots through fault of trembling hand.”65

Finally, the hand was also an important bodily site for religious contemplation, owing to medieval numerology and mnemonics that associated the five fingers with the five senses, the five mysteries of the Rosary, and the five wounds of Christ. The most famous example of this numerology in English literature is the explanation of the Pentagram that Sir Gawain has painted on his shield in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight:

Fyrst he watz funden fautlez in his fyue wyttez,

And efte fayled neuer þe freke in his fyue fyngres,

And alle his afyaunce vpon folde watz in þe fyue woundez

Þat Cryst kaȝt on þe croys, as þe crede tellez;

And quere-so-euer þys mon in melly watz stad,

His þro þoȝt watz in þat, þurȝ alle oþer þyngez,

Þat alle his forsnes he feng at þe fyue joyez

64 Johannes Indagine, Brief introductions, both naturall, pleasant, and delectable vnto the arte of chiromancy, or manuell diuination, and physiognomy with circumstances vpon the faces of the signes, Fabian Withers, tr. (London:

Thomas Purfoot, 1598), sig. A3v-A4r. STC 14077.

65 Passion XXXVI, 5-6. Quoted from Thomas Watson, The Hekatompathia or Passionate Centurie of Love, ed. S.

K. Heninger, Jr. (Gainesville: Scholar’s Facsimile’s & Reprints, 1964). 52

Þat þe hende heuen-quene had of hir chylde…66

Gawain is faultless in his five wits, or senses, while the strength found in his five fingers never fails. Meanwhile, his meditation on the five joys of Mary and the five wounds of Christ provides him with spiritual strength. Manuals of piety in the late medieval period and early Renaissance encouraged such meditative use of the hand—for example by linking the five traditional states of meditation to the five fingers, starting with the thumb.67 More complex illustrations link Christ,

Mary, and the saints with certain fingers. As I discuss in later chapters, Henry Constable and possibly Spenser allude to this religious dimension in their poems on the hand.

Conclusion

Because of its connection with the three faculties and its exalted status in physiological, esoteric, and religious discourse, the hand was clearly well poised to become an important part of

Renaissance models of poetic physicality. Surprisingly, however, the early sonnet sequences of the 1590s do not make the poet’s hand an integral part of their poetic physicality. Instead, they tend more towards the passionate side of the tension I have traced in this chapter. That is, their anatomies of authorship emphasize the sighs and tears that pour out of the poet-lover’s mouth and eyes, or his or her difficulty in breathing and speaking. When a hand does appear in these sequences, as in Constable’s Diana and Daniel’s Delia, it is the hand of the beloved or patron more often than that of the poet. That is, the sonneteer himself passionately expresses what the female beloved’s or patron’s hand moves him to utter. Only in the later sequences of Spenser

66 Quoted from J. R. R. Tolkien and E. V. Gordon, eds., Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, 2nd edition revised by

Norman Davis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), 640-7.

67 See Sherman and Lukehart, Writing on Hands, 64-65. 53 and Chapman—and in Shakespeare’s Sonnets—does the poet’s hand emerge as a prominent icon emphasizing the poet’s control over his literary art.

As a way of summing up the concerns of this chapter and segueing to those of the next, we might turn to Sir Philip Sidney’s handling of the tension between spontaneous expression and controlled composition in both his Defense of Poesy and Astrophil and Stella. In the Defense,

Sidney complains about the lack of visible passion in contemporary love poetry:

But truly many of such writings as come under the banner of unresistable love, if I

were a mistress, would never persuade me they were in love: so coldly they apply

fiery speeches, as men that had rather read lovers’ writings…than that in truth

they feel those passions, which easily (as I think) may be bewrayed by that same

forcibleness or energia (as the Greeks call it) of the writer.68

At issue in this passage is not just style but also poetic physicality. Note Sidney’s emphasis on coldness as opposed to the heat: the fiery speeches that these other poets apply do not suggest that they feel the passions that would produce a real heating of their hearts. Meanwhile, that the

“forcibleness or energia” that Sidney suggests as a solution is that of the “writer,” rather than simply the “lover,” suggests that a forceful description of the physical act of writing could testify to the real heat in the heat produced by imagination and the passions.

Earlier in the Defense, however, Sidney attempts to relocate poetic creation from the passions and the faculty of the imagination to that of reason. For instance, he declares that what poets make “is not wholly imaginative, as we are wont to say by them that build castles in the

68 Quoted from Katherine Duncan-Jones and Jan Van Dorsten, eds., Miscellaneous Prose of Sir Philip Sidney

(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), 116-7. All citations from the Defense of Poesy are taken from this edition and will be supplied parenthetically. 54 air” (79), but rather something that can encourage virtuous behavior, the proper domain of reason. Furthermore, when Sidney argues that poetry can deliver a golden world since “our erected wit maketh us know what perfection is, and yet our infected will keepeth us from reaching unto it” (79), he refers to the notion that reason is a divine gift to man, a sign of his being made in God’s image. Thus, he calls for skeptical readers to “give right honor to the

Heavenly Maker of that maker, who, having made man to His own likeness, set him beyond and over all the works of that second nature” (79). Finally, in the same passage, Sidney emphasizes the poet’s control over his work when he states that the success of a poet in forming his readers in virtue through a “Cyrus”—his “idea of foreconceit”—depends on the reader learning “aright why and how that maker made him” (79). However, the ironies and games that Sidney plays in the Defense and his own reticence concerning his theories (“But these arguments will by few be understood, and by fewer granted” (79)) troubles his attempt to place poetry within the domain of reason rather than the imagination.69

Turning to Astrophil and Stella, one finds Sidney working out this tension—between imagination and the passions, on the one hand, and reason and control, on the other—through the psychomachia of his double Astrophil. Very early on in the sequence, in Sonnet 10, passion scores a victory against reason:

Reason, in faith thou art well serv’d, that still

Wouldst brabling be with sense and love in me:

I rather wisht thee clime the Muses’ hill,

Or reach the fruit of Nature’s choisest tree,

69 See Ronald Levao, “Sidney’s Feigned Apology,” in Dennis Kay, ed., Sir Philip Sidney: An Anthology of Modern

Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 127-146. 55

Or seeke heavn’s course, or heavn’s inside to see:

Why shouldst thou toyle our thornie soile to till?

Leave sense, and those which sense’s objects be:

Deale thou with powers of thoughts, leave love to will.

But thou wouldst needs fight both with love and sence.

With sword of wit, giving wounds of dispraise,

Till downe-right blowes did foyle thy cunning fense:

For soone as they strake thee with Stella’s rayes,

Reason thou kneel’dst, and offerdst straight to prove

By reason good, good reason her to love.

Reason here argues with the common sense and the related imagination, which have provided

Stella’s beauty to the heart, which in turn has reacted passionately with love. At the end of the octave, Astrophil tells his reason to concern itself with abstract thought, and to let the senses and imagination continue their intercourse with the will, which receives power from the passions.

When reason insists on combat, the sense of sigh and love fittingly defeat him with Stella’s rays.

Later in Sonnet 49, Astrophil explains how, in the absence of reason’s controlling force, the faculties of imagination and memory now work together with his passions to master him like a horse:

The raines wherewith my Rider doth me tie,

Are humbled thoughts, which bit of Reverence move,

Of Hope, which makes it seeme faire to the eye.

The Wand is Will thou Fancie Saddle art,

Girt fast by memorie, and while I spurre 56

My horse, he spurres with sharpe desire my hart.

(5-11)

Whenever Astrophil sees or hears Stella, this sensory information is passed from his eyes and ears to his common sense and imagination. Later he can recall these impressions through his memory, which passes them back to the imagination and on to the heart. Imagination and memory, then, work together to prick Astrophil’s desire, while reason’s role is noticeably absent, unless it comprises the reverence that is his bit.

In these two sonnets, one sees Sidney taking the physiology outlined above and using it to characterize Astrophil as truly passionate, unlike the poetasters he criticizes in the Defense.

Hence the violent physical images in these two sonnets: the swordfight between the faculties in the first poem and the mastery and spurring in the second. While Sidney the apologist argues for reason and the poet’s control in the early part of the Defense, the love poet recognizes the need for the sonneteer persona to convince his audience of the disruptive power of his passion. In the next chapter, I discuss how Sidney resolves the resulting tension between Astrophil’s passionate expression and his own authorial control over the sequence through a poetic physicality of oral composition. Like the two sonnets cited above, this model possesses its own violent physical energy. In the scenes of writing that result from this poetic physicality, the distinction between

Sidney and Astrophil is most blurred, the passions apparently the most irresistible, the Sidneyan anatomy of authorship most fully realized as a legacy for future sonneteers. 57

Chapter 2: “Enter Astrophil in pomp”:

Sidney’s Private Performance of Oral Composition in Astrophil and Stella (1591)

“Think upon every word that you will speak before you utter it, and remember how nature hath ramparted up, as it were, the tongue with teeth, lips—yea, and hair without the lips, and all betokening reins and bridles for the loose use of that member.”1 So Sir Henry Sidney advised his twelve-year-old son, studying away from home at Shrewsbury School. Henry's description of the bodily mechanisms that control speech, one after another, is startling in its comprehensiveness, as he urges Philip to consider even the wisps of hair around his lips as tiny reins. Behind these lie the defenses of his teeth, which Henry tells Philip to imagine as ivory ramparts. For the young Philip, to speak was to be aware of his body in the act of speaking. It was an awareness he was doubly instructed to keep. Adding a postscript, Philip’s mother instructed him “to have always before the eyes of your mind these excellent counsels of my lord, your dear father, and that you fail not continually, once in four or five days, to read them over.”2

That this is the only surviving letter from Sidney’s boyhood suggests its significance to him.

In the same letter, Sir Henry gives his son another, less proverbial admonition, but one also concerned with taking care of his body: “Apply your study to such hours as your discreet master doth assign you, earnestly, and the time I know he will so limit as shall be both sufficient for your learning and safe for your health.”3 That learning could be hazardous to one’s health probably strikes the modern reader as odd, but this was not the last time Henry Sidney would

1 Quoted in James M. Osborn, Young Philip Sidney: 1572-1577 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972), 13. The entire letter can be found on pages 11-14.

2 Ibid., 14.

3 Ibid., 12. 58 worry about his child’s study habits. In a 1569 letter, written when Sidney was fifteen, Sir Henry asks Lady Cecil to make sure Philip does not study too much: “for I fear he will be too much given to his book, and yet I have heard of few wise fathers doubt that in their children.”4 As

James Osborn notes, in the winter of that very year, Sidney suffered severe eye inflammation that may have been attributed to excessive studying.5 Sidney’s woes recall Jonathan Goldberg’s comments on writing’s threat to the body in his study of Renaissance handwriting manuals:

… [B]oth written and visual representations of penhold carry the same

implications: that the body and its natural life are menaced by writing, that a

difference body (a socialized and civilized body) is produced by writing. …

Again and again, the parts of the body most threatened are the eyes. … If the hand

produced by writing is also the hand that has been detached, so too the eye is

written into another order of being, a socially scripted one.6

While Goldberg emphasizes the conforming of the eye to society, Sidney seems to have suffered a more immediate physical effect from his writing. For Sidney in his poetry too, as we will see, reading and writing are not activities that involve merely the hand, eye, or mind. Instead, they depend on the entire body, as his father had reminded him—though not in quite the same way as

Sir Henry had lain out.

Sidney’s dangerous study habits became part of family lore. Writing to a thirteen-year- old William Herbert, apparently at the request of his mother, Mary, Thomas Moffet relates to the young boy how his uncle wearied himself with unabated study. According to Moffet, Sidney “so

4 James M. Osborn, Young Philip Sidney, 22.

5 Ibid.

6 Jonathan Goldberg, Writing Matter, 98. 59 held letters in his affection and care that he would scarce ever sleep, still less go forth without a book.”7 However, this tendency to study eventually led to a frightening outcome:

Night and days in ceaseless and related studies he worked upon the anvil of wit,

reason, and memory, at some harm to his welfare; yet he did not wish on this

account to give over literary studies, which lie in wait against health. Hence it

twice occurred that, overstimulated by his prolonged studies in early adolescence,

he fell ill of a fever attended by the greatest peril; and he was forced to slacken

the reins in sports, until, the breakdown of his health having been repaired, more

fit and more active he returned to the Muses.8

“At one moment,” Moffet states, Sidney “judged it inhuman to abjure the care of the body; at another moment not to proceed with his studies he deemed a reproach.”9 According to Moffet, the young Sidney realized painfully how inseparable the mind is from the body. Thus, the future writer of the Arcadia and Astrophil and Stella was forced to give himself “to recreation, and mingled, by way of spice, certain sportive arts—poetic, comic, musical—with his more serious studies.”10 Interestingly, Moffet presents poetry here as a combination of sport and study, a recreation that preserves the health of the body for more serious reading and writing.

7 Thomas Moffet, Nobilis or a View of the Life and Death of a Sidney and Lessus Lugubris, ed. Virgil B. Heltzel and

Hoyt H. Hudson (San Marino: The Huntington Library, 1940), 71. All quotes are taken from their English translation of the original Latin.

8 Ibid., 73. In his commonplace book, Timber, Ben Jonson records a similar story, suggesting that Sidney’s was not an isolated case. See George Parfitt, ed., Ben Jonson: The Complete Poems (New York: Penguin Books, 1975), 399.

9 Moffet, Nobilis, 71.

10 Ibid., 73-4. Osborn identifies running, jumping and wrestling as the exercises Sidney would have engaged in at

Shrewsbury. Young Philip Sidney, 11. 60

These family documents call for modern scholars to examine Sidney’s own depictions of reading and writing. However, in regards to Astrophil and Stella, critics with few exceptions have focused on other issues besides poetic physicality. Thus, James Scanlon and Thomas P.

Roche, Jr., have both argued that Sidney sought to teach a moral lesson, with Astrophil serving as a negative exemplum of the fallen lover.11 Moving away from considering the sequence as primarily about erotic desire, Arthur Marotti has emphasized the political and courtly milieu within which Sidney wrote and against which he complained.12 When critics have turned to representations of poetic composition in the sequence, their readings have focused on Astrophil’s troubling of the protocols of Renaissance rhetoric or his uneasy engagement with Petrarchism, which David Kalstone especially has treated.13 With the advent of poststructuralism, deconstruction, and psychoanalytic criticism, Sidney scholars such as Gary Waller have discussed the ways in which language, including the language of Petrarchism, fails in the sequence, thus determining Astrophil’s fragmented identity.14 In her usual strong synthesis of

11 James T. Scanlon, “Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella: ‘See What It Is to Love’ Sensually!” Studies in English

Literature 16.1 (1976): 65-74; Thomas Roche, “Astrophil and Stella: A Radical Reading,” Spenser Studies 3 (1982):

139-91.

12 Arthur F. Marotti, “‘Love is not Love’”: Elizabethan Sonnet Sequences and the Social Order,” English Literary

History 49.2 (1982): 396-428.

13 David Kalstone, Sidney’s Poetry: Context and Interpretations (New York: The Norton Library, 1965), Ch. 4 “The

Petrarchan Vision” and Ch. 5 “The Sequence.” See also Germaine Warkentin, “Sidney and the Supple Muse:

Compositional Procedures in some Sonnets of ‘Astrophil and Stella,’” Studies in the Literary Imagination 15.1

(1982): 37-48.

14 See the following essays in Gary F. Waller and Michael D. Moore, eds., Sir Philip Sidney and the Interpretation of Renaissance Culture: The Poet in his Time and Ours (London: Croom Helm, 1984): Gary F. Waller, “The

Rewriting of Petrarch: Sidney and the Languages of Sixteenth-Century Poetry,” 69-83; Marion Campbell, 61 formal and historical analysis, Heather Dubrow argues that Sidney was conscious of the contradictions of Petrarchism and anti-Petrarchism in his sequence, using it to express his anxiety regarding the language of desire, his dependence on a female figure (Stella and

Elizabeth), and his own fluid social position.15 As she puts it, “poststructuralism could have taught Sidney nothing he did not already know and manifest here about threats to subjectivity.”16

Despite their important contributions, these interpretations of Astrophil and Stella have favored a division between inward subjectivity and its bodily means of expression in which the first term is often the only one considered. As I suggested in the previous chapter, and as the family documents above bear witness, Sidney and his contemporaries would not have comprehended this division. Recently, then, a few critics have inspected more closely the overlap between the body and language in the sonnets. Catherine Bates employs Kristeva’s theories of abjection and notions of masochism to deconstruct “the image of the unitary writing subject who is master of words,” using the repeated images of the beaten schoolboy as evidence of the writer’s abjection.17 Andrew Strycharksi also discusses these images, as well as the letter from Henry Sidney to his son, arguing that the letter provides a key glimpse into a dynamic in

“Unending Desire: Sidney’s Reinvention of Petrarchan Form in Astrophil and Stella,” 84-94; Jacqueline T. Miller,

“‘What May Words Say,’”: The Limits of Language in Astrophil and Stella,” 95-109. On the text of Astrophil and

Stella as a site for potential meaning and the play of readers see Gary F. Waller, “Acts of Reading: The Production of Meaning in Astrophil and Stella,” Studies in the Literary Imagination 15.1 (1982): 23-35.

15 Dubrow, Echoes of Desire, 99-119.

16 Ibid., 104.

17 Catherine Bates, “Astrophil and the Manic Wit of the Abject Male,” Studies in English Literature 41.1 (2001): 1-

24. See also her study Masculinity, Gender and Identity in the English Renaissance Lyric (New York: Cambridge

University Press, 2008). 62 the sequence between orality and “frustrations with and anxieties about writing.”18 However, neither of these readings examines Astrophil’s compositional practice in depth. Moreover, by omitting to place the resulting model of poetic physicality beside those of his predecessors and contemporaries, they miss the key physiological difference between Sidney’s and Petrarch’s literary personae.

As I argue, whereas the young Sidney had been encouraged to moderate his studies and take care of his body, in Astrophil and Stella the “sportive art” of poetry explodes in multiple dimensions of physicality. Poetic composition here involves not simply the hand, mind, or even the mouth as described by Henry Sidney, but also the heart, lungs, and the exhaled words of the poet that, when received by the ears and returned to his heart, inspire writing. As Styrcharski observes, the “affect often associated with orality is in Sidney’s sonnets mobilized for writing.”19

I push his observation forward by arguing that Sidney links orality and writing through the body of the sonneteer in a recursive physiological process of oral composition. This model of physicality exists in tension with the tradition of Petrarchan poetry that Sidney wrote both within and against, at the same time that its powerful portrayal of passion and eroticism forms a nightmarish realization of Sir Henry’s and Moffet’s anxieties over lack of control. Ultimately,

Sidney presents a poetic physicality distilled from Petrarchism, yet separate from it, for Sidney’s notion of composition as visceral oral experience depends for its reception on knowledge of

Sidney and his mannerisms possessed by a close manuscript audience of family and friends.

Sidney’s emphasis on oral composition as the cornerstone of Astrophil’s poetic

18 Andrew Strycharski, “Literacy, Education and Affect in Astrophil and Stella,” Studies in English Literature 48.1

(2008): 46.

19 Ibid. 63 physicality may seem odd in a modern age of silent reading and composition. However, it is well to remember, as Anne Ferry urges us, that many of the most popular books in the period contained prayers to be read aloud, that people were often encouraged to go into a private place and discourse with themselves, and that orality was still a dominant mode of personal expression in many ways—to the point that the soliloquy may not have seemed artificial.20 In his study of the “acoustic world” of early modern England, Bruce Smith also notes how reading, writing, and speaking were not as separated as they tend to be today.21 In education, schoolmasters followed

Cicero and Quintilian in having their students “sound words aloud as they wrote them down, in just the way that they would sound words aloud as they read them.”22 Surveying this different world of speech and writing, Smith concludes: “We are adept at reading graphemes as symbols of semantic concepts; what we need are ways of reading graphemes as indices of somatic experience.”23 As I show, Astrophil and Stella begs for and rewards this kind of reading.

I

In contrast to English sonneteers such as Barnes, Sidney minimizes the sighs and tears of

Petrarchism, choosing instead to distill and refine a third aspect of its poetic physicality: the poet’s breath captured on the written page. Quantitatively speaking, Astrophil refers to his own sighing in only 4 sonnets out of 108, while his tears are only mentioned 7 times (and in two of these cases the tears are not really Astrophil’s but rather those of Grief and Sorrow). In other

20 Anne Ferry, The “Inward” Language: Sonnets of Wyatt, Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 1983). For more on the importance of orality and memory in a new world of print, see Adam Fox,

Oral and Literate Culture in England: 1500-1700 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).

21 Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England, Chap. 4.

22 Ibid., 119.

23 Ibid., 129. 64 sonnets he portrays Stella’s sighs and tears, or those that Stella and he share (the Eighth Song).

In contrast to these low numbers, Astrophil mounts a sustained description of his writing process in twelve sonnets, and remarks on writing and reading in many others. Throughout the sequence, he brings the poet’s respiring voice and the act of writing more closely together than do Petrarch and other English sonneteers, thus synthesizing a distinctive model of physicality drawing from the Petrarchan tradition and his own fascination with orality.

Sidney sets out this new program of poetic physicality in Sonnet 15, as Astrophil criticizes those writers who resurrect Petrarch’s poetic physicality in English verse: “You that poore Petrarch’s long deceased woes, / With new-borne sighes and denisend wit do sing” (7-8).

Too beholden to Petrarch, these pretenders reanimate his sighing and naturalize an Italianate poetics (“denisend wit”) instead of relying on their own interiorities.24 The lines recall Sidney’s criticism of love poetry in the Defence, in which he takes to task those writers who

“coldly…apply fiery speeches, as men that had rather read lovers’ writings…than that in truth they feel those passions”—with the “lover’s writings” here being Petrarch’s, and with this slavish following marking a similar “want of inward tuch” (10).25 To exorcize this dead poetic tradition from the body of the poet, Astrophil offers a new course: “But if (both for your love and skill) your name / You seeke to nurse at fullest breasts of Fame, / Stella, behold, and then begin to endite” (12-14). “Endite” is a key word in Sidney’s sequence because of its great range of meaning. First, “to endite” can refer to speaking, especially dictation; second, it can also refer to the act of writing itself. Third and finally, the word can mean “to compose a literary work,”

24 O.E.D. defines the verb “denizen” as “To make a denizen; to admit (an alien) to residence and rights of citizenship; to naturalize.”

25 Duncan-Jones and Dorsten, Miscellaneous Prose of Sir Philip Sidney, 116-7. 65 which covers both of these former senses.26 Thus, the word “endite” includes both oral and written means of poetic expression, and crucially the relationship between them, a relationship that Sidney depicts in a visceral manner throughout Astrophil and Stella.

To appreciate both the Petrarchan beginnings and original direction of this poetic physicality, we must first look briefly at Petrarch’s physicality of speech and writing, as well as the models of Sidney’s Elizabethan contemporaries. In the 366 poems that make up the Rime

Sparse, Petrarch refers to the preparatory process of ruling the writing surface and the moment of composition itself about equally.27 His accounts of composition often emphasize that writing captures sighing or occurs after speaking is frustrated. For example, in Canzone 23, he declares:

“To speak aloud had been forbidden me, / So I cried out with paper and with ink” (98-99).

Similarly, in Sonnet 20, Laura’s beauty shames Petrarch so much that his rhyming is silenced:

But neither weight that’s suited to my strength

Nor work for my file’s polishing I find;

And so creative skill that knows its power

Remains in this pursuit all frozen fast.

How often when I part my lips to speak,

My voice remains in silence in my breast—

What sound, in deed, could ever climb so high?

How many times I’ve started to write verse

To find that pen and hand and intellect

26 O.E.D, “indite, v,” 1, 4, 3.

27 Thus, in poem 72, a canzone or song, he concludes by making ready for the next song (“hence I rule more leaves”—“ond’io piu carta vergo,” 78), while Sonnet 146 begins with the cry to Laura: “O noble soul with ardent virtue graced / And flushed, how many leaves I rule for you” (“…tante carte vergo,” 1-2). 66

Remain still vanquished by the first assault.

(5-14)

The sestet gives speaking and writing three lines each, but represents these as individual actions separated in time, for as Petrarch is denied one avenue of expression he takes up another.

Sonnet sequences contemporaneous with Astrophil and Stella follow this Petrarchan passage from frustrated speech to equally frustrated writing. For example, in Thomas Watson’s

Hekatompathia (1582), Passion XXXIX (a partial translation of Petrarch’s Sonnet 20, discussed above), the speaker similarly complains of an inability to either speak or write:

I have attempted oft to make complainte,

And with some dolefull wordes to tell my griefe,

But through my fearefull heart my voyce doth fainte,

And makes me mute where I should crave releise:

An other while I thinke to write my paine,

But straight my hand laies downe the pen againe.

(7-12)

As the words “An other while” make clear, writing does not immediately follow speech. As the poem is a translation of Petrarch, it provides evidence that this is how his poetic physicality was perceived in the Renaissance—that is, as one where writing replaces speech rather than closely following it in a conjoined act of composition. Elsewhere, Watson’s speaker curses his lips and writing implements (Passion XCIIII, a translation of Serafino)

I curse the time, wherein these lips of mine

Did praye or praise the Dame that was unkinde:

I curse both leafe, and ynke, and every line 67

My hand hath write, in hope to move her minde:

(1-4)

Here again, speaking and writing are distinct, separate events. Since the speaker by this point has fallen out of love, writing is also imagined in the past, rather than occurring in the present.28

The next section demonstrates how Sidney brings writing into the present of the sonnet itself, at the same time that he refines the outlined Petrarchan relationship between speech and writing. Through the new form of the English sonnet, Sidney draws speech and writing more closely together until they combine to create a single, extraordinarily vivid portrait of oral composition. In concentrating and combining the Petrarchan experiences of troubled speaking and writing in this way, Sidney achieves a model of poetic physicality that can serve to demonstrate passion and even eroticism through the “energia of the writer.”

II

The struggle for originality that famously opens Astrophil and Stella is a physical struggle as well as a poetic one. The hexameter lines that Sidney experiments with in this

28 References to writing in other contemporary sonnet sequences are less substantial. John Soowthern’s Pandora

(1584) refers to pens and writing, although these mentions are few and far between, and there is no sustained attention to the physical process of composition such as what we find it in Sidney’s or Watson’s sequences.

Pandora: The Musyque of the beautie, of his Mistresse Diana (New York: The Facsimile Text Society-Columbia

University Press, 1938). In James VI’s Essays of a Prentise, published the same year and again in 1585, the future

King of England mentions his pen, his decision to write, and the effects he hopes his writing will have on his readers. However, as his sonnets are set as a litany of prayers to the gods to bless his poetry, there is little variation in their references to writing, and, like in Soowthern, no sustained scenes of composition. The essayes of a prentise, in the divine art of poesie (Edinbrugh [sic], 1584). STC 14373. 68 opening sonnet (a meter he only uses in five other poems in the sequence) reinforce the sense of

Astrophil’s poetic labor, as the reader silently or aloud must take longer to reach the end of lines:

Loving in truth, and faine in verse my love to show,

That the deare She might take some pleasure of my paine:

Pleasure might cause her reade, reading might make her know,

Knowledge might pitie winne, and pitie grace obtaine,

I sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woe,

Studying inventions fine, her wits to entertaine:

Oft turning others’ leaves, to see if thence would flow

Some fresh and fruitfull showers upon my sunne-burn’d braine.

But words came halting forth, wanting Invention’s stay,

Invention, Nature’s child, fled step-dame Studie’s blowes,

And others’ feete still seem’d but strangers in my way.

Thus great with child to speake, and helplesse in my throwes,

Biting my trewand pen, beating my self for spite,

‘Foole,’ said my Muse to me, ‘looke in thy heart and write.’

Astrophil’s self-description at the end of the octave focuses the reader’s attention on his outward body (his hands turning the pages of other books) and his interiority (his mind, or “sunne-burn’d braine”). That his brain is “sun-burnt” not only alludes to Thomas Wilson’s metaphor for the influence of the ancients but also points to the need for the moist humors associated with creativity.29 As Thomas Wright argues in The Passions of the Mind, the moistness of the brain,

29 See Kalstone, Sidney’s Poetry, 127-28, and Russel M. Brown, “Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella 1,” Explicator 32.3

(1973): Item 21. 69 particularly in the fancy or imagination, allows it to receive the images from the senses.30 Indeed,

Astrophil is sunburnt not because he has imitated the ancients; rather, he is already dried out creatively and is struggling to invent the matter for his verse.

The increasingly vivid description towards the end of this sonnet indicates that Astrophil is trying to compose his poem orally before writing it down. At the beginning of the sestet, his striving continues: “But words came halting forth, wanting Invention’s stay” (9). After a violent image of studying (“Invention, Nature’s child, fled step-dame Studie’s blowes”), Astrophil reveals that he would speak the words he is searching for, as well as write them: “Thus great with child to speake, and helplesse in my throwes, / Biting my trewand pen, beating myself for spite…” (12-13). The metaphor of pregnancy here, oft noted by critics, suggests a tremendous physical urge to speak that anticipates images of the poet’s swollen, panting chest later in the sequence. For example, in the First Song Astrophil declares that “my breast orecharg’d to

Musicke lendeth” (2), and in the Fifth before condemning Stella for refusing him he states, “I feele my breast doth swell” (34).31 In Sonnet 1, the reader’s attention is similarly focused on

Astrophil’s chest through the image of pregnancy, until the final line when the Muse instructs

Astrophil to “looke in thy heart and write.” Astrophil must look in his heart for the image of

Stella surrounded by his passions, an image delivered by the imagination. This “fancy” of Stella, then, replaces the words of other poets that Astrophil considered only in his brain. This shift from the brain’s thoughts to the heart and its affections under the influence of imagination suggests orality, since the Renaissance often saw the lungs as the orators of the heart.

30 Wright, Passions of the Mind, 114.

31 On the use by male poets of figures of pregnancy for writing, see Maus, Inwardness and Theater in the English

Renaissance, Ch. 6 “A Womb of His Own: Male Renaissance Poets in the Female Body.” 70

Astrophil’s biting of his “trewand pen” further suggests that he is attempting to compose his verse aloud as well as write. But in fact this is only the reading in the 1598 edition. In the first 1591 quarto readers would have encountered a different reading that would reinforce the sense that Astrophil is composing orally. The first line of the couplet in this edition reads

“Biting my tongue and pen…”32 This alternate line suggests that Astrophil wishes to speak with his tongue and write with his pen, but is unable to, and thus bites into both. Of course, this variation is a common type of error in transcribing, reducing a more difficult expression to a simpler one. Nonetheless, the error suggests that the compositor (and the transcribers who produced the Houghton and Huntington manuscripts where this reading is also preserved) were able to imagine Astrophil as speaking his poem before or at the same time as he was writing it.33

Importantly, this is the reading of the first 1591 edition of Astrophil and Stella that helped inspire the sonnet craze of the 1590s. Sonneteers composing their own poems, and only having this pirated edition of Astrophil to turn to, would see Sidney’s model of oral composition emphasized by this variation.

In the first sonnet, then, a physicality of study (turning others’ leaves, “step-dame

Studie’s blowes”) is replaced by a physicality of oral composition. As the sequence continues,

Sidney develops this new model, exploring its different possibilities for representing Astrophil’s passion. In the very next sonnet, for example, Astrophil mentions the wound Love has given him, “which while I breathe will bleed” (2). Coming right after the preparation to write in the first poem, “Bleed” suggests not just a wound but also the “bleeding pen” Astrophil uses. That is, Astrophil links the effusion of breath from his mouth to the outpouring of ink from the

32 This line was corrected in the second quarto of 1591.

33 Ringler, The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney, 165, n. 71

“mouth” of his pen. The last line of this sonnet, “While with a feeling skill I paint my hell” (14), supports this linkage between breathing and writing, since the word “paint” often meant to compose or write.34

Sonnet 6 is the first sonnet in which Astrophil compares himself to other poets; like the opening sonnet, it is also written in hexameter and explores the oral model of poetic physicality that is quickly emerging in Sidney’s sequence:

Some Lovers speake when they their Muses entertaine,

Of hopes begot by feare, of wot not what desires:

Of force of heav’nly beames, infusing hellish paine:

Of living deaths, deare wounds, faire stormes and freesing fires:

Some one his song in Jove, and Jove’s strange tales attires,

Broadred with buls and swans, powdred with golden raine:

Yet hiding royall bloud full oft in rurall vaine.

To some a sweetest plaint, a sweetest stile affords,

While teares power out his inke, and sighs breathe out his words:

His paper, pale dispaire, and paine his pen doth move.

I can speake what I feele, and feele as much as they,

But thinke that all the Map of my state I display,

When trembling voice brings forth that I do Stella love.

Significantly, Astrophil lists the physicality of other love poets last in this comparative litany, at the beginning of the sestet, as if this approach was the most threatening to his sense of uniqueness. These poets equate the effusions of body and pen, metamorphosing the tears

34 O.E.D. v.1, 1.d and 4.a. 72 common to Petrarchan poetry into ink, while their sighs, part of the same traditional poetic physicality, carry forth the words that they simultaneously write down. These poets, then, seem to be composing very much like Astrophil, in that their poetic composition is oral and elides the difference between the emotional pain of love and the physical pain of writing.

Nevertheless, Astrophil still marks his poetic expression as different from theirs. Sighs and tears are the trappings of Petrarchan physicality, trappings that Astrophil mostly avoids.

Moreover, tears as ink is a metaphor, and a familiar one at that, while Astrophil ends with a more visceral image: the trembling voice, which marks out its individuality by barely uttering the beloved’s name.35 This shuddering vocalization ends the poem before Astrophil can even write like his rivals. Contributing to this sense of a trembling voice is the spondee produced by “When trembling…” itself. Metrically, the longer hexameter lines suggest the straining efforts of composition, as in his opening poem, while the interlaced rhyme scheme here (ababbaa ccdeec) reinforces the sense of vocal struggle. In short, Sidney captures Astrophil’s quaking voice in his alexandrines and stuttering rhyme scheme, suggesting an oral origin for the written poem.

In Sidney’s model, the beloved’s name is not transformed into a metaphor as in the Rime

Sparse but instead is repeatedly uttered in a visceral, recursive process of poetic composition.

Appearing in the middle of the sequence, Sonnet 50 is a tour de force example of the energia of the writer that Sidney is able to create through Astrophil’s poetic physicality:

Stella, the fulnesse of my thoughts of thee

Cannot be staid within my panting breast,

But they do swell and struggle forth of me,

Till that in words thy figure be exprest.

35 Cf. the retort at the end of Sonnet 54: “They love indeed, who quake to say they love” (14). 73

And yet as soone as they so formed be,

According to my Lord Love’s owne behest:

With sad eyes I their weake proportion see,

To portrait that which in this world is best.

So that I cannot chuse but write my mind,

And cannot chuse but put out what I write,

While those poor babes their death in birth do find,

And now my pen these lines had dashed quite,

But that they stopt his furie from the same,

Because their forefront bare sweet Stella’s name.

Despite the presence of the allegorical Love figure and the metaphor of infant thoughts, this sonnet ultimately dwells on the poet’s body. Here, as in the opening sonnet, attention is drawn to

Astrophil’s breast, which pants in order to provide cooling air to the heart that is too hot with the thoughts of Stella it struggles to utter. The passage from speaking to writing between the first four lines and the next four is quick, reinforcing Astrophil’s claim that this writing process is inevitable (“I cannot chuse but write my mind…”). Yet seeing provides an impression different from that of hearing, for only when Astrophil writes his uttered words can he see “their weake proportion” before him on the page. The reference to “poor babes,” repeating the procreation imagery of the first sonnet, again suggests that the pregnancy imagery alludes to the poet’s difficult attempts to utter and then write down his thoughts.

The sestet accelerates away from this process of oral composition to the destruction of what is written, as Sidney highlights the violence of the physicality he has discovered. The reader is caught off guard as Astrophil suddenly prepares to destroy his sonnet in the midst of 74 composing it. This intrusion of the writer into the present of the sonnet (“And now”) actualizes

Sidney’s call for energia of forcefulness in the Defense. The poem is only saved by Stella’s name, the one word that Astrophil most utters aloud throughout the sequence, as when he produces it with his trembling voice in Sonnet 6. The reader is thus thrown back to the first word of the present sonnet, as the picture of Astrophil speaking, writing, reading, and almost destroying his poem comes full circle. As before, only when the poet sees what he has written— here Stella’s name—is he able to reflect on what he has composed. In other words, Sidney suggests that the original process of composing the sonnet orally and writing it down is so passionate as to be relatively unconscious.

Following closely upon this poem, Sonnet 55 provides a look back at this process of oral composition that seemingly lies behind all the poems in Astrophil and Stella. In this poem,

Sidney makes it clear that Astrophil’s poetic physicality is an abandonment of alternative,

“higher” methods of composing in favor of a more visceral approach:

Muses, I oft invoked your holy ayde,

With choisest flowers my speech to engarland so;

That it, despised in true but naked shew,

Might winne some grace in your sweet skill arraid.

And oft whole troupes of saddest words I staid,

Striving abroad a foraging to go,

Untill by your inspiring I might know,

How their blacke banner might be best displaid.

But now I meane no more your helpe to trie,

Nor other sugring of my speech to prove, 75

But on her name incessantly to crie:

For let me but name her whom I do love,

So sweete sounds straight mine eare and heart do hit,

That I well find no eloquence like it.

Astrophil’s reference to armies of words that he halted calls to mind earlier images of a burden in the poet’s heart or chest that he tried to utter. That he waited for the Muses’ “inspiring” suggests he was trying to exhale these words, since “inspire” can signify not only mental inspiration but the entry of spirits into the blood through the heart’s receiving of air. With the turn in the sestet

(“But now”) this burden in the chest is relieved, as Astrophil now declares his freedom to utter what words he chooses, or rather one word: “Stella.” Speaking Stella’s name with his mouth and then hearing it with his ears allows his heart (struck along with his ears in line 13) to consider the thoughts and resulting passions that lead to poetic eloquence. When one recalls that Astrophil had begun Sonnet 50 with Stella’s name—the only thing that saved that poem from destruction—it becomes clear that Sonnet 55 is an unfolding of the same process of oral composition.

By reading these poems aloud and uttering Stella’s name for themselves, readers can take part in this poetic physicality, a fact that Sidney uses to ironic effect. The riddle of Sonnet 37 is the most daring invitation of this kind. Astrophil begins the poem by placing himself in front of an audience of “lordings,” frequently addressed at the beginning of medieval romances:

My mouth doth water, and my breast doth swell,

My tongue doth itch, my thoughts in labor be:

Listen then Lordings with good eare to me,

For of my life I must a riddle tell… 76

(1-4)

The repetition of sentence construction grants urgency to this opening (“My mouth doth…My breast doth…etc…”), while virtually begging the reader to utter the poem aloud. This oral- rhetorical technique also has the effect of linking together physical processes: the “mouth” and

“breast” in line 1 are what contain “the tongue” and “thoughts” in line 2. As in other poems, labor is a metaphor for the air to be expired from the poet’s chest along with the words his heart wishes to express. These references to the organs of speech lend emphasis to the beginning of line 3—“Listen.” The scandal of what follows is that just as other sonnets revolve around the uttering of Stella’s name (including the two sonnets directly before this one), so this poem relies upon the obsessive repetition of Penelope Rich’s real name five times aloud:

Rich in all beauties which man’s eye can see:

Beauties so farre from the reach of words, that we

Abase her praise, saying she doth excell:

Rich in the treasures of deserv’d renowne,

Rich in the riches of a royall hart,

Rich in those gifts which give th’eternall crowne;

Who though most rich in these and everie part,

Which makes the patents of true worldly blisse,

Hath no misfortune, but that Rich she is.

(6-14)

The oral physicality that begins the sonnet, and that invites the reader to speak the lines, carries the poem into dangerous territory, as the only “misfortune” is that Penelope is wedded to Robert

Rich, who was lambasted and accused of abusing her in Sonnet 24. Unsurprisingly, Sonnet 37 77 was omitted from the first edition of Astrophil and Stella, as well as from the Houghton MS (24, startlingly, was not). That the reader must be aware of persons alluded to by Sidney to fully understand the poem reflects on the intimate nature of Sidney’s poetic physicality. That is, just as the subject of the sonnets is intensely personal, so too the physicality may be close to Sidney’s actual manner of composition, explaining his obsession with this model. Seen in this light,

Sidney in this most daring of poems makes Astrophil’s physicality his personal poetic signature.

III

The violence and violation of decorum, both poetic and social, that one finds in Sidney’s model of poetic physicality soon gain an erotic charge. Critics such as Margreta de Grazia and

Alan Sinfield have discussed how Astrophil’s conditional language and puns reveal his erotic desire for Stella.36 As de Grazia comments, the “sexual nature of Astrophil's verse surfaces also through Sidney's use of the common Renaissance analogy between verbal and sexual communication.”37 What has not been addressed, however, is how Sidney specifically links the physicality of Astrophil’s oral composition to sexual desire and consummation. For instance, it is no coincidence that Sidney sets two scenes of composition at night, when Astrophil is most consumed by thoughts of Stella. After addressing the moon and the god of sleep through apostrophe (Sonnets 31 and 32), and after lamenting the missed opportunity with Stella that has plunged him into hellish night (Sonnet 33), Astrophil in Sonnet 34 argues with his wit about whether or not to continue composing:

Come let me write, “And to what end?’ To ease

36 On the link between language and Sidney’s erotic desire in the sequence, see Margreta de Grazia, “Lost Potential in Grammar and Nature: Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella,” Studies in English Literature 21.1 (1981): 21-35 and Alan

Sinfield, “Double Meanings II: Sexual Puns in Astrophil and Stella,” Essays in Criticism (1974): 341-55.

37 de Grazia, “Lost Potential in Grammar and Nature,” 32. 78

A burthned hart. ‘How can words ease, which are

The glasses of thy dayly vexing care?’

Oft cruell fights well pictured forth do please.

‘Art not asham’d to publish thy disease?’

Nay, that may breed my fame, it is so rare:

‘But will not wise men thinke thy words fond ware?’

Then be they close, and so none shall displease.

‘What idler thing, then speake and not be hard?’

What harder thing then smart, and not to speake?

Peace, foolish wit, with wit my wit is mard.

Thus write I while I doubt to write, and wreake

My harmes on Ink’s poore losse, perhaps some find

Stella’s great powers, that so confuse my mind.

