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Renaissance Texts, Medieval Subjectivities: Vernacular Genealogies of English Petrarchism from Wyatt to Wroth

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Renaissance Texts, Medieval Subjectivities: Vernacular Genealogies of English Petrarchism from Wyatt to Wroth Renaissance Texts, Medieval Subjectivities: Vernacular Genealogies of English Petrarchism from Wyatt to Wroth by Danila A. Sokolov A thesis presented to the University of Waterloo in fulfillment of the thesis requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English Waterloo, Ontario, Canada 2012 © Danila A. Sokolov 2012 Author’s Declaration I hereby declare that I am the sole author of this thesis. This is a true copy of the thesis, including any required final revisions, as accepted by my examiners. I understand that my thesis may be made electronically available to the public. ii Abstract This dissertation investigates the symbolic presence of medieval forms of textual selfhood in early modern English Petrarchan poetry. Seeking to problematize the notion of Petrarchism as a Ren- aissance discourse par excellence, as a radical departure from the medieval past marking the birth of the modern poetic voice, the thesis undertakes a systematic re-reading of a significant body of early modern English Petrarchan texts through the prism of late medieval English poetry. I argue that me- dieval poetic texts inscribe in the vernacular literary imaginary (i.e. a repository of discursive forms and identities available to early modern writers through antecedent and contemporaneous literary ut- terances) a network of recognizable and iterable discursive structures and associated subject posi- tions; and that various linguistic and ideological traces of these medieval discourses and selves can be discovered in early modern English Petrarchism. Methodologically, the dissertation’s engagement with poetic texts across the lines of periodization is at once genealogical and hermeneutic. The prin- cipal objective of the dissertation is to uncover a vernacular history behind the subjects of early mod- ern English Petrarchan poems and sonnet sequences. At the same time, medieval poetics imbricated within the textures of early modern Petrarchan discourse also operate as a subtle yet powerful inter- pretive code which, when applied to the early modern texts, helps to elicit new readings of the ca- nonical texts. The dissertation is structured as a series of case studies, with each of the four chapters tracing the medieval genealogy of a distinct scenario of subjectivity deployed by English Renaissance Petrar- chism. The first chapter considers the significance of William Langland’s poetics of meed (reward) articulated in passūs II-IV of Piers Plowman for the anti-laureate and anti-courtly identities assumed by Thomas Wyatt in his Petrarchan poems and by Edmund Spenser in the Amoretti. I suggest that Langland’s anxiety regarding the alignment of pecuniary and erotic aspects of reward makes it prob- lematic for subsequent writers to pursue a form of poetic identity which embraces both courtly iii and laureate ambitions. The second chapter examines the persistence of vernacular melancholy (en- capsulated in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess) in the verse of Henry Howard, earl of Surrey (as it was printed in Richard Tottel’s Songes and Sonettes) and in Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella. The poetics of melancholy engenders a fragmented subjectivity that manifests itself through a series of quasi-theatrical performances of identity, as well as an ambivalent form of poetic discourse in which the production of Petrarchism is carried out alongside its radical critique. The focus of chap- ter three is the master trope of royal incarceration and its function as a mechanism of subject forma- tion in the poetry of James I Stewart, Charles of Orleans, Mary Stewart, and Lady Mary Wroth. As the dissertation argues, the figure of an imprisoned sovereign in these texts is not an accidental coin- age but in fact a crucial ideologeme of the pre-modern English political and literary imaginary, un- derwriting the poetics and politics of royal identity from Sir John Fortescue to James VI/I. Lastly, the fourth chapter investigates the vernacular medieval genealogy of the subject afflicted with a malady of desire (in other words, pathological affect) in Shakespeare’s sonnets, by tracing its inchoate ver- nacular precedents back to the poems of Thomas Hoccleve (La Male Regle) and Robert Henryson (The Testament of Cresseid), which not only articulate identity and otherness in terms of disease and health but, like Shakespeare’s sonnets, prefigure the triangular relationship of the speaker with two objects of desire. iv Acknowledgements In writing this dissertation, I have incurred many debts of scholarship and friendship, and it is my pleasure to acknowledge them here (although I may never be able to requite them in full). First, I