Poetic Tradition and the History of Love in Early Modern

Home , Richard Barnfield, Sonnet 67, Sonnet cycle, Sonnet sequence

POETIC TRADITION AND THE HISTORY OF LOVE IN EARLY MODERN

ENGLAND: EXPLORING REPRESENTATIONS OF LOVE IN THE SONNET

SEQUENCES OF SIDNEY, SPENSER, BARNFIELD, AND WROTH

A Thesis

Presented to the Faculty of the Department of English

California State University, Sacramento

Submitted in partial satisfaction of The requirements for the degree of

MASTER OF ARTS

English

(Literature)

Ashley Thomas

SPRING 2020

Ashley Thomas

POETIC TRADITION AND THE HISTORY OF LOVE IN EARLY MODERN

ENGLAND: EXPLORING REPRESENTATIONS OF LOVE IN THE SONNET

SEQUENCES OF SIDNEY, SPENSER, BARNFIELD, AND WROTH

A Thesis

Ashley Thomas

Approved by:

______, Committee Chair Jason Gieger, Ph.D.

______, Second Reader David Toise, Ph.D.

______Date

iii

Student: Ashley Thomas

I certify that this student has met the requirements for format contained in the University format manual, and this thesis is suitable for electronic submission to the library and credit is to be awarded for the thesis.

______, Graduate Coordinator ______Doug Rice, Ph.D. Date

Department of English

Abstract

POETIC TRADITION AND THE HISTORY OF LOVE IN EARLY MODERN

ENGLAND: EXPLORING REPRESENTATIONS OF LOVE IN THE SONNET

SEQUENCES OF SIDNEY, SPENSER, BARNFIELD, AND WROTH

Ashley Thomas

This study explores representations of love, power, gender, and sexuality in the sonnet sequences of Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, Richard Barnfield, and Lady

Mary Wroth. Although Sidney and Spenser are esteemed authors whose work has shaped our perceptions of Renaissance thought, I look at the sequences of Sidney and

Spenser as problematic works that endorse misogynist and hierarchical models of love.

Conversely, I look at Barnfield’s and Wroth’s respective portrayals of a male speaker writing to a male beloved and a female speaker writing to a male beloved as more diverse and progressive conceptions of love than the ones that Sidney and Spenser provide. I ultimately argue that we should give more canonical power and critical attention to Wroth and Barnfield, since their poetry can give us a more comprehensive understanding of love in early modern England.

In contrast to current critical attitudes that view Sidney and Spenser as canonical poets while viewing Wroth and Barnfield as less canonical or non-canonical poets, a large part of my project deconstructs the canonical authority of Sidney and Spenser and challenges the notion that Barnfield should remain at the fringes of Renaissance literary studies or that Wroth should only be studied in a subfield of women writers. I argue that Barnfield and Wroth should be brought to the forefront of Renaissance literary studies not only for students of literature to be exposed to their poetry, but also because the canonization and recognition of their work can help to refashion modern conceptions of love.

______, Committee Chair Jason Gieger, Ph.D.

______Date

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank my thesis readers, Jason Gieger and David Toise for their invaluable help on this project. Their thoughtful feedback and support for my work has not only made this project one of intellectual growth, but also one that fosters the enjoyment of literature. As my committee chair, Jason Gieger provided guidance and expertise that were essential to the development of my ideas. His constant willingness to discuss my work and his enthusiasm for everything that he teaches has always kept me inspired to pursue a career in the arts and letters.

vii

TABLE OF CONTENTS Page

Acknowledgements ...... vii

Chapter

1. INTRODUCTION: LOVE, MARRIAGE, AND THE SONNET TRADITION IN

EARLY MODERN ENGLAND ...... 1

2. “SWEET BE THE BANDS, THE WHICH TRUE LOVE DOTH TYE”:

DECONSTRUCTING THE CANONICAL AUTHORITY OF SIDNEY AND

SPENSER AND RECOGNIZING THEMES OF MISOGYNY IN ASTROPHIL

AND STELLA AND AMORETTI...... 16

3 “HE STRAIGHT PERCEAV’D HIMSELFE TO BE MY LOVER”: THE

CREATION OF A HOMOEROTIC EXPERIENCE AND THE COST OF

VOICING HOMOEROTICISM IN RICHARD BARNFIELD’S CYNTHIA

SONNETS ...... 42

4. “HEE MAY OWR PROFITT, AND OUR TUTER PROVE”: REFASHIONING

PETRARCHAN CONCEPTIONS OF LOVE IN LADY MARY WROTH’S

PAMPHILIA TO AMPHILANTHUS ...... 71

5. CONCLUSION: THE RENAISSANCE LITERARY CANON AND ITS IMPACT

ON MODERN CULTURE...... 95

Works Cited ...... 102

viii

Chapter One

Introduction: Love, Marriage, and the Sonnet Tradition in Early Modern England

What was love in early modern England? How did early moderns conceptualize love, what forms of love were condoned, and how was power distributed within amorous relationships? This study aims to examine the notion of love within early modern

England and analyze how early moderns figured ideas of gender, sexuality, and power distributions between couples. Looking at the sonnet sequences of Sir Philip Sidney,

Edmund Spenser, Richard Barnfield, and Lady Mary Wroth, I examine how these authors reproduce and reshape early modern ideas of love. Furthermore, I also examine how our critical attitudes towards and canonization of these authors has influenced our current perceptions of love in the Renaissance—and has even impacted contemporary notions of love in popular culture. After exploring how Sidney and Spenser produce patriarchal and often misogynist relationships between their lovers and beloveds—while Barnfield and

Wroth diversify hegemonic models of love through their respective portrayals of homoeroticism and egalitarian love—I ultimately gesture towards the notion that we must grant more canonical power to Barnfield and Wroth in order to gain a comprehensive understanding of what models of love existed during the Renaissance. As we begin our discussion of love in the four sequences of Sidney, Spenser, Barnfield, and Wroth, I first provide historical context surrounding amorous relationships by analyzing marriage practices, religious discourse, and conduct books. Once we move towards literary representations of love, I also outline the inception of the sonnet form and the poetic tradition that early modern English sonneteers inherited.

Social Contexts: Marriage in Early Modern England Although it is difficult to grasp how early moderns conceptualized a notion as broad as

“love,” one of our best resources for tracing ideas of love is marriage. While marriage represents only one form of love—a religiously sanctioned, legal bond between man and woman—marriage rituals, legal documents, and reform theology can also be used to gain insight into other forms of love. For instance, homilies and conduct books on marriage not only tell us about the expectations between husband and wife, but they can also reveal attitudes surrounding forms of love that early moderns did not consider valid, such as adultery, premarital sex, and same-sex desire. To begin our discussion of early modern attitudes on love, though, we need to outline the standard marriage practices in England during this time.1 Regarding the ceremonial aspects of matrimony, marriage ritual in

Reformation England consisted of spousals, the calling of banns (public announcements that a couple will be married), and a church ceremony. Spousals (also known as handfasting and betrothals) consisted of verbal exchanges between couples—usually made before witnesses—where the couples promised to take each other as husband and wife. These betrothals, as Shannon McSheffrey shows in her analysis of late-medieval marriages,2 usually consisted of “formulaic” statements such as “‘I John take you Joan to be my wedded wife,’” and actually constituted legally binding marriages in and of

1Although various critics have marked the start of the English Renaissance between the late 15th century and early 16th century, my discussion of marriage will begin after the Protestant Reformation in 1534, since the sonnet sequences I examine occur post-Reformation and are often informed by Protestant ethics. 2 Even though McSheffrey discusses marriage before the early modern period, her analysis of spousals is helpful since these rituals were part of wedding traditions throughout the medieval and early modern periods (though their relative importance shifted during these times).