Ironically, the argument that is this sonnet interrupts what would have been another, presumably very different poem. As the reader encounters this poem as a written text, then, they are aware of the verbal debate between Astrophil and his Wit that has produced it. This debate comes to a head when Wit claims that Astrophil is unlikely to be heard, and Astrophil responds that he is in such pain that he must speak. He then silences his wit (“Peace,” 11) and turns back to the materiality of writing: “Thus write I while I doubt to write, and wreack / My harmes on Ink’s poore losse…” (12-13). Ink and writing must suffice for the words that cannot be heard, since he has vowed to keep his poetry “close,” that is, secret. Despite the emphasis on the physical act of writing at the end, however, the sense throughout the poem is that Astrophil is speaking aloud, from the first extemporaneous line to the dialogue with Wit that follows. Speaking and then 79 writing down the thoughts of the confused mind “ease a burdened heart,” not only since the troubling passions are located there but also because the sonnet with its strict form can measure grief originally expressed orally.

In the next series of nighttime sonnets, Sidney develops this model of oral composition with attention to the physical environment within which Astrophil writes. In Sonnet 38, he first depicts himself gradually falling asleep:

This night while sleepe begins with heavy wings

To hatch mine eyes, and that unbitted thought

Doth fall to stray, and my chiefe powers are brought

To leave the scepter of all subject things,

The first that straight my fancie’s error brings

Unto my mind, is Stella’s image, wrought

By Love’s owne selfe, but with so curious drought,

That she, me thinks, not onely shines but sings.

(1-8)

As Astrophil’s eyes starting to close, his thoughts, unbridled and unrestrained by reason, begin to stray, while the spirits that allow his senses to perceive the outside world (his “chiefe powers” and “subject things”) withdraw from their organs. His imagination, the site of dreaming, is then allowed to run on unchecked, producing “fancie’s error” or the image of Stella singing. When

Astrophil awakens he hearkens after her voice, but it has fled, leaving him with his own “wailing eloquence” (11) as he tries in vain to woo “sleepe again” (13). The next sonnet, “Come sleepe, ô sleepe,” is clearly the product of this “wailing eloquence,” a poem in which Astrophil unsuccessfully begs sleep to return with numerous bribes. In Sonnet 40, Astrophil finally turns 80 from wailing his woes aloud to writing them. “As good to write as for to lie and grone,” (1) he states pointedly, in a line similar to the one that began Sonnet 34 in the previous night sequence

(“Come let me write…”). Both lines sound like a stolen outburst, suggesting that Astrophil is composing both aloud and on the page. Here, though, Sidney has also indicated Astrophil’s movement from his bed to his writing desk: from lying down to sitting, from hearing Stella’s voice to begging Sleep to return, and ultimately by writing to Stella about his nights spent moaning her name. Sidney thus plays on the sense of the sonnet as a physical space, that is, of a room. The middle sonnet, 39, fill out this physical space with “smooth pillows, sweetest bed, / A chamber deafe to noise, and blind to light / A rosie garland, and a wearie hed” (9-11)—the various things Astrophil promises Sleep if he will return.

Sidney’s chaining together of sonnets to suggest an extended process of oral composition is matched on the level of the single poem by his use of the rhetorical figure gradatio, a figure that also carries erotic possibility. George Puttenham explains this figure as follows:

Ye have another sort of repetition when with the worde by which you finish your

verse, ye beginne the next verse with the same, as thus:

Comforte it is for man to have a wife,

Wife chast, and wise, and lowly all her life.

Or thus:

Your beutie was the cause of my first love,

Loove while I live, that I may sore repent.

The Greeks call this figure Anadiplosis, I call him the Redoubleas the originall

beares.38

38 Puttenham, Art of English Poesy, 284. 81

Puttenham identifies this figure with erotic concerns, and this is the way Sidney uses the figure as well: “While favour fed my hope, delight with hope was brought, / Thought waited on delight, and speech did follow thought: / Then grew my tongue and pen records unto thy glory” (1-3).

Here is a four-fold use of gradatio: “my tongue and pen” in line 3 amplify the “speech” that follows “thought” in line 2, which itself waits on delight fed in turn by hope. With the emphasis on the speaking of thought and the pairing of “tongue and pen,” Sidney presents poetic composition as a simultaneously oral and written process that leads to “glory.” In fact, the linking of “tongue and pen” here may in fact be responsible for the error of “tongue and pen” for

“trewand pen” in the opening sonnet discussed earlier.

However, gradatio is not an innocent rhetorical maneuver by any means. Rather,

Astrophil uses it to create a chain from speech, to writing, and finally to erotic intimacy, as in the opening sonnet: “Pleasure might cause her reade, reading might make her know, / Knowledge might pitie winne, and pitie grace obtaine”). Thus, in Sonnet 74, Astrophil comments not only on his oral composition but also on the erotic desire that powers it:

How falles it then, that with so smooth an ease

My thoughts I speake, and what I speake doth flow

In verse, and that my verse best wits doth please?

(9-11, emphasis added)

The answer, of course, is that his “lips are sweet, inspired with Stella’s kiss” (14). In the four kiss sonnets of 79, 80, 81, and 82 that closely follow this poem, Sidney continues to chain together his poems while playing with the multiple senses of “endite.”39 Sonnet 79 begins with

39 For more on these sonnets and their place in a larger kiss sequence, see James Finn Cotter, "The 'Baiser' Group in

Sidney's Astrophil and Stella," Texas Studies in Literature, 12.3 (1970): 381-403. 82

Astrophil wishing to tell of the sweetness of Stella’s kiss: “Sweet kisse, thy sweets I faine would sweetly endite” (1). In Sonnet 80, Astrophil recalls how “best wits” praise the “sweet swelling lip” (2, 1), by using epithets such as “breather of life” (7) and mythological references such as

“Cupid’s cold fire” (3). In the volta that begins the sestet, Sidney reveals that he has spoken all this: “Thus much my heart compeld my mouth to say, / But now spite of my heart my mouth will stay, / Loathing all lies, doubting this Flatterie is” (9-11). For Astrophil’s mouth to resume speaking, Stella must kiss and teach it the truth of the matter. At this point, enditing is associated more with speech than writing, as poetry seems to emerge from Astrophil’s heart through his mouth. In Sonnet 81, the asked-for kiss has apparently been given, as Astrophil begins to praise her lips once more, as “Breathing all blisse and sweetning to the heart” and “Teaching dumbe lips a nobler lips a nobler exercise” (3, 4). His mouth apparently now convinced of his heart’s truth, Astrophil wishes “to paint” Stella’s kiss “to all men’s eyes” (7). In the volta Stella forbids him to speak of this “with blushing words” (9). But Astrophil is unable to keep quiet: “But my heart burnes, I cannot silent be” (11). Here the heart, overheated by Stella’s breath and kiss, demands cooling through respiration and the vocal expression of its thoughts, as the mouth that

Henry Sidney wished to chasten returns with a vengeance.

In Sonnet 82, Astrophil is forced to turn from speech to writing, as Stella is upset because he has bitten her and so banished him from her presence. He excuses himself as being “full of desire, emptie of wit” (9), and swears by the delight of her kiss not to do the same again: “I will but kisse, I never more will bite” (14). The word “bite” here, besides adding to the erotic frisson of this mini-sequence, recalls the rhyme word “endite” at the beginning of the four poems set on the kiss (“Sweet kisse, thy sweets I faine would sweetly endite”). The rhyming also suggests the verb “write,” which now after four sonnets returns to the reader’s mind, not only as a fulfilling 83 rhyme word but also as a possible meaning for “endite,” which until this poem had seemed to carry a primarily oral meaning. Indeed, biting is what Astrophil has done to his pen (or tongue) when trying to write at the very beginning of the sequence. These kiss sonnets, then, perform what gradatio does in a single sonnet: they mark a passage from orality to writing that declares

Astrophil’s yearning for erotic consummation.

While Astrophil attempts to link oral composition, writing, and erotic union, Stella severs this chain by asserting her own poetic physicality, one primarily based on performing his poems aloud. In Sonnet 57, after finding “the thorowest words, fit for woe’s selfe to grone” (4),

Astrophil hopes Stella shall “soone be pierc’d with sharpnesse of the mone” (8), a bold reference to sexual intercourse. However, Stella repels Astrophil’s advance through her own respiring voice, singing his words back to him: “With that faire breast making woe’s darknesse cleare”

(11). With her own heart and lungs, Stella transforms Astrophil’s groaning verse into a joyful song. Stella repeats this kind of oral transformation in the very next sonnet (58), this time by speaking rather than by singing. Astrophil, after recalling the myth of the Gallic Hercules who was able to bind men’s ears with chains from his tongue, sets up an experiment to test the power of rhetoric. At the beginning of the sestet, he invites the reader to consider how well he exercised himself in the first three activities of the rhetorical canon: inventio, dispositio, and elocutio: “in piercing phrases late, / Th’ anatomy of all my woes I wrate” (9-10). The “woes” are

Astrophil’s matter for invention, which he sets out through his “anatomy,” a word that suggests not only the canon of disposition or arrangement but also Astrophil’s poetic physicality of burning heart, urgent speech, and feverish writing. The canon of elocutio, or style, is indicated by the term “piercing phrases,” which also hints at sexual penetration, like “pierc’d with sharpness of the mone” in the previous poem. Astrophil hopes that the combined force of these 84 canons, delivered in writing (“I wrate”) will ravish Stella. However, it is Stella’s delivery with her “sweet breath” that ravishes—ravishes Astrophil with delight. Stella here exercises the last canon of rhetoric, pronuntiato, as her breath transforms his writing to her own purposes. The irony is that Astrophil’s writing itself originates from his respiring voice, as we have seen.

By imagining Stella as a book, Astrophil attempts to both anticipate a sexual form of inscription and prevent her from breathing back his words to him with a different meaning. In

Sonnet 67, he reads Stella with the assistance of Hope to discover whether erotic union is possible, asking Hope to examine the “faire text” again, including the “blushing notes” underneath her eyes in the “margine” of cheeks. Similarly, in the Eighth Song, after praising her voice, Astrophil describes Stella’s body as a text on which is “writ each character of blisse” (42).

In the same poem, Sidney writes that Astrophil’s “hands in their speech, faine / Would have made tongue’s language plaine…” (65-66) by passionately embracing Stella. “Hands making tongue’s language plain” is what Astrophil has repeatedly tried to do in his sonnets of composition. Whereas Stella fended off his earlier advances with her voice, here she resists him with her own hands: “But her hands his hands repelling, / Gave repulse all grace excelling” (67-

68). In the end, Stella can speak with her hands and her voice and as well as Astrophil.

Although writing is clearly not involved in this scene, the struggle between their hands symbolizes Astrophil’s attempt to persuade her through writing that proceeds from passionate oral expression.

Indeed, it is in the Songs, the poems most oral in nature, where the energia of Astrophil’s poetic physicality takes on the most erotic intensity, where the passage from oral composition to 85 writing is fully revealed as a figure for sexual intercourse.40 While Astrophil declares his abandonment of Desire in Sonnet 72, the return of the repressed occurs immediately in the

Second Song, which follows. Astrophil finds Stella sleeping and attempts to take advantage of her inability to use her eyes, tongue, and especially her hands to resist him. Here the learning of the alphabet that the child first ventures upon becomes a metaphor for the kiss that would lead to more intense discursive and erotic apprehension: “Now will I but venture this, / Who will read must first learne spelling” (23-24). Even more telling is the Fourth Song, where Astrophil attempts to persuade Stella to go to bed with him by alluding to the process of enditing that he has charted to this point:

Your faire mother is a bed,

Candles out, and curtaines spread:

She thinkes you do letters write:

Write, but first let me endite:

Take me to thee, and thee to me.

“No, no, no, no, my Deare, let be.”

(37-42)

Astrophil will speak or dictate while Stella writes, this exchange of speech and writing symbolizing coitus and probably impregnation. The latter possibility is suggested by the procreative metaphors for speech and writing that Astrophil employed earlier in the sequence.

However, Stella refuses this suggestion with her voice, once more breaking the chain Astrophil is trying to forge between his poetic physicality and the realization of his erotic desires.

40 For another take on the songs as encapsulating some of the other concerns in the poem, see James Finn Cotter,

“The Songs in ‘Astrophil and Stella,’” Studies in Philology 67.2 (1970): 178-200. 86

Conclusion

Both students and critics often comment on how Stella seems more powerful, more present, than the beloveds in other sonnet sequences.41 Part of Stella’s presence, perhaps a majority of it, is due to how Sidney sets her oral physicality of singing and speaking against

Astrophil’s physicality of oral composition. At times, the resulting clash gives the sequence the feel of a dialogue on stage, especially in the Eighth Song. Astrophil himself invites us to entertain dramatic notions in Sonnet 45, where Stella is moved more by a story showing “Of

Lovers never knowne, a grievous case” (6) than by his woeful appearance. In response,

Astrophil asks her to think “you in me do reed / Of Lover’s ruine some sad Tragedie: / I am not I, pitie the tale of me” (12-14). Astrophil can also be read as a precursor to Ovid and Horace from

Ben Jonson’s Poetaster, who also compose their verse orally:

Ovid: Then, when this body falls in funeral fire,

My name shall live, and my best part aspire.

It shall go so. [Writes]42

Neil Rudenstine thus identifies dramatic dialogue as one of the main ways Sidney accomplished energia.43 Sidney’s staging scenes of composition, in particular, might propel one to revisit

Nashe’s seemingly incongruous introduction to Astrophil and Stella, listening more carefully this time to his invitation “to turn aside into this Theater of pleasure:”

41 See, for instance, Nona Fienberg, “The Emergence of Stella in Astrophil and Stella,” Studies in English Literature

25.1 (1985): 5-19. Nevertheless, Fienberg concludes that Stella is ultimately silenced by the end of the sequence.

42 1.1.1-3. Quoted from Margeret Jane Kidnie, ed., The Devil is an Ass and Other Plays (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 2000).

43 Neil L. Rudenstine, Sidney’s Poetic Development (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), Ch. 10:

“Energia.” 87

for here you shal find a paper stage streud with pearle, an artificial heau'n to

overshadow the faire frame, & christal wals to encounter your curious eyes,

whiles the tragicommody of loue is performed by starlight.44

Nashe here perhaps picks up on Sidney’s dramatic presentation of oral composition. As Nashe admits, this was a poetic drama long kept away from the public's eyes—“yet at length it breakes foorth in spight of his keepers, and useth some private penne (in steed of a picklock) to procure his violent enlargement.”45

Indeed, while Sidney circulated other poems, as well as the Arcadia, he seems to have guarded Astrophil and Stella closely. As H. R. Woudhuysen notes, relatively few manuscripts of the sequence exist, and individual poems did not circulate much.46 The Sidney circle was shocked in 1591 when these poems were printed, quickly shutting down printing and recalling copies.47 The model of physicality that I have laid out in this chapter provides a partial explanation for Philip’s and the Sidney family’s reticence. For one, Sidney attempted something radically different in Astrophil and Stella compared to his other poems. Nothing similar occurs in Certain Songs and Sonnets. In the seventeenth poem of that collection—the closest Sidney gets to constructing a poetic physicality—his speaker declares that he will “Take harp and sing” so that “That all the earth my woes, sighes, teares may know,” adding sarcastically, “And see you not that I fall now to ryme?” (36-40). Sighs and tears, along with rhyme, will provide the traditional Petrarchan evidence for love that the lady demands. In Astrophil and Stella, Sidney

44 Sir Philip Sidney, His Astrophel and Stella Wherein the excellence of sweete poesie is concluded (1591), sig. A3.

45 Ibid.

46 H. R. Woudhuysen, Sir Philip Sidney and the Circulation of Manuscripts: 1558-1640 (New York: Oxford

University Press, 1996), Chapter 11, especially page 383.

47 When they allowed the sonnet sequence to be reprinted, Nashe's introduction was pointedly not included. 88 would go far beyond this, emphasizing not the sighs and tears associated with Petrarch but the way Astrophil’s heart “measures a verse” by reflecting on Stella’s image, becoming enflamed with passion, respiring, speaking, and finally writing. In the end, in his incomplete translation of the Psalms, Sidney would honor the model he found in Hebrew Scripture, where writing is solely assigned to God, and the psalmist’s vocal response is to alternately utter pleading and praise.

I have already noted that Sonnet 37, one of the most intensely oral poems in the sequence, was censored in manuscript. And there are still other overlaps between the poetic physicality of the sequence and Sidney’s life as retold by the Sidney circle. Stella’s transformation of Astrophil’s verse into song, for example, was a practice Sidney personally encouraged. In a letter to his friend Edward Denny, Sidney closes with the following direction:

“that you remember with your good voyce, to singe my songes for they will one well become an other.”48 After citing this letter, Katherine Duncan-Jones provides evidence that Penelope Rich possessed a good singing voice.49 As she suggests, Sidney may have counted on his better- informed readers to have this characteristic in mind when reading the sonnets where Stella utters

Astrophil’s poems.50 What I am also suggesting, then, is that Sidney’s poetic physicality is meant for the appreciation of an intimate audience, one that could appreciate the overlap between this physicality and Sidney's personal temperament, mannerisms—even his manner of composing. In his dedicatory letter to his sister that introduces the Arcadia, Sidney presents himself as a

48 Osburn, Young Philip Sidney, 540.

49 Katherine Duncan-Jones, “Sidney, Stella, and Lady Rich,” in Sir Philip Sidney: 1586 and the Creation of a

Legend, ed. Jan Van Dorsten, Dominic Baker-Smith, and Arthur F. Kinney (Leiden: E. J. Brill/Leiden University

Press, 1986), 170-192.

50 For more the identification of Penelope with Stella, see Hoyt H. Hudson, "Penelope Devereux as Sidney's Stella,"

The Huntington Library Bulletin 7 (1935): 89-129. 89 feverish writer much like Astrophil: “Your dear self can best witness the manner, being done in loose sheets of paper, most of it in your presence, the rest by sheets sent unto you as fast as they were done.”51 Part of the pleasure of reading Astrophil and Stella in manuscript, then, may have lain in noticing the similarity to how Sidney actually composed. Of course, we cannot be certain whether Sidney composed aloud, although recent work by scholars on orality in the period suggest he may have. What is certain, though, is that a physicality of oral composition fascinated Sidney while writing Astrophil and Stella, to the point that he made it the foundation of the poems’ eroticism, as well their metrical and rhetorical experiments.

Moffet, whose biography of Sidney I examined at the beginning of this chapter, seems to recognize Sidney’s poetic physicality as a siren call to the young Herbert, as illustrated when he insists on Sidney’s unwilling turn to poetry only to recoup stamina for more serious study.

Moffet also makes sure to relate Sidney’s deathbed repentance to Sidney’s nephew with a particular physical and poetic emphasis:

First, enraged at the eyes which had one time preferred Stellas so very different

from those given them by God, he not so much washed them as corroded them

away with salt tears, and exhausted them in weeping, as it were a set task.52

Sidney’s body here punishes itself for its earlier indulgence in poetry: the eyes that had once marked Penelope’s/Stella’s beauty and enflamed his heart now destroy themselves with tears of repentance. Sidney’s dying wish to his brother, according to Moffet, is for his love poetry to be hidden from the world (in Greville’s account it is for the Arcadia to be burned, which says

51 Quoted from Jean Robertson, ed., The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (The Old Arcadia) (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1973), 3.

52 Moffet, Nobilis, 91. 90 something more about Greville’s anxieties over writing, discussed in the next chapter).

Ironically, then, Moffet cannot avoid alluding to Sidney’s sonnet sequence twice in his biography. Describing Sidney’s childlike wonder at age three, Moffet reports how “he beheld the moon, with clean hands and head covered he used to pray to it and devoutly to worship—as if in his earliest years he had compassed the heavens with his mind, and wondered at the works of his Creator.”53 Here Moffet seems to recall Sonnet 31, in which Astrophil addresses the Moon as a fellow suffering male lover, but reinvests this scene with religious wonder rather than erotic frustration. Moffet immediately makes another, even clearer, reference to Astrophil while trying to impress upon William how dedicated Sidney was to study. Sidney, Moffet claims, did not

“direct his eyes so much to the colored and gilded cover of [a] book as to the letters and meaning of it.”54 Moffet here refers not just the imagery but also the language of Sonnet 11, in which

Cupid does not seek Stella’s heart but contents himself with her exterior beauty, like a “small child” who plays with “guilded leaves or colourd Velume” (5, 6). Throughout his biography, then, Moffet seems to be inoculating young William against the influence of Astrophil and

Stella, teaching him to read its images rightly as referring to Sidney’s piety or dedication.

Moffet’s use and repudiation of Astrophil and Stella suggests one final consideration of physicality in the sequence. In Sonnet 23, one sees Sidney’s own, very different, perspective on his youthful experiences with studying. In the poem, Astrophil speaks of those who “know how my spring I did address” and so “Deeme that my Muse some fruit of knowledge plies” (5-6).

Significantly, those “curious wits” (1) who believe Astrophil to be studying base their speculations not only on his youth but also on his poor physical appearance, “seeing dull

53 Moffet, Nobilis, 70-71.

54 Ibid., 71. 91 pensivenesse / Bewray it self in my long-settl’d eies / Whence those same fumes of melancholy rise” (1-3). Sidney almost certainly expected his immediate readers to recognize his dedication to study and its harsh consequences in a sequence that also refers to his father’s Governorship of

Ireland (Sonnet 30) among other personal details. Sonnet 23, then, invites family and friends such as Mary Sidney and Fulke Greville to contrast the studies Sidney engaged in during his youth with the more sportive poetic activity he now pursues, the physicality of which he describes so intensely and repeatedly throughout the sequence. At the same time, Sidney suggests that there may be less division between the physicality of study and poetic creation than

Moffet assumes. Like his father, Sidney emphasizes the physical costs of all types of mental labor—not to lay down a moral maxim but rather to provide energia to his painting of the lover, a painting that is very likely also a self-portrait of himself as writer.

Two questions arise from this conclusion. First, how did the writers in the Sidney circle respond to Sidney’s physicality in their own sequences? Second, how did the professional writers outside this circle who took advantage of Astrophil and Stella’s printing do so? The next chapter will answer the first question, while subsequent chapters will answer the second. 92

Chapter 3: Counter-Sidneyan Poetic Physicality

in Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus (1621) and Greville’s Caelica (1633)

“Who shall measure the heat and violence of the poet’s heart when caught and tangled in a woman’s body?”

– Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own1

“But the truth is, his end was not writing even while he wrote…”

– Fulke Greville, A Dedication to Sir Philip Sidney2

As seen in the previous chapter, a physical model of oral composition leading to writing is as much the subject of Sidney’s sonnets as Astrophil’s love for Stella. This chapter examines how poets within the Sidney circle constructed their models of poetic physicality in response to

Sidney’s. I focus on two writers in particular: Mary Wroth (1587?-1651/1653), Sidney’s niece, and Fulke Greville (1554-1628), his childhood friend and self-identified literary successor. I also briefly discuss Robert Sidney’s engagement with poetic physicality, comparing it to his daughter’s and brother’s; however, I find this engagement to be limited, probably reflecting the fragmentary nature of his collection of verse compared to Philip’s, Wroth’s, and Greville’s.

Analyzing Wroth and Greville together is fitting for a number of reasons. As members of the Sidney circle, both had access to family knowledge and papers that other writers did not possess. Looking over Wroth’s and Greville’s manuscripts, Gary Waller notes that they both kept their sequences mostly to themselves, as Sidney did.3 Both sequences were also published

1 Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, introduced and annotated by Susan Gubar (Orlando: Harcourt, 2005), 48.

2 John Gouws, ed., The Prose Works of Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 12.

3 Gary Waller, The Sidney Family Romance: Mary Wroth, William Herbert, and the Early Modern Construction of

Gender (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993), 194. 93 late—long after the sonnet craze of the 1590s and years after the publication of Shakespeare’s

Sonnets in 1609. Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus was published in 1627 at the back of her

Urania, while Greville’s Caelica was published posthumously in 1633—although it should be noted that some if not many of Greville’s poems in Caelica were probably written while Sidney was still alive.4 Finally, Greville and Wroth share two key images in their poetics: the labyrinth and the quicksand or sandbar. For Wroth, these two images sum up Pamphilia’s experience of love and her poetic physicality. For Greville, the labyrinth and quicksand represent the treacherous and sinful world his poetry is meant to lead readers through.

Yet Wroth and Greville oppose themselves to Sidney in very different ways. Although she does not emphasize writing as much as her uncle, Wroth nevertheless features the body of the female poet and produces two consistent models of poetic physicality. First, her sonneteer persona Pamphilia demonstrates the passionate heat that leads to poetic composition, not by displaying a ceaseless flow between orality and writing, like Astrophil, but by lamenting the inability of her respiring voice to cool the passionate heat in her heart. That is, Wroth incorporates her uncle’s model of oral composition, if only to suffocate it in the interest of producing her own female poetic physicality. Second, in the corona that crowns her sequence,

4 Indeed, Sonnet 29 was included in the 1591 Astrophil and Stella although ascribed to someone else. Some of the poems in Caelica appeared in musical settings by Cavendish, Dowland, and Peerson, as well as in a few manuscript collections. One was included in the anthology Englands Helicon (1600), while thirteen were printed with musical settings in Martin Peerson’s Mottects or Grave Chamber Music (1630), after Greville’s death but before the Works in which the whole of Caelica was printed. However, Greville appears not to have authorized any publication within his lifetime. On the love poetry being written in Sidney's lifetime, see the discussion of his editor, G. A.

Wilkes, in The Complete Poems and Plays of Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke (1554-1628), in Two Volumes (Lewiston:

Edwin Mellen Press, 2008), 1:41-44. On the different texts of Caelica's poems, see pages 62-74. 94

Wroth turns Pamphilia’s hand into an icon, one that guides her through the labyrinth of love. As for Greville, Sidney’s friend consistently veers away from the physical act of writing in poems that seem to span a considerable number of years. When he does mention writing, Greville almost always employs blotting as a symbol of error and sin. In Wroth and Greville, then, one sees how issues of gender and a skeptical emphasis on human weakness, respectively, led to two different revisions of Sidney’s legacy of poetic physicality.

I

From the beginning, readings of Wroth have been polarized between two approaches.

The first sees her as retreating from the Jacobean court to a nascent private female subjectivity.

The second sees her as addressing the wider world while encouraging the public’s gaze. As

Heather Dubrow notes, a similar division separates critics who see Pamphilia as submitting to patriarchal ideals of female constancy or silence from those who see her as challenging them.5

The seminal account of private female subjectivity in Pamphilia to Amphilanthus is

Jeffrey Masten’s essay “‘Shall I turn blabb?’: Circulation, Gender, and Subjectivity in Mary

Wroth’s Sonnets,” printed in Naomi J. Miller and Gary Waller’s important early essay collection

Reading Mary Wroth.6 According to Masten, Pamphilia to Amphilanthus eschews the expressive Petrarchan body and omits reference to the outside world, at the same time that Wroth herself resists manuscript circulation. Female subjectivity in the sequence is intensely private,

5 Dubrow, Echoes of Desire, 135. As she puts it, “to trace the relationship between autonomy and subjection in

Pamphilia to Amphilanthus is to enter a maze signposted with clear but conflicting directions from previous critics.”

6 Jeff Masten, “‘Shall I turne blabb?’”: Circulation, Gender, and Subjectivity in Mary Wroth’s Sonnets,” in Reading

Mary Wroth: Representing Alternatives in Early Modern England, ed. Naomi J. Miller and Gary Waller (Knoxville:

University of Tennessee Press, 1991), 67-87. This collection will be cited hereafter as Miller and Waller, Reading

Mary Wroth. 95 but ironically this subjectivity needs to be spoken in order for its existence to be recognized.

Once published as part of the Urania, then, this inward subjectivity unravels.

Gary Waller, working from a psychoanalytic perspective, has similarly emphasized

Wroth’s struggle to emerge into discourse.7 Comparing Wroth to her cousin William Herbert,

Waller finds her longing for the freedom and power enjoyed by elite males in Jacobean society.

According to Waller, these longings lead to Pamphilia’s self-assertion in both love and writing; however, her “desire for a mutual relationship” is denied by other “masochistic, self-destructive desires in which she finds herself caught.”8 Pamphilia’s physicality manifests this masochism:

Pamphilia describes herself as desiring isolation and silence—desiring, that is,

precisely what the dominant ideology prescribes for women: to have her organs of

self-assertion, her mouth (for speech), her genitals (for sexual self-assertion), and

the door of her gate of her room, house, or garden closed and locked. She knows

that by voicing her miseries, pursuing love, or going abroad, she could overcome

her victimization, but instead she accepts her assignment of silence, isolation and

frigidity. Her posture is frequently described as sleeping, or near sleep, or lying

down in a small space.9

Waller does not analyze the physicality of writing in the sequence, although he still insists that

Wroth’s writing is an act of defiance. Unfortunately, by only comparing Wroth’s poems to

7 Gary Waller, The Sidney Family Romance. For a psychoanalytic reading of the sequence that analyzes sexual repression and erotic dreaming in the sequence, see Jesús Cora, “Sleep Fy Possess Mee Nott”: The Return of the

Repressed in Lady Mary Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, Sonnets 16 and 17 [P18 and P19],” SEDERI: Journal of the Spanish Society for English Renaissance Studies 12 (2001): 151-79.

8 Gary Waller, The Sidney Family Romance, 205.

9 Ibid., 206. 96

Herbert’s within a psychoanalytic framework, Waller, like Masten, overlooks the ways Wroth might be asserting herself in engaging with the poetic physicality of other sonnet sequences, namely her uncle’s. What I am suggesting is that an intertextual analysis of poetic physicality must be included in any reconsideration of female subjectivity in a work like Pamphilia to

Amphilanthus, which is self-consciously part of a “family” of texts in more ways than one.

Other critics have also taken issue with Masten and Waller’s arguments, either by demonstrating how Wroth engages the Jacobean court and the outside world or by approaching the question of subjectivity from a different theoretical perspective. Nona Fienberg, who at first agreed with Masten on the inward turn of Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, has since revised her position, now describing how Wroth “ties the speaker’s emotional life to local markers and to a public world where social change in unpredictable directions is marked by a woman’s activity.”10

Daniel Gil, in his reply to Masten, builds on Karen Newman’s Adorno-influenced critique of the influential homosocial trafficking model, which emphasizes the subjectivity of men over the women who are exchanged.11 Such a model, Newman argues, ignores the “pleasures of the

10 Nona Fienberg, “Mary Wroth’s Poetics of the Self,” Studies in English Literature 42.1 (2002): 121-36.

Fienberg’s earlier essay is “Mary Wroth and the Invention of Female Poetic Subjectivity,” in Miller and Waller,

Reading Mary Wroth, 175-189. Turning to the Urania instead of Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, other studies have shown conversely how Wroth also wrestled with the major international political issues of her day. See, for example, Bernadette Andrea, "Pamphilia's Cabinet: Gendered Authorship and Empire in Lady Mary Wroth's

Urania," English Literary History 68.2 (2001): 335-358 and Melissa E. Sanchez, "The Politics of Masochism in

Mary Wroth's Urania," English Literary History 74 (2007): 449-78.

11 Daniel Juan Gil, “The Currency of the Beloved and the Authority of Lady Mary Wroth,” Modern Language

Studies 29.2 (1999): 73-92, 76. 97 object.”12 For Gil, these pleasures explain Wroth’s authorial mission “to constitute herself as the poetic, literary and public currency from which the eyes of a contemporary readership cannot turn away.”13

Dubrow has carefully adopted a middle position in this debate after closely reading

Pamphilia against the Petrachan tradition that Wroth is supposed to have revised from a female perspective. As Dubrow reminds us, the boundaries between male and female qualities are often blurred in Petrarchism, with the result that “the changes brought about when a woman writes sonnets will be more subtle than literary studies sometimes assume, though no less significant.”14

For Dubrow, then, Wroth’s gender contributed not to a wholesale revision of the Petrachan sonnet sequence, but rather to an intensification of disruptive forces present in many others before hers, including the “equally fraught relationships to speech” that the sonneteer and the lady share.15 Among the other Petrarchan aspects Wroth seized on, according to Dubrow, are the doubt and guilt that surround desire and writing, and the lover’s obsessive constancy. Drawing on feminist theories of cinema, Dubrow further proposes that Wroth puts on a mask of exaggerated feminine passivity, although here again she argues in light of the Petrarchan tradition “not for a consistent and unitary interpretation but for one that recognizes a volatile admixture of control and contradiction, strategy, and self-deception.”16 Dubrow’s estimation of

12 Gil is referring to her essay "Directing Traffic: Subjects, Objects and the Politics of Exchange," Differences 2.2

(1990): 41-54.

13 Gil, “The Currency of the Beloved and the Authority of Lady Mary Wroth,” 76.

14 Dubrow, Echoes of Desire, 148. See also her comment on page 158: “Wroth is responsible not for introduction the erosion of boundaries but for intensifying an ongoing process.”

15 Ibid.

16 Ibid., 160. 98 the sequence is, I think, correct, and I hope to show how Wroth discovers a female poetic physicality that is similarly complicated.

However, while Dubrow emphasizes how the betrayal and self-deception in Pamphilia and Amphilanthus recalls Shakespeare’s Sonnets, I follow Maureen Quilligan and Naomi J.

Miller in stressing Wroth’s self-identification as a member of the Sidney family, since I find that her model of poetic physicality has more in common with her uncle’s than with Shakespeare’s, discussed in my conclusion.17 Miller, for instance, has drawn attention to the following mono- rhymed sonnet in the Arcadia, in which the king’s wife, Gynecia, confesses her adulterous love for Zelmane, one of the romance’s two heroes:

How is my sun, whose beams are shining bright,

Become the cause of my dark ugly night?

Or how do I, captived in this dark plight,

Bewail the case, and in the cause delight?

My mangled mind huge horrors still do fright,

With sense possessed, and claimed by reason’s right:

Betwixt which two in me I have this sight,

17 Maureen Quilligan, “The Constant Subject: Instability and Female Authority in Wroth’s Urania Poems,” in

Soliciting Interpretation: Literary Theory and Seventeenth-Century English Poetry, ed. Elizabeth D. Harvey and

Katharine Eisaman Maus (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 307-335. Naomi J. Miller, “Rewriting

Lyric Fictions: The Role of the Lady in Lady Mary Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus,” in The Renaissance

Englishwoman in Print: Counterbalancing the Canon, ed. Anne M. Haselkorn and Betty S. Travitsky (Amherst: The

University of Massachusetts Press, 1990). Miller, though, has also compared Mary Wroth’s heroines to

Shakespeare’s in terms of voice: “Engendering Discourse: Women’s Voices in Wroth’s Urania and Shakespeare’s

Plays,” in Miller and Waller, Reading Mary Wroth, 154-172. 99

Where whoso wins, I put myself to fight.

Come, cloudy fears, close up my dazzled sight;

Sorrow, suck up the marrow of my might;

Due sighs, blow out all sparks of joyfull light;

Tire on, despair, upon my tired sprite!

An end, an end, my dulled pen cannot write,

Nor mazed head think, nor falt’ring tongue recite!18

Miller argues that Wroth rewrites this sonnet in Pamphilia to Amphilanthus to contrast the selfish, inconstant Gynecia to her constant heroine Pamphilia.19 Other parallels could certainly be drawn between Sidney’s sonnet and Wroth’s sequence, such as the shared use of darkness and night imagery.20 However, I would like to focus my analysis on how Pamphilia, like Gynecia, makes an inability to speak or write the central characteristic of her poetic physicality.

The suffocation of painful thoughts unable to be uttered from the heart marks Pamphilia’s constancy, just as the ceaseless flow of Astrophil’s thoughts, breathe, and writing had marked his sexual aggression in the previous chapter. This suffocation, as well as images of binding and

18 Quoted from Jean Robertson, ed., The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (The Old Arcadia) (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1973), 181.

19 Miller, “Rewriting Lyric Fictions,” 301. On Wroth’s revisiting of this same scene from the Arcadia at the beginning of the Urania, see Quilligan, “The Constant Subject,” 314-5, and Naomi Miller: “‘Not Much to be

Marked,’: Narrative of the Woman’s Part in Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania,” Studies in English Literature 29.1: 127-8.

20 Critics have traced Wroth’s images of darkness to her participation in Jacobean masques. See Ann Rosalind

Jones, “Designing Women: The Self as Spectacle in Mary Wroth and Veronica Franco,” in Miller and Waller,

Reading Mary Wroth, 135-153, esp. 146. For more on the masque and Wroth’s fashioning of female identity, see

Heather L. Weidemann’s essay in the same volume, “Theatricality and Female Identity in Mary Wroth’s Urania,”

191-209. 100 silencing, has understandably led critics to find passivity, even masochism, in the sequence.

Nevertheless, I would suggest that this physicality is better read as Pamphilia’s (and Wroth’s) claim to the vital and poetic heat that Renaissance physiology would deny to her. As Gail Kern

Paster shows, women in the Renaissance were supposed to be more unstable, colder, and moister than men in their humors, and so were often described as phlegmatic or identified with the element of water.21 Discussing a passage in a letter by William Congreve, Paster suggests that women’s supposed instability and coldness reduced male expectations for their individuality of expression. As she puts it, while “women are capable of the hotter passions” in the Galenic system, they are not be able to manifest “the laudable, steady heat that produces either manly constancy or the great distinctiveness of ‘extravagant’ humor.”22 Wroth’s physicality of the fiery female sonneteer provides an important opportunity to test this notion.

We are told that Pamphilia’s chest and heart are consumed with fire in the very first poem, which records a dream in which Cupid at the command of Venus places a burning heart—

“one hart flaming more than all the rest”—in Pamphilia’s breast (p. 1, Sonnet 1, line 9).23 In

Sidney’s sequence, Astrophil had retorted to those who tried to read his sonnets allegorically:

“know that I in pure simplicitie, / Breathe out the flames which burne within my heart, / Love onely reading unto me this art” (Sonnet 28, 12-14). Here Sidney indicates that his model of oral composition demonstrates passions’ true effects, in contrast to the cold poets he criticizes in the

Defense of Poetry. The heat in Pamphilia’s heart, however, is too intense for this kind of

21 Paster, Humoring the Body. Paster does not discuss Wroth in her study.

22 Ibid., 80.

23 Mary Wroth, The Countesse of Mountgomeries Urania (London: 1621). All quotations from Pamphilia to

Amphilanthus will be to this edition, cited by page number, sonnet number, and my own line numbers parenthetically. In the 1621 Urania, the numbering of pages for Pamphilia to Amphilanthus starts anew. 101 respiratory and poetic release:

How like a fire doth Love increase in me?

The longer that it lasts the stronger still;

The greater, purer, brighter; and doth fill

No eye with wonder more then hopes still bee.

Bred in my breast, when fires of Love are free

To use that part to their best pleasing will,

And now unpossible it is to kill

The heate so great where Love his strength doth see.

Mine eyes can scarce sustaine the flames, my heart

Doth trust in them my passions to impart,

And languishingly strive to shew my love.

My breath not able is to breath least part

Of that increasing fuell of my smart;

Yet love I will, till I but ashes prove.

(p. 25, Sonnet 48)

Whereas Sidney usually marks decisions to write near the end of his sonnets and their concluding couplets, Wroth constructs Pamphilia’s poetic physicality most often in her sestets.

To put it simply, Pamphilia’s is a pulmonary system out of control. But ironically this overpowering heat serves to authenticate her poetry as coming from a bodily experience of passion even fiercer than Astrophil’s.

For, unlike Astrophil, who is eventually frustrated and befuddled by Stella’s reading and singing of his poems, Pamphilia immediately discovers on her own that composition cannot calm 102 her distress. In Sonnet 8, she seeks “for some smale ease by lines” but they only “increase the paine; griefe is not cur'd by Art” (3-4). Wroth alludes here to the notion, discussed in George

Puttenham’s Arte of English Poesie, that poets heal like “the Paracelsians, who cure [similia similibus] making one dolour to expell another.”24 Pamphilia tries this “cure” but finds it does not work:

No time, no roome, no thought, or writing can

Give rest, or quiet to my loving heart,

Or can my memory or Phant'sie scan,

The measure of my still renewing smart.

(p. 47, Sonnet 7, lines 1-4)

Whereas Astrophil relies on his memory and fancy to provide Stella’s image for his heart to react to, Pamphilia, much like Gynecia, discovers that these faculties fail her.25

In a later poem Wroth takes further issue with Sidney’s flowing physicality of oral composition:

If I were given to mirth, 'twould be more crosse,

Thus to be robbed of my chiefest ioy:

But silently I beare my greatest losse

Who's us'd to sorrow, griefe will not destroy.

Nor can I as those pleasant wits injoy

Mine owne fram'd wordes, which I account the dross

24 Puttenham, Art of English Poesy, 136-37.

25 In another sonnet she asks rhetorically, “What pleasure can a banish’d creature have / In all the pastimes that invented are / By wit or learning?” (p. 22, Sonnet 38, lines 1-3). 103

Of purer thoughts, or reckon them as mosse,

While they (wit-sick) themselves to breath imploy.

Alas, thinke I, your plenty shewes your want;

For where most feeling is, wordes are more scant,

Yet pardon mee, live, and your pleasure take.

Grudge not if I (neglected) envy show,

‘Tis not to you that I dislike doe owe;

But (crost my self) wish some like me to make.

(p. 23, Sonnet 39)

Pamphilia declares that she will bear her loss silently, in contrast to the “pleasant wits” who enjoy their “owne fram’d words.” The use of the word “fram’d” suggests that the wits’ words are versified, as this is a common meaning of “framed” that Wroth employs elsewhere. That their words are spoken and not just written is made clear by the fact that these poets “(wit-sick) themselves to breath imploy.” Ironically, Wroth’s complaint against this Sidneyan poetic physicality is expressed in the very language of his sequence. The accusation that “your plenty shewes your want; / For where most feeling is, wordes are more scant,” recalls Astrophil’s retort in Sonnet 54 to those who claim he cannot love because he does not “breathe” his love to everyone: “Dumbe Swans, not chattering Pyes, do lovers prove; / They love indeed who quake to say they love” (13-14).

Indeed, Wroth’s next sonnet (p. 23, Sonnet 40) focuses on how outward appearances cannot discern the true lover, like several of Sidney’s. However, while Astrophil chastises the

“courtly Nymphs” (5) who look askance at him, Wroth challenges other poets more bitterly, wishing that they would find expressing themselves as physically difficult as she does. In other 104 words, Astrophil’s audience is other women, potential lovers and rivals to Stella, while Wroth’s audience is other poets, potential rivals more in their literary production than in their erotic desires. Hence, her comparative emphasis not on professions of love but on the physical acts of breathing words and then framing them into poetry.

Smothering Sidney’s oral physicality in a latter sonnet (pp. 31-32, Sonnet 6), Wroth demonstrates the greater strength of Pamphilia’s desire and constancy compared to Astrophil’s.