must thank my supervisor, Sarah Tolmie, for her unwavering support and faith in this project from its inception to the final stages, as well as for her sense of humour, hospitality, and unfailing generosity. Her guidance and support have made this dissertation possible. I also owe a special debt of gratitude to Kenneth Graham, whose influence on this project cannot be overstated, for giving unselfishly of his time and expertise. His questions, suggestions, and insights, as well as his healthy skepticism combined with genuine support, have helped me stay disciplined and focused on my own argument. Murray McArthur was a wonderful reader, always receiving my ideas with enthusiasm and wit. Out- side my immediate dissertation committee, I have benefitted immensely from the warm and collegial atmosphere of the English Department at the University of Waterloo. I am particularly grateful to Kevin McGuirk and Fraser Easton. I also thank my fellow graduate students David Shakespeare, Alexis McQuigge, Kevin Ziegler, and Pamela Mansutti, who on many occasions have offered good company and sympathetic ears. Special thanks to Heather Dubrow, Arthur Marotti, Kari Boyd McBride, and Paul Marquis for many years of friendship, encouragement, and interest in my work. My research for this dissertation has been generously funded by the Social Sciences and Hu- manities Research Council of Canada in the form of a Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship. My deepest debt, however, is to my wife Maria and my daughter Sophia, whose love, pa- tience, and support have made it all worthwhile. Parts of Chapter Two previously appeared as “‘Love gave the wound, which while I breathe doth bleed:’ Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella and the Subject of Melancholy” in The Sidney Journal 30.1 (2012): 27-50. I thank The Sidney Journal and Mary Ellen Lamb personally for permission to repro- duce here parts of the argument that first appeared in their pages. v Table of Contents Author’s Declaration.............................................................................................................................. ii Abstract ................................................................................................................................................. iii Acknowledgements.................................................................................................................................v Table of Contents ...................................................................................................................................vi Introduction. Vernacular Genealogies of Petrarchan Discourse.............................................................1 Chapter 1. The Langlandian Poetics of Meed in Wyatt and Spenser ...................................................36 Chapter 2. Chaucerian Melancholy in Early Modern England: Surrey’s Songes and Sonettes and Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella.....................................102 Chapter 3. Captive Voices of Desire: the Casket Sonnets and the Poetics of Monarchical Prison Writing ................................................................175 Chapter 4. The Pathology of Affect in Shakespeare, Hoccleve, and Henryson .................................241 Conclusion. The “English Straine” of Early Modern Petrarchism .....................................................309 Bibliography........................................................................................................................................314 vi Introduction Vernacular Genealogies of Petrarchan Discourse I would like to begin by invoking two celebrated events in the history of English poetry in general, and of English Petrarchism in particular. The first one is the soliloquy of the lovesick Troilus in Geoffrey Chaucer’s romance Troilus and Criseyde (c. 1380s): If no love is, O God, what fele I so? And if love is, what thing and which is he? If love be good, from whennes cometh my woo? If it be wikke, a wonder thynketh me, Whenne every torment and adversite That cometh of hym may to me savory thinke, For ay thurst I the more that ich it drynke. And if that at myn owen lust I brenne, From whennes cometh my waillynge and my pleynte? If harme agree me, wherto pleyne I thenne? I noot, ne whi unwery that I feynte. O quike deth, O swete harm so queynte, How may of the in me swich quantite, But if that I consente that it be? And if that I consente, I wrongfully Compleyne, iwis. Thus possed to and fro, Al sterelees withinne a boot am I 1 Amydde the see, bitwixen wyndes two, That in contrarie stonden evere mo. Allas, what is this wondre maladie? For hete of cold, for cold of hete, I dye.” (I.400-20)1 What is remarkable about these three stanzas is not that Chaucer, arresting his narrative, deploys what is in essence a first-person lyric poem in an attempt to represent the sophistication of Troilus’s psy- chic and emotional
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