3 themselves—a law which was not dissolved until 1753 (22). However, as Christine

Peters, Martin Ingram, and McSheffrey have noted, the efficacy and authority of spousals declined from the late medieval period into the early modern period. Ingram, for instance, states that spousals began to lose their status as valid forms of marriage in the sixteenth century, since property laws (such as one which dictates that “no woman could claim dower unless she had been endowed at the church door”) and the prosecution of

“disputed contracts” (marriages not made in church) rendered “a church wedding” as “the only satisfactory guarantee of a socially and legally acceptable union” (142). This, of course, brings us to our discussion of banns and church ceremonies, and their increasing importance after the Reformation. A standard Protestant wedding ceremony began with the calling of the banns, which would be announced in church “for three Sundays prior to the wedding,” and would provide the community with the opportunity to learn of the impending marriage and object to the marriage if they knew of impediments (such as previous marriage contracts) that should prevent the ceremony from occurring (Davis

183). After the calling of the banns, the wedding ceremony would take place. The ceremony occurred completely within the bounds of the church interior (as opposed to medieval weddings, which included a church door ceremony on the exterior of the church) and represented a religiously and publicly sanctioned union between husband and wife. The decreasing authority of spousals and the increasing focus on the banns and church ceremony in sixteenth-century England shows us that the public aspect of church weddings was perhaps their most integral feature. The announcement of the marriage between husband and wife and the church ceremony itself confirmed the couple’s marital

4 status in front of their parish clerk and religious congregation, and thus promoted social conformity by legitimizing the couple’s union in front of the community and allowing each couple to rehearse “a public articulation of gender assumptions” (Peters 80).

Marriage rituals, then, fostered communal growth and ultimately show us that early modern conceptions of love are “crucially involved in the affairs of one’s family, neighbors, and community” (Davis xvi).

Whereas the ceremonial aspects of marriage allow us to see their public significance, religious homilies and conduct books show us more intimate conceptions of love in their descriptions of spousal relationships. One key tenet of Reformation-era liturgy was the idea of mutuality and reciprocity between husband and wife. For instance, the homily “Of the State of Matrimony”3 (included in multiple editions of the

Book of Homilies, a “standard text of royally approved doctrines”) states that “man and woman should live lawfully in a perpetual friendship” and live in “one concord of heart and mind” (“Of the State of Matrimony” 24, 33; Davis 4). Additionally, Robert Cleaver, in his conduct book, A Godly Form of Household Government, advocates for mutuality between husband and wife when he states that the pair should “be of one heart, will and mind,” should “faithfully serveth the other,” and should “learn to be obsequious, diligent, and serviceable to the other in all other things” (204-205). Cleaver even seems to imply equality between husband and wife when he claims that “the man hath not power over his own body nor the woman over hers,” with the implication that each spouse has control

3 The authorship of this particular homily is unknown, although Thomas Cranmer, the Archbishop of Canterbury, is generally credited with compiling and writing some of the sermons in the Book of Homilies.

5 over the other’s body regarding sexual desires (196-197). Both “Of the State of

Matrimony” and A Godly Form of Household Government emphasize the idea that husband and wife should be “one”: their “hearts” and “minds” should be in accordance with one another and they should “serve” each other equally in all things—and even view their marriage as a “perpetual friendship.” While the idea that husband and wife could be

“friends” in the early modern period may seem strange to contemporary readers, this idea that men and women should be companions and share equal duties in marriage stems from Reformation theology’s promotion of “the supremacy of the individual conscience in matters of salvation” (McDonald 262). The notion that women as well as men were religious beings whose “conscience” mattered in their relationship to god theoretically gave women the potential to be recognized as autonomous individuals and allowed them to be “elevat[ed] in relation to all mortal creatures, even their husbands” (McDonald

262). Indeed, there may have been real changes that women experienced due to these