Fienberg has discussed how the poem revises Petrarch’s Canzoniere 189 (“Passa la nave mia”) and its Wyattean and Spenserian analogues, “My galley charged with forgetfulness” and “Like as a ship that through the Ocean wyde.”26 For Fienberg, Wroth links her poem not with their notions of a “classical epic quest” but with the painful experience of childbirth and “the cultural constraints of a family and a social environment in its English history and geography,” in particular “the risky social world of her native Kent.”27 Additionally, we may read the sonnet as a family conversation in another way, that is, as a revision of Sidney’s poetic physicality:

My paine still smother'd in my grieved brest,

Seekes for some ease, yet cannot passage finde,

To be discharg'd of this unwellcome guest,

When most I strive, more fast his burthens binde.

Like to a Ship on Goodwins cast by winde,

The more she strives, more deepe in Sand is prest,

Till she be lost: so am I in this kind

Sunck, and devour’d, and swallow’ed by unrest.

26 Fienberg, “Mary Wroth’s Poetics of the Self,” 123-7.

27 Ibid., 124. 105

Lost, shipwrackt, spoyl’d, debar’d of smallest hope,

Nothing of pleasure left, save thoughts have scope,

Which wander may; goe then my thoughts and cry:

Hope’s perish’d, Love tempest-beaten, Joy lost,

Killing Despaire hath all these blessings crost;

Yet Faith still cries, Love will not falsifie.

Like Astrophil in his opening sonnet, Pamphilia describes a pressure within her chest, a pain that

“seeks ease” and “passage” through the voice, only to be “smother’d in [her] grieved brest” and forced to remain in her heart and lungs. Instead of discharging “this unwellcome guest,” which

Fienberg reads as an image of labor, Pamphilia finds herself bound by it, suggesting further constriction of the breath. References to being trapped in sand, “devour’d, and swallow’ed,” heighten the claustrophobia, while suggesting the throat undergoing difficult respiration.

Fienberg notes that other writers such as Thomas Campion refer to the Goodwin Sands as

“devouring” or as a “ship swallower.”28 Possibly Wroth was also aware of the term “quicksands” that William Camden reports in Lancashire:

There be also here uncertaine sands not to be trusted, but ready to catch and

swallow, they call them Quick-sands, so dangerous for travailors, whiles at a low

water when tide is past they seeke to goe the nerest way, that they had neede to

take very good heed least in going a foote (I use Sidonius his wordes) they suffer

not shipwracke and be cast away on the land.29

28 Fienberg, “Mary Wroth’s Poetics of the Self,” 126.

29 William Camden, Britain: or a chorographicall description of the most flourishing kingdomes, England, Scotland, and Ireland, tr. Philémon Holland (London, 1616), 753. 106

Silenced in this way, Pamphilia can only rely on her thoughts, which must “cry” for her. The fact that Pamphilia can still feel pleasure from these thoughts suggests that they are located in her heart with her passions. Their silent cry is supported by the more vocal cry of Faith in the final line, an ironic reference to the famous ending of Sidney’s Sonnet 71: “But, ah, Desire still cries,

Give me some food.” Faith will stay with Pamphilia, rather than the Desire that refuses to remove from Astrophil, an example of how Wroth’s greater concern with constancy is bound up with her poetic physicality.

In her final sonnet in the sequence, Wroth states her intention to leave behind the fiery yet frustrating model of poetic physicality that she has explored in response to her uncle:

My Muse now happy lay thy selfe to rest,

Sleepe in the quiet of a faithfull love,

Write you no more, but let these Phant'sies moove

Some other hearts, wake not to new unrest.

But if you Study be those thoughts adrest

To truth, which shall eternall goodnes proove;

Enjoying of true joy the most, and best

The endles gaine which never will remove.

Leave the discourse of Venus, and her sonne

To young beginners, and their braines inspire

With storyes of great Love, and from that fire,

Get heat to write the fortunes they have wonne.

And thus leave off; what's past shewes you can love,

Now let your Constancy your Honor prove. 107

(pp. 47-8, Sonnet 9)

Fienberg suggests that Wroth in closing her sequence rewrites the beginning poem of Sidney’s:

“In contrast to Sir Philip Sidney’s chiding muse, who opens his sequence with her summons,

“Fool…look in thy heart and write,” Wroth’s muse has been an assumed partner, not absent, but a tacit collaborator.”30 I would add that whereas Sidney’s sequence begins with the struggle to write, Wroth concludes her sequence by abandoning that struggle. Her Muse will now “Sleepe in the quiet of a faithfull loue,” as Pamphilia instructs her—and herself—to “Write you no more.” However, if the Muse, like Astrophil, would “Study,” Wroth directs herself not to the fire in her own heart but to “To truth, which shall eternall goodnes proove.” What follows is not just the abandonment of “the discourse of Venus, and her sonne / To young beginners” but also a disclaiming of the interior heat upon which Astrophil grounds his physicality of respiration and writing, a physicality that Wroth has intensified only to ultimately move away from. That is, what has passed and what shows she can love is the caloric economy of love and poetry that she has experimented with but now abandons. Although Dubrow may be correct that an attraction to the discourse of love still lingers, it is a “discourse” that Pamphilia will have to express through a different physicality.31 Indeed, in the poem’s sestet, Wroth opens up her sequence to include the physicality of her readers. Whereas she will let the “Phant'sies” of love she has pondered “move

/ Some other hearts,” she will—more actively—inspire other “braines… / With storyes of great

Love.” It is from the resulting “fire” in her readers—not from herself—that she will “Get heat to

30 Fienberg, “Wroth and the Invention of Female Poetic Subjectivity,” 189.

31 Dubrow, Echoes of Desire, 156. Miller, on the other hand, notes that “Wroth demonstrates that she has moved beyond the influence of her father and uncle in tracing her thread of song from the margins of the Sidney family to the central achievement of her own lyric sequence, whose existence re-forms the tradition.” “Rewriting Lyric

Fictions,” 304. My findings regarding Wroth’s revisioning of Sidney support her statement. 108 write the fortunes they have wonne.”

Wroth suggests another exchange between poet and reader in the Crown of Sonnets to

Love, an experiment in the corona form, in which the last line of one sonnet becomes the opening line of the next, until the mini-sequence comes full circle. Miller has outlined how

Wroth responds here to her uncle’s and her father’s efforts in this form, relying on a female point of view to craft “a triumph of individual expression for the voice of the lady in affirming a love- centered rather than a self-centered perspective.”32 As Dubrow suggests, John Donne’s “La

Corona” may also have been an influence.33 Both Robert Sidney and Donne highlight poetic physicality, especially the hand of the poet, at the beginning or immediately before their coronas.

The first poem in Donne’s corona, included among his Holy Sonnets, begins, “Deigne at my hands this crown of prayer and praise, / Weav’d in my low devout melancholie” (1-2).34 Robert

Sidney also draws attention to the physical act of writing right before his own unfinished crown of sonnets, in one of the only poems in which he seems to respond to his brother’s physicality:

She whom I serve to write did not despise—

Few words, but which with wonder filled my sprite

How from dark ink, as from springs of delight,

Beauty, sweetness, grace, joy and love should rise;

Till I remembered, that those fairest eyes

Whose beams are joys and love did lend their light,

That happy hand, those blessèd words did write

32 Miller, “Rewriting Lyric Fictions,” 300.

33 Dubrow, Echoes of Desire, 151.

34 Quoted from C. A. Patrides, ed., John Donne: The Complete English Poems (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991),

429. On Donne’s melancholy, see Trevor, The Poetics of Melancholy in Early Modern England, Chapter 4. 109

Which where it toucheth, marks of beauty ties;

Those ruby lips, full of nectar divine,

A rosy breath did on the words bestow,

That heavenly face did on the paper shine

From whose least motion thousand graces flow,

And that fair mind the subject did approve,

Which is itself, all other praise above.35

The speaker is surprised at how his “dark ink” has the power to capture the beauty of his lady and give her pleasure. He then remembers the interaction between his lady and the material poem, from her eyes that lend their light on the page to the breath her lips bestow on his words when she reads them aloud. Her face too sheds a glow on the paper before her. Her hand, which ties up her hair, also writes “blessèd words” in response to his. These references to the physicality of reading and writing prepare for the weaving of the corona by the poet’s own hand.

Wroth follows Donne in emphasizing the hand of the poet, both in the sonnet preceding her crown and in the first poem of her mini-sequence. Unlike in her father’s poem, though, the body of the lover who requests the corona is absent: it is her physicality alone that Wroth highlights. In the poem that precedes the Crown, Pamphilia apologizes to Cupid for treasonously writing the other poems of the sequence, and she promises to make amends. As we often seen in

Wroth’s sonnets, poetic physicality emerges in the sestet:

I curse that thought, and hand which that first fram'd,

For which by thee I am most justly blam'd:

35 Quoted from P. J. Croft, ed., The Poems of Robert Sidney (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 173. The next quotation is cited parenthetically. 110

But now that hand shall guided be aright,

And give a Crown unto thy endlesse praise,

Which shall thy glory, and thy greatnesse raise,

More then these poore things could thy honor spight.

(p. 35, 9-12)

Here Wroth again uses the word “fram’d” to refer to the crafting of verse, which involves both the poet’s thoughts and the hand that writes them. Whereas this hand had written the previous sonnets with their suffocating physicality, it will now be “guided aright” to write a crown to

Love. However, the corona itself reveals Pamphilia’s difficulty in turning her hand to this end:

In this strange labourinth how shall I turne,

Wayes are on all sides while the way I misse:

If to the right hand, there, in love I burne,

Let mee goe forward, therein danger is.

If to the left, suspition hinders blisse;

Let mee turne back, shame cryes I ought returne:

Nor faint, though crosses [with] my fortunes kiss,

Stand still is harder, allthough sure to mourne.

Thus let mee take the right, or left hand way,

Goe forward, or stand still, or back retire:

I must these doubts indure without allay

Or helpe, but travell finde for my best hire.

Yet that which most my troubled sense doth moue,

Is to leave all, and take the thread of Love. 111

(p. 36)

Mary Moore has drawn attention to this sonnet and its image of the labyrinth, which she shows

Wroth drew from classical, Petrarchan, and Protestant sources.36 Moore also notes how the physical space of the labyrinth is mapped onto the space of the sonnet, much as Donne maps a room or an urn onto the form in his “Canonization.” The labyrinth is thus the sonnet sequence itself. The pun on “labour,” referring to the labor of writing and procreation (often a figure for composition), is actually a three-fold pun that points to the metaphor of the labyrinth as poem.

Through her use of off-putting syntax and the enclosed, complex form of the sonnet, Wroth presents a feminine self that “is isolated enclosed, difficult, and complex.”37

Yet Wroth here also focuses on the poet’s hands, which weigh the different options she might take. Among these options is that presented by the right hand: to burn, the physicality of which Wroth has described already to this point. At the end of the sonnet, though, Wroth identifies the poet’s hand itself as an alternative option to a respiring physicality. Despite all his depictions of writing, Astrophil only mentions his “hand” as writing once, and there Cupid guides it (Sonnet 90). As they weave her corona and guide her through the labyrinth of love,

Pamphilia’s hands become an icon of poetic and erotic intervention. That this only takes place in the corona indicates the important connection between poetic physicality and poetic form. That is, the corona’s circling design calls to mind the hand of the poet more than his or her voice.

Wroth’s two models of physicality—the stifled poet’s respiring voice and her guiding hand—are thus integral to the sonnet forms she chooses to manipulate. Moreover, both models

36 Mary Moore, “The Labyrinth as Style in Pamphilia to Amphilanthus,” Studies in English Literature 38.1 (1998):

109-25.

37 Ibid., 110. 112 are linked by Wroth’s assertion of female agency and constancy, poetic and erotic. The first model is a kind of negative energia of the female writer, for the overabundance of heat caused by her passions prevents the flow between orality and writing that is a hallmark of Sidney’s sequence. In this way, Wroth might be said to return to her Petrarchan sources for this image of being unable to speak, while still maintaining the close coupling between speaking and writing that was her uncle’s legacy. Her second model of physicality is much more balanced, building off of the Renaissance belief that the hand was connected with reason and contained the only perfect balance of the four elements in the human body. Attempting earlier to use her reason to decide which way to turn in her labyrinth of love, Pamphilia ends her sequence by choosing reason over phantasy or imagination, pursuing the “truth, which shall eternall goodnes prove” that so often eludes the latter faculty but can be seized by the former in constancy of mind and honor. Pamphilia and Wroth’s choice can be better understood by turning to Greville, who is as skeptical of reason as he is of the imagination, and who pictures the hand of the poet producing writing that soon dissipates like letters drawn in sand.

II

Caelica was printed posthumously in the 1633 Works volume, along with Greville’s plays and some of his treatises. These works were advertised as being “written in his youth, and familiar exercise with Sir Philip Sidney,” a description that seems to especially apply to Caelica, whose subject and form initially suggest parallels with Astrophil and Stella. While the first, larger part of the sequence is amatory, like Sidney’s, the second, smaller part beginning after poem 84 is moral, political, and religious, much like the treatises. For this reason, the poems in this part have been often described, in Morris W. Croll’s words, as “chips thrown off in the 113 shaping of the longer works.”38 Nevertheless, Greville’s worldly and philosophical interests do intrude into the amatory portion of the collection. By the same token, the failure of language as a theme recurs throughout the entire sequence, meaning that Greville’s skeptical treatment of writing and his resulting model of poetic physicality were relatively consistent.

Before examining Greville’s Caelica as a response to Astrophil and Stella, it is necessary to define Greville’s attitude towards Sidney’s works, as well as towards poetry in general.

Critics have reconstructed Greville’s poetics from two documents: his Dedication to Sir Philip

Sidney and his Treatise on Humane Learning. The consensus of these critics is, first, that unlike

Sidney who accords the poet power to move the will, Greville is pessimistic about the ability of poetry to make men virtuous and, second, that this pessimism grows out of a Calvinist contrast between Grace and Nature, which Greville held more strictly than Sidney.39

38 Morris W. Croll, The Works of Fulke Greville (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott company, 1903), 29.

39 On Greville and Sidney’s different poetics, see Hugh N. Maclean, “Greville’s ‘Poetic’,” Studies in Philology 61.1

(1964): 170-91; Maria R. Rohr Philmus, "Greville's Poetic Revisited," Neophilologus 83 (1999), 145-67; and G. A.

Wilkes, “‘Left…to play the ill poet in my own part’: The Literary Relationship of Sidney and Fulke Greville,”

Review of English Studies 57.230 (2006): 291-309. Philmus’s articles is, in part, a rebuttal of the view that Greville writes in a plain style, a view offered by Norman Farmer in “Fulke Greville and the Poetic of the Plain Style,” Texas

Studies in Literature and Language 11.1 (1969): 657- 70. See also David A. Roberts, "Fulke Greville's Aesthetic

Reconsidered," Studies in Philology 74.4 (1977): 388-405; and June Dwyer, “Fulke Greville’s Aesthetic: Another

Perspective,” Studies in Philology 78.3 (1981): 255-74. On Greville’s Calvinism, see G. F. Waller, “Fulke

Greville’s Struggle with Calvinism,” Studia Neophilologica 44 (1972): 295-313; and Elaine Y. L. Ho, “Fulke

Greville’s Caelica and the Calvinist Self,” Studies in English Literature 32.1 (1992): 35-57. See also Richard

Waswo’s monograph The Fatal Mirror: Themes and Techniques in the Poetry of Fulke Greville (Charlottesville:

University Press of Virginia, 1972). For summary of earlier work on Greville and discussion of his political career, see F. J. Levy, “Fulke Greville: The Courtier as Philosophic Poet,” Modern Language Quarterly 33 (1972): 433-48. 114

Although he speaks approvingly of Sidney’s intention to “to guide every man through the confused labyrinth of his own desires and life,” near the end of the Dedication Greville contrasts

Sidney’s and his poetic missions:

For my own part, I found my creeping genius more fixed upon the images of life

than the images of wit, and therefore chose not to write to them on whose feet the

black ox had not already trod (as the proverb is), but to those only that are

weather-beaten in the sea of this world, such as, having lost the sight of their

gardens and groves, study to sail on a right course among rocks and quicksand.40

Greville’s comment has provoked controversy, with critics contending that Greville does not create a clear-cut division between his and Sidney’s poetics, where he chooses Images of Life and Sidney Images of Wit.41 However, such explanations whitewash Greville’s real anxiety about Sidney’s literary legacy. As Maria Philmus notes,

Greville frankly locates the sphere of his own concerns in the realm of

phenomenal experience. He expressly identifies the things he deals with as

belonging to the order of what is—the province of history, as opposed to the art

that, as Sidney insists, bodies forth what should be. Hence the special boldness

that his description of his artistic proclivities acquires when we read it with the

40 Quoted from John Gouws, ed., The Prose Works of Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 1986), 134. Hereafter cited as Greville, A Dedication to Sir Philip Sidney.

41 For example, David A. Roberts contends that since they both shared a didactic purpose they “both employed, in

Sidney’s terms, Eikastike rather than Phantastike images, that is, “Images of Life” rather than “Images of Wit.”

“Fulke Greville's Aesthetic Reconsidered,” 389. Reading Greville’s statements another way, June Dwyer explains that what Greville means is that Sidney was able to “moralize the ‘images of wit,” to which classical material lends itself, into ‘images of life.’” “Fulke Greville's Aesthetic: Another Perspective,” 264. 115

Apology in mind; his “creeping Genius…fixed upon the Images of Life” is all too

precisely the negation of the “erected wit” of Sidney’s theoretical poet which

“maketh us know what perfection is.”42

In other words, Greville will not “deliver a golden world” for men to aim at, but will rather present the world as it is for men to find their way through, his “rocks and quicksand” paralleling the earlier image of the labyrinth in his discussion of Sidney’s original moral aim.

While Greville’s different stylistic and religious considerations have been recognized, the physical dimensions of his disagreement with Sidney have not. These dimensions are visible in

Greville’s distinction in the Dedication between Sidney’s inner genius and its outward manifestation in writing, a distinction he also makes in the second headnote to this chapter.

According to Greville, although Sidney gave the Arcadia “many aspersions of spirit and learning from the Father,” its pages were “scribbled rather as pamphlets for entertainment of time and friends than any account of himself to the world” (emphasis added).43 Speaking again of the romance at the end of his Dedication, Greville argues that even though Sidney possessed “that dexterity—even with the dashes of his pen—to make the Arcadian antiques beautify the margents of his works,” nevertheless his aim was “not vanishing pleasure alone, but moral images and examples, as directing threads, to guide every man through the confused labyrinth of his own desires and life.” Given Greville’s reference to “the dashes of his pen” and his general ambivalence over Sidney’s works, “vanishing pleasure” here can be interpreted as the pleasure of writing as well as of reading.

42 Philmus, “Greville's Poetic Revisited,” 161.

43 Greville, A Dedication to Sir Philip Sidney, 11. 116

Greville’s Treatise of Humane Learning supports this interpretation, as Greville deems poetry an “art of recreation" (111.1), as opposed to the instrumental and practical arts of the trivium and sciences.44 Sidney's biographer, Thomas Moffet, similarly categorized poetry as a

“sportive art” in his account of how Sidney preserved his health after excessive studying.

However, Greville is not interested in the health benefits of poetry, holding the body too fallen to be redeemed by mere words.45 Rather, he is concerned with poetry’s moral utility, which he would still severely limit. Since it only “Teaches, and makes, but hath noe power to binde”

(115.6), poetry along with music is profitable only so long as it “serve[s], and not possesse[s] our harts” (115.8). Greville’s words explain why scholars have suspected him to be the friend in

Sonnet 21 of Astrophil and Stella, the one who complains against Astrophil’s “young mind marde” (1) and who charges that his “writings like bad servants show / [His] wits, quicke in vaine thoughts, in vertue lame” (3-4).46 Besides vanity, what is at issue for the friend is the

“quickness” of Astrophil’s thoughts, as reflected in his intense, flowing poems, written seemingly without consideration or control. Strikingly, Greville never once mentions Astrophil and Stella in his writings, perhaps because it is here, even more than in the Arcadia, that Sidney was overcome with the pleasures of composition.

44 All quotations from the Treatise of Human Learning are cited parenthetically from G. A. Wilkes, ed., The

Complete Poems and Plays of Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke (1554-1628), in Two Volumes (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen

Press, 2008), vol. II.

45 Earlier in the Treatise Greville remarks how “among Physitians, what they call / Word-magicke, never helpeth the disease” (30.1-2).

46 Although “quick” often means alive, especially when referring to an animal or person in the Renaissance, when applied to thought it has often connoted wit as well as mental energy and agility, even quickness. See O.E.D., adj., n. 1, II, 8, and III, 20.a and 20.b. 117

In his own sonnet sequence Caelica, Greville carefully avoids becoming enraptured with writing poetry. As Hugh Maclean observes: “One might say, in fact, that Sidney directs our attention to the poem; Greville, away from it. … we do not feel that anyone is watching Greville make poetry, nor is there any continuing evidence that this much concerns him.”47 As Maclean points out, this neglect is fitting given Greville's view of poetry as only a means to an end.

While he eschews depictions of writing, so he makes the body of the poet another necessary casualty. In her perceptive essay on Greville's Calvinism and its influence on Caelica, Elaine Ho explains, “the opening poems of Caelica articulate but also denigrate desire by figuring it in a damaged body which is then cut out of the model self.”48 This criticism might suggest that poetic physicality in Greville is a proverbial mare’s nest. However, before rejecting the body, the poems must first trace the sin and weakness of the flesh. Similarly, to evade the allures of poetic composition, Greville must first show the tenuousness of writing. Unlike Sidney's sequence, then, where depictions of writing are more thorough, one must attend to the moments in Caelica when the body and its inscriptions disappear. From this very fragmentation of the body and writing a coherent model of poetic physicality emerges, one based not so much on the first facet of poetic physicality in this study, the body, but on the second: the material implements of writing that that body manipulates.

In Caelica Greville soon marks off his poetics from Sidney by passing from a Petrarchan physicality to one concerned with mutability and decay. That this occurs early in the sequence, in Sonnet 8, is significant given the possible chronological organization of the poems:

Selfe-pitties teares, wherein my hope lies drown’d,

47 Maclean, “Greville's ‘Poetic’,” 172.

48 Ho, "Fulke Greville's Caelica and the Calvinist Self," 48. 118

Sighes from thoughtes fire, where my desires languish,

Dispaire by humble love of beawtie crown’d,

Furrowes not worne by tyme, but wheeles of anguish;

Dry upp, smile, joye, make smooth, and see,

Furrowes, dispaires, sighes, teares, in beawtie be.

Beawtie, out of whose clowdes my hart teares rayned,

Beawtie, whose niggard fire, sighes smoake did nourish,

Beawtie, in whose eclipse, dispaires remained,

Beawtie, whose scorchinge beames, make wrinckles florish;

Tyme hath made free of teares, sighes and dispare,

Writing in furrowes deepe, she once was fayre.49

As in the passionate sonnets discussed in Chapter 1, sighs here cool the heart that burns with desire. Tears attempt to cool the heart while furrows and wrinkles appear on the lover’s forehead, not from age but from anguish. Greville’s speaker then suddenly smiles as he sees

Time writing furrows on the beloved’s face that state “she once was fair.” Writing here is revenge—not used not to praise the beloved or attain erotic desire, as in Sidney, but to symbolize earthly mutability, which extends even to the aging of the beloved.

Greville’s response in Caelica to Sidney’s sequence is sometimes startlingly direct. For example, in Sonnet 17 he subtly revises Sidney’s Sonnet 31 on the moon, “With how sad steps,” while also contrasting the astronomical bodies that lie behind the names of their beloveds:

49 All quotations from Caelica are taken from G. A. Wilkes, ed., The Complete Poems and Plays of Fulke Greville,

Lord Brooke (1554-1628), in Two Volumes (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 2008), vol. I, and are cited parenthetically. 119

Cynthia, whose glories are at full for ever,

Whose beawties drawe forth teares, and kindle fires,

Fyers, which kindled once are quenched never,

Soe beyond hope your worth beares upp desires.

Whie cast you clowdes on your sweet looking eyes?

Are you afraid they shew mee too much pleasure?

Stronge nature deckes the grave, wherein it lyes,

Excellence can never be exprest in measure.

Are you afraide, because my heart adores you,

The world will thinke I hold Endimion’s place?

Hippolytus, sweet Cynthia, kneel’d before you,

Yet did you not come downe to kisse his face.

Angelles enjoy the heavens inward quires

Star-gazers only multiply desyrs.

While angels may enjoy the heavens signified by the title of Greville’s sequence, Sidney’s stargazer (Astrophil) only ends up frustrated by his desire for Stella. But this ending jab belies the deeper division between Sidney’s and Greville’s worldviews. Greville follows the

Petrarchan sighs and tears with the stark image of the grave, a reminder that Cynthia’s glories will not last “for ever,” a fact that Astrophil barely considers about Stella in Sonnet 5 and never revisits. Furthermore, unlike Stella, Cynthia is radically unapproachable. Contact between the lover and his lady, which occurs often in Sidney’s sequence, seems impossible here. Finally, in

Sidney’s sonnet, Astrophil forges a connection between himself and the moon that also “feel’st a lover’s case (6). By amplifying the vast distance between the Earth and the heavens, rather than 120 collapsing them as Sidney’s poem does, Greville’s sonnet produces a cold, vast sense of alienation.

Indeed, while Astrophil often speaks to Stella, Cupid, other courtiers, and even to himself about his poetry, Greville’s speaker is mostly alone, speaking only to the love god. These exchanges are often humorous, as in Sonnet 20 where Greville’s speaker suggests the cuckolding of one of Cupid’s hunting dogs. However, as Richard Waswo has shown, Greville’s treatment of the Anacreontic Cupid is ultimately darker and more ironic compared to Sidney.50 Thus, in

Sonnet 11 Greville tells how Juno banished Cupid to colder regions where women’s hearts

far colder there than ice,

When once the fire of lust they have received,

With two extremes so multiply the vice,

As neither party satisfying other,

Repentance still becomes desire’s mother.

(10-14)

Coldness of humoral complexion here results from both gender and geographic location.

Women were generally held to be colder in the Galenic system, while people in the South were believed to possess warmer humoral complexions than those in the North, a notion defined as geohumoralism by Mary Floyd-Wilson.51 While this might suggest that the women of the North would be chaster, since less prone to the heat of desire, Greville reveals that their guilt only causes more sinful desire, since part of the pleasure of lust is the violation of moral boundaries.

50 Richard Waswo, The Fatal Mirror, 54-58, esp. 57-8.

51 Mary Floyd-Wilson, English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 2003). 121

The poem registers not only the sequence’s misogyny but also Greville’s suspicion of the chaotic humoral body, which he attacks in his Treatise on Humane Learning.

This disillusionment with the physical world and the female soon leads to the abandonment of language and writing, as opposed to the continual engagement with these things in Sidney. Greville’s Sonnet 39 uses the Tower of Babel myth to explain Caelica’s coldness:

So I that heavenly peace would comprehend,

In mortal seat of Caelica’s fair heart,

To babylon myself there, did intend,

With natural kindness, and with passion’s art:

But when I thought myself of herself free,

All’s chang’d: she understands all men but me.

(9-14)

Unlike Astrophil whose passionate and poetic pleas are at least sung back to him by Stella,

Greville’s speaker meets only incomprehension. As for the lady, the sexual pun on

“understands” suggests her sinfulness. As Lisa Klein notes, “the ideal, virginal sonnet mistress becomes the whore of Babylon.”52 Turning from spoken to written language, Sonnet 66 finds

Greville’s speaker rejecting Caelica’s suggestion to read books for edification. Products of human imagination and sense prone to error, “bookes of vaine humanitie…dazell truth, by representing it” (44-45), which would only distract the speaker from recognizing the inward truth that “all men feele, or heare, before they sinne” (48).

52 Lisa M. Klein, The Exemplary Sidney and the Elizabethan Sonneteer (Newark: University of Delaware Press,

1998), 117. 122

The material images of writing that Greville presents demand to be understood against this continuing failure of language. In Caelica, writing is revealed in the song-like poems to be consistently deceptive and ephemeral, especially when produced by the woman writer. In

Sonnet 22, Greville’s speaker bitterly questions whether he has loved Myra in vain:

I, with whose colours Myra drest her head,

I, that ware posies of her owne hand makeing,

I, that myne owne name in the chymney’s read,

By Myra finely wrought ere I was wakeing,

Must I looke on, In hope tyme coming may,

With change bringe backe my turne agayne to play?

(2-6)

Myra has written his name in the soot of the chimney, suggesting not only the fire of her passion but also its inevitable extinction into the lower element of earth. In other words, writing in the dust, easily dispersed by a single breath, represents the mutability of the inscriber’s affections.

The poem’s ending thus declares a longing for a more permanent, trustworthy form of writing:

Was it for this that I might Myra see

Washing the water with her beauties white?

Yet would she never write her love to mee;

Thinkes witt of change while thoughts are in delight;

Madd girles must safely love, as they may leave;

No man can print a kisse, lynes may deceave.

(25-30) 123

Still, the posies that Myra also wrote cannot fill in the lack of this more substantial writing. All the speaker is left with are effervescent memories: seeing her bathe, a kiss. She has “safely loved” in not leaving evidence of their affair in a text, which could be printed—the word meaning both “impressed” and “published” here. But even if the lady had written their love,

“lynes may deceave”—there is no telling if her feelings would have been captured truthfully on paper. Greville here exposes a slippage between the physicalities of writing and erotic love—the two things Sidney had melded in his own sonnet sequence.

In Sonnet 52, Greville’s speaker looks at his own writing and reaches a slightly different conclusion about its instability. The poems begins with a farewell to both those who never feel

Cupid’s arrows and those who “sigh and weepe” (3), Petrarch-like, in unrequited love. In contrast to these ignorant and deluded lovers, and like Donne’s proponents of inconstancy,

Greville’s speaker will enjoy the ceaseless change of love, which obeys its own laws (12):

My songes they be of Cynthia’s praise,

I weare her ringes on holy daies,

In every tree I write her name,

And every day I read the same.

Where honour Cupids rivall is

There miracles are seene of his

If Cynthia crave her ringe of mee,

I blott her name out of the tree,

(13-20)

When Cynthia no longer loves him, it is not enough for Greville’s speaker to abandon writing.

He must also blot out what he had formerly written, for writing should be as transitory as the 124 passion it expresses. There is a sense of bitter victory in the final lines: “Sweet Sainct tis true, you worthy be, / Yet without Love nought worth to mee” (29-30). This antithesis suggests the ending to Sidney’s Sonnet 5: “True, and yet true that that I must Stella love” (14). However,

Greville uses this rhetorical figure to an opposite end: the denial of love’s irresistibility.

Blotting, the crucial physical act in this poem, is a key image in Caelica, one that

Greville uses not only to represent the end of love but also to make more philosophical observations about human nature. Blots were something to be avoided in writing, as manuals from the period repeatedly direct. When writing, rough paper would be kept nearby in order to clean up excess ink. The “Rules made by E.B. For Children to write by” mandates that “Who that his paper doth blurre or else blot, / Yeeldes me a flouen, it falles him by lot.”53 True, blotting was sometimes necessary to cancel out a passage in writing, and thus could be a sign of agency

(O.E.D., 4). Ben Jonson’s remarks on Shakespeare are well known: “I remember, the players have often mentioned it as an honour to Shakespeare, that in his writing (whatsoever he penned) he never blotted out line. My answer hath been, would he had blotted a thousand.”54 Blotting for

Jonson is a sign of the hard-working poet who carefully revises. Nevertheless, when used figuratively, “to blot” almost always had negative connotations.55 For example, the figurative use of the word indicated the tarnishing of good qualities or intense attacks on one’s reputation.56 In

53 John de Beau Chesne and John Baildon, A Book Containing Divers Sortes of Hands (London:By Richard Field dwelling in the Blacke-Friers neare Ludgate, 1602), sig. A2v. STC 6449.

54 Quoted from George Parfitt, ed., Ben Jonson: The Complete Poems (New York: Penguin Books, 1996), 394.

55 For example, “to blot” could mean to “cover paper with worthless writing,” as in Shakespeare’s Merchant of

Venice 3.2.253-4: “Heere are a few of the unpleasant’st words / That ever blotted paper.” Cited by the O.E.D., definition 2.

56 O.E.D., 3a & 3b. 125

Greville’s own Inquisition Upon Fame, and Honor, he associates blotting with spiritual error:

“Who fixe on error doe but write to blotte” (85.6).57

In Caelica, Greville employs blotting in both a physical and figurative sense, but in each case the meaning or context is negative. Sonnet 75 is a turning point in the sequence, a dialogue poem like Sidney’s Eighth Song, in which Caelica decisively rebuffs Philocell, Greville’s version of Astrophil. Angry at his continual advances, Caelica demands he leave and efface the love tokens they had exchanged along with the desire they testify to:

Though I lett you posies beare,

Wherein my name cyphred were

For I bidd you in the tree,

Cipher downe your name by mee…

Philocell, I say depart,

Blott my love out of thy heart,

Cutt my name out of the tree,

Beare noe memorie of mee.

(159-162, 173-76)

Here the heart is pictured as the page on which love is written, corresponding to the tree on which he had carved her name. Both forms of inscription are to be obliterated along with the memory, which is another type of inscription or imprinting according to the ancient, medieval, and Renaissance comparison of memory’s site in the brain to a wax tablet. Thus, although the

57 Quoted from G. A. Wilkes, The Complete Poems and Plays of Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke (1554-1628), in Two

Volumes (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 2008), vol. II. For Greville’s critique of Fame in Caelica, see Sonnets 104 and 105. 126 immediate context is the blotting out of love from the heart, Greville also implicates the affective and intellectual faculties of man in general for their instability and vulnerability to the world.

Indeed, earlier in Sonnet 67, Greville had revealed sin as the ultimate blot on the human heart. The poem considers the dangerous consequences of “Unconstant thoughtes” mixed with

“light desires” (1): “With bloud and paine these dearely purchase shame, / Time blotting all thinges out, but evill name” (5-6). Here Time appears as the familiar destroyer of all things.

However, even this all-powerful writer cannot blot out the text that is ironically a blot itself: an evil name. Greville then turns to the site of these thoughts, man’s “double heart” that “can make selfe love beare the name of frend” (8). Whereas the first part of the poem portrays the lover swept away by overpowering passion or lust, the second portrays a more calculating lover who persuades the beloved of affection only to hide his own selfish motives. In the face of these two immoral extremes, Greville provides a diagnosis of man’s sinful condition and its cure:

The hart of man mis-seekinge for the best,

Oft doubly, or unconstantlie must blott;

Betwene these twoe the misconceipt doth rest,

Whether it ever were that lasteth not.

Unconstancy and doublenesse depart,

Where man bendes his desires to mend his hart.

(13-18)

“Blotting” here refers to these two negative possibilities of human love: inconstancy and duplicity. Faced with this two-sided blotting, man must somehow mend his heart—Greville here suggesting the necessity of Grace. 127

Finally, in Sonnet 82, one of the central poems in the sequence, Greville deals devastatingly with Sidney’s powerful model of oral composition. Despite its short length, the piece is a tour de force deconstruction of a respiring poetic physicality and hope in poetic immortality:

You that seeke what life is in death,

Now finde it ayre that once was breath,

New names unknowne, old names gone,

Till tyme end bodies, but soules none.

Reader then make tyme while you be,

But stepps to your Eternitie.

Here Greville dwells on the vanishing breath of the mortal writer that had powered Sidney’s poetic physicality. The future reader meets tremendous difficulties in trying to return breath to these writings by uttering them aloud, since the words he finds are mysterious, refusing to line up with his or her experience and knowledge.58 Poems, like “bodies,” are ended by time, yet paradoxically the poem still urges the reader to turn away from writing and the body to eternity.

Beneath this poem in the Warwick manuscript Greville’s added the following note: “This to come after wth the rest.”59 Douglas L. Peterson, Steven W. May, and Joan Rees have all offered answers as to what Greville meant here. For Peterson, the piece casts the poems that

58 For more on Greville’s conflicted notion of poetic afterlife, and the reception of his works in the 17th century and beyond, see Gavin Alexander, “Fulke Greville and the Afterlife,” The Huntington Library Quarterly 62.3/4 (1999):

203-231.

59 G. A. Wilkes, ed., The Complete Poems and Plays of Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke (1554-1628), in Two Volumes

(Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 2008), vol. I: 60. 128 follow “in the central Christian experience of preparing oneself for death.”60 Steven May holds that the six poems before 82 were misplaced by the scribe; Greville, he argues, is instructing the scribe to move these and 82 to their proper place after the amorous poems conclude and the sequence moves more firmly into the political and religious realm.61 Rees suggests that the poem was Greville’s reattempt at composing Sidney’s epitaph for a joint monument he proposed—a blank leaf following, according to her, is where the rest of the poem would have gone when

Greville finished it.62 While Greville’s specific intentions must remain unknown, it is certain that he wanted this memento mori poem to serve a pivotal role in the sequence. Indeed, it neatly encapsulates his model of poetic physicality seen throughout the work.

The fate of the epitaph for Sidney, which Rees suggests may be connected with Sonnet

82, provides one last instance of Greville’s suspicion of writing and poetic immortality. In the autumn of 1615, Greville wrote to his friend John Coke, requesting his opinion on inscriptions to be placed on a double sepulcher he wanted to construct for Sidney and himself. Coke’s surviving letter (Greville’s original is lost) indicates that he found serious problems with

Greville’s epitaph.63 Objecting to Greville’s opening lines, “You who from the grave / Revive

60 Douglas L. Peterson, The English Lyric from Wyatt to Donne: A History of the Plain and Eloquent Styles

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), 270.

61 Steven W. May, The Elizabethan Courtier Poets: The Poems and Their Contexts (Columbia: University of

Missouri Press, 1991), 88.

62 Joan Rees, “Fulke Greville’s Epitaph on Sidney,” Review of English Studies 19.73 (1968): 49.

63 For the relevant portion of the letter, see G. A. Wilkes, The Complete Poems and Plays of Fulke Greville, Lord

Brooke (1554-1628), in Two Volumes (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 2008), vol. II: Appendix B. All citations from the letter are from Wilkes's edition of Greville. For more on these verses see Joan Rees, “Fulke Greville’s

Epitaph on Sidney,” and Norman Farmer, Jr., “Fulke Greville and Sir John Coke: An Exchange of Letters on a 129 those that no other lyfe can have,” Coke notes that this could be misconstrued to mean that “the dead had no hope of other lyfe but the memorie of the living,” which would be a denial of the

Christian hope in the Resurrection.64 Conversely, Coke points out Greville’s ambivalence regarding poetic immortality in subsequent lines: “The next fowr have this incongruitie that the inscription condemneth the tomb: the words despise the deeds: and take away that honor wch is sought for wth such charge.”65 Commenting on a later portion of the epitaph, Coke again notes that these verses “are more suteble to your treatise of honor, becawse here they serve also to pul down that you build…”66 Having suggested the possibility of earthly honor and immortality,

Greville almost immediately rejects it, to Coke’s chargin.

Greville eventually settled for a much simpler grave for himself. Attempting to secure

Sidney’s and his joint memory, Greville had been unable to put aside his mistrust of this present world and poetry, even in an epitaph that bids farewell to both. As I have shown, this is the mistrust that resurfaces in Caelica, where writing is always about to be blotted or effaced. This model of poetic physicality performs just what Greville calls for poetry to do in his Dedication: it reveals the inconstancy and sinfulness of human actions, both in the realm of love early in the sequence and in the wider human world that demands Greville’s attention in later poems.

Caelica thus responds both to Sidney’s argument for poetry in the Defense and to his poetic physicality in Astrophil and Stella—a work that Greville could seemingly only acknowledge in

History Lecture and Certain Latin Verses on Sir Philip Sidney,” in The Huntington Library Quarterly, 33.3 (1970):

217-236

64 Wilkes, The Complete Poems and Plays of Fulke Greville, 2:550.

65 Ibid.

66 Ibid. 130 such a subtle, dark, and deconstructive way. To paraphrase Coke, he could not avoid “blotting out what he wrote.”

Conclusion

As noted at the beginning of this chapter, both Wroth and Greville use the images of the labyrinth and quicksand to symbolize their solutions to the problem of poetic physicality that

Sidney poses. For Wroth, quicksand represents her stifling of the physicality of oral composition that her uncle discovered. This stifling, as I have suggested, only demonstrates the greater poetic and erotic heat that her female sonneteer persona possesses. As discussed in Chapter 1, while the heated heart and respiration of the sonneteer demonstrate passion, they also suggest instability.

Wroth seems to recognize this and so turns to the poet’s hand in her corona, which appears in the labyrinth as a guiding force. Ultimately, Pamphilia disclaims poetic heat and searches for a new model of physicality through which to relate to her readers. Greville, for his part, identifies the labyrinth not with his sequence but with the world outside, which is filled with moral quicksands. But quicksand itself may also stand for his physicality of blotting and effacement, in which the moment of writing disappears beneath the surface of the poem. Instability, then, is the sine qua non of Greville’s poetic physicality, while being something Wroth wrestles with and struggles to move beyond both as a woman writer and as a Sidney.

As the first female English writer of a Petrarchan sonnet sequence, Mary Wroth has emerged as a critical figure in scholarship on Renaissance women’s writing. As discussed in the

Introduction, such scholarship has often drawn attention to how women writers used female bodily experiences, such as pregnancy, to authorize themselves. Naomi Miller, for example, has discussed Wroth’s use of images of difficult pregnancy and miscarriage to represent poetic creation, showing how Wroth’s use of the trope opposes male sonneteers’ facile use of the 131 same.67 Remarkably, contemporary feminist theorists of writing have also emphasized the uniqueness of the female body. Hélène Cixous, for instance, rejects the traditional masculine association of writing with the phallus and proposes models of writing incorporating the milk of the mother.68 We might add Pamphilia’s stifling experience of composition to Cixous’s in her essay “Coming to Writing”: “‘Writing’ seized me, gripped me, around the diaphragm, between the stomach and the chest, a blast dilated my lungs and I stopped breathing. Suddenly I was filled with a turbulence that knocked the wind out of me and inspired me to wild acts.”69

Pamphilia also provides an answer to Virginia Woolf’s question in the first headnote to this chapter. These resonances between women writers, Renaissance and modern, suggest examining how Wroth discovers a female poetic physicality in her other works. In her continuation of the

Urania, for instance, Wroth notes that Pamphilia had “so great a spirit, as might be called

Masculine.”70 Whether emphasizing Pamphilia’s heat, respiration, or her guiding hand, Wroth depicts her heroine’s poetic composition as a physical act as great in heat and spirits as any male sonneteer’s.

Turning to Greville, whereas Sidney’s poems are intensely present in their depictions of composition, his friend’s are either retrospective or look to the future in imagining the decay of

67 Naomi J. Miller, Changing the Subject: Mary Wroth and the Figurations of Gender in Early Modern England

(Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1996), 82-7. On the male use of this trope, see Katharine Eisaman

Maus, Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), Ch. 6.

68 See her seminal essay “The Laugh of the Medusa,” Keith and Paula Cohen, trs., Signs, 1.4 (1976): 875-93.

69 Quoted from Coming to Writing and Other Essays, ed. Deborah Jenson, tr. Sarah Cornell et al. (Cambridge, MA:

Harvard University Press, 1991), 9.

70 Cited in Josephine A. Roberts, ed., The First Part of the Countess of Montgomery’s Urania (Binghamton: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, State University of New York, 1995), 735, n. on 161.18-19. 132 love and writing. For example, in Sonnet 58, Greville’s speaker recalls how Caelica used to wear a blond wig when she was young, but now that she is older she lets her black hair show as a sign of mourning for “thoughtes, by her worths overthrowne”—that is, her memories of former lovers. A similar moment of aging in Astrophil and Stella is unthinkable. As the next chapter will demonstrate, however, Henry Constable and Samuel Daniel introduce similar notions of time and aging to the English sonnet sequence soon after the pirated publication of Sidney’s sequence in 1591. However, Constable and Daniel differ from Greville in also portraying the aging of the sonneteer himself. Meanwhile, like Wroth, Constable and Daniel consider their models of poetic physicality in light of gender and the stability that the hand as an icon promises to give. In contrast to the Sidney’s, though, both Constable and Daniel end by focusing on the physicality of the patron rather than on their own individual experience of writing. 133

Chapter 4:

The Aging Poet’s Request for Patronage

in Constable’s Diana and Daniel’s Delia (1592)

Having reached the halfway point of this study, it seems necessary to take stock of both what poetic physicality has meant and to what uses the poets discussed thus far have put it. In his recent study, Writing After Sidney, Gavin Alexander identifies incompletion and dialogue as two defining themes in the Sidney Circle’s writings.1 Following him, we might say that these are important elements of Sidney’s, Wroth’s, and Greville’s models of poetic physicality as well.

Besides the songs where he talks to Stella in person, Astrophil often speaks to himself, his Muse, or his wit in composing his poems aloud. In these moments of oral composition, the words that

Astrophil utters to himself often interrupt the writing process, demonstrating the violence of his passions. The dramatic performance of this physicality takes place before an intimate audience, one which Sidney expects to notice the controlled overlap between Astrophil and himself.

In responding to Sidney’s poetic physicality, Wroth and Greville transform these same elements of incompletion and dialogue. For Wroth, oral composition is suffocated even before it begins, while for Greville writing is continually incomplete, either failing to testify to the truth of the writer’s intentions or simply fading away without a trace. By subverting Sidney’s physicality in this way, Wroth and Greville enter into dialogue with Sidney over the limits of poetry and, in

Wroth’s case especially, the role of gender in composition. For Wroth in her corona and at the end of her sequence, poetic physicality allows the poet to mark a turn in her writing or to

1 Gavin Alexander, Writing After Sidney: The Literary Response to Sir Philip Sidney, 1586-1640 (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 2006). 134 renegotiate her literary persona with her audience. Poetic physicality, then, seems above all to be a tool by which a writer communicates with readers and sets expectations for his or her authorship—expectations that are based on the particular physiology, materiality, and spaces that writer chooses to present. Thus, Wroth suggests a turn to a more spiritual poetics both by focusing on the writer’s hand and by disclaiming a respiring physicality of heated passion. As I argued above, in this way she accords more control to the writer than Greville.

But what happens when poetic physicality, rather than fostering dialogue among equals in a literary circle or between a writer and her readers, is used instead to express the relationship between a poet and his patron, his superior? The current chapter answers this question, demonstrating how both Henry Constable and Samuel Daniel seek patronage through a poetic physicality that does not simply modify Sidney’s model of physicality but rather takes a new and very different course. This difference, I suggest, is partly a result of their positions outside

Sidney’s circle and their varying purposes in fashioning their literary personae. Constable, it is true, was personally acquainted with Sidney’s Stella, Penelope Rich, calculating an astrological nativity for her daughter in 1588.2 However, although he also mourns Sidney in his sonnets,

Constable, unlike Greville, does not appear to have been close with Sidney, and he even admits to only knowing his sister Mary Herbert “by reporte.”3 As for Daniel, Mary Herbert would not become his official patron until after the authorized publication of his sonnet sequence Delia in

1592. This chapter shows one avenue by which Daniel sought to gain Mary Herbert’s patronage: a poetic physicality of the aging poet who composes under the influence of his lady’s hand.

2 “Fayre by inheritance, whome borne we see,” in Joan Grundy, ed., The Poems of Henry Constable (Liverpool:

Liverpool University Press, 1960), 157.

3 “Ladie whome by reporte, I only knowe,” in Grundy, 154. 135

Constable uses a similar model of poetic physicality to earn patronage, albeit of a spiritual rather than secular sort in the end.

Pre-modern notions of aging have become the recent subject of both medieval and

Renaissance scholarship.4 Gail Kern Paster, Ian MacInnes, and others have especially focused on humoral explanations of aging.5 As they show, the essence of youth was thought to be the radical heat and moisture that cooled and dried up as one grew older. Paster, in particular, discusses how this meant loss of blood, the humor that, like air, possessed qualities both of moistness and heat. She cites Lady Macbeth’s surprise after the killing of Duncan: “Who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?”6

Because the blood and its heat were supposed to wane with age, love being a hot passion was associated with youth. By the same token, erotic sonnet sequences were a young person’s genre. The “G.T.” who introduces George Gascoigne’s Hundreth Sundrie Flowers (1573) associates “pleasaunt ditties or compendious Sonets” with “green youthful capacities,” while contrasting such poems and their young writers with the “the ryper workes of grave and

4 See Albrecht Classen, Old Age in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Interdisciplinary Approaches to a

Neglected Topic (New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2007); Nina Taunton, Fictions of Old Age in Early Modern

Literature and Culture (New York: Routledge, 2007); and Eric Campbell, ed., Growing Old in Early Modern

Europe: Cultural Representations (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006), especially the following two essays: Stella

Achilleos, “Youth, Old Age and Male Self-Fashioning: The Appropriation of the Anacreontic Figure of the Old Man by Jonson and his ‘Sons’” (39-53) and Kevin P. Laam, “Aging the Lover: The Posies of George Gascoigne” (75-91).

The seminal study of old age to which a number of these works respond is Georges Minois, History of Old Age:

From Antiquity to the Renaissance (Oxford: Polity Press, in association with Basil Blackwell, 1989).

5 Paster, Humoring the Body, 138-39. Ian MacInnes, “Cheerful Girls and Willing Boys: Old and Young Boys in

Shakespeare’s Sonnets,” Early Modern Literature Studies 6.2 (2000): 1.1-26.

6 Quoted from Paster, The Body Embarrassed, 70. 136 grayheared” poets.7 Admittedly, since love could strike at any age, even old men might receive the heat from this passion necessary to compose. Castiglione’s Book the Courtier features a famous debate over whether and how the older lover should express his affections.8 In his

Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton notes that “ancient men will dote [in verse] sometimes as well as the rest; the heat of love will thaw their frozen affections, [and] dissolve the ice of age…”9 Such a thing seems to happen in Richard Barnfield’s homoerotic sequence, in a dream the speaker has of his beloved:

Where-with inspir’d, I young againe became,

And from my heart a spring of blood did streame,

But when I wak’t, I found it nothing so.

Save that my limbs (me thought) did waxe more strong

And I more lusty far, and far more yong.

(7-11)10

In a recent essay, Ceri Sullivan discusses how poets such as Robert Herrick and Ben Jonson played on these beliefs about youth and heated blood.11 For them, the ability of an older poet to versify his passion demonstrates that he is still worthy of erotic attention despite his age.

7 George Gascoigne, A Hundreth Sundrie Flowers, ed. G. W. Pigman III (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), 143.

8 See especially Book IV and Pietro Bembo’s famous speech on Neo-Platonic Love.

9 Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, 3:179.

10 Quoted from George Klawitter, ed., Richard Barnfield: The Complete Poems (Selinsgrove: Susquehanna

University Press, 1990), 125, Sonnet VI.

11 Ceri Sullivan, “The carpe diem topos and the ‘geriatric gaze’ in early modern verse,” Early Modern Literary

Studies 14.3 (2009): 8.1-21. 137

Whereas Sullivan examines mostly seventeenth century verse, I turn to the sonnet sequences of the sixteenth century, specifically to Constable and Daniel who depict themselves abandoning love poetry as they get older. As the above quote from G.T. suggests, there was a cultural expectation that the older writer would choose more mature and wholesome genres to write in.12 A striking example of this is Greene’s Vision, one of the myriad works claiming to be written by the prodigal author Robert Greene on his deathbed and published the same year

(1592) as Daniel’s Delia and Constable’s Diana.13 In this confessional work, the ghosts of

Gower and Chaucer come to advise an ill Greene. Gower admonishes Greene to abandon

“wanton writings,” while Chaucer, more indulgently, laughs and cites his Canterbury Tales in defense of writing about all sorts of matters, including erotic love. Here Greene acknowledges

Gower’s dramatic revelation as the aged lover at the end of his Confessio Amantis, which set an important precedent for abandoning love poetry in old age. In that work, Gower had hid himself under the cover of the titular character Amans, whom the reader at first thinks is a young man having trouble wooing his lady. Amans gives a lover’s confession to Venus’s priest, who instructs him on the seven deadly sins as they pertain to courtly love. After the confession, the

12 Or, of course, give up writing altogether. See Richard Helgerson, The Elizabethan Prodigals (Berkeley:

University of California Press, 1976).

13 Greenes vision written at the instant of his death. Conteyning a penitent passion for the folly of his pen (London,

1592). STC 12261. On Greene’s haunting of the Elizabethan literary scene after his death, see Steve Mentz,

Romance for Sale in Early Modern England: The Rise of Prose Fiction (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006), as well as the recent collection of essays edited by Kirk Melnikoff and Edward Gieskes, Writing Robert Greene: Essays on

England’s First Notorious Professional Writer (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008).

138 elderly Gower reveals himself to be Amans and abandons his pursuit of love upon being confronted with his age and healed of his inappropriate erotic desire by Venus’s command.

Constable and Daniel follow Gower’s venerable course, depicting the aging of their sonneteer personae and abandoning erotic verse for other poetry. However, they make this transition in very different ways. Constable, for his part, organizes his sonnets according to a numerology that suggests the inexorable march of time. Through an extremely limited manuscript circulation, Constable keeps this poetic physicality as private as Sidney’s or

Greville’s. But Constable, unlike Sidney, also indicates the future direction of his writings through the icon of the hand—not the poet’s hand but the female beloved’s—that becomes a sacred relic. In this way, Constable sets in motion his Catholic Spiritual Sonnets. Daniel, as I show next, also uses the icon of the female hand to indicate the future direction of his poetry.

However, he paints a more visceral portrait of aging than Constable, using the sighs and tears

Sidney eschewed to portray himself as having spent his young moisture and heat in writing. In his Delia, it is the lady’s hand that violently writes this aging upon the poet-lover, preparing him to assume higher genres such as epic. In this way, both Constable and Daniel resolve the tension between passionate expression and reasoned control by assigning the former to the poet and the latter to the female patron who charts the upward course of his writings.

I

An analysis of Constable is no simple matter, given the tangled textual state of his sonnets. Existing in two very different print versions (the 1592 quarto and 1594 octavo), as well as in multiple manuscripts, Constable’s erotic collection Diana is irreducible to a single version, unlike Spenser’s Amoretti. Thus, it is necessary to refer to facets of poetic physicality presented by different texts. For instance, while the largest manuscript source of Constable’s poems, the 139

Todd manuscript (MS Dyce 44), features the theme of aging, the printed editions do not. Joan

Grundy, Constable’s editor, selects the Todd MS manuscript as her base text, due to its early date, carefully planned structure, and the fact that it presents 27 sonnets not preserved elsewhere.14 For these same reasons—and also because it presents his most coherent portrait of poetic physicality—I focus on this version of Constable’s love sonnets.

Unlike Diana, Constable’s Spiritual Sonnets exist in a single seventeenth century manuscript, Harleian MS 7753. In comparing the two collections, the most striking thing appears to be their shared erotic and spiritual concerns. Taking up the Spiritual Sonnets, Gary

Kuchar discusses how Constable’s speaker identifies erotically with the female saints whose intercession he beseeches.15 For instance, Constable’s speaker prays to St. Margaret for “purity in steade of power” so that his “soule mayd chaste, [may] passe” for a Mayde” (189, 13-14).16

That is, he wishes for his soul to be rendered more feminine and virginal than it is. Conversely,

14 Joan Grundy, ed., The Poems of Henry Constable (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1960). Hereafter cited as Grundy. For her discussion of the textual situation, see pages 84-104. Both the 1592 and 1594 texts of Diana have been reprinted separately since Grundy’s edition. Robert F. Fleissner, who dissents from Grundy in seeing the

1592 text as more authoritative, has published an edited version of this text: Resolved to Love: The 1592 Edition of

Henry Constables Diana, Critically Considered (Salzburgh: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik-Universität

Salzburgh, 1980). The 1594 edition is available in facsimile in the Scolar Press series (Yorkshire: Scolar Press,

Limited, 1973).

15 Gary Kuchar, “Henry Constable and the Question of Catholic Poetics: Affective Piety and Erotic Identification in the Spirituall Sonnettes,” Philological Quarterly 85.1-2 (2006): 69-90.

16 All of Constable’s writings are cited from Grundy’s edition, The Poems of Henry Constable (Liverpool: Liverpool

University Press, 1960), with page and line numbers provided parenthetically. Since the numbering of Constable’s poems varies among printed editions and manuscripts, I do not supply sonnet numbers, but rather first lines. On the same page as each poem, Grundy helpfully notes in which print and manuscript sources the poem may be found. 140 in the final poem to Mary Magdalen, he imagines a time when “lyke a woman spowse my sowle shalbee, / whom synfull passions once to lust did move” (192, 5-6), recalling the traditional conflation of Mary Magdalene with the woman caught in adultery in the Gospel of John. For

Kuchar, these sonnets search for a transsexual “mystical body” within the context of medieval affective piety, rather than the religious devotion encouraged by the Counter-Reformation. In my discussion of Diana, I show how Constable prepares for this identification with the body of the female saint through his poetic physicality, which has two main aspects: the aging of the poet and the sacredness of the lady’s hand. In between I also address Constable’s poems to King

James and Queen Elizabeth, since they demonstrate how Constable also put poetic physicality to political ends in seeking secular patronage.

“The order of the booke” that introduces the sequence in the Todd MS schematizes the poet’s aging (114). The sonnets are divided into three parts, with each part subdivided into three arguments, seven sonnets per argument. Thus, there are 63 sonnets in total, not counting an introductory sonnet, a prayer that God either grant the poet his lady or the grace never to love again. This count of 63 poems carries a numerological significance that can be contrasted with

Astrophil and Stella. As Alastair Fowler remarks, Sidney’s numerology (108 sonnets being the same number of Penelope’s suitors in the Odyssey) emphasizes Astrophil’s erotic frustration.17 In contrast, Constable’s numerology acts as a memento mori, turning the poet to higher concerns and away from erotic desire. One’s sixty-third year was supposed to be the “grand climacteric” in the body’s development, a time in which one was particularly vulnerable to disease and

17 Alastair Fowler, Triumphal Forms: Structural Patterns in Elizabethan Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1970), 175f. 141 mortality. After Queen Elizabeth’s death, the Jesuit Thomas Wright added an appendix to his

Passions of the Mind, in which he explains this notion in connection with her demise.18

Each of the three parts of Constable’s Diana has an overarching theme. The first part concerns “variable affections of love,” including “accidents hapenning in the tyme of his love”

(114). The second part contains more occasional pieces and praise poems, including the aforementioned sonnets to Elizabeth and James as King of Scotland. The third and final part of the Todd MS is downcast, with lamentations of love, funeral sonnets for the deaths of famous persons, including Sidney, and finally seven sonnets on the death of the poet’s desire.19 The final poem in this section, number 63, bids farewell to love poetry: “Sometymes in verse I prays’d, sometimes I sigh’d / No more shall pen with love nor beautie mell” (178, 1-2). A note from the author then follows:

When I had ended this last sonnet and found that such vayne poems as I had by

idle houres writ did amounte iust to the climatericall number 63. me thought it

was high tyme for my follie to die and to employe the remnant of [my] wit to

other calmer thoughts lesse sweete and lesse bitter.

(179)

Reinforcing this tracing of the poet’s love from birth and death are the running titles to the sonnets, which appear elsewhere only in the Marsh MS (National Library of Ireland Z.3.5.21).

In the first part, which tells of the beginning of the love, the second poem is entitled “Of the byrth of his love” (116), the fifth poem, “Of the discouragement he had to proceed in love

18 The passions of the minde in generall. Corrected, enlarged, and with sundry new discourses augmented. By

Thomas Wright. With a treatise thereto adjoyning of the clymatericall yeare, occasioned by the death of Queene

Elizabeth (London: 1604). STC 26040.

19 See also Fowler, Triumphal Forms, 176. 142 through the multitude of his Ladies perfections and his owne lownesse” (119), and the sixth

“How he encouraged himselfe to proceede in love and to hope for favoure in the ende at Loves hands” (120). In other words, the titles suggest the inexorable march of time that the sequence chronicles, up until the awareness of death and the abandonment of love poetry.

Unlike Sidney, Constable does not eschew the sighs and tears of Petrarchan physicality.

At the same time, he differs from the sonneteers discussed in the first and next chapters by using sighs and tears not only to demonstrate passion but also to forge political connections. In a poem to King James of Scotland, “If I durst sigh still as I had begun” (142), Constable responds to a sonnet by the king that complained against a contrary wind preventing Anne, his new queen, from sailing from Denmark to Scotland. In his own sonnet, Constable declares that his sighs and tears would have provided the wind and water necessary to bear the Queen to her new home; however, since his mistress was displeased with him, he was not able to do this. His concluding couplet makes the following request of the king: “Sith I desir’d my sighes should blow for thee /

Desire thow the winds to sigh for me” (13-14). Here Constable uses the standard physicality of

Petrarchism to juxtapose his own love with the king’s in an elegant and flattering manner.20

In another sonnet Constable honors James not primarily as a king but as a poet, this time paying more attention to the physicality of composition itself:

Bloome of the rose I hope those hands to kisse

Which yonge a scepter which olde wisdome bore

20 In “If I durst love as heeretofore I have” (143), Constable remarks on an occasion when James himself was kept in

Denmark by the frozen sea. Constable tells the king that the burning of his heart would have thawed the ice, but he was loath to reveal his heart’s torment since it would lead to his cruel beloved’s blame. This time Constable pulls back by declaring in the sestet how the frozen sea actually had no need of his heart to warm it, since the royal James and Anne are “two suns” already (10, 14)—here observing a more respectful distance between himself and James. 143

And offer up joy-sacrifice before

Thy altar throne for that receaved blisse

Yet prince of hope suppose not for all this

That I thy place and not thy guifts adore

Thy scepter no thy pen I honoure more

More deare to me then crowne thy garland is

That laurel garland which (if hope say true)

To thee for deeds of prowesse shall belong

And now allreadie unto thee is due

As to a David for a kinglie songe

The pen wherewith thow dost to heavenly singe

Made of a quill pluckt from an Angells winge.

(140)

The octave draws attention to the king’s hand that wields a scepter, yet Constable in the sestet confesses to being more impressed with the pen that James also wields, while the laurel gracing the king’s consecrated head is dearer to Constable than James’s crown. Constable is referring to

James’s Essayes of a Prentise in the Divine Art of Poesie (1584), which, besides sonnets and other pieces, contains translations of the Psalms that mark out James as king and poet in the mold of King David.21 The volta of Constable’s sonnet thus serves as a fulcrum to balance James’s political and literary personae, along with their respective physical signs. In other words, the king has three bodies, not two: his own body, the body politic, and the body poetic.

21 The essayes of a prentise, in the diuine art of poesie (Edinbrugh [sic]: By Thomas Vautroullier, 1584). STC

14373. 144

Significantly, these different bodies have in common both James’s head, the home of his reason and inspiration, and his hand, the agent of his thoughts and rule. In describing James as a poet- king, then, Constable makes the same edifying link between head and hand as the philosophers and medical authorities discussed in Chapter 1.

While Constable constructs the king’s poetic physicality for him, in writing to Queen

Elizabeth he constructs his own. The sonnet in question appears to dedicate a work he wrote in defense of her policy in the Low Countries.22 In the poem, Constable portrays himself much like

George Gascoigne as discussed by Wendy Wall—that is, as fighting for his queen with pen rather than sword in hand:23

The love wherewith youre vertues chayne my sprite

Envyes the hate I beare vnto youre foe

Since hatefull pen had meanes his hate to showe

And love like meanes had not of love to wryte.

I mean write that yowre vertues doe endite

From which sweet spring all my conceyts doe flow

And of my pen my sword doth enviouse growe

That pen before my sword youre foes should smite

And to my inke my bloud doth envie beare

That in youre cause more inke than bloud I shed

Which envie though it be a vice yet heare

22 The defense was likely written in 1585 in response to what is reported in a manuscript as “slanders as be dispersed in a libel against her majesty by Thomas Throgmorton 1583.” Grundy, The Poems of Henry Constable, 232, n.

23 See Wall, The Imprint of Gender, 128-32. 145

Tis vetue, sith youre vertues have it bred

Thus powerfull your sacred vertues be

Which vice it selfe a vertue makes in me

(139)

In revealing the jealousy his passions felt for his pen, Constable identifies his heart as his true inspiration for writing, rather than his head. However, it is the queen’s virtues that have actually

“endited” what Constable has written. Whereas Astrophil’s composition seems to proceed orally from his interiority, Constable listens and then writes. Furthermore, by suggesting that he would use his body in defense of the queen, Constable attempts to win regard for the physical act of writing, asking Elizabeth to imagine his pen as a sword and his ink as blood. The sword also calls to mind the penknife, which must be in hand to sharpen the quill. Ironically, Sidney would die in the Low Countries only a year after Constable apparently made his boast.

Significantly, in almost none of Constable’s love poems is there as sustained an attention to writing as in these attempts to gain royal favor. This fact shows that writing occasional pieces to people of influence especially motivated Constable to consider composition in a physical way.

It would seem at first glance, then, that gaining patronage is the determining force behind

Constable’s poetic physicality. Nevertheless, the location of these sonnets in the middle of the

Todd MS ultimately makes them subservient to the physicality of aging that surrounds them.

That is, writings to secular rulers, like writings to the beloved, are abandoned in the face of death, as called to mind by the grand climacteric at the end of the sequence. Indeed, through other sonnets in the collection, Constable ultimately seeks spiritual rather than secular patronage.

One of these sonnets suggests comparison with Sidney, while providing the more important opportunity to observe a poet carefully revising his poetic physicality: 146

Falselye doth envie of youre praises blame

My tongue my pen my heart of flatterye

Because I sayd there was no sunne but thee

It call’d my tongue the partiall trumpe of fame

And sayd my pen had flattered thy name

Because my pen did to my tongue agree

And needs my heart a flatterer must be

Which taught both tongue and pen to say the same

No no I flatter not when I thee call

The sun: Sith sun in world was never such

But when the sun I thee compar’d withall

Doubtlesse the sun I flattered too much

Witnesse myne eyes I say the truth in this

They have thee seene and know that so it is.

(128)

To exonerate his heart, tongue, and pen from the charge of flattery, the lover brings in the witness of his eyes, which testify to the lady’s beauty as rightly compared to the sun. Of course, the eye informed the imagination that inspired his heart’s wish to praise Diana in the first place.

The sonnet thus traces the poet’s physicality of speech and writing back to his initial sensory impression of the beloved. Although missing the struggle and strain found in Astrophil and

Stella, being somehow more elegant and balanced, Constable’s sonnet like many of Sidney’s shares an interest in orality. Like in Sidney, the procession of the poem from the heart and 147 mouth of the lover—rather than simply silently from the pen—becomes a demonstration of the truth of what the poem says.

The Marsh MS, which may be the earliest manuscript containing Constable’s sonnets, contains variations in the octave that suggest that Constable had to carefully revise this sonnet in order to develop its four-fold physicality of eyes, heart, tongue, and pen:24

False the report, and unjust is ye blame

that envye of youre praise imputes to mee

when it arreastes my penn of flatterye

for honoringe too muche thy sacred name.

And calls my tonge ye partiall trompe of fame

for saying that ther is no sunne but thee.

And eke would burne my hart for heresye

sith obstinate it doth beleve the same.

(129, 1-8)

Here the pen and the tongue are blamed separately in the two halves of the octave, whereas in the

Todd MS the blaming of the tongue and pen had been interwoven. There is no mention here of the pen agreeing with the tongue, while the heart is not mentioned until the final two lines of the octave, where it is sentenced to burn like a heretic. Although the burning heart certainly stands metonymically for the poet’s body, the complex interaction between the heart and the different organs of this body in the later version of the poem is not yet apparent. In the Marsh MS, a different concluding couplet returns to the heart-as-heretic image “And thoghe I erd, my hart

24 Grundy, The Poems of Henry Constable, bases the dating (1588) on the fact that the nativity for Penelope Rich’s daughter in the MS is headed by a title that specifies that the child was born in “this yeare” (86). 148 cannot for this / be burnt, for it already burned is” (129, 13-14). Constable, then, seems to have censored his poem by erasing the reference to the heretic’s fate. Whether Constable abandoned this conceit because of his engagement in religious controversies on the side of the English

Church, his conversion to Catholicism, or some other reason, is unclear. What is apparent is that while muting this religious and political resonance he chained together a more coherent poetic physicality that could rival Sidney’s, at least in this one poem.

As seen in his poems to James, Constable does not share Sidney’s opposition to resurrecting Petrarch’s “long deceased sighes.” In Constable’s sequence, then, Petrarch is summoned not to be rejected but to prophesy Constable’s beloved:

Thy coming to the world hath taught us to descrie

What Petrarchs Laura meant (for truth the lips bewrayes)

Loe why th’Italians yet which never saw thy rayes

To finde oute Petrarchs sense such forged glosses trye.

The beauties which he in a vayle enclosd beheld

But revealations were within his secreat hert

By which in parables thy coming he foretold

His songes were hymnes of thee which only now before

Thy image should be sunge for thow that goddesse art

Which onlye we withoute idolatry adore.

(133, 5-14)

This is the same type of argument Shakespeare would take up in his Sonnet 106, “When in the chronicle of wasted time.” What sets Constable’s poem apart from Shakespeare’s is its references to goddesses and idolatry that resonate with the religious imagery he removed in the 149 previously discussed poem. The Italian glossers of Petrarch, like erring theologians, miss the point of the text they are attempting to interpret, but Constable’s speaker is able to see into

Petrarch’s “secret hert,” which had famously sighed and wept at the memory of Laura.

Constable’s religious language, though, mostly centers on his lady’s hand, which inspires him to produce devoted poetry. In “Not that thy hand is soft is sweet is white,” Constable explains why the lady’s hand, lips, and breast are “the chiefest blisse / Which nature ever made for lipps delight” (125, 3-4). It is not their beauty but their “heavenly might” (5) that demands his “devotion” (6), for her hand makes her dumb lute speak (9, 10) as her lips and breast utter

“sweet tunes” that restore his own “dead heart” (11, 12). Similar to his poem to Elizabeth—and unlike Astrophil who writes poems for Stella to sing—Constable reveals his written sonnet to be inspired by his lady’s own hand and voice. When next he turns to the lady’s hand, he is transforming it into a relic:

Sweet hand the sweet (yet cruell) bowe thow art

From whence at me five ivorye arrowes flye

So with five wounds at once I wounded lye

Bearing in breast the print of every dart

Saynt Francis had the like yet felt no smart

Where I in living torments never dye

His wounds were in his hands and feete where I

All these same helplesse wounds feele in my hearte

Now (as Saint Francis) if a Saint am I

The bow which shotte these shafts a relique is

I meane the hand which is the reason why 150

So many for devotion thee would kisse

And I thy glove kisse as a thinge devine

Thy arrows quiver and thy reliques shrine.

(131)

The hand was an important religious symbol in the late medieval and Renaissance periods due to numerology that linked the five fingers to the five senses and the five wounds of Christ.25

Constable draws on this numerology, recalling the stigmata that St. Francis was reputed to be the first saint to receive. The lady’s hand with its five fingers rewrites the speaker’s own identity as saint, as he bears “in breast the print of every dart.”

By highlighting the imprint of the lady’s hand rather than his own, Constable depicts his poetry as reliant upon an outside female influence, rather than emerging spontaneously from within his own interiority—a reversal of the male co-opting of the “womb” that Katharine

Eisaman Maus finds in the works of Sidney and others.26 While the influence or inscription performed by the female beloved is a common trope, Constable’s sequence is unique for using this trope to forecast the future spiritual direction of his poetry. Thus, instead of Sidney’s visceral depictions of oral composition, one finds in Constable a poetic physicality scripted by the female, erotic and spiritual grace shadowing his own act of composition. Constable’s

Catholic approach here can also be contrasted to Greville’s Calvinist one, in which writing is in no way spiritual but fleshly and always prone to dissolution. The poet Constable most resembles is Donne, who similarly mixes erotic and religious language. But whereas Donne repeatedly imagines the poet’s body placed in the grave with his amorous writings, which make him and his

25 See Sherman and Lukehart, Writing on Hands, 64-65.

26 Maus, Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance, Ch. 6. 151 lady into saints (“The Funerall,” “The Canonization,” “The Relique”), Constable uses the mortality of the grand climacteric as the point on which to turn to the body of the actual female saint erase his self-conscious part in the act of writing.

II

As a larger structure surrounds the poet’s aging in Constable’s Diana, so does structure play a major role in Daniel’s Delia. C. F. Williamson was the first to note that Delia is divided between sonnets that emphasize Delia’s tyranny and the poet’s powerlessness, on the one hand, and those that emphasize Time’s tyranny and the poet’s ability to immortalize Delia, on the other.27 This is not an equal division; rather, Williamson observed that the turning point between these two sections created a proportion (8:6) equivalent to that created by the volta between octave and sestet in a Petrarchan sonnet. The fact that Daniel in revising Delia inserted new poems throughout, instead of just adding them to the end, provides evidence that he carefully composed this larger structure. In a more recent essay, Gary Ettari argues that this turning point also marks the moment when the speaker replaces Delia’s physical mirrors, which reflect her beauty and foretell its withering, with his own textual ones.28

What has not been noticed in theses studies is that this volta, in which the poet begins to anticipate Delia’s aging, is an act of revenge for the poet’s own aging, which he has lamented earlier in the sequence. Whereas Constable does not describe the wasting away of the lover’s

27 C. F. Williamson, “The Design of Daniel’s Delia,” Review of English Studies 19.75 (1968): 251-60.

28 Gary Ettari, “‘That Mirrour Faire’”: Samuel Daniel and the Collapse of the Subject,” Philological Review 33.2

(2007): 1-22. Zarra Bruzzi also discusses the bifurcated nature of the sequence but extends her analysis to the

Complaint of Rosamond: “‘I Find Myself Vnparadis’d’: The Integrity of Daniel’s Delia,” Cahiers elisabethains 48

(1995): 1-15. For more on Rosamond and her relation to Delia, see Wall, The Imprint of Gender, 250-60 and

Dubrow, Echoes of Desire, 75-76. 152 life, Daniel does so in great detail, blaming the sighs, tears, and poetry that use up his hot, moist young blood. As my conclusion shows, Daniel’s aging of his sonneteer persona enables the beginning of his literary career and the pursuit of greater generic challenges. That is, a female hand inscribes this aging of the poet that allows him to receive her patronage and to write in higher forms of verse. With this conclusion in mind, I focus on the first edition of Delia in 1592.

However, it is necessary to note that over twenty of its poems had already been published in the

1591 pirated version of Astrophil and Stella, a fact that Daniel apologized for at the beginning of his first authorized book of poetry.29 Although the sonnets in 1591 are not in the same order as in

1592, the aging theme is already present, indicating Daniel had this physicality in mind early on.

The first few sonnets in the 1592 Delia cast the entire sequence as a record of the poet’s sighing, which has wasted his youth by using up his blood. Unlike Petrarch, who scatters his past sighs, Daniel sums up his “dear expenses of…youth” (Sonne 1, 9) in a kind of accounting book: “Here I unclasp the book of my charged soul, / Where I have cast th’accounts of all my care” (5-6).30 For Christopher Warley, Daniel’s opening poem literalizes Sidney’s “Reasons audit,” revealing a “strain between an ideal nobility and a group of writers who associate themselves and their distinct social position with market exchange.”31 For my part, I would like to pay special attention to the bodily expenses that this book is meant to record. “Here,” the speaker says, “have I summed my sighs, here I enrol / How they were spent for thee; look what they are” (7-8). Closely linking poems and spent sighs, the sonneteer suggests that paper and ink

29 Sir Philip Sidney, His Astrophel and Stella (London, 1591). STC 22536. The sonnets are attributed to S.D.

30 All quotations from Daniel’s Delia are taken from Geoffrey G. Hiller and Peter L. Groves, eds., Samuel Daniel:

Selected Poetry and A Defense of Rhyme (Asheville: Pegasus Press-University of North Carolina, 1998) and are cited parenthetically.

31 Warley, Sonnet Sequences and Social Distinction in Renaissance England, 98-99. 153 capture the airy essence of his passion for Delia’s examination. He then invites her to interact with the sequence in a physical way: “cross my cares ere greater sums arise” (12). In other words, Delia should cross out each sighing sonnet as she reads them, repaying the humoral debts they record with warm affection.

The second sonnet addresses this book of sighs itself, in the fashion of Spenser’s “Goe little booke” from the Shepheardes Calender or the ending of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde.

The speaker sends his book to the lady to “Sigh out a story of her cruel deeds” (5) and to “Say her disdain hath dried up my blood, / And starved you, in succors still denying” (9-10). That sighing was thought to cost a drop of blood in fanning the heart explains how Delia’s disdain could dry up his blood, as well as how the previous sonnet could consider his sighs as expenses.

That is, the second poem glosses the “dear expenses of my youth” catalogued in the first sonnet: the sighs and poems did not just occur in the poet’s youth—they cost him some of that youth too.

While these opening sonnets look back on the aging that has already occurred, the remaining sonnets describe how old age was actually written on the poet’s body. In Sonnet 4, the speaker’s skin becomes a book, where “Delia her self, and all the world view / Best in my face, how cares hath tilled deep furrows” (7-8). These furrows indicate the dryness and wrinkles that come with age, while also suggesting a kind of inscription has taken place, writing being a sort of carving. In Sonnet 20, the young poet’s blood has dried up, prompting him to call for death: “For all too long on earth my fancy dotes, / Whilst my best blood my young desires seeleth” (3-4). The use of the word “seel” suggests not only that his blood authenticates (or is authenticated by) the warmth of his desire but also perhaps that it is chartered (and thus marked out by writing) for desire’s use.32 The mention of expenses in the first poem in the sequence

32 See O.E.D. v1 definitions 1.a, c, and d. 154 supports the notion that this chartering of the blood to be spent in sighing has occurred. Still, in the 1594 edition, Daniel changed line four to “Whilst age upon my wasted body steales,” eliminating the financial reference but making the lover’s aging a clearer idea.33

The very next sonnet (21) depicts the poet’s aging in gritty detail, describing how the sighs and tears that arise from his heart dry up his youthful moisture:

These sorrowing sighs, the smokes of mine annoy,

These tears, which heat of sacred flame distils,

Are these due tributes that my faith doth pay

Unto the tyrant; whose unkindness kills.

I sacrifice my youth, and blooming years

At her proud feet, and she respects not it;

My flower untimely’s withered with my tears

And winter woes, for spring of youth unfit.

(1-8)

The heat in his heart fanned by his sighs evaporates his humors, which rise up to his head to cool and condense into tears. These distilled tears and the sighs that accompany them are the tributes of warm blood his passions pay to Delia. But the lover’s reserves of moisture are not unlimited, as he indicates in the next quatrain where he states that he sacrifices his youth by sorrowing in this way. Tears in particular desiccate him, leaving a poor wintry shell of a sonneteer behind.

Perhaps bizarre to modern ears, the poem’s complex anatomy reminds one of how different the

Renaissance’s understanding of the physicality of love and composition could be from today’s.

33 The Sonnet is now numbered 21. See Delia and Rosamond augmented (London: [By James Roberts and Edward

Allde] for Simon Waterson, and are to be sold in Paules Church-yarde at the signe of the Crowne, 1594), sig. C3. 155

In the sonnets that follow, Daniel suggests that this payment of youth and verse has gone on for some time, producing the poems we are reading. In Sonnet 26, the lover’s heart is slain despite its “privilege of faith” signed with “blood and three years witness” (5-6), an allusion to the spending of blood in sighing and the “signing” that the sonnets have performed in describing this process. In the 1594 edition Daniel adds a new sonnet (numbered 17) that reinforces this connection between poetry and aging, indicating its importance to him at the start of his career:

Why should I sing in verse, why should I frame

These sad neglected notes for her dear sake?

Why should I offer up unto her name

The sweetest sacrifice my youth can make?

(1-4)34

As in Wroth, “framing” refers to the composing of poetry, especially of sonnets that perfectly frame a physical portrait of their poet within their rectangular dimensions. The “sweetest sacrifice” depicted by this particular portrait includes the sighs and tears that arise from his heart and cost him his moisture.

In response to this wasting of his youth, the poet takes revenge on Delia by imagining her in old age, the aforementioned volta of the sequence identified by other critics:

I once may see when years shall wreck my wrong,

When golden hairs shall change to silver wire,

And those bright rays that kindle all this fire

Shall fail in force, their working not so strong.

(Sonnet 30, 1-4)

34 Quoted from Hiller and Groves, Samuel Daniel: Selected Poetry and a Defense of Rhyme, 288. 156

Ironically, however, even as Delia ages, the heat in the poet’s heart continues unabated, not giving way to the coldness of age that one would expect. This is true also of his verse, whose

“fiery heat” he predicts will not allow “her glory [to] pass, / But Phoenix-like shall make her live anew” (13-14). The initial implication is that, like Medea’s reinvigoration of Jason’s father, the lover has sacrificed his own salad days to grant the beloved eternal youth, albeit in verse. But in

Sonnet 33 the speaker declares that, “Though spent thy flame,” Delia will still find in him “the heat remaining” (6): “The world shall find this miracle in me, / That fire can burn, when all the matter’s spent” (9-10). “Matter” here refers not just to the lady’s beauty, the matter of his poem, but also to the humoral moistness dried out by his heart’s flame and poetic inspiration. Even with the loss of this matter (in particular the blood), his heart burns on, making her repent that she scorned his desiccating tears when she herself is dried by wintry age (13-14).

Daniel uses this survival of the heated heart to render his poetic physicality particularly

English. Like Sidney and Constable, Daniel cannot resist comparing himself to Petrarch:

Sonnet 35

Thou canst not dye whilst any zeal abound

In feeling harts, that can conceive these lines;

Though thou a Laura hast no Petrarch found,

In base attire, yet clearly Beauty shines.

And I, though borne in a colder clime,

Doe feel mine inward heat as great, I know it;

He never had more faith, although more rhyme;

I love as well, though he could better show it.

But I may add one feather to thy fame 157

To help her flight throughout the fairest Ile;

And if my penne could more enlarge thy name,

Then shouldst thou live in an immortal style.

But though that Laura better limned be,

Suffice, thou shalt be loved as well as she.

Here the ghost of Petrarch returns, to be exorcised differently than in Sidney, who had cast out his sighs and tears with a physicality of oral composition. Daniel, for his part, accepts Petrarch’s physicality, but ironically uses it to demonstrate the superiority of his love. Although the poet admits that he is inferior to Petrarch in poetic skill, he insists that because Petrarch is from Italy, a warmer country, he should be expected to be warmer in terms of his humors. Daniel here follows the geohumoralism mentioned in my discussion of Greville.35 However, since the poet’s sighing heart generates greater heat than the warmer Petrarch’s, this must mean he loves Delia more than Petrarch loved Laura. Poetic physicality thus marks a kind of humoral anxiety of influence.36

Daniel also absorbs a French influence into his poetic physicality. In Sonnet 36, the speaker tells Delia not to lament the circulation of his “papers” (1) produced by his “wits” and the “chastest flame that ever “warmèd heart” (3-4), since Delia’s name is “graved in marble” (8) by his sonnets. These poems will “entomb those eyes, that have redeemed / Me from the vulgar, thee from all obscureness” (11-12). Here the sonnet becomes a sort of grave, a significant idea in Du Bellay’s Les Antiquitez de Rome. Du Bellay’s sonnet sequence was translated by Spenser as the Ruines of Rome and published in 1591, the same year as the edition of Astrophil and Stella

35 See Floyd-Wilson, English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama.

36 Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence. 158 containing Daniel’s sonnets.37 Confirming this Du Bellayan (and likely Spenserian influence, since these poems are new in 1592) is the very next sonnet, which speaks of “those walls the which ambition reared” (2) that now lie “entombed… / within themselves” (3-4). Superior to such ruined edifices, the poet’s “happy pen” (8) creates for Delia a poetic monument that “no barbarous hand” (5) can similarly spoil.

Strikingly, though, Daniel never once mentions the hand of the sonneteer. Instead, the sequence invests power in Delia’s hand, which bears the speaker’s life—and literary art—in its grasp. Most of the sonnets that portray Delia’s hand as powerful are present in the 1591-pirated edition of Astrophil and Stella. However, those poems on the lady’s hand that are new to the

1592 Delia depict her hand either writing or acting in a literary context. This fact suggests that, unlike the poet’s aging, Daniel incorporated the lady’s hand into his model of poetic physicality only after he wrote the sonnets included in the 1591 Astrophil and Stella. For instance, in the new Sonnet 10, the sonneteer views Delia’s brow and finds “written…the sentence of my death, /

In unkind letters; wrought she cares no how” (3-4). In Sonnet 38, another poem new in 1592, the poet is drowning like Leander and calls for rescue:

To save thine own, stretch out the fairest hand.

Stretch out the fairest hand a pledge of peace—

That hand that darts so right, and never misses;

I’ll not revenge old wrongs, my wrath shall cease;

For that which gave me wounds, Ile give it kisses.