Reformation ideals—such as increased literacy—since reformers believed that

“individual Christians ought to be permitted and able to read the Bible in their own language” (McDonald 256). In spite of these theological ideals, though, the reality of marriage was that husbands and wives occupied hierarchical relationships. Husbands were given economic control over their households and were allowed to pursue careers and express their opinions in public, while wives were expected to stay within the bounds of the home and obey their husbands. Although the gender hierarchy within marriage may not be surprising to modern readers, it does contradict the supposed mutuality in

Protestant liturgy. As Sid Ray explains, “the claim to mutuality, which is sometimes

6 worded as ‘equality,’ dishonestly elevates the woman, and…belies claims about the domestic hierarchy and its chain of command” (24). On the one hand, then, Protestant liturgy presents us with a conception of love that seems to foster friendship and equality between husband and wife while on the other hand, the everyday practice of marriage shows the relationship between husband and wife to be a hierarchical one that endows the husband with control.

While we have learned about some conceptions of the public nature of love via wedding rituals and the hierarchical nature of love between husband and wife, what do we know about other forms of love during this period? What positions did adultery, premarital sex, and same-sex desire hold in early modern England? Although it can be difficult to glean exactly how early moderns felt about these issues, we can learn about them tangentially from sermons, conduct books, and legal records. Adultery and premarital sex were often the subject of religious exhortations, as seen in popular religious sermons such as “A Sermon against Whoredom and Uncleanness,” and “A

White Sheet, or a Warning for Whoremongers.” Sermons such as these use harsh language, making statements such as “the seas of adultery…whoredom, fornication, and uncleanness have…overflowed almost the whole world unto the great dishonor of GOD” and promising that those who commit sins of adultery and fornication will be reprimanded (“A Sermon against Whoredom and Uncleanness” 5). The popularity of such sermons and their invective rhetoric shows that illicit sex was no small problem in early modern England. However, while religious attitudes towards extramarital sex were unequivocally severe, there may have been more tolerance of these practices than

7 religious attitudes suggest. Russ McDonald explains that “sexual intercourse for a betrothed couple” (a practice frowned upon by the church) was “quietly tolerated” by some portions of early modern society, while Martin Ingram states that private attitudes to “bastardy and to fornication” were “on the whole more tolerant, or at least more humane, than public attitudes” (McDonald 271; Ingram 152). While scholars have been able to notice a marked difference between religious attitudes and the reality of adultery and extramarital sex, can the same be said for same-sex desire during this period? It is unfortunately much more difficult to assess the state of homosexuality in early modern

England—especially since the experiential category of homosexuality (as it exists in modern culture) did not exist during the Renaissance. Indeed, it is incredibly difficult to gauge whether or not early moderns conceived of same-sex desire as a unique sexuality.

Although writers such as Robert Cleaver have stated that a marriage contract between

“man and man or woman and woman” is “a mere wicked profanation of God’s ordinance,” these statements do not guarantee that early moderns thought of same-sex desire as a sexuality in and of itself, but rather show that they thought of it as sinful behavior that anyone could succumb to, as scholars like Alan Bray and Bruce Smith have pointed out (Cleaver 197). We do, however, know that same-sex intercourse occurred during this time through documentation in legal records and in pamphlets denouncing same-sex intercourse.4 Indeed, Alan Bray contends that same-sex intercourse may have

4 Most literary criticism surrounding homosexuality in the Renaissance has focused on same-sex desire between men, partly because historical documents such as legal records and religious sermons focused on the prosecution and denouncement of sodomitical acts (and did not record sexual acts between women). However, more recent works by scholars such as Valerie Traub have explored lesbianism in the Renaissance. For the purposes of my study, I will be focusing on

8 existed as an outlet for many men to relieve their sexual urges without risking the possibility of impregnating a woman. Nonetheless, the gap between our modern understanding of homosexuality and its manifestations in the Renaissance—along with the limited amount of historical documents on the topic—makes it challenging for us to know exactly how many men (let alone women) participated in same-sex intercourse, and what early moderns really thought of same-sex desire. The difficulty of assessing early modern attitudes surrounding homosexuality—in addition to the difficultly of truly understanding how early moderns conceptualized heterosexual relationships—shows us that we face limitations when we look solely at liturgy, conduct books, or legal records in order to reconstruct ideals of love. However, we can turn to literary sources (in the case of this study, sonnets) in order to learn more about how individuals from early modern

England conceptualized love.