37 See Eric MacPhail, “The Roman Tomb or the Image of the Tomb in Du Bellay’s Antiquitez,” Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 48.2 (1986): 359-72. On the influence of Ruines on Shakespeare, see A. Kent Hieatt,

“The Genesis of Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Spenser’s Ruines of Rome: By Bellay,” PMLA 98.5 (1983): 800-14. 159

Once let the Ocean of my cares find shore,

That thou be pleased, and I may sigh no more.

(8-14)

The “old wrongs” that he promises to cease revenging, I suggest, are the aging she has inflicted on him, and for which he has visualized her in her own elderly years. By referring to the ocean in which he drowns, the lover suggests the tears he ceaselessly sheds, while in the last line he begs to be relieved of the sighing that is also draining his blood. All this takes place within the story told by Musaeus in a poem that the Renaissance considered to be most ancient. In other words, the sonneteer wishes to be brought not only out of his suffering but also out of ignominy, so as to gain everlasting poetic fame after age has long finished taking its toll on him.

This wish for poetic immortality becomes clear in the tour de force of Sonnet 39, also new in the authorized edition of Delia. Whereas the previous poem had portrayed the sonneteer as a character in Marlowe’s contemporaneous epyllion, in this poem we are in the realm of epic:

Read in my face, a volume of despairs,

The wailing Iliads of my tragic woe,

Drawn with my blood, and printed with my cares,

Wrought by her hand, that I have honored so;

Who whilst I burn, she singes at my soul’s wrack,

Looking a loft from turret of her pride;

There my soul’s tyrant joys her, in the sack

Of her own seat, whereof I made her guide.

There doe these smokes that from affliction rise

Serve as an incense to a cruel dame, 160

A Sacrifice thrice grateful to her eyes,

Because their power serve to exact the same.

Thus ruins she, to satisfy her will,

The Temple, where her name was honored still.

Astrophil had asked Stella to read and pity his tale in Sonnet 45, but here the story is written by the lady herself and read by the poet’s audience. What is especially threatening to the sonneteer is the fact that the lady is already an epic poet, while he is still working in the lower genre of the sonnet sequence. Realizing this threat physically is the tremendous suffering that the sonneteer undergoes here, inflicted by the materiality of writing. First, the lines of Delia’s epic text are drawn with the blood that wastes away as he ages. These wrinkles and the cares he is imprinted with are wrought by her hand, as if she is the one turning the vise of the printing press upon his body. This violent, rather than erotic, image of printing is exceeded only by the destruction of

Troy that is another symbol for his physical suffering. The “smokes that from affliction rise” and that serve as “incense” recall the fires of Troy, while also standing for the sighing that is costing him his blood. Finally, the Temple that Delia “ruins” suggests not only Classical temples but also the poet’s tortured body. Figuratively the poet’s Temple burns; literally, his body burns with the vital heat from his heart.

This sonnet is the climactic realization of the growing notion that the lady’s hand inscribes the poet’s aging. As the speaker declares earlier in Sonnet 20: “This is her laurel and her triumph’s prize, / To tread me down with foot of her disgrace” (9-10). In other words, the poet’s poetic physicality is produced by the lady who gains the laurel he would seem to seek in his efforts to immortalize her. Like Constable, then, Daniel suggests where he intends to take his career by associating a higher genre and poetic fame with the lady’s hand, while growing old 161 himself in the lower genre of the sonnet sequence. Further recalling Constable, Daniel credits the lady’s hand with inspiring his own verse through the music she plays in Sonnet 47:

Like as the Lute that joys or else dislikes,

As is his art that plays upon the same,

So sounds my Muse according as she strikes

On my hart strings high tuned unto her fame.

Her touch doth cause the warble of the sound,

Which here I yield in lamentable wise,

A wailing descant on the sweetest ground,

Whose due reports give honor to her eyes.

Else harsh my style, untunable my muse;

Hoarse sounds the voice that prayseth not her name;

If any pleasing relish here I use,

Then judge the world her beauty gives the same.

O happy ground that makes the music such,

And blessed hand that gives so sweet a touch!

The sonnet also recalls Wyatt’s poem “Blame not my lute,” in which the poet asserts his mastery over his instrument against a lady who is not pleased to hear him sing her inconstancy: “Blame not my Lute! for he must sound / Of this or that as liketh me” (1-2).38 However, for Daniel the lady’s hand decides what sounds the poet makes. The sonnet also plays with the convention of praising the lady’s musical skill, as in Constable’s poem on the “miracle” discussed above,

38 Quoted from R. A. Rebholz, Sir Thomas Wyatt: The Complete Poems (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978),

129. 162 where Diana’s lute playing revives his dead heart. Whereas Constable and others praise the woman’s musical playing and its effect on their passions, Daniel collapses this exchange into the direct action of hand on heart.

In Astrophil and Stella, the transition from speech to writing takes place within a single poem; in Delia, the transformation takes place across several sonnets. This difference occurs because Daniel depicts the lover’s poetry as an exchange between the lady’s hand and his body, while Sidney portrays writing as emerging from within Astrophil’s own physicality. Or in other words, whereas Astrophil writes from his heart and then gives the poem to Stella to utter, Delia writes and manipulates the lover’s body herself, and then he orally expresses her praise, as in the previous poem, before writing it down in the next: “For God forbid I should my papers blot /

With mercenary lines, with servile pen, / Praising virtues in them that have them not” (5-7).

Again, the poet’s physicality is specifically native: “Avon rich in fame, though poor in waters, /

Shall have my song, where Delia hath her seat” (11-12). The virtues that lie within Delia and especially in her hand verify Daniel’s poetry as English and save him from blotting and servility.

Not wishing the respect either of the public (“Theaters”) or the powerful (“the Great”) he is content with pleasing his patroness. Surprisingly, then, the sequence ends with a vow of silence:

“I say no more, I fear I said too much” (14). The chain of poetic physicality introduced just a few sonnets before is broken, and the lady’s hand seems to play on his heartstrings no longer. It would seem as if it is time for the English sonneteer to proceed to a new genre and physical mode of composition.

Conclusion

While Constable’s poetic physicality is a private manuscript performance, like Sidney’s,

Daniel’s model was crucial to beginning his public career. The 1592 edition of Delia begins 163 with Daniel apologizing to the Countess of Pembroke for the printing of his poems with Sidney’s the year before in the pirated Astrophil and Stella. Claiming that his own poems were published without his consent as well, Daniel explains how they are products of his youth that age must leave behind, as they themselves suggest:

Right honorable, although I had rather desired 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 indescrition 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.39

In the final sonnet of his sequence, Daniel similarly consecrates himself to silence. The poetic physicality in Delia, then, shows what Daniel tells Herbert: that he has aged but also that he still possesses the fire of poetic creation. For in explaining that the poems in the 1591 Astrophil and

Stella were uncorrected, he invites Herbert to note which sonnets are new. As I have shown, many of these new poems emphasize the lady’s hand as a poetic icon, advertising Daniel’s interest in taking on greater literary challenges under the guiding hand of a female patron.

By the 1594 edition, Daniel had received this patronage from the Countess. Now he begins his volume not with an apology but with a dedication:

Sith only thou hast deigned to raise them higher,

Vouchsafe now to accept them as thine own,

Begotten by thy hand and my desire,

Wherein my zeal and thy great might is shown.

39 Quoted from Hiller and Groves, Samuel Daniel: Selected Poetry and A Defense of Rhyme, 30. 164

(11-14)40

Rather than a product of his misspent youth, the poems are now the product of a union between the patron’s and the poet’s powers. Symbolizing this union is the sonnet’s interlaced rhyme scheme. In almost all of the sonnets in Delia, Daniel uses a “Shakespearean” rhyme scheme, but here he adopts a “Spenserian” one that suggests the intertwining of Herbert’s and his physicalities. A lot had obviously changed in the years between 1592 and 1594. As Wendy

Wall notes, the 1594 edition included Daniel’s name for the first time, while enlarging the titles of his poems, which now include the tragic poem Cleopatra.41 Although Daniel’s claim that his poetry was begotten by his patroness’s hand is conventional in dedications, his careful plotting of the lady’s hand as an icon in 1592 suggests that this sonnet marks the fulfillment of his individual model of poetic physicality and authorship in the way he had first envisioned it.

Daniel’s Delia, then, represents the moment at which poetic physicality in the sonnet sequence becomes a public matter from first to last. The next chapter will continue to follow this trend, examining the subsequent sequences that were intended from the beginning for publication, rather than circulating earlier in manuscript. Like Constable’s and Daniel’s sonnets, the sequences of 1593 and 1594 employ the physicality of composition as a tool to support their author’s ambitions, albeit in a different way. Whereas Constable and Daniel had carefully structured their sequences around the theme of aging and the icon of the lady’s hand in order to gain patronage, the authors of these sequences all aim for diversity and explicitly address a wider readership—an audience that is already familiar, too, with other sequences. By displaying an

40 Quoted from Hiller and Groves, Samuel Daniel: Selected Poetry and A Defense of Rhyme, 227.

41 Wall, The Imprint of Gender, 75-77. 165 array of passions and models of poetic physicality in this way, the sonneteers in question attempt to gain both recognition and distinction on what was fast becoming a crowded sonnet stage. 166

Chapter 5:

English Sighs and Sonnet Tears:

Seeking Recognition and Distinction in a Crowded Field

In the previous chapter, the tension between passionate expression and controlled composition played itself out between the poet and his patron. That is, while the sonneteer aged, wept, and sighed, a powerful female figure led him onward with her guiding hand to higher genres. Whereas this relationship between poet and patron was the determining force behind the poetic physicalities of Constable and Daniel, it is not so for those poets who write after them, and who first take advantage of the growing fashion for sonnet sequences. Published in 1593,

Thomas Lodge’s Phillis, Giles Fletcher the Elder’s Licia, and Barnabe Barnes’s Parthenophil and Parthenophe stand out from the sequences discussed in previous chapters in that they appear complete in print, rather than circulating earlier in manuscript (Sidney’s and Constable’s) or being first published unauthorized and only in part (Daniel’s). None of these 1593 sequences would be reprinted. Nevertheless, their experimentation with lyric forms and poetic physicality reveals 1593 as a turning point for the English Renaissance sonnet sequence. Rather than the relationship between the poet and an intimate circle, or between a poet and his patron, the relationships among English sonneteers and between them and their new audience in print become the dominant factors influencing models of poetic physicality. This is also true of

Michael Drayton’s Idea, first published the next year in 1594. As I show in the second half of this chapter, Drayton revises and republishes his sequence both to separate himself from other poets and to present an authorial persona to his readers that sums up a life of passion and writing. 167

As the literary marketplace becomes saturated with sonnet sequences, sonneteers must negotiate the tension between passionate expression and controlled composition in new ways.

To reconcile these two sides of their authorship, sonneteers after Daniel and Constable express a renewed interest in a dichotomy I term “recognition and distinction.” By “recognition” I mean the sonneteer’s goal of taking a place in a growing pantheon of English writers by imitating their models of poetic physicality. By “distinction” I mean the contrasting goal of displaying new, unique models of poetic physicality that will demonstrates the greatest passion and so attract readers. As this chapter shows, the tension between these two goals exists in tandem with the tension between controlled composition and passionate expression, respectively. First, by incorporating the physicality of other poets, sonneteers such as Lodge point to their control over their authorship and their wish to be identified with successful writers such as Spenser. Second, by seeking new and ever more extreme models of poetic physicality, sonneteers like Fletcher authenticate the distinctive passions of their sonneteer personae.

By its nature, of course, the passion of love prompts a search for distinctive models of poetic physicality, as well as lyric forms. As Katharine Craik and Adrian Johns argue, there is an important Renaissance discourse concerning reading’s effects on the passions and the humors that underlie them.1 As we have seen, because of its formal characteristics and erotic subject matter, the sonnet sequence is a special site for poets to inquire into these effects and also those of writing. Introducing his sequence, Wittes Pilgrimage (1605?), to his patron, Philip Herbert, the Earl of Montgomery, John Davies of Hereford declares:

Yet, if therein be ought that stirs thy bloud

To boile with heat for thy wisht health unfitt,

1 Craik, Reading Sensations in Early Modern England; Johns, “The physiology of reading in Restoration England.” 168

I have it mixt I hope with so much good

As thou shalt have no hurt by tasting it.

(2:4)

In Chapter 3, I discussed George Puttenham’s poetic prescription for emotional distress. That is, the poem should have something to do with the passion that is perplexing either the writer or the reader. In the same discussion, Puttenham uses this principle to explain why love poetry is often so varied in its strategies:

And because love is of all other humane affections the most puissant and

passionate, and most generall to all sortes and ages of men and women, so as

whether it be of the yong or old or wise or holy, or high estate or low, none ever

could truly bragge of any exemption in that case: it requireth a forme of Poesie

variable, inconstant, affected, curious and most witty of any others, whereof the

joyes were to be uttered in one sorte, the sorrowes in an other, and by the many

formes of Poesie, the many moodes and panges of lovers, throughly to be

discovered: the poore soules sometimes praying, beseeching, sometime

honouring, avancing, praising: an other while railing, reviling, and cursing: then

sorrowing, weeping, lamenting: in the ende laughing, rejoysing & solacing the

beloved againe, with a thousand delicate devises, odes, songs, elegies, ballads,

sonets and other ditties, mooving one way and another to great compassion.2

Puttenham’s physiological analysis of love poetry explains why sonneteers often included other types of poems in sonnet sequences, such as songs, and also why they sometimes followed a sequence with a complaint or epithalamion.

2 Puttenham, Art of English Poesy, 133-34. 169

Since love produces so many different passions in the lover, it demands different models of physicality as well as lyric forms. Each of the sonnet sequences discussed in this chapter fills

Puttenham’s prescription for variety in this dual way. Lodge, with whom I begin, prefers to borrow his poetic physicality from other poets, namely Sidney, Daniel, and Spenser. Through flattering imitation, Lodge seeks recognition as a fellow sonneteer in what he imagines as an

English pastoral field. Fletcher, who publishes his sequence anonymously, prefers to seek distinction, criticizing Daniel and Lodge and drawing on Latin poets for his poetic physicality.

Competing with other sequences by including more lyric forms, Fletcher plays with his readers’ expectations and keeps them guessing as to his identity. Barnabe Barnes includes the most varied lyric forms and models of physicality, which include the first solid attempts to imitate

Sidney’s sonnets about composition. Barnes, then, seeks distinction and recognition to the hilt, presenting both the most extreme passions and the clearest appeals to the Sidney circle.

Drayton also wishes his sonneteer persona to be recognized alongside those of Sidney and others, and he, too, includes a variety of physicalities to suggest love’s passion. However, a number of qualities separate his Idea from the sequences of 1593. First, Drayton publishes his sequence multiple times into the first half of the seventeenth century. Second, he continually revises his sonnets and their poetic physicality, with very different results each time. While

Fletcher, Lodge, and Barnes all make use of Petrarchan sighs and tears, Drayton minimizes these marks of physicality in subsequent editions. This is one strategy by which Drayton, like Sidney, seeks distinction for his sonnet sequence. But Drayton also carefully adds poems to Idea over time to broaden its physicality. At the start, Drayton meant these additional poems to emphasize an originality and Englishness, but in the end he suggests that this variety represents the experience of passions in a lifelong poetic career, now viewed from the vantage of old age. 170

I

Thomas Lodge’s Phillis

The reputation of Phillis has not fared well in modern times with the discovery that most of its sonnets are translations of Desportes and other French and Italian sonneteers.3 However, charges of plagiarism against Lodge have obscured his engagement with the poetic physicality that English sonneteers were discovering. His “Induction” to the sequence advertises his part in this process—or rather drama—of discovery. Responding to Nashe’s introduction to Astrophil and Stella, Lodge visualizes the sonnet sequence as a performative genre: “I that obscur’d have fled the Sceane of Fame… / Now mount the Theater of this our age, / To plead my faith and

Cupids cursed rage” (sig. B).4 Like Astrophil, Lodge’s sonneteer persona Damon mounts a paper stage, where action revolves around scenes of writing. And this is not the only Sidneyan mark that Lodge incorporates into his poetic physicality. In Sonnet VIII, identifying an erotic frisson in the act of composition that also recalls Sidney, Damon praises Phillis’s eyes, brow, and lips and then declares “when I touch and tast as others do, / I then shall wright and you shall wonder to” (sig. Cv, 11-12).5 In Sonnet XX, he recalls Astrophil’s comparison of himself to other poets:

3 L. E. Kastner, “Thomas Lodge as an Imitator of the Italian Poets,” Modern Language Review 2.2 (1907): 155-61;

Marion Grubb, “Lodge’s Borrowing from Ronsard,” Modern Language Notes 45.6 (1930): 357-60; Walter F.

Staton, Jr., “A Lodge Borrowing from Watson,” Renaissance News 14.1 (1961): 3-6; John Holmes, “Thomas

Lodge’s Amours: The Copy-Text for Imitations of Ronsard in Phillis,” Notes and Queries (2006): 55-57.

4 All quotations from Phillis are taken from the following facsimile edition: The Complete Works of Thomas Lodge

[1580-1623?] (New York: Russell & Russell, 1963), Vol. II of IV, and are cited parenthetically by Renaissance sig. numbers and my own line numbers in the case of the sonnets.

5 This is a twelve-line sonnet, so these lines are the concluding couplet. 171

Some praise the lookes, and others praise the lockes,

Of their faire Queenes, in love with curious wordes:

Some laud the breast where love his treasure locks,

All like the eie that life and love affordes.

(sig. D3v, 1-4)

Like Astrophil, Damon contrasts their poetic strategies with his own individual course: “But none of these fraile beauties and unstable / Shall make my pen ryot in pompous stile” (5-6).

Nevertheless, despite this protestation of originality, Lodge is clearly receptive to Sidney’s emphasis on the bodily and material realities of writing.

Lodge, though, also blends other English influences into his poetic physicality. The previous chapter argued that Daniel’s poetic physicality centers on the lady’s hand, as well as the sighs and tears that age the poet prematurely; Lodge’s tribute to Daniel in Phillis confirms this thesis. In the “Induction,” he directs his sonnets to “Kisse Delias hand for her sweet Prophets sake” (sig. Bv), then acknowledges how “not affected but well couched teares…Have power, have worth, a Marble minde to shake” (sig. Bv). As with Sidney, Lodge goes so far as to make

Daniel’s tears an important part of his own physicality. In “An Elegie,” the speaker beseeches wind and water to allow his poems to reach his beloved Phillis:

A faint farewell, with trembling hand I tender,

And with my teares my papers are distained,

Which closed up, my heart in them I render,

To tell thee how at parting I complained.

Vouchsafe his message that doth bring farewell,

And for my sake let him with beautie dwell. 172

(sig. E3v)

The poet’s hand does not stand as an icon of poetic control, as it will in Chapman and Spenser; instead, its trembling demonstrates the same passions testified to by sighs and tears, the latter of which stain his poem. For Lodge, tears are a constant accompaniment to composition. In Sonnet

III, Damon describes how “every paper” his muse sends to beauty “in tract of sable teares bringes wofull newes” (sig. B3, 6-7). And in Sonnet XXX, Damon tells Phillis that she paints his

“verse with Pallas learned flowers,” while she wrings his “hart with weeping sighes” (sig. G2,

10, 12). Here Lodge strikingly combines the two main aspects of Petrarchan physicality into one synaesthastic experience; nevertheless, the physicality he offers recognizably builds on Daniel’s, for like him Lodge soon takes up issues of aging, as in Sonnet XXI where he fears the assaults of his love might “call on timelesse age” (sig. Fv, 12).

The strongest influence on Lodge, though, is Spenser, particularly his Colin Clout of The

Shepheardes Calender. Again in his “Induction,” Lodge directs his sonnets, “Truce-men in your sighing weedes,” to flee if they come “where learned Colin feedes / His lovely flocke,” since his poems would be “But mistes before so bright a sunne, / Who hath the Palme for deepe invention wunne” (sig. Bv). In his sonnets themselves, Damon seems to live and write in Spenser’s pastoral landscape. True, the names of sonnet mistresses, such as Delia and Idea, often suggest pastoral characters, and Richard Barnefield’s sequence and William Smith’s Chloris (1596) also take place in a pastoral setting. Lodge, however, is the first to present his characters as shepherds specifically. He also stands apart from these other sonneteers by incorporating the pastoral form itself into his sequence, dividing the forty sonnets of Phillis in half with three poems identified as eclogues. 173

Fittingly, then, Lodge makes his poetic physicality a pastoral one in the Spenserian mold.

In Sonnet IIII, Damon declares:

The moning lines which weeping I have written,

And writing red unto my ruthful sheepe,

And reading sent with teares that never sitten,

To my loves Queene, that hath my heart in keepe:

Have made my Lambkins, lay them down and sigh:

But Phillis sittes, and reades, and cals them trifles:

Oh heavens why clime not happie lines so high,

To rent that ruthlesse heart, that all hearts rifles?

None wrightes with truer faith, or greater love,

Yet out alas I have no power to move.

(sig. B3v, 5-14)

Damon writes poems that are marked by his tears, one half of Petrarchan physicality. His lambs enact the other half, sighing in response to his reading of his poems aloud. However, when

Phillis reads them, she only regards them with disdain, disregarding the tears that stain his poems and testify to his passions. Here a physicality of writing replaces the usual pastoral physicality of pipe and voice in song. Indeed, in Sonnet XIIII, Lodge seems to acknowledge the incongruous presence of pen and paper in his pastoral landscape by switching to a different image of writing:

I wroat in Mirrhaes barcke, and as I wroate,

Poore Mirrha wept because I wroat forsaken:

T’was of thy pride I soong in weeping noate, 174

When as hir leaves greate moane for pittie maken.

The falling fountaines from the mountains falling,

Cride out ah-las, so faire and bee so cruel?

And Babling Echo never ceased callinge,

Phillis disdaine is fitte for none but truthlesse.

The rising pines wherein I had engraved,

Thy memorie consulting with the winde:

Are trucemen to thy heart, and thoughts depraved,

And say thy kind should not bee so unkinde.

But (out ah-las) so fell is Phillis pheerlesse,

That she hath made hir Damon welnie tearlesse.

(sig. C4v)

Here Damon employs the pathetic fallacy, as the tree (Mirrha) that he scratches “forsaken” upon weeps in sympathy by bleeding sap. The leaves of the tree also moan in pity, while the falling fountains and their echoes cry out against Phillis, as well. Cementing the link to Spenser’s

Shepheardes Calender is the fact that the trees are “trucemen,” or interpreters to her heart, just as the sonnets themselves are “trucemen” to Colin in the passage from the Induction quoted above.6

Thus, the poetic physicality of these poems is not simply an effort to convince the lady or a larger audience of the truth of Lodge’s passion, but is more importantly an attempt to make an authorial connection with Daniel and Spenser through imitation of their poetic physicality—the sincerest form of flattery a sonneteer can offer. Lodge, for his part, suggests that if readers wish to fully understand Daniel’s, Spenser’s, and even Sidney’s poetic personae, then they need to

6 See O.E.D. “truchman.” 175 understand his as well. Thus, his borrowing of their poetic physicality is a carefully controlled attempt to increase the marketability of his sequence. Phillis ultimately demonstrates that

English poets saw their models of poetic physicality not just as means to display passion but as authorial signatures, to be recognized and invoked, an important notion we will see later at work in Barnes’s sequence.

Giles Fletcher the Elder’s Licia

While Lodge seeks recognition among other English poets, Giles Fletcher the Elder prefers distinction, competing with—and even outright challenging—Daniel and Lodge with his multitude of lyric forms and Latinate models of poetic physicality. Following his sonnets to

Licia, Fletcher includes an ode, a dialogue between the sea-nymphs Doris and Galatea translated out of Lucian, the paradox poem “A Lovers Maze,” three elegies, and a complaint uttered by

Richard III. These are more forms than were included in Astrophil and Stella (sonnets and songs), Diana (only sonnets), Delia (sonnets, an ode, and a complaint), and Phillis (sonnets, pastoral poems, an ode, and a complaint). Fletcher’s competitive drive emerges most clearly in his complaint, entitled The Rising to the Crowne of Richard the third. Written by him selfe.

Richard begins by declaring “The Stage is set, for Stately matter fitte, / Three partes are past, which Prince-like acted were, / To play the fourth, requires a Kingly witte” (1-3).7 The “three parts” he refers to are Shore’s wife from the Mirror of Magistrates, Daniel’s Rosamond

(published with Delia), and Lodge’s Elstred (published with Phillis). Looking over these female complaints, Richard does not weep in sympathy but rather smiles to see male sonneteers

“Loosing their paynes and lacking still there wage. / To write of women, and of womens falles, /

7 All quotations from the poems in Licia will be taken from Lloyd E. Berry, ed., The English Works of Giles

Fletcher, the Elder (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1964) and cited parenthetically. 176

Wo are too light, for to be fortunes balles” (34-6). In having Richard attempt to outperform these three fallen women, Fletcher poses an implicit challenge to the masculine authorship of

Daniel and Lodge, declaring that while their wits may be feminine, his are “kingly” and thus more deserving of wages. His quick response to Lodge is especially telling, for his Complaint of

Elstred had only come out earlier the same year.

Fletcher also competes with Daniel and Lodge by composing fifty-two sonnets, a greater number than their fifty and forty sonnets, respectively. As the title page indicates, Licia contains

“Poemes of Love, in Honour of the admirable and singular vertues of his Lady, to the imitation of the best Latin Poets, and others.”8 Continental Latin poetry certainly influences Fletcher’s poetic physicality, making it stand apart from the preceding sequences, which have tended to be more concerned with Petrarch and Sidney. For example, in Sonnets VI, X, and XV, Fletcher follows poems by Angerianus in which painting is the primary physical image, rather than writing. Although Fletcher does sometimes seem to recall Sidney—seemingly the only English influence on his poetic physicality—he is more consistently informed by the neo-Latin poets.9

Thus, in Sonnet XXXVII, apparently following both his Continental sources and Sidney,

Fletcher makes orality an important part of his poetic physicality:

I speake (faire Licia) what my torments be:

But then my speech, too partiall doe I finde:

For hardlie words, can with those thoughts agree:

Those thoughtes that swarme, in such a troubled mind.

8 The title page is reproduced in Berry, The English Works of Giles Fletcher, the Elder, between pages 72 and 73.

For the sources of Fletcher’s sonnets, see Berry’s notes on pages 417-26, which I make use of in my discussion.

9 Internal evidence dates the sonnets to after 1591, the year of Astrophil and Stella’s publication. Berry, The English

Works of Giles Fletcher, the Elder, 55-61. 177

Then doe I vowe, my tongue shall never speake:

Nor tell my griefe, that in my heart doth lie:

But cannon-like, I then surcharg’d, doe breake,

And so my silence, worse than speech I trie.

Thus speech, or none, they both doe breed my care.

I live dismayd, and kill my heart with griefe:

In all respectes, my case alike doth fare:

To him that wants, and dare not aske reliefe.

Then you (faire Licia) soveraigne of my heart:

Read to your selfe, my anguish, and my smart.

Like Sidney’s sonnets, the poem extends an invitation to be read aloud. The lover’s lungs and voice attempt to express his heart’s thoughts, but he finds that these cannot be captured in words.

When the lover vows not to speak, he finds that his passion overwhelms his heart, so that silence is more painful than speech. As an attempt to address this dilemma, the lover offers the poem, which he asks Licia to read to herself, providing her own voice when his fails. Fletcher, then, like Wroth, uses an energia provided by a frustrated orality to demonstrate great passion, although he does not couple speaking and writing together as tightly as she.

Unlike Sidney, but like sonneteers such as Daniel, Fletcher makes sighing integral to this physicality of composition. Sonnet XXIII turns on the question of whether paper and ink can capture the passions indicated by sighing, a common Petrarchan theme as we have seen.

However, Fletcher’s poem, based on another by Angerianus, distinctively emphasizes the materiality of the poem and its unfortunate fate:

I wrote my sighs, and sent them to my love, 178

I prais’d that faire, that none ynough could praise:

But plaints, nor praises, could faire Lycia move,

Above my reach, she did her vertues raise.

And thus reply’d: False Scrawle, untrue thou art,

To faine those sighes, that no where can be found:

For halfe those praises, came not from his hart:

Whose faith and love, as yet was never found.

Thy maisters lyfe, (false Scrawle) shall be thy doome:

Because he burnes, I judge thee to the flame:

Both your attempts, deserve no better roome,

Thus at her word, we ashes both become.

Beleeve me (faire) and let my paper live:

Or be not faire, and so me freedome give.

The sonneteer tries to inscribe his sighs, but Licia declares them to be feigned and that his praise of her does not come from his heart. Her judgment that poem should be burned emphasizes his scrawl’s material existence, while alluding to the heat in his heart that causes the sighing he tried to inscribe in the first place (“Because he burns”). Despite Licia’s objection to the poem as a lie, then, it does ironically come to correspond to the lover’s inner physical state. Thus, this sonnet shows that while Lodge primarily uses poetic physicality to demonstrate a similarity between himself and other English sonneteers, Fletcher pursues a poetic physicality of composition to present a striking picture of passion before readers, a picture unseen in the English poems of

Sidney, Constable, or Daniel. This tendency toward distinction rather than recognition holds true for his poems incorporating sighs and tears, such as Sonnet XLI, based on a poem by Gruterus. 179

In his sonnet, Fletcher’s speaker tells Charon, rower to the underworld, that he must take him to the afterlife with Licia, since her coldness will moderate the heat he exhales in sighing, which would otherwise burn up air and water. Whether constructing a poetic physicality based on the materiality of the poem or a more bodily and Petrarchan model, Fletcher consistently reaches for the most extreme image.

In the prefatory letters that open the Licia quarto, Fletcher addresses the possible connections between the poetic physicality of a poem and the inner physical state of the writer, indicating the greater importance of this notion to him than to Lodge, who in his Induction as we saw above is more concerned with the physicality he finds in other sequences. In the first letter,

Fletcher offers various humoral explanations for why he composed his sonnets. To an older reader “who so wiselie after an afternoons sleepe gapes, and saith, Oh howe young men spende their time idlie,” Fletcher responds, “first, let him spende his tyme better than to sleepe:

Secondlie, he knowes not my age: I feared a hot ague, and with Tasso I was content to let my wit blood.”10 Fletcher was actually forty-seven in 1593, which explains his claim that—rather than expending youthful passion in verse (like Daniel)—he was attempting to lend warm blood to his brain in the writing of poetry and so channel the heat from a fever. Nevertheless, this explanation contradicts one he offers earlier in the letter, in which he complains that he was oppressed by religious controversy “into a fitte so melancholie, as I onely had leasure to growe passionate.”11 Contra Puttenham, Fletcher follows a Galenic rather than Paracelsian regimen of

10 Berry, The English Works of Giles Fletcher, the Elder, 76.

11 Ibid., 74-75. “And I see not why upon our dissentions I may not sit downe idle, forsake my study, and goe sing of love, as well as our Brownistes forsake the Church, and write of malice” (75). Berry notes “Just before Fletcher wrote this epistle, two of the leaders of the Brownists, Henry Barrow and John Greenwood, had been hanged at

Tyburn” (418). 180 poetic writing: one humor opposing another. Fletcher’s different explanations for the writing of his poems, especially his reference to being old, raise the question of whether he really is in love.

As he acknowledges, “a man may write of love, and not bee in love,” and he goes on in the second prefatory letter to offer multiple possibilities for Licia’s true identity.12

These opening games complement the variety of poetic physicality in the sonnets themselves, which Fletcher hopes will entertain his stated audience, the students at the Inns of

Court. His poetic physicality is meant to tickle and delight this audience in its variety, newness, and extremity of passion, rather than to build a solid literary persona for readers to connect with a name, like Lodge’s. Indeed, since Fletcher decided to publish his poems anonymously, his adoption of many entertaining poses is best seen as an attempt to deepen the mystery behind his true identity. Fletcher further distances himself from the other English sequences by displaying his knowledge of Latin and rhetorical versatility. Compared to Lodge and to Barnes, whom I discuss next, Fletcher seems little interested in being recognized among a pastoral fellowship of

English sonneteers. Perhaps for this reason he also appears less fascinated with the act of composition itself, treating it substantially only in the two sonnets quoted above, and preferring more often to create an extreme poetic physicality of sighs and tears in keeping with his Latin sources. Fletcher’s control over his sequence, then, is mainly expressed through his knowledge of these sources and his multitude of forms, rather than through poetic physicality per se, which again seems to exist for him only as a tool to play a game of distinguishing passion.

12 Berry, The English Works of Giles Fletcher, the Elder, 76. 181

Barnabe Barnes’s Parthenophe and Parthenophil

Even more than Fletcher, Barnabe Barnes follows Puttenham’s prescription of variety by embracing a multitude of lyric forms and models of poetic physicality.13 One of these attempts at an original physicality, Sonnet LXIII, was castigated for its final image in a series of imagined metamorphoses: the poet pictures himself turned into wine that flows through his mistress’s veins and past “pleasures part” (14).14 Modern criticism, on the other hand, has focused on the violent ending to the sequence: a triple sestina in which Parthenophil employs witchcraft to have his way with a frightened Parthenophe. As I go on to suggest, the extreme nature of Barnes’s poetic physicality may disturbingly anticipate this sexually violent conclusion.15 Nevertheless, despite these attempts to garner distinction for his sequence through passionate variety and violence, Barnes also seeks to portray himself as in control of his authorship in order to gain recognition from Mary Sidney and her circle. As I argue, Barnes demonstrates this control and addresses the Sidney Circle both through his manipulation of lyric forms and through a consistent adoption of Sidney’s poetic physicality.

13 On Barnes’s experimentation with forms and his introduction of some of these to English, see Philip E. Blank, Jr.,

Lyric Forms in the Sonnet Sequences of Barnabe Barnes (The Hague, Netherlands: Mouton and Co., 1974).

14 Thomas Nashe scornfully concluded that the lover would then be further turned into her urine. “[Piers Pennilesse

Respondent]: “…or if you would have anie rymes to the tune of stink-a-pisse, hee is for you; in one place of his

Parthenophil and Parthenophe wishing no other thing of Heaven but that hee might bee transformed to the Wine his

Mistres drinks, and so passe thorough her.” [Domino Bentiuole]: “Therein hee was verie ill aduisde, for so the next time his Mistres made water, he was in danger to be cast out of her fauour.” Ibid., 164. See Doyno’s defense of the conceit on page 165. On the reception of Barnes by both contemporaries and later critics, see Blank, Lyric Forms in the Sonnet Sequences of Barnabe Barnes, 27-30.

15 See Heather Dubrow’s comments on the rage and violence of this conclusion in Echoes of Desire, 64-67. 182

Petrarchan sighs and tears intersect with the act of writing throughout Barnes’s sequence, demonstrating violent passion. To take just one example, in Elegie XVI, the speaker wishes “Ah were my teares (as many writers bee) / Meere droppes of incke proceeding from my penne” (1-

2). The parenthetical comment recalls Sidney’s Sonnet 6, in which Astrophil contrasted himself to those whose ink poured out their tears. Parthenophil, like Astrophil, suggests that there is an insincerity attached to this kind of rhetoric. If he could achieve such poetic distance from his subject, then he would not be “sever’d from societie of men” (4) by his very real weeping.

Barnes here recognizes one cost of the sighs and tears of Petrarchism: they alienate the poet from society, possibly preventing him from shaping it through his poetry. As the elegy continues,

Parthenophil declares how nothing satisfies the cruel eye of his beloved Parthenophe “But blacke, and payle on body, and in face” (14). The black ink on the white page before the reader represents the dark existence and pale skin of the poet. Parthenophe, for her part, “Joyes in the paper which her prayses beares / And (for his sake that sent) that schœdule teares” (20-21). As

Barnes’s editor notes, the word “schœdule” refers to “a separate paper or slip of parchment accompanying or appended to a document, and containing explanatory or supplementary matter.”16 In other words, the poem is the equivalent of an abstract for his tears. As in Lodge, tears are a constant accompaniment to composition and a sign of the passion that motivates it.

Sighs and tears are also important in the Petrarchan sestinas that Barnes attempts, where they often serve as two of the six repeated words.17 This is the case in Sestine 3, while “tears” alone are one of the key words in Sestine 5. In Sestine 4, which is also an Echo poem, “sighs”

16 Doyno, Parthenophil and Parthenophe, 191. See also O.E.D., 2b.

17 On Barnes’s success and innovation with this form, see Blank, Lyric Forms in the Sonnet Sequences of Barnabe

Barnes, 46-48. 183 and “tears” are not included in the final words, but are still the main tools given to the sonneteer to demonstrate the violence of his passion:

I must write with teares, and sighes, before that I do so?

Eccho, do so.

But what if my teares, and sighes be to weake to remove her?

Eccho, move her.

So shall yee move huge Alpes with teares, and sighes, if you may such.

Eccho, you may such.

(7-9)

Here Echo orders him to write with a Petrarchan physicality. In response, Parthenophil questions the ability of this physicality to achieve his desired ends. Once more, the poet asks:

Then will I wrest out sighes, and wring forth teares when I do so?

Eccho, do so.

(14)

Barnes here plays on his audience’s expectation that the sonneteer’s erotic desire will not be realized in the sequence. That is, clichéd sighs and tears will not move the lady, but the violent passion that inspires them will eventually move Parthenophil to take a weeping Parthenophe through magic. Still, Barnes’s realization that Petrarchan physicality is ultimately a vain exercise does not lead him to abandon sighs and tears like Sidney. Barnes either misses the revolutionary character of Astrophil’s physical self-presentation in this regard or, more likely, prefers to keep sighs and tears in his arsenal of poetic physicality, ready to deploy them in competition with other sonneteers in order to represent the strongest passion. 184

This passionate expression contrasts with Barnes’s more calculated attempts to gain the attention of Mary Sidney and the rest of her circle. In Madrigal 14, Parthenophil responds to

Parthenophe’s scorn by declaring how his poetry places her above both Stella and Laura. Sonnet

XCV is actually written to Stella, addressed in the opening lines as “Thou bright beame- spreading loves thrise happy starre, / Th’arcadia Shepheard Astrophill’s cleare guide” (1-2). In

Canzon 2, Parthenophil sings in celebration of “Astrophill’s byrth-day” (4).18 During his song,

Stella is seen bearing “three garlanddes in her hand.” Spenser as Colin Clout is present here, too, sitting beneath an oak tree and singing praises of Eliza (41-42). In Madrigall 20, Parthenophe, like Stella, becomes ill and pants (“Sweet graces… / At her short breath, breathe short, and sigh so deepe,” 8-9). Finally, in Sonnet LXVIII, Barnes may actually refer to the manner of Sidney’s death when he compares Cupid’s arrow to “the musket in the field” that “hittes, and kills unseene, till unawares / To death the wounded man his body yeeld” (9, 10-11). Barnes’s allusion to Philip’s death—both he and his father were surprised when his wounds suddenly became gangrenous—daringly attempts to increase the intimacy between himself and the Sidneys.19

Here Barnes declares not only that he has mastered Sidney’s sonneteering (as the dual title of his sequence that recalls Sidney’s would suggest) but also that he is aware of Sidney’s martial exploits and demise—and is eager to use them to his own benefit.

18 Based on the occasion of the poem and allusions made to Irish rebels, Barnes’s editor is able to date this poem to

November 30, 1591. See Doyno, Parthenophil and Parthenophe, 197.

19 See Katherine Duncan-Jones, “Philip Sidney’s Toys,” in Sir Philip Sidney: An Anthology of

Modern Criticism, ed. Dennis Kay (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 127-146.

185

In fact, Barnes is the only sonneteer discussed so far who portrays himself in the present moment of composition like Sidney. In Sonnet XII, Parthenophil considers Parthenophe’s beauty, before suddenly revealing in the couplet that he has been trying to write a poem:

Vext with th’ assaultes of thy conceived bewtie

I restlesse on thy favors meditate:

And tho dispare full love (sometime) my suite tye

Unto those fagottes figures of my state,

Which bound with endlesse lyne by leasure wate

That happy moment of your hartes reply.

Yet by those lynes I hope to finde the gate,

Which through loves laberinth shall guide me right.

Whiles unacquainted exercise I try

Sweete solitude I shunne my lifes cheef light

And all because I would forget thee quite.

And (working that) we thinke it’s such a sinne

(As I take penne and paper for to write)

Thee to forget: that leaving I beginne.

Although Barnes’s editor notes that there is an “apparent incoherence” to this sonnet “caused by the plethora of ideas and the repetition of ‘lyne’,” the structure of the poem clearly pays homage to Sidney’s Sonnet 50.20 In Sidney’s poem the surprise had been that the poem had almost been destroyed after it was composed; here it is that the poem is almost not written at all.

Interestingly, Parthenophil also anticipates Wroth’s Pamphilia in hoping to find his way in a

20 Doyno, Parthenophil and Parthenophe, 143. 186 labyrinth of love through his sonnets, which replicate the geometry of the labyrinth through their twisting, varying rhyme schemes and rectangles of sestets and octaves.

Barnes engages Sidney’s precedent of poetic physicality even more directly in a pair of sonnets that follow not long after the one above. Earlier in the sequence, Parthenophil had signed a charter with Parthenophe that led to the losing of his heart. Sonnet XVII follows shortly after Parthenophil has complained against and ultimately accepted this fatal agreement:

How then succeedeth (that amid this woe)

Where reasons sence doth from my soule devide:

By these vaine lines my fittes be specified

Which from their endlesse Ocean dayly floe

Where was it borne whence did this humour groe?

Which long obscur’d with melancholyes mist

Inspires my gyddie braynes unpurified

So lively, with sound reasons to persist

In framing tunefull Elegies, and Hymnes

For her whose name my Sonnets note so trimmes,

That nought but her chast name so could assist:

And my muse in first tricking out her lymmes,

Found in her livelesse shadow such delight:

That yet she shadowes her, when as I write.

The opening words “How then” recall Sidney’s similar use of this phrase at the end of his sonnets, where he explains why he is able to write as well as he does—as in Sonnet 4, when he copies Stella’s face and the Love and Beauty he finds there, or in Sonnet 74, where his lips are 187 inspired by Stella’s kiss. Barnes’s explanation, though, focuses more on the internal humoral physiology of the poet. That is, the poet’s sonnets originate from his brain affected by the melancholy that rises there as a vapor. While Barnes’s sonnet may be more humoral than

Sidney’s, there is the familiar ingredient of the lady’s name. Due to the flexibility of syntax, his melody can either be said to “trim” (deck) her name or the reverse. In Astrophil and Stella,

Stella’s name, spoken aloud, was also an inspiration to writing.

Finally, the next sonnet (XVIII) explores the physicality of oral composition that Sidney had made such a large part of his Astrophil persona:

Write write, helpe helpe, sweet muse and never cease

In endlesse labours pennes and papers tyer

Untill I purchase my long-wish’t desire:

Braynes with my reason never rest in peace,

Wast breathelesse wordes, and breathfull sighes increase,

Till of my woes remorsefull you espye her,

Till she with me, be burnt in equall fier.

I never will from labour wittes release

My sences never shall in quiet rest

Till thou be pitifull, and love alike:

And if thou never pitie my distresses

Thy crueltie with endless force shall strike

Upon my witts, to ceaseless writs addrest:

My cares (in hope of some revenge) this lesses. 188

Here Barnes connects the labor of writing with the breathless speech and sighing that his poems encode. Like the previous poem, the sense that composition is occurring in the present of the poem and on into the immediate future assures the energia that Sidney calls for in the Defense.

In each of these poems, then, Barnes tries to both identify with Sidney’s recognizable poetic physicality and demonstrate the distinctively violent passion possessed by his sonneteer persona. Thus, in the ending to the last poem, Parthenophil goes further than Astrophil by threatening revenge against Parthenophe if she does not bend to his desires, a threat of violence realized in the rape at the end of the sequence. Sidney had taken Petrarch’s poetic physicality, distilled the moment of oral composition out of a medium of sighs and tears, and then emphasized the erotic nature of his resulting model of poetic physicality. Barnes takes Sidney’s oral and erotic model to its extreme conclusion. His multiple lyric forms, sighs and tears, and

Sidneyan physicality allow for both passionate expression and virtuosic control over the form of the sonnet sequence. Along with the shocking ending to his sequence, these various elements demonstrate Barnes’s intention to go beyond not just Petrarch but Sidney himself.

II

Unlike Lodge, Fletcher, and Barnes, Drayton revised and republished his sonnet sequence throughout his long laureate career. As Marcy North notes, these facts make Idea anomalous among the sonnet sequences of the 1590s.21 Even Daniel, who also revised his sequence, did not make nearly as many changes as Drayton. Between 1594 and 1619 Drayton issued six editions of Idea with variations: in 1594, 1599, 1600, 1602, 1605, and 1619. Many times his changes were substantial (eliminating twenty-one poems and adding nineteen in 1599, adding ten poems in 1619). Sometimes they were more minor (adding just one poem in 1602). Daniel, in contrast,

21 North, “The Sonnets and Book History.” 189 only added ten poems to Delia over all his years of writing. Drayton’s Idea, then, provides a unique opportunity to study an author’s development of his poetic physicality over a virtual lifetime.

Critics have commented on Drayton’s different tendencies in revising. Kathleen

Tillotson and Bernard H. Newdigate, Drayton’s modern editors, offered the following summary:

Explanatory titles are added; the metre is gradually regularized, sonnets with

alexandrines and unusual rhyme-schemes being dropped or rewritten; the

grammar is made clearer and the structure more logical; and there is a reaction

against rhetoric—repetitions, strings of apostrophes and exclamations.22

Tillotson and Newdigate also remarked on the liveliness and colloquialism in the sonnets

Drayton added.23 Commenting just on the revision of 1599, F. Y. St. Clair argued for the sequence’s move away from Petrarchism to embrace dramatic, metaphysical, and satirical styles.24 He made the intriguing suggestion, as well, that Drayton fashions “what might be called the sonnet of humours,” drawing attention to Idea’s portrayal of many different passions with their underlying physiological basis.25 More recently, Walter R. Davis proposed that the final

1619 version of the sequence is a comedy, in which the mask of the libertine that Drayton wears is exposed and the lover must come to grips with his inability to escape from his passion and its clichés.26 Louise Hutchings Westling, in a monograph that considers all of Drayton’s revisions,

22 Kathleen Tillotson and Bernard H. Newdigate, eds., The Works of Michael Drayton (Oxford: Basil Blackwell &

Mott, Ltd., 1961), 5:137.

23 Tillotson and Newdigate, The Works of Michael Drayton, 5:138-39.

24 F. Y. St. Clair, “Drayton’s First Revision of His Sonnets,” Studies in Philology, 36.1 (1939): 40-59.

25 F. Y. St. Clair, “Drayton’s First Revision of His Sonnets,” 50.

26 Walter R. Davis, “Fantastickly I Sing”: Drayton’s Idea of 1619,” Studies in Philology 66. 2 (1969): 204-216. 190 also focused on the libertine and skeptical poses in the sequence, while arguing in contrast to

Davis that the unmasking of these poses is serious rather than comic.27 That is, Drayton's speaker first pretends knowingness and ironic detachment from the tired tropes of love, until he reveals towards the end of the sequence that the passion he feels is real and powerful. Most recently,

Christopher Warley has argued that Drayton comes to identify the absolutism of James with a poet figure defined by class and his own authorship rather than by aristocratic patronage.28

A notion common to many of these studies, and especially prominent in Westling’s, is that Drayton was responding to criticism of the sonnet sequence genre by Sir John Davies, John

Marston, and Joseph Hall, among others. Davies, ironically, sent his Gulling Sonnets to Sir

Anthony Cooke, the dedicatee of the first edition of Idea—then entitled Ideas Mirrour.29 In his parodic poems, Davies mocks the rhetorical excesses and legal conceits of Barnes and the anonymous author of Zepheria more than Petrarchan physicality. However, Marston does attack

“puling sighes” and “aye me’s,” while Hall dedicates one his satires to the “love-sicke Poet” and similarly mocks his sighing and “But ohs.”30 Despite noting this and the fact that Drayton

27 Louise Hutchings Westling, The Evolution of Michael Drayton’s Idea (Salzburg: Institut für Englische Sprache und Literatur, 1974).

28 Christopher Warley, “‘The English straine’: Absolutism, Class, and Drayton’s Ideas, 1594-1619,” in Material

Culture and Cultural Materialisms in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, Curtis Perry, ed. (Turnhout: Brepolis,

2001), 177-202.

29 See Robert Krueger, The Poems of Sir John Davies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 164-67. The changing of the title from Ideas Mirrour to Idea serves to provide some distance between the sequence and the sonnet mistress.

30 Marston, “Satyre VIII, Inamorato Curio,” 52. From The Scourge of Villanie (1598), quoted from The Poems of

John Marston, ed. Arnold Davenport (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1961). Hall, Virgidemiarvm, Book I, 191 removes sighs and tears from his sequence, critics have not offered a full analysis of how

Drayton continually reshapes his at once physical and literary persona. In what follows, I discuss the first edition of Ideas Mirrour and each of Drayton’s substantial revisions, demonstrating how he carefully revised his poetic physicality each time so as to create multiple portraits of his authorship, up until the monumental 1619 folio. As opposed to Westling and

Davis, then, who read the 1619 poems diachronically as a gradual unmasking, I read Drayton’s final version of his sequence synchronically as Drayton’s completed “sonnet gallery” of himself as recognized English writer and distinguished lover. As opposed to the social dimension that

Warley stresses, I also emphasize the physicality of this authorial realization.

Drayton begins the original version of his sonnet sequence with a dedicatory sonnet to Sir

Anthony Cooke, Greville’s friend, executor, and critic of his planned monument, as discussed in

Chapter 3. In the poem, Drayton distances himself from sonneteers, like Lodge, who translate from French and Italian originals:

Yet these mine owne, I wrong not other men,

Nor trafique further then thys happy Clyme,

Nor filch from Portes nor from Petrarchs pen,

A fault too common in thy latter tyme.

Divine Syr Phillip, I avouch thy writ,

I am no Pickpurse of anothers wit.

(9-14)31

“Satyre VII” and Book VI, “Satyre I,” 253, quoted from The Collected Poems of Joseph Hall, Bishop of Exeter and

Norwich, ed. A. Davenport (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1949).

31 Quoted from J. William Hebel, ed., The Works of Michael Drayton (Oxford: Basil Blackwell & Mott, Ltd., 1961),

1:96. All quotations from the 1594 Ideas Mirrour are taken from this first volume. Sonnets that Drayton added 192

The poem makes a dual claim to both originality and Englishness, as Drayton’s poems remain within “thys happy Clyme,” that is, within the island of England. Hence the quote from Philip

Sidney, who had rejected the poetic physicality of Petrarchism, follows Drayton’s own rejection of French and Italian sources.

Nevertheless, despite these claims to originality and Englishness, Ideas Mirrour relies on sighs and tears for its physicality, much like the sequences Drayton attacked. In the first sonnet, the speaker asks the woman to read the sequence as “The drery abstracts of my endless cares /

With my lives sorrow enterlyned so, / Smok’d with my sighes, and blotted with my teares” (I,

98, lines 2-4). As in Barnes, each sonnet is an abstract of passion accompanied by sighs and tears. Like Daniel’s poems, the sonnets are “incense which I offer heere, / By my strong fayth ascending to thy fame” (9-10). These images of glossing and incense suggest that the book is an important legal or religious text. The second sonnet makes the most of these two notions:

My fayre, if thou wilt register my love,

More then worlds volumes shall thereof arise,

Preserve my teares, and thou thy selfe shalt prove

A second flood down rayning from mine eyes.

Note but my sighes, and thine eyes shal behold,

The Sun-beames smothered with immortall smoke:

And if by thee my prayers may be enrold, after 1594 but then removed before the final version of his sequence are also in this volume. The 1619 version of the sequence can be found in the second volume of Hebel’s edition. I will cite Drayton’s sonnets parenthetically with Hebel’s volume number, page number, and line numbers, while identifying the sonnets by edition and number in the text. For a finding aid to Drayton’s sonnets, see Tillotson and. Newdigate, The Works of Michael Drayton,

5:326-28, which also indicates how the poems were numbered in each subsequent edition, a matter I discuss below. 193

They heaven and earth to pitty shall provoke.

Looke thou into my breast, and thou shalt see

Chaste holy vowes for my soules sacrifice:

That soule (sweet Maide) which so hath honored thee,

Erecting Trophies to thy sacred eyes.

Those eyes to my hart shining ever bright,

When darknes hath obscur’d each other light.

(I, 98)

Now the poet invites the lady to register his tears and sighs, that is, write them down in a legal record, before turning once more to religious images of prayers, sacrifice, and vows. Based on these two opening sonnets, the reader expects to “register” or record much sighing and weeping throughout the rest of the sequence—and indeed these are the predominant physical marks one finds. Drayton’s first two poems thus recall Delia, which had begun by picturing sighs and tears as expenses recorded on a balance sheet, and then proceeded to show how these sighs and tears aged the poet to the point where he was forced to abandon love poetry—a point I will return to at the end of my discussion.

When he first revised the sequence in 1599, Drayton attempted to reassert his originality and Englishness by “purifying” his poetic physicality of Petrarchan influence. By moving the two poems above to much later in the sequence (to 49th and 50th position, respectively), Drayton no longer suggests at the outset that his book is made up of sighs and tears.32 In fact, a new poem

32 By 1602 they would become the 54th and 55th sonnets and would remain so until the final 1619 revision. To facilitate the move, Drayton also reworded the beginning of the first sonnet from “Reade heere (sweet Mayd) the story of my wo” to “Yet reade at last the storie of my Woe.” 194 added to the beginning of the sequence in their place, and entitled “To the Reader of his Poems,” explicitly rejects such expectations:

Into these Loves, who but for Passion lookes

At this first sight, here let him lay them by

And seeke else-where, in turning other Bookes,

Which better may his labour satisfie.

No farre-fetch’d Sigh shall ever wound my Brest,

Love from mine Eye a Teare shall never wring,

Nor in Ah-mees my whining Sonnets drest,

(A Libertine) fantastickly I sing:

My verse is the true image of my Mind,

Ever in motion, still desiring change;

And as thus to Varietie inclin’d,

So in all Humors sportively I range:

My Muse is rightly of the English straine,

That cannot long one Fashion intertaine.

(II, 310)

Drayton’s eschewing of a “farre-fetch’d Sigh” echoes Sidney’s criticism of those who would resurrect Petrarch’s dead and foreign sighing, while also responding to Marston’s criticism of whining “Ah-mees.” Instead of a foreign and outworn physicality of sighs and tears, Drayton in the third quatrain embraces a multiplicity of mental and humoral states, as St. Clair noted. This multiplicity suggests that although sighs and tears may appear later in the sequence (in

Westling’s and Davis’s “unmasking”), they will not be the predominant mark of his physicality, 195 the variety of which will better demonstrate his poetic skill. That is, the libertine’s reputation for

“sexual variety” or promiscuity (a la Donne’s inconstant lovers) gives way here to humoral and poetic variety—hence the importance of the verse reflecting the mind of the poet.

Besides shifting sighs and tears to later in the sequence, Drayton simply removed them.

Though many examples could be offered, I offer only a few here. In Sonnet 38, the poet complains, Daniel-like, that the lady has disgraced the

…chaste and pure devotion my youth,

Or glorie of my Aprill-springing yeeres,

Unfained love, in naked simple truth,

A thousand vowes, and thousand sighes and tears:

(I, 117, lines 1-4)

In 1599 Drayton removed this poem. He also rejected Sonnets 39, “Die, die, my soule, and never taste of joy,” and Sonnet 41, “Rare of-spring of my thoughts, my deerest Love,” apparently for containing similar lines. For instance, in the latter poem the poet bids farwell to “…sighes,

Symtomas of my woe, / The dolefull Anthems of my endlesse care” (I, 119, lines 5-6).

As I argued in Chapter 2, Sidney used hexameter lines and the rhetorical device of gradatio to frame his physicality of oral composition. Drayton similarly uses hexameter lines and parallelism as frames for sighs and tears. In removing sighs and tears, then, he would also have to remove the metrical and structural frame that surrounds this physicality, as in Sonnet 33:

My hart surcharg’d with thoughts, sighes in abundance raise,

My eyes made dim with lookes, poure down a flood of tears,

And whilst my hart and eye, envy each others praise,

My dying lookes and thoughts are peiz’d in equall feares. 196

And thus whilst sighes and teares together doe contende,

Each one of these, doth ayde unto the other lende.

(I, 115, 9-14)

Here sighs and tears make their appearance in the final six lines of the poem, which unlike the first two quatrains are written in hexameter. In revising the poem in 1599, Drayton not only reduces the hexameter lines to pentameter, but also removes the sighs and tears:

That Eyes had Heart, or that the Heart had Eyes,

As covetous the others use to have:

But finding reason still the same denyes,

This to each other mutually they crave;

That since each other yet they cannot bee,

That Eyes could thinke, or that my Heart could see.

(II, 327, lines 9-14)

Rather than the physical straits of sighs and tears, the focus is now on the competition between the eyes and heart to possess the image of the beloved. Emphasizing this change is the heading that Drayton also added to the poem, “To Imagination”—the faculty that links the eyes and heart as discussed in Chapter 1. Thus, Drayton’s poetic physicality becomes more concerned here with interior mental states as opposed to the outward effusions of Petrarchism.33

While removing sighs and tears, Drayton retains and highlights sonnets rejecting these marks of physicality. For example, he brings the following poem from 21st to 15th place:

Letters and Lines we see are soone defaced,

Metals doe waste, and fret with Cankers Rust,

33 Indeed, Drayton revised the physicality of Sonnet 43 in a similar way. 197

The Diamond shall once consume to Dust,

And freshest Colours with foule staynes disgraced:

Paper and Inke can paint but naked Words,

To write with Bloud, of force offends the Sight;

And if with Teares I find them all too light,

And Sighes and Signes a silly Hope affords,

O sweetest Shadow, how thou serv’st my turne!

Which still shalt be, as long as there is Sunne;

Nor whilst the World is, never shall be done,

Whilst Moone shall shine or any Fire shall burne:

That ev’ry thing whence Shadow doth proceed,

May in his Shadow my Loves storie read.

(II, 317)

The poem begins with the monumentalizing topos familiar from Delia but then moves to question poetic immortality itself, since poems (“Letters and Lines”) are also material objects vulnerable to wasting, and in any case they paint only “naked words” rather than true pictures.

Drayton then alludes to Sidney’s Sonnet 6 and the poet there whose “teares power out his inke, and sighs breathe out his words.” Like Sidney, Drayton rejects this physicality, but he also seems to reject an emphasis on the material text that Sidney embraces. Instead of the poet’s body or his page, Drayton embraces the “Shadow”—a trace that can be left by both and something that in its universality will better assure poetic immortality. Here Drayton tries to impress upon the reader both the uniqueness of his experience of love and its ability to swallow up the world in an original conceit or model of physicality. That is, while other sonneteers 198 repeatedly offer their readers the poet’s body with its signs of passion to look at and admire,

Drayton offers a shadow that can be cast by “any body” at all, befitting his interest in variety.

As with Barnes and Fletcher, this aiming at variety and distinction supports Drayton’s attempts to compete with other sonneteers in a literary marketplace where sonnet sequences are differentiated not so much by their singular ladies as by the physical and poetic personae they perform before readers. Acknowledging this competition, Drayton adds another sonnet to the beginning of his 1599 sequence, one that, like the dedicatory poem to Anthony Cooke, contrasts

Drayton’s sequence with those of other sonneteers. This time, however, the names of the sonneteers are English:

Many there be excelling in this kind,

Whose well trick’d rimes with all invention swell,

Let each commend as best shall like his minde,

Some Sidney, Constable, some Daniell.

That thus theyr names familiarly I sing,

Let none thinke them dispraraged to be,

Poore men with reverence may speake of a King,

And so may these be spoken of by mee;

My wanton verse nere keepes one certain stay,

But now, at hand; then, seekes invention far,

And with each little motion runnes astray,

Wild, madding, jocund, & irreguler;

Like me that lust, my honest mery rimes,

Nor care for Criticke, nor regard the times. 199

(I, 485)

Despite the humble disclaimer in the second quatrain, Drayton audaciously includes his sequence among Sidney’s, as well as Constable’s and Daniel’s. As I have shown, at least two of these sequences, namely Sidney’s and Daniel’s, contain overarching models of poetic physicality.

While each of these writers thus appeals to some minds more than others, Drayton seeks as much variety as possible for his “wanton verse” and its poetic physicality. Here again Drayton refers to the promiscuity of the libertine, albeit to define the variety of invention in his “honest mery rimes.” Despite his claim to disregard critics and times, his rejection of sighs and tears and his seeking for invention even “now, at hand,” or in England, indicates his control over this variety.

Besides mounting a claim for distinction, then, Drayton also expects his readers to recognize how he has absorbed the influence of the other sonneteers he mentions. For instance, in “Sitting alone, Love bids me goe and write,” Drayton clearly responds to Sidney’s Sonnet 34,

“Come let me write,” in which Astrophil debates with his Wit about the advisability of writing about his love. However, here the debate is between Love and Reason rather than Reason and the poet. Reason argues not against composing but rather for its more important part in the process—a surprising twist since poetic invention was usually associated with the Imagination.

“Some, when in Ryme,” meanwhile, is another version of Sidney’s Sonnet 6, “Some Lovers speake when they their Muses entertaine,” as both writers criticize the practices of other poets in similar ways. Sidney’s sonnet ends with the voicing of Stella’s name; Drayton’s ends with the name of his mistress as well: “I passe not for Minerva, nor Astræa, / But ever call upon divine

Idea” (I, 107, lines 13-14). In the 1594 Ideas Mirrour “Sitting alone” is Sonnet 31 while “Some, when in Ryme” is Sonnet 18. However, in the 1599 edition Drayton brought these sonnets 200 together as Sonnets 37 and 38 respectively, highlighting both their identification with Sidney’s poetic physicality and their divergence from his example.

Drayton’s engagement with Daniel’s poetic physicality is more ambivalent, revealing the dual purposes of recognition and distinction. In 1599, Drayton includes a new Sonnet 23:

Whilst thus my Pen strives to eternize thee

Age rules my Lines with Wrinkles in my Face,

Where, in the Map of all my Miserie,

Is model’d out the World of my Disgrace;

Whilst in despite of tyrannizing Times,

MEDEA-like I make thee young againe,

Proudly thou scorn’st my World-out-wearing Rimes,

And murther’st Vertue with thy coy disdaine:

And though in youth, my Youth untimely perish,

To keepe Thee from Oblivion and the Grave,

Ensuing Ages yet my Rimes shall cherish,

Where I intomb’d, my better part shall save;

And though this Earthly Body fade and die,

My name shall mount upon Eternitie.

(II, 332)

Whereas Daniel blames the lover’s aging on his sighs and tears, as well as his writing, Drayton focuses exclusively on the latter. At the same time as he writes of his lady, Age writes on him.

After the opening quatrain he refers to this notion that composition ages the lover twice, once explicitly mentioning how his Youth untimely perishes to keep her from Oblivion and once 201 figuratively in comparing himself to Medea, who sacrificed her youth and beauty in order to rejuvenate Jason’s father. However, rather than ending the poem by dwelling on his wasted youth, the lady’s own aging, or his efforts to immortalize her, Drayton states that by writing poetry about her he is ensuring his own literary fame. He thus concludes his poem on a more triumphant and independent note than Daniel, who had sought female patronage with his model as I showed in the previous chapter.34 In other words, Drayton, unlike Daniel, is not concerned with addressing patronage through his poetic physicality, but rather seeks to define his own authorship for himself, a significant notion to which I will return in my conclusion.

Finally, in 1599 Drayton added sonnets that take a more philosophical approach to the body of the poet, perhaps reflecting the influence of Barnes. For example, the new Sonnet 14 outlines the faculties of the soul discussed in Chapter 1. Drayton also added two sonnets that play off the four elements and the microcosm-macrocosm understanding of the body: Sonnet 11,

“To the Moone” (I, 486) and Sonnet 23, “To the Spheares” (I, 486). The first poem concerns the elements that comprise the world below the moon and also the lover’s body. Water can be found in his tears, earth in his melancholy, air in his sighs, and fire in this thoughts. The second poem explains how the celestial bodies impact the different parts of the poet’s body, including his

Mercury-influenced quick hands that are “Organs” (11) of his lady’s fame. Both of these poems parallel Barnes’s humoral and astrological sonnets.35 However, unlike his recollections of Daniel and Sidney’s poetic physicalities, which he kept and emphasized in subsequent editions, Drayton

34 A poem added in 1619 as Sonnet 8 pictures the beloved turning old, like Daniel, although Drayton’s anti-blazon is more graphic, and his ending colder: “These Lines that now thou scorn’st, which should delight thee, / Then would I make thee read, but to despight thee.” (II, 314).

35 See Barnes’s Sonnets XXXII-XLIII and Doyno’s commentary in his edition of Parthenophil and Parthenophe,

150-153. 202 seems to have wished to shed any connection with Barnes’s poetic physicality, removing both of these poems before the final iteration of his sequence.

In 1605 Drayton added poems that do not appear to pay tribute to any other sonneteer, but rather take an original, almost “gothic” approach to poetic physicality. While the sonnets added in 1599 reflect an older, ancient and medieval view of the body, the new Sonnet 50 alludes to Renaissance advancements in anatomy:36

As in some Countries, farre remote from hence,

The wretched Creature, destined to die,

Having the Judgement due to this Offence,

By Surgeons beg’d, their Art on him to trie,

Which on the Living worke without remorse,

First make incision on each mast’ring Veine,

Then stanch the bleeding, then trans-pierce the Coarse,

And with their Balmes recure the Wounds againe;

Then Poyson, and with Physike him restore:

Not that they feare the hope-lesse Man to kill,

But to their Experience to increase the more:

Ev’n so my Mistres workes upon my Ill;

By curing me, and killing me each How’r,

Onely to shew her Beauties Sov’raigne Pow’r.

(II, 335)

36 On anatomical science as treated in Renaissance literature, see Sawday, The Body Emblazoned. 203

The emphasis on the dying body of the poet in this and other sonnets added in 1605 recalls

Donne, although we do not know if Drayton had access to manuscripts with Donne’s poems.

More likely, Drayton is striking out here into new territory. The poem suggests that all the sonnets in the sequence are anatomies of the poet himself, revealing what Idea has worked in him and how he responds with his own “Living work” and literary “Art.”

Filling in this anatomy of his authorship in 1605 is the new Sonnet 47, which records his recent role as dramatist in addition to that of lyric poet:

In pride of Wit, when high desire of Fame

Gave Life and Courage to my lab’ring Pen,

And first the sound and vertue of my Name

Wonne grace and credit in the Eares of Men;

With those the thronged Theaters that presse,

I in the Circuit for the Lawrell strove:

Where, the full I freely must confesse,

In heat of Bloud, a modest Mind might move.

With Showts and Claps at ev’ry little pawse,

When the proud Round on ev’ry side hath rung,

Sadly I sit, unmov’d with the Applause,

As though to me it nothing did belong:

No publike Glorie vainely I pursue,

All that I seeke, is to eternize you.

(II, 334) 204

Here Drayton acknowledges the labor of writing, in particular the arduous task of writing plays.

As opposed to lyrical poetry published in print, where the author is physically removed from the reader, drama allows the poet to see the effects of his verse firsthand and so bask in “publike

Glorie.” However, the claps and applause of his plays’ audiences do not move him, despite his initial desire to win fame and the laurel in this way. Instead, he returns to lyric at the end of the sonnet, embracing the mode that assures his beloved poetic immortality. But as we just saw, the sonnet sequence also allows him to eternize his own authorship, as his lyric persona is capable of encircling his dramatic one. Drayton, then, retreats to the lyric in part because it provides an unparalleled power to sketch an author’s physical and poetic persona, a lesson he would seem to have learned from Daniel’s and Barnes’s responses to Sidney.

Thus, when it came time to decide on a final version of his sequence in 1619, Drayton stressed the distinctive qualities of his sonnets in a different way. Although he kept the sonnet

“To the Reader,” he rejected “Many there be excelling in this kind,” no longer drawing a comparison between himself and Sidney, Constable, and Daniel.37 Drayton replaced this poem with a sonnet that reinvigorates the Petrarchan trope of the sea voyage, while also casting his sequence as the product of intense, individual experience:

Like an adventurous Sea-farer am I,

Who hath some long and dang’rous Voyage beene,

And call’d to tell of his Discoverie,

How farre he sayl’d, what Countries he had seene…

Thus in my Love, Time calls me to relate

My tedious Travels, and oft-varying Fate.

37 At the same time, he also moved the “Catalogue of the Heroicall Loves” to England’s Heroical Epistles itself. 205

(II, 311, lines 1-4, 13-14)

This sonnet reconfigures Drayton’s variety of physical self-presentation not as the result of remaining in one place (as the “English straine” of the “To the Reader” would suggest), but rather as an exhaustive search for new ways of constructing the persona of the poet-lover and his passions. There is an almost personal touch here, as Drayton no longer competes with other sequences but instead rests on the laurels of a long literary career.

Indeed, this final version of Idea was included in the 1619 edition of his Poems, a folio edition unlike the 1605 octavo, and containing a new portrait of the author.38 Drayton was now

56, and the new total number of sonnets—the climacterical number 63—marks his awareness of old age. In this light, the variety in his sequence now indicates something new. The sense of

Englishness and originality is still there, but these things give place to an overarching definition of a writer’s life. One could say that while Daniel and Constable age their poetic personae in order to proceed to higher genres, Drayton incorporates age into his persona to provide a retrospective survey of his entire career, including his role as playwright. Drayton, then, ultimately makes Idea a kind of portrait gallery, preserving his past passion and authorship in a completed collection of sonnet paintings, each illustrating a different model of poetic physicality.

To conclude my discussion, I offer just one final demonstration of how strongly Drayton identified the form and physicality of the sonnet sequence with the course of his life and authorship. The last poem he apparently wrote addresses the real-life woman who had inspired

Idea: Anne Goodyere. In this poem, written “the night before he dyed,” according to the

38 For a reproduction of this portrait, see Wall, The Imprint of Gender, 84. See also her discussion of the path of

Drayton’s career, as ad through the apparatus to his works, 79-87. 206 manuscript (Bodl. MS Ash. 38), Drayton declares that Anne alone inspired the passions that his

1619 sequence traces:

The seeds of Love first by thy eyes were thrown

Into a ground untill’d, a heart unknown

To bear such fruit, till by thy hands t’was sown.39

Like Constable and Daniel, Drayton uses the icon of his lady’s hand to indicate her influence.

Supporting his claim to such influence is the similar tone in a sonnet from the first edition of

Ideas Mirrour:

Some Athiest or vile Infidell in Love,

When I doe speake of thy divinitie,

May blaspheme thus, and say, I flatter thee:

And onely write, my skill in verse to prove.

See myracles, yee unbeleeving, see,

A dumbe-borne Muse made to expresse the mind,

A cripple hand to write, yet lame by kind,

One by thy name, the other touching thee.

Blind were mine Eyes, till they were seene of thine,

And mine eares deafe, by thy fame healed bee,

My vices cur’d, by vertues sprung from thee,

My hopes reviv’d which long in grave had lyne:

All uncleane thoughts, foule Spirits cast out in mee,

39 For this poem see Bernard H. Newdigate, Michael Drayton and his Circle (Oxford: Basil Blackwell & Mott, Ltd.,

1961 (1941)), 223. For more on Anne Goodere and Drayton’s lifelong affection for her, see pages 40-55. 207

By thy great power, and by strong fayth in thee.

(I, 103)

This is one of the only sonnets in which Drayton portrays the hand of the poet. However, similarly to Daniel and Constable who had represented the hand of their lady rather than their own, Drayton credits Anne with giving his crippled hand the ability to write by her touch. While the libertine boasts of his promiscuity, Drayon at both the beginning and end of his career presents himself as devoted to his singular sonnet mistress through spiritual language.

This final observation points the way forward to the next chapter, which turns to the sequences of George Chapman and Edmund Spenser. Chapman and Spenser stand out from every other English sonneteer except Shakespeare in being the most interested in the hand of the poet as a model or rather icon of poetic physicality. Still, like Drayton, they grant power to the hand of the poet only after having it touch the female beloved. In this way, Drayton, Chapman, and Spenser represent a gendered development in the physical notions of authorship and patronage that one finds in Constable, Daniel, and Drayton. That is, they begin to shift authority away from the female beloved and her physicality to the hand and physicality of the male poet.

One final link connects Spenser in particular with Drayton. Like Drayton, Spenser identifies his sonnet sequence both as the product of passionate, individual experience and as an important record of his authorship—for in it he records his courtship and marriage to Elizabeth Boyle, as well as his composition of the Faerie Queene. As I will show, it is again the hands of the poet and the lady that unite these private and public spheres for Spenser, who thus answers a number of the developments in poetic physicality we have observed so far in this study. 208

Chapter 6

The Public Emergence of the Poet’s Hand as an Icon of Authorship

in the Sonnet Sequences of George Chapman and Edmund Spenser (1595)

More than the other poets hitherto discussed, George Chapman and Edmund Spenser eschew the traditional Petrarchan body with its effusion of sighs and tears. Like the writers discussed in the last chapter, they also seek distinction through new models of poetic physicality.

However, whereas sonneteers such as Fletcher and Drayton emphasize variety and passion,

Chapman and Spenser take a different path, selecting the poet’s hand as the main icon of their sonneteering. Furthermore, rather than limiting this model of poetic physicality to their sonnet sequences, both poets use the poet’s hand as an icon throughout their careers, thus interrelating their works in different genres. Chapman and Spenser choose the hand for this purpose because of its flexible association with the three faculties of imagination, reason, and memory, as well for the philosophical and religious discourses that elevated the hand above all the other parts of the body, except perhaps for the brain. Chapman and Spenser thus ennoble the poet through the most exalted exterior part of his body, creating a way of understanding his literary activity that can support his emerging public identity as author.

Of course, the poet’s hand had been celebrated before in English poetry, the most notable example being Surrey’s elegy for Sir Thomas Wyatt, “W. resteth here, that quick could never rest.”1 In this poem, one of the few male blazons from the English Renaissance, Surrey celebrates the public virtues and poetic skill that resided in Wyatt’s body, beginning with his

1 All quotes from this poem are taken from Emrys Jones, ed., Henry Howard Earl of Surrey: Poems (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 1964), 27-28, and are cited parenthetically. The poem is numbered 28 in Jones edition. 209 head where “hammers beat still in that lively brain” (6) and “where…some work of fame / Was daily wrought, to turn to Britain’s gain” (7-8). Surrey next turns to Wyatt’s face (“A visage stern, and mild,” 9), which condemned vice and rejoiced in virtue, living upright and smiling at fortune. Returning to the works of fame that Wyatt wrought, Surrey then praises his

…hand that taught what might be said in rhyme,

That reft Chaucer the glory of his wit.

A mark, the which (unperfected for time)

Some may approach, but never none shall hit.

(13-16)

In a striking image, Surrey portrays the poet’s hand as engaged in both instruction and literary theft. Whereas Wyatt’s tongue served his king through diplomacy and discoursed on virtue in civil conversation with young men at court (17-20), his hand engaged in poetic composition that declared his virtue and poetic skill before the world for all time.

Because Surrey’s poem is an elegy, his emphasis on the hand of the poet here is a special case. Indeed, this poem is the only one Surrey published in his lifetime, suggesting how his public purpose pushed him toward blazoning Wyatt’s body in this way.2 In his sonnets, Surrey does not emphasize the writing hand as part of his poetic physicality.3 No doubt this has to do with his reliance upon Petrarch, whom he often translates, yet even in his original sonnets the poet’s hand does not make its presence felt. Wyatt, too, does not feature the poet’s hand to a

2 See An excellent epitaffe of syr Thomas wyat with two other compendious dytties, wherein are touchyd, and set furth the state of mannes lyfe (London, 1545?). STC 26054.

3 One other original poem by Surrey that does feature the writing hand is “In winters just returne, when Boreas gan his raigne,” numbered 16 in Jones’s edition, a piece in which a jilted lover curses the pen and hand that wrote to the beloved who has apparently betrayed him. 210 great extent in his sonnets, which are also often revisions of Petrarch. As I have shown, a lot of the sonnet sequences written later in the century also emphasize Petrarchan physicality. When the poet’s hand does appear in a sequence like Thomas Watson’s Hekatompathia, it trembles and shakes as a sign of passion, complementing familiar sighs and tears. Sidney, who eschewed this physicality, was attracted towards images of oral composition rather than the hand, while for

Constable and Daniel the important hand is that of the lady or patron. Thus, although other poets had incorporated the hand into their poetic physicality before, until Chapman and Spenser in

1595 the stable hand of the poet had not been highlighted throughout a sonnet sequence to the same extent as other parts of the poet’s anatomy. By displaying their hard-won manual control over their poetry, rather than their passionate expression, Chapman and Spenser mark out a new direction for the English sonneteer, one that Wroth (in her corona) and Shakespeare (in his

Sonnets) would follow.

I

In 1595, Chapman published Ovid’s Banquet of Sense, a volume that contains the epyllion of the same name, his “Coronet for his Mistress Philosophy,” and several other poems.

Of all the poems, it is Chapman’s epyllion that has garnered the most attention. However, as I show, the epyllion needs to be understood in light of the “Coronet” and vice versa. That is, just as Donne and Wroth draw attention to their writing hand in beginning their coronas, so does

Chapman ennoble the poet’s hand in “Ovid’s Banquet of Sense” before weaving his own corona in the “Coronet.” The epyllion itself tells a story about the Roman poet Ovid, who enters the garden of the Emperor Augustus one day. There he stumbles upon Julia, the emperor’s daughter, singing naked beside a pool after having bathed herself. As Ovid draws closer to Julia, he indulges each of his five senses in turn, hence the title of the poem. Descending down the 211 hierarchy of the senses set out in the anatomical treatises discussed in Chapter 1, albeit with some modification, Ovid first hears Julia’s song, then smells the odors coming from her body and bath, then sees her beautiful nakedness, then receives a kiss, and finally places his hand upon her breast. In the process of concluding this sensual banquet with the sense of touch, Ovid is interrupted by the approach of other ladies and is forced to flee the scene. The mini-sonnet sequence of praise that is the “Coronet” then follows.

Modern critics traditionally understood Chapman’s narrative epyllion as a Neo-Platonic ascent, until Frank Kermode’s influential reading of Ovid as a counter-Plato and the poem as ironic.4 Following Kermode, Raymond Waddington has used the references to optics and illusion in Chapman’s volume to argue that “Ovid’s Banquet of Sense” is a perspective poem.

That is, we must read the epyllion from the right angle in order to see Chapman’s critique of contemporary preference for the erotic Ovid of the Amores over the philosophical Ovid of the

Metamorphoses.5 Meanwhile, Gerald Snare has challenged Kermode and Waddington by arguing that Chapman’s poem is really about invention, the method by which Ovid achieves a poetic metamorphosis of his sensory impressions.6 Most recently, Georgia Brown has turned

4 Frank Kermode, Shakespeare, Spenser, Donne (New York: Viking Press, 1971), 84-115. For an early, positive reading of the poem’s banquet, see Janet Spens, “George Chapman’s Ethical Thought,” E & S 11 (1925): 145-69.

For a more measured view of Chapman’s Ovid, see James D. Mulvihill, “Jonson’s Poetaster and Ovidian Debate,”

Studies in English Literature 22.2 (1982): 239-255.

5 Raymond B. Waddington, The Mind’s Empire: Myth and Form in George Chapman’s Narrative Poems

(Baltimore: John Hopkin’s University Press, 1974), 113-151. See also his “Visual Rhetoric: Chapman and the

Extended Poem,” English Literary Renaissance 13.1 (1983): 36-57. For more on the emblematic imagery in the poem, see Rhoda M. Ribner, “The Compasse of This Curious Frame: Chapman’s Ovids Banquet of Sence and the

Emblematic Tradition,” Studies in the Renaissance 17 (1970): 233-258.

6 Gerald Snare, The Mystification of George Chapman (Durham: Duke University Press, 1989), 111-138. 212 attention to the ways in which “Ovid’s Banquet of Sense” is about poetry itself, specifically writing and publishing. For her, Chapman’s story of unpunished exposure “can be interpreted as an encouragement to the writers and readers of published texts, and to anyone who dares expose what should be kept from view.”7

While I agree that “Ovid’s Banquet of Sense” is ultimately a self-reflexive poem about authorship and the poet’s public presentation, I believe both Brown and Snare have overlooked the most important sign of literary production in the poem. This sign is Ovid’s hand, which is imbued with poetic inspiration after contact with Julia, whose body Ovid and the narrator repeatedly describe as the origin of oral poetry. Brown sees the epyllion as a genre of shame that offered emerging writers a “hermaphroditic” or “effeminizing” model of authorship with which to challenge Elizabethan norms, and thus reads “Ovid’s Banquet of Sense” in particular as

“shamelessly expos[ing] writing as a masturbatory activity” through Ovid’s poetically self- generative desire for Julia.”8 My reading, however, emphasizes the transfer that takes place between Julia’s poetic activity and Ovid’s, as well as the poem’s gendered depictions of their bodies in the act of poetic production. My discussion also responds to Kermode and

Waddington’s ironic readings, which focus on the problematic placement of touch as the last sense in the banquet—touch being denigrated by traditional Neo-Platonism as the basest sense.9

As I show, this degradation of touch was in opposition to Chapman’s interest in the hand as an icon for the laboring poet’s authorship.

7 Georgia Brown, Redefining Elizabethan Literature (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 173.

8 Ibid., 144.

9 On the ambiguous relationship between Stoicism and Platonism in the poem, and for another rebuttal of Kermode, see John Huntington, “Philosophical Seduction in Chapman, Davies, and Donne,” English Literary History 44.1

(1997), 40-49. 213

My reading of “Ovid’s Banquet of Sense” also provides the groundwork for a reinterpretation of the oft-neglected “Coronet.” Having authorized the hand of the poet in his epyllion, Chapman proceeds to weave a corona that repudiates the poetic physicality of rival sonneteers. In this regard, Chapman’s “Coronet” can be contrasted with the “Gulling Sonnets” of Sir John Davies, who contributes dedicatory sonnets to Ovid’s Banquet of Sense. That is, while Davies mocks the overwrought rhetoric and excessive passion to be found in the sonnet sequence genre, Chapman criticizes the poetic physicality of other sonneteers who depend on their senses and imagination, while also arguing for his own reason-based poetics. The passage from “Ovid’s Banquet of Sense” to the “Coronet,” then, traces a path from the senses of the poet, to his hand, and then back again to his interior physicality. Borrowing the title and theme of

Clark Hulse’s seminal study of the epyllion genre, we can say that, through both “Ovid’s

Banquet of Sense” and “A Coronet for his Mistress Philosophy,” Chapman metamorphoses the body of the poet inside and out.10

Chapman’s epyllion depicts the breast and fingers of Julia as the sites of her oral poetic activity, since her fingers play the lute that accompanies her respiring song. But actually,

Chapman sets up this notion of feminine oral poetry in his letter to Matthew Roydon that prefaces his poem. In the letter, Chapman attacks unsophisticated verses that “are not consecrate by the Muses which are divine artists, but by Euippes daughters, that challengd them with meere nature, whose brests I doubt noot had beene well worthy commendation, if their comparison had not turned them into Pyes.”11 Here Chapman alludes to the story, told in Book V of Ovid’s

Metamorphoses, of Euippe’s nine daughters who competed against the Muses in a singing

10 Clark Hulse, Metamorphic Verse: The Elizabethan Minor Epic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981).

11 Phyllis Brooks Bartlett, ed., The Poems of George Chapman (New York: Russell & Russell, 1969 (1941)), 49. 214 contest. The mortal daughters lost their contest with the divine sisters when Calliope, the eldest

Muse, sang of Pluto’s abduction of Persephone. For their hubris in challenging the Muses, and for their grumbling upon losing, the daughters were changed into magpies. Chapman’s comparison of the inferior poetic composition of these sisters to the superiority of the Muses serves as an appropriate introduction to Ovid’s quest for union with Julia’s breast, which in contrast to those of Euippe’s daughters is portrayed as a source of divine poetry.

Julia engages in poetic activity not too long after she appears, as Chapman quickly establishes this connection between the breast of the female poet and her song. Upon bathing and drying herself beside a fountain, which is in actuality the statue of poor Niobe, Julia takes up her lute and tries to sing life back into the marble form of the grief-stricken mother, whose children were killed by Apollo and Diana to punish her pride in them:

And drying her on that disparent grounde;

Her Lute she takes t’enamoure hevenly eares,

And try if with her voyces vitall sounde,

She could warme life through these cold statues spread.

And cheere the Dame that wept when she was dead.

And thus she sung, all naked as she sat,

Laying the happy Lute upon her thigh,

Not thinking any neere to wonder at

The blisse of her sweet brests divinitie. 215

(11.5-9, 12.1-4)12

While Ovid as the main character and voyeur within the poem will often control our impression of Julia, this moment before his appearance depicts Julia as an active and considering creator of verse. Although these lines clearly have an erotic register, the “bliss of her sweet brests divinite” is also a poetic ecstasy, as her song and Ovid’s reaction to it indicate: “Nought are these notes her breast so sweetely frames, / But motions, fled out of her spirits flames” (26.8-9).