Poetic Tradition and the English Sonnet Sequence Before we examine how Sidney, Spenser, Barnfield, and Wroth represent love in their sonnet sequences, I wish to first introduce the sonnet form itself and define the key features of the sonnet tradition that English writers inherited from Petrarch. The sonnet can be said to originate as early as 1220 when Sicilian courtiers of Emperor Frederick II began to alter lyric forms of troubadour love poetry (Kennedy 84-85). The Sicilian poet

Giacomo da Lentini was one of the early inventors of the sonnet, creating a lyric form

“where a unit of eight lines (the octave) joins with another stanzaic unit of six lines (the

homosexuality in the Renaissance as it pertains to men (since male-male desire will apply to Barnfield’s work). I do, however, acknowledge that lesbian desire existed in the Renaissance even though a discussion of lesbianism does not appear in my study.

9 sestet), initiating a subtle change of tone, mood or attitude at its point of fusion”

(Kennedy 85). After Lentini’s prototypic construction of the sonnet, several other Italian poets began to popularize the form before Dante Alighieri officially set down the sonnet as a valuable literary form in his sonnet sequence Vita nuova. The Vita nuova is a significant literary achievement, containing “complex lyric and philosophical sonnet forms” that express Dante’s love for Beatrice and include iconic images such as Love setting Dante’s heart aflame and feeding Dante’s heart to Beatrice (Kennedy 89).

Although Dante’s contribution to the history of the sonnet is substantial, the figure that was most influential to English sonneteers was that of Francesco Petrarch. Petrarch wrote his seminal sonnet sequence, Rime sparse, throughout the mid-1300s, chronicling his love for the chaste and saintly Laura. Petrarch gives us the Italian sonnet as we know it today, comprising of an octave and sestet with a thematic turn (or volta) at the ninth line, and rhyming “abba abba cde cde” (with several variations on the rhyme scheme in the last six lines). Early English sonneteers, Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, were the first to translate Petrarch’s verse in England, and their work helped to facilitate the sonnet vogue from 1580-1600 (Spiller 81). What is most significant about

Wyatt’s and Surrey’s translation of Petrarch—and the ensuing sonnet vogue in

England—is not so much their use of Petrarch’s lyric form itself (the meter, rhyme, octave/sestet, etc.), but rather their use of Petrarch’s thematic conceptualization of love in his sonnets.

We can define the thematic elements of the Petrarchan sonnet sequence as displaying a constantly pining (usually male) lover chronicling his love for a forever

10 unavailable, distant, and chaste (usually female) beloved. Furthermore, the situation that the lover inhabits will almost always be paradoxical since the lover will simultaneously be in a position of stasis and constant emotional change. The lover remains in stasis because he is always unable to obtain his beloved, yet his emotions are always dynamic since his feelings towards himself and his beloved may change from sonnet to sonnet. As

Catherine Bates explains, “sonnet sequences…enact the experience of pure duration: of living without growing, of chasing without catching, of running without moving forward…They detail…the sheer state of lacking, wanting, with no end or object realistically in sight” (112). For Petrarch, this paradoxical experience of “chasing without catching” or “freezing and burning” is manifested in his constant celebration of

Laura without being able to attain her. For the English sonneteers, such as Wyatt, Surrey,

Sidney, and Spenser, this experience of “living without growing” is somewhat different than that of Petrarch’s. In English adaptations of the sonnet, the speaker’s desire for the lady is often far more eroticized than Petrarch’s desire for Laura, and the speaker may embody more aggressive attitudes towards the beloved than Petrarch does with Laura (for instance, a poet like Spenser may celebrate his beloved as an “Angel[]” in one sonnet while deeming her a “[f]ayre cruell” in another) (Spenser “Sonnet 17” 1; “Sonnet 49” 1).