Significantly, Julia’s song is a sonnet, printed in italics to set it off from the surrounding epyllion and given the heading “The Song of Corynna.” In her sonnet, Julia mocks the male gaze constructed by many sonnet sequences:

T’is better to contemne then love,

And to be fayre then wise,

For soules are ruled by eyes:

And Joves Bird, ceaz’d by Cypris Dove,

It is our grace and sport to see,

Our beauties sorcerie,

That makes (like destinie)

Men followe us the more wee flee;

That sets Wise Glosses on the foole,

And turns her cheeks to bookes.

Where Wisdome sees in lookes,

12 All quotations from the Ovid’s Banquet of Sense and Chapman’s other poems are taken from Phyllis Brooks

Bartlett, ed., The Poems of George Chapman (New York: Russell & Russell, 1969 (1941)), and are cited parenthetically by stanza and line number (and page number in the case of Corinna’s song below). 216

Derision, laughing at his schoole,

Who (loving) proves, prophaness, holy;

Nature, our fate, our wisdome, folly.

(p. 56)

The poem is written in quatrameter and trimeter lines, rare meters for sonnets but appropriate short lines for songs. Julia’s poem, then, although a sonnet in terms of its larger structure and rhyme scheme, opposes the typical sonnet with its meter and content. Moreover, it foreshadows

Ovid’s descent on the ladder of the senses from hearing to touch, as well as Chapman’s rejection of the Petrarchan lover’s poetic physicality in the “Coronet.” That is, while Julia mocks male lovers for letting female beauty transform them into fools, Chapman will soon mock poets who similarly allow themselves to be transformed physically by love's passion.

Ovid praises Julia’s “Sonnet, in her breathing sacrifiz’d” (21.5), as having Orphic power to shape the natural world. First, he calls for stones to build “a Cittie with her notes” (19.5), as rocks had once done for the legendary poet Amphion. He then states that Julia’s words are

“disperst in tunes so Orphean” (20.4) that the earth “like heaven might move, / In ceaseless

Musick, and be fill’d with love” (20.8-9). Of course, Julia is not really a second Orpheus, as

Ovid acknowledges: “my Muse so strong…works too hye” (29.9). Nevertheless, his praise confirms Julia as an effective oral poet. He then turns to her fingers, which play the lute and thus round off the picture of her as another Orpheus: “Her fingers to the strings doth speeche inspire /

And numberd laughter; that the descant beares / To hir sweete voice” (17.3-5). Later in the poem, Ovid will recall this moment in describing the action of Julia’s fingers in tying up her hair.

There he will introduce another metaphor of Orphic creation:

These winde theyr courses through the painted bowres, 217

And raise such sounds in theyr inflection,

As ceaseles start from Earth fresh sorts of flowers,

And bound that booke of life with every section.

(60.1-4)

Similarly, when Julia kisses Ovid, he describes her kiss as discursive (“Shee spake in kissing, and her breath infusde” (97.5)) and musical, like the heavenly melodies that produced the Golden

Age: “As if the best Musicians hands were striking: / This kisse in mee hath endlesse Musicke closed, / Like Phoebus Lute, on Nisus Towrs imposed” (7-9). All of these passages reproduce

Julia as a female Orpheus, whose poetry is sung rather than written.

However, when Julia grants Ovid leave to touch her breasts, the focus turns from her physical poetic activity to Ovid’s, which the poem defines as manual rather than oral. Before touching her, Ovid performs the following act of poetic consecration upon his hand:

Hee, well acknowledging [his hand] much too base

For such an action, did a little stand,

Enobling it with tytles full of grace,

And conjures it with charge of reverend verse,

To use with pietie that sacred place,

And through his Feelings organ to disperse

Worth to his spirits, amply to supply

The porenes of his fleshes facultie.

(106.2-9)

Touching Julia, Ovid states, will amplify the spirits and mental faculties that we have seen are essential to poetic creation. Indeed, after this consecration he will dedicate his hand to 218 composition. Before touching Julia, then, he fittingly blesses his hand in three stanzas. In the first he endows the hand with many “tytles full of grace” that draw on Renaissance celebrations of the hand. For example, he terms the hand “King of the King of Sences” (107.1), since every sense can be considered a kind of touching.13 Instead of Aristotle's “instrument of instruments,”

Ovid calls his fingers “Engines of all the engines under heaven” (107.2). His hand is also

To health, and life, defence of all defences,

Bountie by which our nourishment is given,

Beauties bewtifier, kinde acquaintance maker,

Proportions odnes that makes all things even,

Wealth of the laborer, wrongs revengement taker,

Patterne of concord, Lord of exercise,

And figure of that power the world did guise:

(107.3-9)

Like John Davies of Hereford, Chapman praises the hand as the provider of nourishment to the body, an appropriate role considering the careful balance of the four elements that the hand alone possesses. The other titles that Ovid bestows also correspond to Renaissance praise of the hand, but two specifically forecast the main tenets of Chapman’s authorship. First, “wealth of the laborer” anticipates his Jonsonian emphasis on the labor of poetry. Second, “power the world did guise” looks forward to the authority he grants the poet’s hand over readers.

The contact between Ovid’s hand and Julia’s breast looks back to the very beginning of the poem, which portrayed the feminine earth conceiving heat from the male sun’s light: “Which mixed all her moyst parts with her dry / When with right beames the Sun her bosome beat, / And

13 Crooke, Microcosmographia, 648. 219 with fit foode her Plants did nutrifie” (1.2-4). This notion of the productive encounter of male fire with the female bosom returns in the poetic transfer that takes place between Julia’s and

Ovid’s oral and manual modes of poetic physicality:

This sayd, hee layde his hand upon her side,

Which made her start like sparckles from a fire,

Or like Saturnia from th' Ambrosian pride

Of her morns slumber, frighted with admire

When Jove layd young Alcydes to her brest

(110.1-5)

As Martin Wheeler argues, Chapman draws here on Natalis Comes’s Mythologiae and its account of how Jupiter placed Hercules at the breasts of Juno in order that he might receive her immortality.14 As Wheeler notes, Hercules was an important model of intellectual perception for

Chapman. Thus, in his letter to Roydon that heads his first poetic volume, The Shadow of Night,

Chapman calls “the deepe search of knowledge…that Herculean labour.”15 The title page of

Ovid’s Banquet of Sense, the sequel to The Shadow of Night, then features the following quote from Persius: “Quis leget hac? Nemo Hercule Nemo, vel duo vel nemo”—“Who reads here? No one by Hercules no one, either two or no one.”16 For Waddington, “by Hercules” is not simply an oath but a suggestion of the way Chapman expected poetry to be read, with a searching spirit that

14 Martin Wheeler, “The object whereto all his actions tend”: George Chapman’s Ouid’s Banquet of Sence and the

Thrill of the Chase,” Modern Language Review 101 (2006): 325-46.

15 Bartlett, The Poems of George Chapman, 19.

16 Ovids banquet of sence A coronet for his mistresse philosophie, and his amorous zodiacke. With a translation of a

Latine coppie, written by a fryer, anno Dom. 1400. (London, 1595). STC 4985. 220 plumbs obscurity.17 For Wheeler in Ovid’s Banquet of Sense, meanwhile, Ovid is receiving a type of poetic apotheosis from Julia’s breast, an apotheosis patterned on Hercules’s nursing.

Chapman also likely expected his readers to recall the Gallic Hercules, who was able to bind men’s ears with chains representing the eloquence of his silver tongue. Humanist writers such as Thomas Wilson used the Gallic Hercules as a symbol for the power of rhetoric and the orator, but the image could also suggest the power of poetry.18 That the first myth is about nursing emphasizes the female poetic physicality that Chapman has highlighted through Julia’s breast, while the second myth draws attention to the verbal power that Julia is granting Ovid.

Finally, since they emphasize orality, both myths draw attention to the contrast between Julia's breast and Ovid's hand: the one stands as an icon of oral poetry, the other of writing.

While touching Julia, Ovid charts this transition from the oral poetry of the female breast to the written poetry of the male hand. Significantly, he regrets his inability to “sigh out this effect”:

Alas, why lent not heven the soule a tongue?

Nor language, nor peculier dialect,

To make her high conceits as highly sung

But that a fleshlie engine must unfold

A spiritual notion.

(111.1-5)

17 Raymond B. Waddington, “Chapman and Persius: The Epigraph to Ovids Banquet of Sence,” Review of English

Studies n.s. 19 (May, 1968): 158-62.

18 Thomas Wilson, The arte of rhetorique (London, 1553), sig. A3. STC 25799. 221

Finding himself unable to utter his poetry like Julia, Ovid turns to his hand, now ennobled through contact with the site of her oral poetic physicality:

Sweete touch the engine that loves bow doth bend,

The sence wherewith he feeles him deified,

The object whereto all his actions tend,

In all his blindenes his most pleasing guide,

For thy sake will I write the Art of love.

(113.1-5)

In a perhaps not-so-surprising twist, Chapman reveals that the Ars Amatoria was written specifically for the hand and its sense of touch. Besides the humorous and erotic tone to this revelation, there is also the important idea that now that Ovid’s hand has been endued with

Julia’s inspiration it is ready to accept the burden of literary creation. It is for this reason that

Ovid addresses Julia, not simply as a lover or the Emperor’s daughter (“deere Soveraigne”) but as a “Patronesse” (115.1), before declaring his strikingly non-erotic poetic mission to her: “And

I, with that thy graces have infused, / Will make all fat and foggy braines confesse, / Riches may from a poore verse be deduced” (115.1-4). Ovid then declares his intention to write didactic poetry opposing avarice and, instead, “vertue, love, and beauty [to sing]” (115.9). Chapman, for his part, thus concludes his banquet not with sensuality but by exalting this “engine of engines” that allows the poet to write of virtue.

The very end of the poem invests a mysterious and royal authority in the poet’s hand.

Upon his discovery of a literary calling, Ovid is forced to fly the scene, but not before being compared to Alexander the Great, who “griev’d that no greater action could be done” (116.7): 222

But as when expert Painters have displaid,

To quickest life a Monarchs royall hand

Holding a Scepter, there is yet bewraide

But halfe his fingers; when we understand

The rest not to be seene; and never blame

The Painters Art, in nicest censures skand:

So in the compasse of this curious frame,

Ovid well knew there was much more intended,

With whose omition none must be offended.

(117)

While Ovid regrets the interruption of his encounter with Julia, Chapman emerges here to mockingly lament the ending of his poem. His authorial intervention is essential to understanding the stanza’s overlapping of manual imagery. The reader first imagines the painter’s hand, then the “Monarch’s royall hand” that the painter’s hand produces. However, the latter hand is obscured by the scepter, an artistic effect that is praised as skilled and above blame.

Providing a key to this image in his letter to Roydon at the beginning of the book, Chapman discusses how he also uses light and shadow so that only a fit audience can understand his verse:

That, Enargia, or cleerenes of representation, requird in absolute Poems is not the

perspicuous delivery of a lowe invention; but high, and harty invention exprest in

most significant, and unaffected phrase; it serves not a skillfull Painters turne, to

draw the figure of a face onely to make knowne who it represents; bet hee must

lymn, give luster, shadow, and heightening; which though ignorants will esteeme 223

spic’d, and too curious, yet such as have the judiciall perspective, will see it hath,

motion, spirit, and life.19

Here Chapman carefully prepares the reader to notice the reference to painting at the poem’s end, while also indicating that the image of the monarch’s hand captures the Enargia he seeks as a poet. The final stanza in Ovid’s Banquet of Sense, then, suggests the author’s shaping hand behind the poem, as the painter’s hand lies behind his painting. While Sidney had realized energia through a primarily oral poetic physicality, Chapman realizes his enargia through the poet’s hand, which is inspired though contact with a female mode of oral composition.

Having highlighted the hand of the poet through this encounter between male and female poets in the epyllion, Chapman exercises his hand in weaving a sonnet crown for “His Mistress

Philosophy.” Readers have often noted that the “His” is ambiguous—is it Ovid or Chapman?

However, this ambiguity serves the useful function of enacting a smooth transition from the consecration of Ovid’s hand to Chapman’s own manual labor. Sir John Davies, like

Waddington, recognizes Chapman’s goal of reshaping Ovid’s and his poetic physicality through the juncture between these two poems, declaring in one of his dedicatory sonnets that Ovid’s soul “in Chapman lives… / [and] now growne more old and wise, / Poures foorth it selfe in deeper misteries” (9, 13-14).20 Reinforcing this transition between poets and genres is the arrangement of the book’s pages. Whereas Ovid’s Banquet of Sense is printed with four stanzas on each page with notes, the corona is printed two sonnets per page with no notes. There is also a change in focus from the hand of the poet to his physical interiority, especially his mind. Yet a

19 Bartlett, The Poems of George Chapman, 49.

20 “Onely that eye which for true love doth weepe,” quoted from Bartlett, The Poems of George Chapman, 52. 224 crucial link between the epyllion and the sonnet sequence remains—namely the mocking of erotic poetry that Julia’s sonnet had also mounted.

In the early sonnets of the “Coronet,” Chapman rejects the sighs and tears of Petrarchan sonneteers such as Daniel and Barnes. The latter, with his emphasis on imagination and the violent sexual ending to his sequence, is perhaps most on Chapman’s mind in these sonnets:

Muses that sing loves sensuall Emperie,

And Lovers kindling your enraged fires

At Cupids bonfires burning in the eye,

Blowne with the emptie breath of vaine desires,

You that prefer the painted Cabinet

Before the welthy Jewels it doth store yee,

That all your joyes in dying figures set,

And staine the living substance of your glory,

Abjure those joyes, abhor their memory.

And let my love the honord subject be

Of love, and honors compleate historie;

Your eyes were never yet, let in to see

The majestie and riches of the minde,

But dwell in darknes; for your God is blind.21

The poem repudiates the heat of the heart and the fire from the female eye that creates it. Many sonnet sequences, such as Constable’s, feature this interaction between the lady’s eye and the

21 All quotations from “A Coronet for his Mistress Philosophy” are taken from Phyllis Brooks Bartlett, ed., The

Poems of George Chapman (New York: Russell & Russell, 1969 (1941)), 83-86, and are cited parenthetically. 225 poet’s heart, but Chapman will have none of it. The “breath of vaine desires” that blows this flame is the sighing that predominantly marks the physicality of these sonneteers. At the same time as he rejects the blind Anacreontic Cupid figure, Chapman draws the reader’s attention away from exterior Petrarchan physicality to what is inward: the majesty and riches of the mind.

Chapman’s dismissal of the outwardly effusive body of the Petrarchan sonneteer continues in the next poem, Sonnet 2, in which he describes erotic poets as drenched and maddened by Cupid's tears: “Humor poures downe such torrents on his eyes, / Which (as from

Mountaines) fall on his base kind, / And eate your entrails out with exstasies” (2-4).

Meanwhile, the beauty of the lady, as Julia had predicted, takes away their reason and leaves them fools. Her color “Can binde your waxen thoughts in Adamant, / And with her painted fires your harts doth melt / Which beate your soules in peeces with a pant” (6-8). The reference to panting again suggests sighing. Instead of this madness of love, Chapman turns to Philosophy in the volta of the third quatrain. She is “the cordiall of soules” (9) who supplies wondrous spiritual effects. Love thus flows not from his “liver,” the seat of the vegetative faculty and erotic desire according to Galenic physiology and sonneteers such as Barnes, but from “her living” (14).

As the coronet continues, Chapman turns his attention to the theme of the mistress's aging that Daniel had employed, as well as the religious terminology often used in sequences to address the mistress. However, he makes these moves to demonstrate the superiority of his Lady

Philosophy to mortals such as Delia and Parthenophe. In the third sonnet, Chapman describes the brow of Philosophy’s beautiful brow as “so firme” that “age, nor care, nor torment can contract it” (5-6). In the fourth sonnet, Philosophy celebrates “divorceles nuptials” (7) in the

Temple of her heart between her and God, as opposed to the heart-temple of the poet that offers up only sighs of incense, such as in Daniel. In her heart, Philosophy also sacrifices “The Robes, 226 lookes, deedes, desires, and whole deceptions / Of female natures built in shops of art" (11-12).

Chapman here makes a Boethian comparison between his own Lady Philosophy and the false

Lady Fortune who deceives with appearances, while also taking a swipe at the probable fabricated nature of most sonnet mistresses.

This repeated contrast between an ideal feminine figure and an earthly one predictably leads Chapman to express misogynistic sentiment, as he mocks other sonneteers for dwelling on women of flesh and blood rather than on his idealized mistress. In the sixth sonnet, he insists that his Mistress Philosophy forces “a rebateles point / In her high deedes, through every thing obscure / To full perfection” (2-4). This ability of Philosophy to reveal truth in obscurity makes

Philosophy especially attractive to Chapman, who practices a poetics of obscurity himself.

Unlike the other sonnet mistresses, too, his Philosophy is unaffected by

…the weake disjoint

Of female humors, nor the Protean rages

Of pied fac’d fashion, that doth shrink and swell,

Working poore men like waxen images

And makes them apish strangers where they dwell

(4-8)

Here Chapman alludes to the inconstancy of the female assumed by humoral physiology in the

Renaissance. This female instability corresponds to the effeminate gallant who must own every recent fashion, as suggested by the next lines. Here Chapman declares his independence from erotic desire for the unstable body of the female, as well as from the search for variety and the sighing and weeping that result from this desire. Thus, whereas Greville endows his flesh and blood lady with titles of virtue and reason only to be disappointed, Chapman immediately 227 constructs an “Idea” of a woman—that is, an ideal female figure. He then uses this “lady” as a symbol for the reason and Philosophy that he wishes his poetry to expound.

Indeed, in the final sonnets of his crown, Chapman turns from his idealized Lady

Philosophy to reconsider the own literary labor in which his hand is engaged. First, in Sonnet 8, he states that his “lines” attempt in vain to “imitate” her outward grace and inward work, and ends by declaring: “Her vertues then above my verse must raise her, / For words want Art, and

Art wants words to praise her” (10-11, 13-14). Despite this use of the inexpressibility topos,

Chapman still insists in the next poem, Sonnet 9, that his hand will write of her virtue: “Yet shall my active and industrious pen, / Wind his sharpe forheade through those parts that raise her /

And register her worth past rarest women” (2-4). Here the pen becomes an extension not only of the poet’s hand but also of his mind and its faculties, located in the forehead. Again, instead of a flesh and blood woman who appeals to the senses and imagination, Philosophy who appeals to reason will be his Muse. In the final sonnet, Chapman turns like Drayton to the theater. Poets who neglect the theater, Chapman states, are ignorant of the fact that poets have assured their eternal memory there: “The Theaters of Athens and of Rome / Have been the Crownes, and not the base empayre” of those who “for the kingly Lawrell bent affayre” (6-8). Having both declared the worthiness of his hand and mind for the stage, for which he would eventually write plays, Chapman concludes his “Coronet.” Like in his epyllion, he ends with an image of monarchy, reiterating the public authority he is investing in the poet and his hand as it finishes weaving the corona.

While Chapman suggests his readiness to become a playwright at the end of his mini- sonnet sequence, he would soon also emphasize his hand’s suitability for epic translation. In a poem to Thomas Harriot appended to the end of Achilles’ Shield, published in 1598 just a few 228 years after Ovid’s Banquet of Sense, Chapman speaks of Homer’s “seven bookes, which my hard hand hath drest” (8), recollecting Thomas Williams’ tribute to Chapman’s georgic toil (“hardest hand”) in his dedicatory sonnet to Ovid’s Banquet of Sense.22 Later, in his 1609 translation of the

Illiad, Chapman declares to young Prince Henry, his patron, that a king should support poetry, since “he sits sure, / Whom her [that is, Poesie’s] wing’d hand advanceth” (139-40, 148).23

Writing to his noble and royal patrons, Chapman reminds them that although they support him with their hands, the hand of the poet is also deserving of honor.24 If, as Christopher Warley argues, Drayton absorbs James’s absolutism into the poet’s persona, then Chapman anticipates this move several years earlier in constructing the poet’s hand as an icon of authority.25 By using this icon to unify his public career, Chapman seeks to determine the reception of his poems not

22 Bartlett, The Poems of George Chapman, 381 and 52.

23 Ibid., 388. In his 1614 translation of the Odyssey, in a poem addressed to the Earl of Somerset after Henry had died (p. 406 in Bartlett’s edition), Chapman again uses the poet’s hand as an icon of authorship, referring to the

Greek poet’s “all sinewie Odyssæan hand” with which he “at Joves Table set, fils out to us, / Cups that repaire Age, sad and ruinous; / And gives it Built, of an eternall stand” (29-32).

24 In his translations of Homer, Chapman also outlines the type of literary exchange between poet and reader that should take place. In Achilles’ Shield, Chapman directs a dedicatory epistle to the Earl of Essex in which he states that “Onely kings & princes have been Homers Patrones, amongst whom Ptolomie wold say, he that had sleight handes to entertayne Homer, had as sleight braines to rule his common wealth.” “To the most honored Earle, Earle

Marshall,” in Achilles shield Translated as the other seven bookes of Homer, out of his eighteenth booke of Iliades

(London, 1598), sig. A4. STC: 13635. Here the ability of the reader to hold and understand Homer is directly linked to the ability to run the nation. As he had in his epyllion and sonnet sequence, Chapman relies on the link between the hand and reason as the two mutually reinforcing gifts God gave to man at his creation.

25 Warley, “‘The English Straine’: Absolutism, Class, and Drayton’s Ideas, 1594-1619.” 229 only by the hands of noble and royal dedicatees but also by the hands of a larger audience of readers in print.26

II

Chapman delineated his poetic physicality of the hand early on in his literary career through his epyllion and sonnets. Spenser, in contrast, fashioned a model centered on the hand long after his career had begun, in his sonnet sequence Amoretti and his marriage poem

Epithalamion, which he published together in 1595 after the pastoral Shepheardes Calender

(1579) and the first installment of the epic Faerie Queene (1590). Discussing Spenser’s use of these different genres to plan his literary career, Patrick Cheney has revealed how Spenser utilizes the rejuvenating powers of the love lyric in Amoretti and Epithalamion in order to resume The Faerie Queene.27 Thus, the sonnet sequence genre is not a distraction from the poet’s laureate career but an integral part of it, given Spenser’s Christian transformation of the Virgilian career model to include Protestant marriage. Joseph Loewenstein, for his part, has charted how

Amoretti wrestles with issues of male desire raised in Book III of the 1590 Faerie Queene.28 For

26 To take just one example, addressing the reader in the 1609 edition of the Iliad, Chapman admonishes them with a quotation from Silius Italicus: “Least with foule hands you touch these holy Rites, / And with prejudicacies too prophane, / Passe Homer, in your other Poets sleights; Wash here” (1-4). Quoted from Bartlett, The Poems of

George Chapman, 390.

27 Cheney, Spenser’s Famous Flight.

28 “Simply put, the wedding volume of 1595 engages in a critique of the degenerate Petrarchism embodied in the masque of Busyrane.” Joseph Loewenstein, “Echo’s Ring: Orpheus and Spenser’s Career,” English Literary

Renaissance 16 (1986): 293. See also his “A Note on the Structure of Spenser’s Amoretti: Viper Thoughts,”

Spenser Studies 8 (1988): 311-323, and Carol Kaske’s response, “Rethinking Loewenstein’s ‘Viper Thoughts’,”

325-329, favorable to Loewenstein’s treatment of the poem’s search for an alternative to Petrarchism, if not to

Loewenstein’s discussion of numerology in Epithalamion. 230

Loewenstein, the Anacreontics in the volume feature a further resurgence of Cupid’s cruel sport, until the final banishing of fear and trepidation in Epithalamion. Building on both his and

Cheney’s work, I argue that the hand of the poet provides another link between the Faerie

Queene and Amoretti and Epithalamion, in addition to these generic, erotic, and thematic considerations. After looking at the association of orality and the writing hand with specific genres in the prefatory matter to Amoretti and the Proem to Book III, I examine Spenser’s interrogation of the poet’s hand in the Busyrane episode. I then turn fully to Amoretti, showing how the poet’s hand is similarly tested in the sonnet sequence and opposed to the lady’s hands, with which it battles for supremacy. However, through these encounters, the poet’s hand re- emerges in mutuality with the beloved’s hand as a stable icon of authorship, until it is finally sanctified in the public marriage ceremony that occurs at the heart of Epithalamion.

Both the prefatory matter to Amoretti and the Proems to the books of The Faerie Queene connect technologies of poetic production, such as the pipe or the poet’s voice, with specific genres. These schemas consistently associate the pen or quill with love lyric. In the second commendatory sonnet to Amoretti and Epithalamion, the Renaissance emblem writer Geoffrey

Whitney, Jr., puts forward the following three-fold division of technologies and genres:

Ah Colin, whether on the lowly plaine,

pyping to shepherds thy sweete roundelaies:

or whether singing in some lofty vaine,

heroick deedes, of past, or present daies:

Or whether in thy lovely mistris praise,

thou list to exercise thy learned quill,

thy muse hath got such a grace, and power to please, 231

with rare invention bewtified by skill,

As who therin can ever joy their fill.

O therefore let that happy muse proceede

to clime the height of vertues sacred hill,

where endles honor shall be made thy meede.

Because no malice of succeeding daies,

can rase those records of thy lasting praise.29

Whitney first acknowledges Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender, which ends with Spenser's poetic persona, Colin, warning his book “not to match thy pype with Tityrus hys style” (9).30 Second,

Whitney holds up Colin’s triumph in The Faerie Queene, describing him as “singing in some lofty vaine / heroick deedes of past or present daies” (3-4). Whitney’s lines are a clear echo of

Spenser’s own famous declaration at the beginning of The Faerie Queene, “For trumpets sterne to chaunge mine Oaten reeds: And sing of Knights and Ladies gentle deeds” (1.4-5, 9). Finally,

Whitney turns to Amoretti and Epithalamion itself: “…in thy lovely mistris praise / thou list to exercise thy learned quill” (5-6). Whereas the pastoral mode is marked by the pipe and the epic by the trumpet—and both of these with song, that is, with the poet’s voice—the love lyric, as

Whitney suggests with his reference to the quill, is associated with writing itself. Whitney here responds not just to the scenes of writing in Amoretti that I examine, but also to the well-known practice of referring to the material implements of writing in the openings of sonnet sequences:

29 Quoted from Richard A. McCabe, ed., Edmund Spenser: The Shorter Poems (New York: Penguin Putnam, 1999),

387.

30 Quoted from McCabe, Edmund Spenser: The Shorter Poems, 156. 232 as in Astrophil and Stella where Astrophil bites his pen or in Delia where the poet unclasps his account book with its pages full of sighs and cares.

Like Whitney's dedicatory sonnet, Spenser’s Proem to Book III of The Faerie Queene associates the subject of erotic love with writing. Unlike the Proem to the Book of Holiness, which considers the poet’s “trumpet” and epic voice, the Proem to the Book of Chastity begins with the action of the poet’s hand: “It falls me here to write of Chastity” (1.1). The poet, however, is afflicted by torturous self-doubt in offering this part of his epic to Queen Elizabeth.

For, although the virtue of chastity is easily accessed in her heart, “living art may not least part expresse, / Nor life-resembling pencill it can paynt” (2.1-2). Here Spenser alludes to the rivalry between painting and poetry over which art provided the best mimesis. But the dueling arts are frustrated in attempting to render Elizabeth’s chastity:

All were it Zeuxis or Praxiteles:

His dædale hand would faile, and greatly faynt,

And her perfections with his error taynt:

Ne Poets witt, that passeth Painter farre

In picturing the parts of beauty daynt,

So hard a workemanship adventure darre.

For fear through want of wordes her excellence to marre.

(2.3-9)

The reference to “dædale hand” recalls Daedelus, the maker of the labyrinth, long a symbol for poetry, as in Petrarch, Greville and Wroth, with whom it is also a symbol for the sonnet form itself. However, the hand capable of creating such a complex object is powerless before the chastity that Elizabeth possesses. As for the poet, he too questions the ability of his hand to 233 describe this virtue: “How then shall I, Apprentice of the skill, / That whilome in divinest wits did rayne, / Presume so high to stretch my humble quill?” (3.1-3). Although the word “quill” can indicate a musical pipe, the focus on writing and the painter’s “dædale hand” preceding these lines suggest that Spenser has the poet’s pen in mind specifically.31 Thus the word “stretch” refers both to a bird straining its wings and to the extension of the writing quill across the page.

While Book III begins by questioning the ability of the poet’s hand to write about

Elizabeth’s chastity, it ends with an outright crisis. Pointedly included in the Masque of Cupid that Britomart witnesses in the House of Busyrane is a “joyous fellowship... / Of Minstrales, making goodly meriment, / With wanton Bardes, and Rymers impudent” (III.xii.5.3-5). Each of the allegorical figures that follow hold a significant item in their hands, but it is with the hands of

Ease, who introduces the masque, that I am particularly interested. After a “stormy whirlwind” that startles Britomart, Spenser tells us that

forth yssewd, as on the redie flore

Of some Theatre, a grave personage,

That in his hand a braunch of laurell bore,

With comely haveour and count’nance sage,

Yclad in costly garments, fit for tragicke Stage.

(3.5-9)

As both Drayton and Chapman state, citing classical precedent, the theater is an appropriate venue for the poet to seek the laurel. Thus, although Ease engages in the actions of a masque

31 See OED n1 3c and OED n1 1b. 234 presenter, as A. C. Hamilton notes (“And to the vulgare beckning with his hand, / In signe of silence, as to heare a play (4.3-4)), the “braunch of laurell” also identifies him as a poet.32

While Busyrane’s murals and the Masque of Cupid present the problems of erotic desire in the Western literary heritage, Britomart’s encounter with Busyrane allows the reader a full-on view of the poetic physicality that lies behind erotic verse that tries to manipulate the female.

Boldly entering the next room, Britomart finds Amoret bound to a “brasen pillour”

And her before the vile Enchaunter sate,

Figuring straunge characters of his art,

With living blood he those characters wrate,

Dreadfully dropping from her dying hart.

(31.1-4)

The notion of the lover writing from his blood is one that occurs in many sonnet sequences, including Spenser’s, as we will see shortly. Indeed, Busyrane’s torture of Amoret is inspired by the “wicked Bookes” that he overturns before rushing at Britomart with a knife. While the knife suggests the penknife that had to be constantly held in the left hand of the writer, the books that

Busyrane pores over suggest that he is attempting a darker version of what Astrophil tried to do at the beginning of Sidney’s sonnet sequence. As Harry Berger memorably states, in explaining

32 Or, as Harry Berger, Jr., notes, “the masquers project an atmosphere in its characteristics and literary in its base.

For they are acting out generalized roles which imitate literary models…this accounts for Ease’s brand of laurel and for the prominent position assigned to ‘wanton Bardes, and Rymers impudent.” “Busirane and the War Between the

Sexes: An Interpretation of The Fairie Queene III.xi-xii,” English Literary Renaissance 1 (1971): 108. Elsewhere he states: “Busirane seeks to impress onto Amoret the sad range of possibilities offered male and female psyches by the centuries of erotic experience crystallized in pagan, medieval, and Renaissance institutions as in the literature in which Spenser finds them reflected” (100). 235 the significance of Busyrane’s name, “Busirane…is simply Busy-reign: the male imagination trying busily (because unsuccessfully) to dominate and possess woman’s will…by all the instruments of culture except the normal means of persuasion.”33 Significantly, when Britomart forces Busyrane to “reverse” his charms, the magic is couched in the language of poetics:

Full dreadfull thinges out of that balefull booke

He red, and measur’d many a sad verse,

That horrour gan the virgins hart to perse,

And her faire locks up stared stiffe on end,

Hearing him those same bloody lynes reherse.

(36.2-7, emphasis added)

The narrator deems Busyrane’s hand “cursed” too (32.9), I argue, not simply because with it he attacks Britomart, but because it enables his attempt to control the female through poetry, that is, through the “leaves” that are also “cursed” (36.2).

After Britomart disarms Busyrane and the 1590 Faerie Queene concludes, Spenser leaves the problem of how the male poet is to write to the female beloved unresolved. Five years later, in Amoretti and Epithalamion, Spenser finally provides an answer. The first part of the sonnet sequence re-exposes the “curse” placed on the poet’s hand as well as the new vulnerability of the poetry it produces. That is, while the first sonnet predictably draws attention to the materiality of the poems that the lover presents to the lady, the tone of his envoy is remarkably submissive:

Happy ye leaves when as those lilly hands,

which hold my life in their dead doing might

shall handle you and hold in loves soft bands,

33 Berger, “Busirane and the War Between the Sexes,” 100. 236

lyke captives trembling at the victors sight.

And happy lines, on which with starry light,

those lamping eyes will deigne sometimes to look

and reade the sorrowes of my dying spright,

written with teares in harts close bleeding book.

And happy rymes bath’d in the sacred brooke,

of Helicon whence she derived is,

when ye behold that Angels blessed looke,

my soules long lacked foode, my heavens blis.

Leaves, lines, and rymes, seeke her to please alone,

whom if ye please, I care for other none.34

The sonnet presents a number of connections to the end of Book III. First, the poet’s “leaves” recall Busyrane's cursed ones, although here they are the fortunate captives in the lady’s grasp.

At the beginning of the sequence, then, the lady’s hands are preeminent, rather than the poet’s.

As for the poet’s lines that she gazes on, these hearken back to his body and its self-torturing desires, “written with teares in harts close bleeding book.” The line recalls the tears of the

Petrarchan lover, as well as the bleeding heart from the Busyrane episode—though here it is the poet’s heart that bleeds. This is the initial impression that Spenser gives us of the physical dynamic between the poet and lady, in which the male poet appears to be dominated by the female beloved, yet also attempts to persuade her through his poetic art in ways that betray his lack of self-awareness and understanding of her true motives.

34 All quotations from Amoretti and Epithalamion are taken from Richard A. McCabe, Edmund Spenser: The

Shorter Poems (New York: Penguin Putnam, 1999), and are cited parenthetically. 237

Although the first poem mentions the poet’s weeping, neither sighs nor tears overwhelm

Spenser’s sequence as they do Daniel’s Delia or Drayton’s first edition of Idea. This is the first hint that Spenser is ultimately presenting a very different poetic physicality: one centered on the control to be eventually found in the writing hand rather than the passionate expression to be found in sighs, tears, or even the lover’s quaking voice. In the second sonnet, the lover speaks of

“th’inward bale of my love pined hart” which he has “with sighes and sorrowes fed” (2-3).

However, in Sonnet XVIII the lady puts a stop to any Petrarchan pity parties:

The rolling wheele that runneth often round,

The hardest steele in tract of time doth round,

and drizzling drops that often doe redound,

the firmest flint doth in continuance weare.

Yet cannot I with many a dropping teare,

and long intreaty soften her hard hart:

that she will once vouchsafe my plaint to heare,

or looke with pitty on my payneful smart.

But when I pleade, she bids me play my part,

and when I weep, she says teares are but water:

and when I sigh, she sayes I know the art,

and when I waile she turnes hir selfe to laughter.

So doe I weepe, and wayle, and pleade in vaine,

Whiles she as steele and flint doth still remayne.

The lady has apparently read her fill of sonnet sequences and so rejects tears as mere water, ironically repeating the point of “elemental sonnets,” such as those by Barnes. Meanwhile, she 238 rejects sighing as a physical sign that is easy to fake, making the same accusations of disingenuousness that Sidney had made years before. Significantly, after the first two poems and this one, sighs and tears make no further appearance in Amoretti.

Thrown back like Astrophil upon his own act of writing, Spenser’s poet runs into problems of representation similar to those he had first faced in the Proem to Book III, as he doubts the ability of his hand to render a fitting portrait of the lady. In Amoretti III, the poet finds his composing halted not by Queen Elizabeth’s chastity but by his lady’s beauty:

The soverayne beauty which I doo admyre,

witnesse the world how worthy to be prayzed:

the light wherof hath kindled heavenly fyre,

in my fraile spirit by her from baseness raysed.

That being now with her huge brightnesse dazed,

base thing I can no more endure to view:

but looking still on her I stand amazed,

at wondrous sight of so celestiall hew.

So when my tongue would speak her praises dew,

it stopped is with thoughts astonishment:

and when my pen would write her titles true,

it ravisht is with fancies wonderment:

Yet in my hart I then both speake and write

The wonder that my wit cannot endite.

Here “fancies wonderment,” or the imagination, plays a disruptive role, for the images it gives the heart overwhelm both tongue and pen with astonishment, preventing both speech and 239 writing. These are the images of the “sight of so celestiall hew” that the eyes pass to his imagination, which normally transfer them to the heart to arouse passions, as we have seen.

However, unlike a Sidney or a Barnes, Spenser does not emphasize the heat that arises from these passions but rather the more spiritual effect of having his soul raised from baseness. The sestet, meanwhile, seems to also testify to Spenser’s awareness of Sidney and his sequence, for here he, too, links speech and writing together under the verb “endite.” However, since he has been silenced and is unable to write, oral composition does not proceed in the outside world but only in his heart. Spenser in these respects is best compared to Wroth. Like her, he returns to the Petrarchan trope of the inability to speak, while retaining Sidney’s close coupling of orality and writing. Furthermore, like Wroth at the conclusion of her sequence, Spenser considers the spiritual effects of love, and so suggests a role for reason as well as imagination. The difference between them is that Spenser introduces this idea at the very beginning of his sequence and continues to develop it throughout, whereas Wroth, like Sidney and Barnes, first focuses at length on the fire in the heart aroused by passions.

Further anticipating Wroth, Spenser soon transforms the poet’s hand into an icon in

Amoretti XVII, as he continues to explore the topos of inexpressibility. Here Spenser alludes again to the Proem to Book III by comparing the hand of the poet to that of the painter:

The glorious poutraict of that Angels face,

made to amaze weake mens confused skil:

and this worlds worthlesse glory to embase,

what pen, what pencill can expresse her fill?

For though he colours could devize at will,

and eke his learned hand at pleasure guide: 240

least trembling it his workmanship should spill,

yet many wondrous things there are beside.

The sweet eye-glaunces, that like arrows glide,

the charming smiles, that rob sence from the hart:

the lovely pleasance and the lofty pride,

cannot expressed be by any art.

A greater craftsmans hand thereto doth neede,

that can expresse the life of things indeed.

Faced with another impossible artistic situation, the poet wonders suggestively about the “greater craftsmans hand” that might render what painting cannot. In other words, if the painter’s hand cannot capture the beloved’s face, perhaps the poet’s hand can. To “express the life of things” is, of course, the object of the poet and his energia, as Sidney and Chapman had stated. However, at this point in the sequence, the poet's hands are not up to this task.

Making matters worse, Spenser makes it clear that the poet’s writing hand is unable to compete with the lady’s hands, which were victorious in the first sonnet, and which appear to commit acts of violence in subsequent poems. The extent of this war between the hands of poet and lady is unprecedented in any of the sequences we have already looked at, being only hinted at in Sidney’s Eighth Song. In Sonnet XXXI the lover claims that his “proud one” (9) is worse than “beastes of bloody race” (5), since unlike them she presents not a fearsome face but a

“sweet allurement of her lovely hew” (10). She does this, he claims, so that she “better may in blood bath, / of such poore thralls her cruell hands embrew” (11-12). Here the lady appears like 241 a murderer with bloody hands from a revenge tragedy.35 In Sonnet XLVIII, the lady commits actual violence—not against the poet but against the leaves that served as the substitute for his physical presence in the first sonnet:

Innocent paper whom too cruell hand,

Did make the matter to avenge her yre:

And ere she could thy cause wel understand,

Did sacrifize vnto the greedy fyre.

Well worthy thou to have found better hyre,

Then so bad end for hereticks ordained:

Yet heresy nor treason didst conspire,

But plead thy maisters cause unjustly payned.

Whom all the carelesse of his griefe constrained

To utter forth th’anguish of his hart:

And would not heare, when he to her complained,

The piteous passion of his dying smart.

Yet live for ever, though against her will,

And speake her good, though she requite it ill.

The sonnet also seems to recall Fletcher’s “I wrote my sighs, and sent them to my love,” discussed in the last chapter. In Fletcher’s sonnet the lady had deemed the poem a liar and had burned it, ironically confirming its statement that the poet truly burned in sighing. A number of

35 In Sonnet XLVII the lover accuses her again of being a murderess who uses her deceitful appearance to lure others willingly to their destruction: “Yet even whilst her bloody hands them slay, / her eyes looke lovely and upon them smyle” (9-10). 242 things set Spenser’s treatment of this idea apart from Fletcher’s, however. First, there is no sighing in Spenser’s poem and his lady does not attempt to understand what it states. Second, and more importantly, whereas Fletcher’s sonnet records an isolated incident, Spenser’s poem exists within the context of a continual battle between the poet’s and the lady’s hands. Since

Book III, Spenser has depicted the male poet’s writing hand as attempting to control the female in order to satisfy his passion. This sonnet reports another incident in this struggle. Third and finally, Spenser introduces another idea at the end of the poem, unseen in Fletcher’s: the poetic immortality that his poem will grant the beloved, even after being destroyed by her hands. Here

Spenser points to the hand’s familiar role as an instrument of cultural memory, preserving in writing what would otherwise be lost.

This defiant assertion of the poet’s ability to grant poetic immortality becomes celebratory later in the sequence once the lady and the poet have reconciled. In Sonnet LXXII, the poet records their conversation concerning one of his more recent inscriptions:

One day I wrote her name upon the strand,

but came the wave and washed it a way:

agayne I wrote it with a second hand,

but came the tyde, and made my paynes his pray.

Vayne man, sayd she, that doest in vaine assay,

A mortall thing so to immortalize,

For I my selve shall lyke to his decay,

And eek my name bee wiped out lykewize.

Not so, (quod I) let baser things devize

To dy in dust, but you shall live by fame: 243

My verse your vertues rare shall eternize,

And in the heavens wryte your glorious name.

Where whenas death shall all the world subdew,

Our love shall live, and later life renew.

Besides being centered on the writing hand, the poetic physicality of this poem is also elemental.

Spenser's poet attempts twice to write in the lowest element, the earth, but the next highest element, water, washes this script away. Undeterred by the ocean and his beloved’s warning, the poet promises to raise his script through the two highest elements, air and fire, so as to reach the fifth element in the heavens, where he will write Elizabeth Boyle’s name. As the only part of the body possessing a perfect balance of the four elements, the hand is fittingly endowed to ascend this elemental ladder.