This notion that the speaker eroticizes the beloved and celebrates/disparages her in his verse brings us to another central tenet of English adaptations of Petrarch: they often give total power to the speaker by having him shape the lady through his poetry. The first- person, biased narrative of sonnet sequences allows for the objectification, oppression, and vilification of the female beloveds—something to which these women cannot

11 respond back. While the sonnet form allows readers to experience the speaker’s deepest feelings and learn about his conceptualizations of love, the sonnet can also be a form that lends itself to misogynist representations of women. In my discussion of Sidney,

Spenser, Barnfield, and Wroth, I analyze how each author reproduces the Petrarchan tradition (in their representation of desiring speakers who have near-total control over their beloveds), and also how these authors push back against the sonnet tradition and introduce new ideas of love.

Exploring Representations of Love in Sidney, Spenser, Barnfield, and Wroth My first chapter examines Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella and Edmund Spenser’s

Amoretti. I look at Sidney and Spenser as highly canonical poets who have greatly influenced our perceptions of the English sonnet sequence and whose work has traditionally been considered the pinnacle of Renaissance verse. I challenge the notion that we should celebrate and validate the work of Sidney and Spenser and conduct a revisionary reading of each poet that focuses on the lack of power given to the female beloveds in each sequence. Regarding Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella, I take note of the objectifying and sexually aggressive language that Astrophil uses towards Stella, and I argue that Sidney presents us with a highly problematic form of love that gives near-total control to the lover while failing to take into consideration the desires of the beloved.

Regarding Spenser’s Amoretti, I argue that Spenser presents readers with an equally misogynist and hierarchical relationship between lover and beloved, in spite of the fact that Spenser’s speaker seems to advocate for mutuality and marriage. I especially interrogate the notion that Spenser “fixes” the problematic nature of the sonnet sequence

(supposedly through his advocacy for marriage) and argue that Spenser fails to put forth a model of love that truly shows reciprocity and mutuality. Although we may expect

Sidney and Spenser to have patriarchal notions within their poetry, my aim in this first chapter is not to blame “‘the past of having been the past,’” but rather it is to challenge the idea that we should consider Sidney’s and Spenser’s sequences to be the “standard” of Renaissance sonnets in England (Booth qtd. in McDonald 254).

My second chapter on Richard Barnfield’s Cynthia sonnets examines the homoerotic relationship between the lover, Daphnis, and the beloved, Ganymede. I begin my chapter by acknowledging the relative dearth of critical work done on Barnfield’s poetry, which I attribute to historical discrimination against homosexuality. I then examine Barnfield’s critical corpus, and survey scholars such as Alan Bray and Bruce

Smith who state that Barnfield’s sequence (written from a male speaker to a male beloved) does not constitute anything similar to modern ideas of homosexuality, since it would be anachronistic to attribute the idea of homosexuality to Barnfield’s poetry. I also survey scholars such as Kenneth Borris and Sam See, who oppose Bray and Smith by celebrating Barnfield for his depiction of a proto-homosexual relationship and for his flouting of cultural norms. In my analysis of Barnfield, I adopt a critical perspective that acknowledges the anachronistic nature of labeling Barnfield’s poems as “homosexual,” but I also acknowledge the possibility that same-sex desire may have been recognizable as a distinct sexual preference in the Renaissance. I present a two-fold argument in this chapter by stating that Barnfield creates a model of love that empowers homoerotic experiences and dissolves some of the unequal distributions of power in traditional sonnet