Intriguingly, Spenser’s climb up this ladder of elements resembles an emblem by

Whitney, who had also drawn attention to the hand of the poet in his dedicatory sonnet to

Amorretti. Whitney’s emblem shows a speaker with one foot planted on the earth and one foot raised in the air, with one hand (with wings attached) reaching towards heaven and one weighed down to the ground with a stone. The accompanying poem focuses attention on the figure’s hands:

One hande with winges, would flie unto the starres,

And raise mee up to winne immortall fame:

But my desire, necessitie still barres,

And in the duste doth burie up my name:

That hande woulde flie, th’other still is bounde, 244

With heavie stone, which houldes it to the grounde.36

Like Spenser’s speaker (Sonnet LXXIIII), Whitney’s figure also desires to be raised from dust.

This desire provides an image of fire to the poem, to accompany the allusions to the elements of air and earth. That is, the fire of the poet’s desire for fame lifts him from earth to the sky. The winged arm of the figure is thus raised towards heaven, where another person beckons behind a cloud, offering the goal of immortal fame. Behind the main figure lies the city, recalling the emblems of Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender that show the poet Colin against a similar background. The winged arm, meanwhile, suggests Pegasus and similar images of poetic inspiration and yearning, such as the avian imagery Spenser uses throughout his career.37 Besides influencing Spenser’s iconography, perhaps Whitney's emblem also provided the source for

Chapman's winged hand of Poetry, which he offered for Prince Henry's consideration in the first part of this chapter.

However, in Spenser’s poetry, the hand is not simply a body part but also carries the meaning of a type of script. This use of “hand” suggests that the Spenserian poet is attempting to try different ways of writing a sonnet. In this reading, the poet eventually escapes from the hand of Petrarchism, represented in Book III by Busyrane’s “cursed hand.” Further signifying this escape, again, is the fact that he has been able to combine earthly and spiritual love while being reconciled to his beloved, with whom he will soon join hands in marriage. Needless to say, this is not the expected ending of a Petrarchan sonnet sequence, just as the iconography of the hand that Spenser is fashioning is an unusual model of poetic physicality in a genre where sighs, tears,

36 Quoted from the facsimile edition, John Manning, intr., A Choice of Emblems (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1989), 152

(sig. T4v). All quotations are from this page.

37 For an analysis of avian and flight imagery throughout Spenser’s career, see Cheney, Spenser’s Famous Flight. 245 and the lover’s respiring voice are much more prevalent. But being the masterpiece of God’s design, a complement to reason, and related to mystical numbers such as the five wounds of

Christ, the poet’s hand with its five fingers (also alluding to the five senses) becomes the perfect icon for Spenser’s Protestant poetics.

What, however, has enabled this reconciliation between the poet and his beloved, as well as the exaltation of his writing hand? In the earlier part of the sequence, as we have seen, the poet’s hands and the lady’s are placed in opposition, as the poet attempts to control Elizabeth through his verse. For example, in Sonnet XXVIII, the poet attempts to use the laurel (another link back to Book III through the figure of the laurel-bearing Ease) to ingratiate himself with the lady after he sees her wearing it. Threatening her with the story of Daphne, he warns her that lest she be turned into a laurel tree, she should “his leafe and love embrace” (14) in her breast, a reference not only to the laurel but also to the leaves on which his poem are written in both

Sonnet I and the Busyrane episode. However, in the subsequent sonnet (XXIX), the lover complains that she has turned the symbol of the laurel against him, seeing it as a sign of her conquest over him. As in the seashore poem later, the poet gives us the lady’s own words:

The bay (quoth she) is of the victours borne,

Yielded them by the vanquish as theyre meeds,

And they therewith doe poetes heads adorne,

To sing the glory of their famous deedes.

(5-8)

Here the lady seizes the laurel instead of the poet, threatening his literary identity—similar to how Delia’s writing hand had threatened the poet in Daniel’s sequence. Later, in Sonnet LVIII,

Elizabeth actually writes a sonnet of her own in response to Sonnet LVII, in which the poet had 246 asked her to give him grace. To set this poem off from the rest, Spenser gives it its own heading, the only one in the sequence: “By her that is most assured to her selfe.” In the poem, Elizabeth argues for the frailty of flesh in much the same way as she will later in the seashore sonnet. This piece inspires the poet’s next sonnet, in which he praises her steadfastness and confesses his own love for her. This dialectic between the poet and the lady, in which he offers poetry, she more spiritual concerns, leads to the synthesis achieved in the seashore sonnet. That is, the poet comes to see the lady’s refusal not as a sign of pride or cruelty, but as a reflection of her modesty and spirituality. His poetry and hand are elevated because of the resistance of her own hand, perhaps recalling how Stella had transformed Sidney’s oral poetry through her own respiring voice.

The most important turning point occurs between Sonnets LXII and LXIII. Editors have noted that the former poem is situated in the exact center of the volume, and also marks the 25th of March or Lady Day, the Feast of the Annunciation. Besides this spatial, vernal, and liturgical significance, the number also connects to the theme of aging that I have discussed throughout this study. That is, 62 is the last number before the grand climacteric of old age. Spenser emphasizes this numerology by marking the end of one year and the start of the next:

So let us, which this chaunge of weather vew,

chaunge eeke our mynds and former lives amend,

the old yeares sinnes forepast let us eschew

and fly the faults with which we did offend...

So likewise love cheare you your heavy spright,

and chaunge old yeares annoy to new delight.

(5-8, 13-4) 247

In other sequences, such as Constable’s or Drayton’s, this would be the end of the love and the sequence. However, Spenser's next poem, Sonnet LXIII, does not mark death but rather the birth of new hope, through the image of the ship in sight of land. Here Spenser revises in a positive the famous “ship conceit” used by Petrarch and other sonneteers like Wroth. Similarly, in

Sonnet LXVII just a few poems later, he responds to sonnets on Caesar's deer by both Petrarch and Wyatt (Sonnet 190, “Una candida cerva sopra l’erba” and “Who so list to hunt”). Unlike their poems, in which the deer flees, in Spenser’s sonnet the deer returns to a brook near where the poet-huntsman is resting:

There she beholding me with milder looke,

Sought not to fly, but fearelesse still did bide:

Till I in hand her yet halfe trembling tooke,

And with her own goodwill hir fyrmely tyde.

(9-12, emphasis added)

Spenser is careful to accord volition to the deer, so as not to turn the poet into another Busyrane.

The fact that he takes her “in hand...halfe trembling” reverses the earlier sonnets that emphasized the strength of her hands as they held his trembling poems within them. The change in power here might lead to the suspicion that dominance of the poet’s hand rather than mutuality between their hands is the new dynamic. As I showed above in my analysis of LXXV, however, the poet's hand that emerges through the rest of the sequence is dependant upon the lady and her name. Indeed, the sonnet just before the seashore sonnet (LXXIIII) demonstrates this fact by focusing on that name, Elizabeth, and the three women who, bearing that name, have enabled the poet's physical and literary existence: “Most happy letters fram'd by skillfull trade / … the which three times thrise happy hath me made, / with guifts of body, fortune, and of mind…” (1, 3-4). 248

This spiritual and romantic growth, developed through the productive exchange between the poet and the beloved’s hands, ultimately comes to a close in the wedding song of the

Epithalamion, in the very center of that poem. After the priest “blesseth her with his two happy hands” (225), the groom asks his bride: “Why blush ye love to give to me your hand, / The pledge of all our band?” (238-39). While also revisiting the moment in LXVII where the poet- hunter takes the deer in hand, the lines mainly represent the exchange of vows during the

Elizabethan marriage ceremony. As the “Form of Solemnization of Matrimony” in the 1559

Book of Common Prayer directs, “the Minister receivyng the woman at her father or frendes handes, shall cause the man to take the woman by the right hand, and so either to geve their trouth to other, the man first…”38 After the groom declares his vows in this manner, the bride makes hers after the following gesture: “Then shall they louse their handes, and the woman takyng againe the man by the right hande, shall saie…”39 As in Spenser's sonnet sequence, both the male and the female’s hand are active agents in the marriage ceremony. Moreover, the

Elizabethan reader of Epithalamion could not help thinking of the climactic moment in the marriage itself, when the “the Priest joyne[s] their right handes together and say[s]: Those whome God hath joyned together, let no man put a sonder.”40 In Spenser’s marriage song, the hand that had written poetry, and the hand that had held it, rejected it, and then finally cherished

38 John E. Booty, ed., The Book of Common Prayer, 1559: The Elizabethan Prayer Book (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press for The Folger Shakespeare Library, 2005), 292.

39 Ibid.

40 Ibid., 293. 249 its author, come together in holy matrimony.41 Whereas Spenser had continued to interrogate the relationship between the male poet’s hand and its inscription of the beloved between Book III and Amoretti, the union of the poet’s and the beloved’s hands in Epithalamion serves as the ultimate resolution of the anxieties revealed in those former works.

Like Chapman, then, Spenser makes the poet’s hand an icon that can support his literary career only after physical contact with a female beloved. However, there are some key differences between their management of this physicality. While Chapman very quickly declares the authority to be found in his hand, audaciously even to his noble readers, Spenser is more hesitant, declaring his humility before Queene Elizabeth and testing his hand in praise of that other Elizabeth, Elizabeth Boyle, the real woman who stands behind his sonnet mistress in

Amoretti. Moreover, while Chapman prefers to use an abstraction, Lady Philosophy, as his mistress, Spenser makes his real-life marriage to Elizabeth Boyle the foundation of his poetic physicality. Like Drayton, then, Spenser can be said to shape an authorial identity in an almost contemporary sense—that is, one in which the poet’s life is known to readers who can use this to help understand his works if they so choose. In other words, Spenser’s physicality of the poet’s hand is both private and public, personal and published, as this “instrument of instruments” becomes the site of an intersection between these two sides of the English Renaissance author’s new and developing identity.

41 For more discussion regarding the issues of time, eschatology, and Spenser’s reference to the Bible and the

Anglican wedding ceremony, see John. N. Wall, Transformations of the Word: Spenser, Herbert, Vaughan (Athens:

University of Georgia Press, 1988), 129-65. 250

Conclusion:

Shakespeare’s Sonnets:

The Death of the Author and the Life of the Reader:

Perhaps surprisingly, given the repeated themes of suffering, aging, and the pursuit of poetic immortality, none of the writers discussed thus far makes much of the dead body of the sonneteer. When death occurs in a sonnet sequence, it is more often the death of the beloved (as in William Drummond’s sonnet sequence) or of the love itself (as in Constable’s), rather than the actual death of the poet—who after all has other works to compose. Greville, who comes closest to acknowledging the death of the writer in Caelica, concentrates, as we have seen, more on the written text he has left behind than the writer’s actual corpus itself. Meanwhile, Drayton’s 1605 additions to his sequence, while they tend to be morbid, do not consider the body of the poet as dead and buried so much as the body of the lover tortured by the lady. The same can also be said of Barnes’s poem that refers to the manner of Sidney’s death to describe love’s passion.

This lack of attention to the poet’s demise becomes all the more surprising when we consider some of the more important literary events of the 1580s and 1590s, such as Sidney’s death in 1586, Robert Greene’s in 1592, and Christopher Marlowe’s in 1593, the latter of which altered the Elizabethan dramatic scene.1 One should also acknowledge the removal of Chaucer’s

1 On Greene’s death and the publicity storm following it, see Mentz, Romance for Sale in Early Modern England and Melnikoff and Gieskes, Writing Robert Greene. On the suspicious circumstances of Marlowe’s death, see J.

Leslie Hotson’s breakthrough study The Death of Christopher Marlowe (New York: Russell & Russell, 1967

[reissue]). For the personal, political and historical context of Marlowe’s death, and conjecture about what might have really happened that fateful day in Deptford, see Charles Nicholl, The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher

Marlowe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 251 body in 1566 to Poet’s Corner, where Spenser himself would be laid in 1599.2 Reporting on

Spenser’s funeral, William Camden states “[his] hearse being attended by poets…mournful elegies and poems, with the pens that wrote them, [were] thrown into the tomb.”3 One can only wish to know who wrote these elegies and what they said. Here Camden records a ritual that turns the pen and the poems it wrote into totems performing a kind of consecration over the poet’s dead body—a body that for Spenser is primarily known by its writing hand.

To conclude this study, I turn to Shakespeare’s Sonnets, the one Elizabethan sonnet sequence that repeatedly imagines the dead body of the poet.4 Scholars have already set

Shakespeare’s sequence apart for the anomalous character of its publication, its “young man,” and its “dark lady.”5 As I argue, the morbid poetic physicality of its aged poet figure and the

2 On the translation of Chaucer’s body and its repercussions, see Thomas A. Prendergast, Chaucer’s Dead Body:

From Corpse to Corpus (New York: Routledge, 2004).

3 Quoted from Willy Maley, A Spenser Chronology (Houndmills, NH: MacMillan, 1994), 80.

4 Bartholomew Griffin’s Fidessa, more chaste then kinde (London, 1596) does feature one sonnet imagining the poet’s death (sig. D2v). Like Constable and Drayton, Griffin makes use of the “grand climacteric” to structure his sequence. However, while they include 63 sonnets he only includes 62, leaving reader to visualize the grand climacteric (and likely death) of the poet’s body for themselves in the blank page that follows the final sonnet.

Spenser’s Ruines of Rome, a translation of Du Bellay’s Les Antiquitez, imagines Rome as a dead body, and seems to have influenced Shakespeare’s meditation on death and ruin in the Sonnets. See MacPhail, “The Roman Tomb,” and Hieatt, “The Genesis of Shakespeare’s Sonnets.”

5 On the publication question, see Katherine Duncan-Jones, “Was the 1609 Shake-Speares Sonnets Really

Unauthorized?” Review of English Studies 34.134 (1983): 151-71 and North, “The Sonnets and Book History.” On homoeroticism in the Sonnets see Joseph Pequiqney, Such Is My Love: A Study of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1985) and Bruce R. Smith, Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare’s England: A Cultural

Poetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). 252 relationship he wishes to have with his readers is a further distinguishing mark.6 Following

Sidney, Drayton, Chapman, and Spenser, Shakespeare for the most part eschews the Petrarchan physicality of sighs and tears that commonly demonstrate the heat of the lover’s passion.7

Furthermore, like Spenser and Chapman, Shakespeare emphasizes the poet’s hand as one of the most significant parts of his anatomy. Unlike Spenser and Chapman, however, who celebrate the activity of the poet’s living hand, Shakespeare’s hand is the proverbial “dead hand of memory,” haunting the present through the poems it wrote in the past. Echoing Spenser’s mourners,

Shakespeare too sets out a ritual surrounding the dead body of the poet—but one he imagines taking place in the future. Whereas Sidney had portrayed a process of oral composition leading to writing, Shakespeare obsessively returns to the hope, rejected by Greville, of his readers giving breath to his words again. In this way, Shakespeare can be said to provide a master commentary on the project of poetic physicality that he and other poets engaged in through the

English Renaissance sonnet sequence.

6 On the physiological resonances of Shakespeare’s combination of young man, woman, and old man, see Ian

MacInnes, “Cheerful Girls and Willing Boys.”

7 In Sonnet 30, for example, Will pointedly associates sighs and tears not with the friend but with his other worldly concerns, making it clear that his eyes are unused to tears. Cf. Sonnet 29. Similarly, in Sonnet 31, Will recalls how he has shed “many a holy and obsequious tear” at the deaths of friends, but this is now in the past as he views all his loves in the friend. Thus, in Sonnet 44, it is not the friend’s beauty or disdain but his absence that causes Will to shed “heavy tears,” being made as he is of the elements of earth and water. Meanwhile, in Sonnet 148, Will does weep, but the emphasis is not on his inner suffering so much as on the power of his tears to blind his eyes to the truth. As for sighing, in Sonnet 47, Will does acknowledge that, before his heart and eyes exchange the images of the beloved between them, his heart “with sighs himself doth smother,” but this is the only other mention of sighing in the sequence besides Sonnet 30. 253

The outlining of this poetic physicality occurs near the center of the sequence, in Sonnet

71. With seemingly deliberate irony, Shakespeare lays his writing hand—celebrated by both anatomical and literary discourse as the “instrument of instruments”—into the grave:

No longer mourn for me when I am dead,

Than you shall hear the surly sullen bell

Give warning to the world that I am fled

From this vile world with vilest worms to dwell:

Nay if you read this line, remember not,

The hand that writ it, for I love you so,

That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot,

If thinking on me then should make you woe.

O if (I say) you look upon this verse,

When I (perhaps) compounded am with clay,

Do not so much as my poor name rehearse;

But let your love even with my life decay.

Lest the wise world should look into your moan,

And mock you with me after I am gone.8

To remember the sonneteer here is primarily to remember his hand and then to utter his name aloud. Although hand here also means “script,” as in Spenser’s seashore sonnet, the continual emphasis on the poet’s dead body lying in the grave fleshes out the image of the anatomical

8 All quotations from Shakespeare’s Sonnets are taken from Colin Burrow, ed., William Shakespeare: The Complete

Sonnets and Poems (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) and are cited parenthetically. 254 hand. The word “rehearse” here is also pun, suggesting that reading over the poem and then speaking the poet’s name performs a kind of reburial of the sonneteer.

The very next poem, Sonnet 72, repeats this admonition not to utter the poet’s name and memory, this time by using the word “recite” rather than “rehearse”:

O lest the world should task you to recite,

What merit lived in me that you should love

After my death (dear love) forget me quite,

For you in me can nothing worthy prove.

Unless you would devise some virtuous lie,

To do more for me than mine own desert,

And hang more praise upon deceased I,

Than niggard truth would willingly impart:

O lest your true love may seem false in this,

That you for love speak well of me untrue,

My name be buried where my body is,

And live no more to shame nor me, nor you.

For I am shamed by that which I bring forth,

And so should you, to love things nothing worth.

In these two poems, then, Shakespeare emphasizes the role of readers who “rehearse” or “recite” his text by giving it breath again, a reversal of the process of oral composition that Sidney had presented in Astrophil and Stella. These two key words, “rehearse” and “recite,” do not occur in

Sidney’s sequence. Nor do they appear in Spenser’s or Daniel’s sonnets. The word “rehearse” does appear twice in Drayton’s 1619 Idea, but this is still less than the number of times that 255

Shakespeare uses the word (four), indicating its special importance to him as actor, playwright and sonneteer, as I show in a moment.

In Sonnet 81, Shakespeare uses the word “rehearse” again in the context of Will’s death—but this time considers the young man’s as well. Whereas Will had warned the young man not to breathe a word about him upon reading his sonnet, here he declares that this process of re-uttering the poem is what will assure the youth’s immortality:

Or I shall live your epitaph to make,

Or you survive when I in earth am rotten,

From hence your memory death cannot take,

Although in me each part will be forgotten.

Your name from hence immortal life shall have,

Though I (once gone) to all the world must die,

The earth can yield me but a common grave,

When you entombed in men's eyes shall lie,

Your monument shall be my gentle verse,

Which eyes not yet created shall o'er-read,

And tongues to be, your being shall rehearse,

When all the breathers of this world are dead,

You still shall live (such virtue hath my pen)

Where breath most breathes, even in the mouths of men.

The poem’s shocking opening, which visualizes the poet making an epitaph for the friend and decaying in the grave himself, only prepares the reader for the grand promise that follows. The friend’s memory will survive not just on the page. Rather, while the poet himself lies in a 256 common tomb, the friend will be entombed in men’s eyes. Not only this, but the tongues that speak the poem shall somehow be rehearsing the young man’s very own being.

In this dual model for understanding the death of the author and the life of the reader,

Shakespeare’s repeated use of the word “rehearse” would seem to dovetail with scholarship that finds in the Sonnets references to Shakespeare’s work in the theater.9 Sonnet 110 is especially read in this way for its opening, where Will confesses to having “gone here and there” (1) and made himself “a motley to the view” (2), lines understood as a confession of having sullied himself with the public theaters. However, since as Colin Burrow points out, the role of the fool was a specialized one which Shakespeare did not play, this sonnet is, I suggest, a red herring in the search for the particular model of physicality that Shakespeare constructs in his Sonnets.10

Stronger evidence can be found in Sonnet 23, a poem that reminds one that in the Renaissance the theater was associated with the sense of sound as much as with sight.11 Here Shakespeare uses the distinctive image of the actor unable to perform his lines to figure the traditional inability of the Petrarchan lover unable to speak:

As an unperfect actor on the stage,

Who with his fear is put besides his part,

Or some fierce thing replete with too much rage,

Whose strength’s abundance weakens his own heart;

So I, for fear of trust, forget to say

The perfect ceremony of love’s rite,

9 See, for example, Cheney, Shakespeare, National Poet-Playwright.

10 Burrow, William Shakespeare: The Complete Sonnets and Poems, 600, note on line 2.

11 On the conjunction of stage and print in this sonnet, see Cheney, Shakespeare, National Poet-Playwright, 220-

225. 257

And in mine owne love’s strength seem to decay,

O’er-charg’d with burden of mine own love’s might:

O let my books be then the eloquence

And dumb presagers of my speaking breast,

Who plead for love, and look for recompense,

More than that tongue that hath more expressed.

O learn to read what silent love hath writ:

To hear with eyes belongs to love’s fine wit.

Here, however, the actor’s vocal performance is replaced by the silent written text. And yet, as we have already seen, the reader’s action of speaking the sonnet is key to Shakespeare’s understanding of how poetic immortality takes place in a physical way. And in this regard it is important to note that this sonnet’s focus is not on poetic immortality but on the confession of love. It is necessary to look elsewhere, then, to understand how Shakespeare fashions a model of poetic physicality involving both the death of the poet and the afterlives of his readers who

“rehearse” his poems.

First, it is important to note that although “to rehearse” did not have the primary meaning of “to practice a play,” being frequently applied to all kinds of vocal utterance and performance, this is how Shakespeare uses it twice in Midsummer Night’s dream, in some of the first instances of this meaning recorded in the O.E.D.12 Although the word “rehearse” in the Sonnets cannot always be read as referring specifically to acting, then, it almost certainly carried some dramatic

12 On rehearse, see O.E.D. 4a, 7a: Midsummer Night's Dream iii. i. 68 “Sit downe‥and reherse your parts” and

III.2.11: “A crew of patches…Were met together to rehearse a play, Intended for great Theseus nuptiall day.” For recite, see O.E.D. 5.a. 258 association for Shakespeare and his readers, allowing for a “play” with meaning. In fact, a brief look at Hamlet, often compared to the Sonnets in studies of the latter, reveals a dramatic model of poetic immortality here as well.13 When Hamlet makes his mother promise to remain silent about his uncle’s murder of his father, she responds: “Be thou assur'd, if words be made of breath, / And breath of life, I have no life to breathe / What thou hast said to me” (3.4.197-99).14

Breath, words, and life are all linked here, suggesting how the re-breathing of one’s words restores a kind of life to whoever uttered them. Similarly, when Hamlet is exhaling his final breaths, he charges Horatio to stay alive so an account of himself can also live on: “in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain, / To tell my story” (5.2.348-49). But Shakespeare has already planted this idea in his audience’s minds, that is, when he has Hamlet tell Polonius that the players he has hired should be treated well: “Let them be well us'd; for they are the abstract and brief chronicles of the time. After your death you were better have a bad epitaph than their ill report while you live” (2.2.523-26). Here the living, breathing actor who disseminates a good report with his voice is superior to the power of the poet’s pen, which leaves only a silent epitaph. The reference to the epitaph recalls Sonnet 81, which had begun with this image but had similarly concluded that the young man would live “Where breath most breathes, even in the mouths of men.” Shakespeare’s use of this theme in both the Sonnets and Hamlet suggests that a full examination of his poetic physicality must include both his poems and plays. With this caveat, I limit myself to showing here how Shakespeare’s poetic physicality of the poet’s dead hand and the reader’s breath works itself out in the Sonnets.

13 See, for example, Anne Ferry, The “Inward” Language: Sonnets of Wyatt, Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1983).

14 All quotations from Hamlet are taken from G. Blakemore Evans, ed., The Riverside Shakespeare (Boston:

Houghton Mifflin, 1997) and are cited parenthetically. 259

The notion of the reader re-breathing the words of the poet provides the conclusion for

Sonnet 18, which significantly marks the poet’s final turn away from encouraging the young man to procreate to focusing instead on the poetic immortality afforded by his own verse:

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate:

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,

And summer's lease hath all too short a date:

Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,

And often is his gold complexion dimmed,

And every fair from fair sometime declines,

By chance, or nature's changing course untrimmed:

But thy eternal summer shall not fade,

Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st,

Nor shall death brag thou wand'rest in his shade,

When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st,

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,

So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

In this sonnet, Shakespeare again imagines two routes by which his “eternal lines” can grant the friend immortality. The life of the friend depends on the life of the poem, which depends itself on the breath or eyes of men. The former indicates the voice, which originates from the lungs with their breath. That is, if men should someday not be able to see, the sonnet (the “this” that lives) can still be remembered and recited. As Sidney had used the short form of the sonnet to create believable scenes of oral composition, Shakespeare here uses the same form with its 260 highly mnemonic structure of quatrains and couplet to suggest the remembrance and future reading aloud of the poem.

Exactly what the sonnets capture to be re-uttered in this way is the breath of the young man. This notion explains how Will can assure the young man that the poems will truly keep him alive. As Sonnet 38 indicates:

How can my Muse want subject to invent,

While thou dost breathe, that pour’st into my verse

Thine own sweet argument, too excellent

For every vulgar paper to rehearse?

(1-4)

One is reminded here of Sidney’s sonnets, in which the poem was the product of Astrophil’s respiring voice and then was re-uttered by Stella. Conversely, here the poet records the breath of the beloved rather than his own. The poem “rehearses” or re-utters this breath with its argument, a reminder that the verb “rehearse” had a wider meaning than simply to practice a play.

Nevertheless, given Shakespeare’s profession and the dramatic images elsewhere in the sequence, the use of the word here likely carries a pun. The “vulgar papers” in this reading become other actors who would rehearse the young man’s life. Thus, Will presents himself before the young man’s eyes in the next quatrain, as if on stage waiting for applause:

O give thyself the thanks if aught in me

Worthy perusal stand against thy sight,

For who’s so dumb that cannot write to thee,

When thou thyself dost give invention light? 261

Rather than accepting thanks for his written performance, Will tells the young man to congratulate himself for his virtues. By incorporating his living breath into his verse, Will would

“bring forth / Eternal numbers to outlive long date” (11-12) and so win everlasting fame.

Shakespeare’s repeated use of distillation imagery reinforces this “respiring model” of poetic immortality, since the perfume that distilling produced was enjoyed by smell, the sense associated with breath and the element of air. In Sonnet 5, Will reminds the young man that

Time will lead summer “To hideous winter”:

Then, were not summer’s distillation left

A liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass,

Beauty’s effect with beauty were bereft,

Nor it nor no remembrance what it was.

But flowers distilled, though they with winter meet,

Lose but their show; their substance still lives sweet.

(9-14)

The sonnet, Will suggests, becomes a distilled essence of what the friend was, which can then be breathed back again into the world by its readers, imagined to read the poem aloud in later sonnets as we have seen. In Sonnet 54, the sonneteer recalls this image after comparing the young man to roses “When summer’s breath their masked buds disclose” (8). Like the sweet roses that make the sweetest perfume, “so of you, beauteous and lovely youth, / When that shall vade, by verse distills your truth” (13-14). Summer’s breath here also recalls the summer’s day of Sonnet 18, in which Will had also promised the young man poetic immortality.

This, then, is the mission that Will’s hands accept, as they hold both pen and penknife. In

Sonnet 15, Will considers all men as plants that fade before the might of Time, with whom he 262 wars, yet “As he takes from you, I engraft you new” (14). This image of splicing together plants complements the imagery of distilled perfume elsewhere in the sequence, while also alluding to the penknife that sharpens the poet’s quill—the instrument, along with his hand, that grants the young man poetic immortality. Indeed, if Time is considered as a second “rival poet” to Will, then he can also be seen to wield both quill and penknife in his hands.15 In Sonnet 19, Will forbids Time to inscribe on the beloved whose breath he incorporates into his poems:

O carve not with thy hours my love's fair brow,

Nor draw no lines there with thine antique pen,

Him in thy course untainted do allow,

For beauty's pattern to succeeding men.

Yet do thy worst old Time: despite thy wrong,

My love shall in my verse ever live young.

Whereas in Daniel’s Delia writing had similarly aged the poet, here the young man ages while

Will and Time write of and on him respectively. Writing can be understood as a type of carving into paper, yet the verb also suggests the knife that sharpens that “antique pen” that Time also holds in its hand.16 Glossing these lines, Colin Burrow notes that “antique” means not just ancient but “mad,” suggesting that Time’s writing lacks reason, a charge Will fears others will make against his “antique song” (12) in Sonnet 17.17 Will, then, argues for the relative reason of

15 In Sonnet 6, Will pleads with the young man: “Then let not winter’s ragged hand deface / In thee thy summer ere thou be distilled” (1-2), racing against winter to distil the beloved with his poems before Time’s hand can ruin his youth.

16 In Sonnet 123, Will declares to Time “Thy registers and thee I both defy,” again figuring Time as a writer.

17 Burrow, William Shakespeare: The Complete Sonnets and Poems, 418, note on line 10. 263 his own poetic mission, much like Chapman and Spenser, while centering his anatomy on the poet’s hands.

But while the hands of Spenser’s poet had continually warred with those of Elizabeth

Boyle, Will’s hands war with those of Time. So Sonnet 60, which marks the minutes in an hour, concludes with the hope that “verse shall stand, / Praising thy worth, despite [Time’s] cruel hand” (13-14). Three poems later, in Sonnet 63, Time writes on the poet himself, but here again

Will asserts the ability of his hand to grant poetic immortality.

Against my love shall be as I am now

With Time's injurious hand crushed and o’erworn,

When hours have drained his blood and filled his brow

With lines and wrinkles, when his youthful morn

Hath travelled on to age’s steepy night,

And all those beauties whereof now he's king

Are vanishing, or vanished out of sight,

Stealing away the treasure of his spring:

For such a time do I now fortify

Against confounding age’s cruel knife,

That he shall never cut from memory

My sweet love’s beauty, though my lover’s life.

His beauty shall in these black lines be seen,

And they shall live, and he in them still green.

Like Drayton and Constable, Shakespeare uses the climacteric number 63 to cast the aging of the writing poet. But he also turns to the aging of the young man as well. The image of the beloved 264 being drained of blood suggests the bleeding of ink, as Time has filled his brow with “lines and wrinkles.” Meanwhile, Time’s “cruel knife” recalls the knife that Will was using earlier to engraft the young man, and which he must use throughout his writing of his sonnets. Like

Greville, then, Shakespeare makes the material implements of writing central to his poetic physicality. However, his black lines preserve life, as opposed to those in Greville’s Sonnet 82, where the reader, seeking what was lost, only finds “it ayre that once was breath” (2).

It is in the context of these references to aging and the materiality of writing that the poet’s hand emerges before being placed in the grave in Sonnet 71:

Shall Time's best jewel from Time's chest lie hid?

Or what strong hand can hold [Time’s] swift foot back,

Or who his spoil of beauty can forbid?

O none, unless this miracle have might,

That in black ink my love may still shine bright.

(9-14)

The repeated references to Time’s hand in the previous sonnets turns the first appearance of the poet’s hand here into an event. Yet the emergence of the poet’s hand here is not triumphant, as in Chapman, or the product of sanctification, as in Spenser. Rather, the poet’s hand is tentative, unsure of itself, dependant on a miracle as Spenser’s hand had been dependant on Elizabeth and the divine grace she figured forth. Shakespeare’s hand never does find mutuality with the beloved like Spenser’s—its destiny being rather to lie alone in the grave.

Fitting given its summation of his physicality of both poetry and performance,

Shakespeare’s Sonnet 71 would prove to be a special poem for many of its readers. A keeper of a commonplace book copied the sonnet into his manuscript, testifying to the effect it had on at 265 least one contemporary reader in particular.18 Two centuries years later, the poet John Keats would apparently be so struck by Shakespeare’s sonnet that he would attempt a Romantic re- writing of it in “This Living Hand”:

This living hand, now warm and capable

Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold

And in the icy silence of the tomb,

So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights

That thou wouldst wish thine own heart dry of blood

So in my veins red life might stream again,

And thou be conscience-calmed—see here it is—

I hold it towards you.19

The poem plays off the same pun on hand as Shakespeare’s sonnet—the bodily hand and the hand left by writing—to haunting effect.20 But the notion of the writer’s dead hand was more than just a surprise twist for a Gothic poem such as Keats’s. After Jane Austen’s death, her brother revealed the identity of the woman who had published her novels anonymously by remarking

And when the public, which has not been insensible to the merits of Sense and

Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, and Emma, shall be informed

that the hand that guided the pen is now mouldering in the grave, perhaps a

brief account of Jane Austen will be read with a kindlier sentiment than simple

18 Folger MS V.a.162, fo. 12v.

19 Quoted from Jack Stillinger, John Keats: Complete Poems (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 384).

20 See Katherine Rowe’s discussion of this poem in Dead Hands, 114-22. 266

curiosity.21

Here Austen’s brother expects his nineteenth century audience to connect the novelist, her hand, and the books that hand has written. Like Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Austen’s note suggests that the author’s death finalizes the link between an author’s writings and his or her body.

As this dissertation has suggested, writers discover models of poetic physicality in response to different cultural tensions that exist at particular historical moments. At the same time, past discourses of poetic physicality live on like Keats’s hand. Surveying Classical literature, in particular Ennius, Philip Hardie and Emily Gowers discuss “the problem of how to represent the body of the poet” in the ancient period.22 In examining Elizabethan poetic physicality further, it will also be necessary examine its medieval roots, in the case of writers like

Chaucer and Gower, who each put forward their own depictions of the physicality of composition and aging respectively—the former as when Chaucer ponders writing the Miller’s

Tale, “M’athynketh that I shal reherce it heere,” and tells the offended reader to “Turne over the leef and chese another tale.”23 As Nicholas Dame argues in his study, The Physiology of the

Novel: Reading, Neural Science, and the Form of Victorian Fiction, reception of the nineteenth century novel was influenced by the physiological discourses of the time. Meanwhile, past discourses of the body continue to influence our own present-day writing and teaching of composition, as evidenced by the survival of certain clichés in a scientific and computerized

21 Quoted from Persuasion, ed. John Davie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 1.

22 Philip Hardie, Lucretian Receptions: History, The Sublime, Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

2009), 117. Emily Gowers, “The cor of Ennius,” in Ennius Perennis, the Annals and Beyond, ed. William

Fitzgerald and Emily Gowers (Cambridge: Cambridge Philological Society, 2007), 17-37.

23 “The Miller’s Prologue,” 3170, 3177. Quoted from Larry D. Benson, ed., The Riverside Chaucer, Third Edition

(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987). 267 culture: “writing from the heart,” “putting pen to paper,” “going back to the drawing board.”

Seeing how the physicality of composition was portrayed and understood in the Renaissance, then, can perhaps prompt reflection on current understandings of how writing takes place through the body as it uses material implements in a variety of physical spaces.

Over the course of this study, three main issues worthy of further inquiry have emerged.

First, gender been an especially important issue in all the models of poetic physicality I have examined. For example, when Daniel attempts the transition from love lyric to more serious genres he does so under the blessing of the female patron’s hand, which he encodes throughout his sonnet sequence. Although they grant the poet’s hand relative independence, both Chapman and Spenser preserve a male/female dichotomy, in which poetic production occurs under the aegis of the female. One consequence of their models, however, is that the hand of the poet is predominantly gendered male. As Margaret Cavendish complains, in introducing her first book of poems in 1653: “Men will cast a smile of scorne upon my Book, because they think thereby,

Women incroach too much upon their Prerogatives; for they hold Books as their Crowne, and the

Sword as their Scepter, by which they rule, and governe.”24 Cavendish immediately recalls

Wroth as a fellow woman writer who dared to seize the crown of writing, and she quotes Edward

Denny’s infamous attack on Wroth in ironically defending her own book.25 As I have suggested, part of the challenge of Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus to the sonnet sequence status quo is

24 “To all noble, and worthy ladies,” from Poems, and fancies written by the Right Honourable, the Lady Margaret

Newcastle (London: Printed by T.R. for J. Martin, and J. Allestrye, 1653), sig. A3r-v. Wing N869.

25 “And very like [men] will say to me, as to the Lady that wrote the Romancy,

Work Lady, work, let writing Books alone,

For surely wiser women nere wrote one.”

(Cavendish, “To all noble, and worthy ladies,” sig. A3v.) 268 its representation of a female poetic physicality. At the same time, perhaps the most surprising thing about gender and poetic physicality in light of traditional sonnet criticism is that it is the body of the poet as much if not more than the body of the female beloved that is anatomized and catalogued, as can be seen in both Wroth’s and her uncle’s sequences. Clearly, the similarities and differences between how men and women anatomize their authorship, inside the Sidney

Circle and more widely in English Renaissance literature, demand more attention.

Second, to what extent the models of poetic physicality delineated by this dissertation are certifiably English is another question. Sidney, certainly, pits his poetic physicality of oral composition against Petrarch’s model of sighs and tears, which he deems foreign. He seems to do this, though, more for the sake of individuality than for a wish that his poetic physicality be readily identifiable as English. Most other sonneteers see little problem in adopting sighs and tears and maintaining their fellowship in a growing group of English sonneteers. For example,

Daniel identifies himself as English primarily though the greater heat of his passions, a heat that inspires his sighs and tears and rages more hotly than Petrarch’s despite his warmer, southern humoral condition. Drayton would seem to make the strongest claims to Englishness out of all the sonneteers in this study, as he carefully prunes sighs and tears and asserts a variety that he claims fits the “English straine.” Perhaps through his notion of poetic physicality, then, the poet’s body can truly become a microcosm of the nation.26 It will remain for future studies to answer this question, as well as to document what influence French, Spanish, and Italian sonnet sequences had on models of poetic physicality in Renaissance England. Notions of the “Italian” and “English” sonnet form will of course also need to be included in such a survey.

26 On the land as envisioned by Poly-Olbion, see Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), chap. 3. 269

Third and finally, while a wider survey of poetic physicality in the period is needed to gauge how much physicality varied among print and manuscript writings, my analysis has shown that, in the genre of the sonnet sequence at least, the professional writers who followed Sidney developed their poetic physicality differently in writing for print. The developments in poetic physicality that I have charted echo the findings of scholars like Wall who emphasize in their studies of book history how the author’s name gradually becomes more significant on title pages towards the end of the sixteenth century.27 In this way, too, the iconography of the poet’s hand that Chapman, Spenser, and Shakespeare constructed can be compared to the frontispiece illustrations of authors that eventually appeared in the seventeenth century. Alongside these changes to the printed book, then, poetic physicality seems to have granted the Elizabethan author a public presence, a “local habitation and a name.” That is, poetic physicality in the

English Renaissance sonnet sequence allowed a growing audience of print readers to visualize a relatively new species: the early modern author.

As this conclusion has argued, the writer’s public and physical persona was ironically solidified after his death. This can also be said of the sonnet sequence as a genre, since it only proliferated after the posthumous publication of Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella. But one final case is especially instructive. Shakespeare had warned his reader not to remember his writing hand after his death. But this is precisely what the publishers who disseminated his works did.

When John Benson published his octavo edition of Shakespeare’s sonnets and poems in 1640, he made sure to include an illustration of Shakespeare that pulled out from the First Folio frontispiece to reveal the poet-playwright’s hand holding a laurel wreath.28 A poem introducing

27 Wall, The Imprint of Gender, especially 71-93.

28 On this edition of Shakespeare’s poems, see Cheney, Shakespeare, National Poet-Playwright, 1-12. 270 the collection pointedly gives this praise to Shakespeare, “that by him the Kings men live, / His

Players, which should they but have shar’d the Fate, / All else expir’d within the short Termes date.”29 Like in the Sonnets, Shakespeare guarantees poetic immortality by providing matter to be rehearsed and recited. Thus, the poet roundly declares to Shakespeare’s “happy Verse” that

“thou shalt be sung and heard, / When hungry quills shall be such honour bard.”30 In presenting

Shakespeare to the public as a laureate poet-playwright, through both the frontispiece and this poem, Benson’s edition reifies Shakespeare’s own hand-centered and respiring model of poetic physicality, which I have shown builds on the models in Sidney, Chapman, and Spenser’s sequences. Ultimately, then, Benson’s edition, and similar monuments like the Shakespeare funerary sculpture in Stratford-upon-Avon, record the ascendance over oral and passionate models of poetic physicality achieved by Chapman, Spenser, and Shakespeare’s anatomies of authorship.

29 Poems, Written by Wil. Shake-speare. Gent (London, 1640), sig. 3v. STC 22344.

30 Ibid. 271

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Ryan J. Croft

411 Waupelani Dr., Apt. 129-D Pennsylvania State University State College, PA 16801 Department of English (814) 272-0624 Burrowes Building [email protected] University Park, PA 16802

EMPLOYMENT Fixed-Term Lecturer, Pennsylvania State University (Fall 2010-Present)

EDUCATION PhD in English, Pennsylvania State University  Dissertation Successfully Defended in August, 2010  Graduation in May, 2011 MA in English, Pennsylvania State University (2006) Bachelor of Arts, Rutgers University (2004)

PUBLICATION “Sanctified Tyrannicide: Political Theology in John Ponet and Edmund Spenser”  Forthcoming in Studies in Philology (Fall, 2011)

COURSES TAUGHT

CMLIT 106: Arthurian Legend ENGL 129: Shakespeare ENGL 15: Rhetoric and Composition ENGL 191: Science Fiction ENGL 202-A: Writing in the Social Sciences ENGL 221: British Literature to 1798 ENGL 202-C: Technical Communication ENGL 443: The English Renaissance ENGL 202-D: Business Writing

CONFERENCES “Embodying Roman Ruins: Spenser, Shakespeare, and Emblematic Technique in Titus Andronicus,” International Congress on Medieval Studies, May of 2008 “Jesuits, Plain Style, and Resistance: The Catholic Response to Protestant Constructions of Rhetorical Identity,” CCCC, March 2007

AWARDS Institute for the Arts and Humanities Fellowship (Spring 2010) Folger Institute Fellowship: Year-Long Dissertation Seminar, Researching the Archives (Fall 2008-Spring 2009)  Led by Jean Howard and Linda Levy Peck Wilma R. Ebbitt Graduate Travel Award in Rhetoric, for CCCC in March 2007

ACADEMIC SERVICE Assistant to the Weiss Chair: Spring 2008 Renaissance Reading Group: Fall 2007 - Spring 2008

LANGUAGES: French Old English Latin