13 sequences, while also acknowledging that Barnfield reproduces some of the objectifying and misogynist tendencies of traditional Petrarchan sequences. Regarding the positive aspects of the Cynthia sequence, I show that Barnfield revises Petrarchism’s hierarchical relationship between lover and beloved in his refusal to blame Ganymede for Daphnis’s desire, and in his representation of Daphnis and Ganymede as friends who appear to have a relationship of equality. Regarding the problematic elements of Barnfield’s sonnets, I show that Barnfield’s poetic speaker, Daphnis, voices anxieties about women’s potential to destroy homoerotic attachments (which endorse misogynist notions that women should be excluded from society with men) and additionally uses objectifying rhetoric that reduces Ganymede to an object of beauty for Daphnis’s pleasure. At the end of my chapter, I ultimately suggest that Barnfield’s inability to escape from the misogynist and hierarchical tendencies of Petrarchan sequences may attest to the power that heterosexual verse forms have over marginalized forms of love.

My final chapter on Lady Mary Wroth analyzes her sonnet sequence, Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, and argues that Wroth reshapes the Petrarchan tradition by presenting readers with an egalitarian form of love that focuses on the spiritual betterment of the self. I show that Wroth presents an egalitarian form of love by analyzing Pamphilia’s

(the speaker’s) refusal to objectify or blame Amphilanthus for her unrequited love.

Unlike other sonneteers who constantly address their poems to the beloveds, Pamphilia addresses herself to abstractions such as Hope, Night, and Time, while rarely addressing

Amphilanthus (Amphilanthus is, in fact, not named in any of Wroth’s sonnets). By looking at the exclusion of Amphilanthus from the sequence, I argue that Wroth

14 circumvents the inherently imbalanced power dynamic within Petrarchan sonnets (where the lover unfairly disparages and blames the beloved for refusing his or her advances) and is able to put forth a model of love where the lover does not have to infringe on the freedom of the beloved to express herself. Regarding Wroth’s representation of love as spiritually beneficial, I analyze Wroth’s description of love as a “Tuter” who will reveal hidden gifts within the lovers, and show that this portrayal of love is a spiritual experience which betters the self rather than a portrayal of love that focuses on the physical possession of the beloved (Wroth [P82] 1). Compared to Sidney’s and

Spenser’s sequences, which represent physical possession of as the “goal” of love, I posit that Wroth’s more spiritually centered version of love presents readers with an alternate model of love during the early modern period. Furthermore, while Wroth has received more critical attention than Barnfield, a good deal of my chapter investigates our critical reception of Wroth and argues that her work should be viewed outside of the genre of

“women’s writing,” since this label has restricted Wroth to a space of sexual difference and does not allow her to have the same canonical impact as male sonneteers.

Finally, I would like to address a notably absent figure from this study: William

Shakespeare. Shakespeare’s Sonnets, published in 1609, have been critically renowned for their portrayal of the intimate—and even proto-homosexual—relationship between the speaker and the young man he writes to in the first 126 sonnets, and for their portrayal of the “Dark Lady” (whose existence flouts the trope of the emotionally distant, chaste beloved), whom the speaker writes about in the final 28 sonnets. Given these remarkable aspects of Shakespeare’s sequence, it may seem amiss to exclude him from this study.

However, my exclusion of Shakespeare is based on two primary concerns. The first is the already exorbitant amount of work done on Shakespeare’s Sonnets. While new analyses of Shakespeare’s poetry are certainly valuable, it will likely be more productive to conduct analyses of lesser-studied poets such as Barnfield and Wroth rather than studying Shakespeare’s sonnets. The second reason for excluding Shakespeare has to do with Shakespeare’s canonical power. My current formulation—where I look at Sidney as one of the originators of the English sonnet sequence, interrogate the critical consensus that Spenser “fixes” the problematic elements of Sidney’s sequence, and then view

Barnfield and Wroth as poets who challenge and reshape Sidney’s and Spenser’s conceptions of love—allows us to not only study the work of lesser-known poets, but also allows us to challenge the canonical power that poets like Sidney and Spenser have over Barnfield and Wroth. To replace Barnfield or Wroth with Shakespeare (and view

Shakespeare as a poet who revises the sonnet tradition) would be to reaffirm our canonical choices and preclude the opportunity to interrogate why we canonize certain poets over others. In this project, I ultimately hope to show—through my analysis of

Barnfield and Wroth—that diverse and progressive models of love existed during the early modern period, and that these representations of love should prompt us to reconsider what poets we choose to canonize and what forms of love we uphold as

“standard” during this period.

Chapter Two

“Sweet be the bands, the which true love doth tye”: Deconstructing the Canonical

Authority of Sidney and Spenser and Recognizing Themes of Misogyny in Astrophil and

Stella and Amoretti

Introduction Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586) and Edmund Spenser (1552-1599) produced two of the most widely-renowned sonnet sequences in English literature. Following the publication of Wyatt’s and Surrey’s sonnets in Tottel’s Miscellany (1557) and Thomas

Watson’s prototypic sonnet sequence Hekatompathia (1582), Sidney’s Astrophil and

Stella (1591) is one of the first English amatory sonnet sequences of its kind, and it is comprised of one-hundred and eight sonnets and eleven songs, recording the eponymous

Astrophil’s unrequited love for his beloved Stella. The lyric personas of Astrophil and

Stella are often linked to that of Sidney himself and Lady Penelope Rich (to whom

Sidney may have been betrothed for a time), and thus readers have not only been attracted to Sidney’s sonnet sequence for its originality, but also for its subtle references to real-life events in the Sidney circle. Spenser’s Amoretti (1595) was written during the height of the Elizabethan sonnet vogue and depicts the speaker’s courtship with his beloved, containing eighty-nine sonnets which culminate in Spenser’s Epithalamion, a marriage poem between the speaker and the lady that is appended to the sonnet sequence.

Like Astrophil and Stella, Amoretti also has a biographical connection to its author: the courtship and marriage between the speaker and beloved is thought to represent Spenser’s own relationship with his second wife, Elizabeth Boyle. Both Astrophil and Stella and

Amoretti are Petrarchan sequences,5 presenting readers with poetic speakers who profess love, hate, and anguish for their respective ladies, and also presenting readers with seemingly unattainable beloveds who rebuff their lovers’ attempts to woo them.

However, in spite of the fact that both sequences make use of the Petrarchan tradition,

Sidney’s and Spenser’s sequences differ from each other in significant ways. While

Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella depicts Astrophil’s licentious desire to engage in an extramarital affair with Stella (and his subsequent failure to do so), Spenser’s Amoretti depicts its poetic speaker as succeeding in his courtship of the beloved, and renders its speaker’s desire virtuous through his marriage to the lady. Because of Astrophil’s excessive focus on consummating his love to Stella through an adulterous affair, critics have deemed Astrophil and Stella as a sequence that portrays an “obsessive lover imprisoned in Petrarchan clichés,” and one that finally either “warns its reader against indulging an aggressive masculine libido” or reveals Sidney’s “failures as a statesman and divine poet” (Klein 102; Sanchez 2). Conversely, Spenser’s focus on legitimizing his speaker’s desire through marriage has led critics to deem Amoretti as a sequence that

“radically revis[es] Petrarchan conventions of loving and writing” by using Protestantism to create a relationship “informed not by an ethic of domination and force but by the

5 While Sidney and Spenser doubtlessly reproduce Petrarch’s emotionally fraught lover and chaste beloved, both sequences’ relationship with Petrarchism are quite complex. Sidney explicitly flouts the Petrarchan tradition early in his sequence when he mocks poets who imitate “poore Petrarchs long deceased woes,” and Sidney departs significantly from Petrarchism by placing far more emphasis on the erotic nature of Astrophil’s love than does Petrarch for his speaker’s love of Laura (“XV” 7). Spenser, too, deviates from the Petrarchan model by making his initially cold and distant beloved attainable through marriage (thus refashioning the Petrarchan notion that the beloved is forever unattainable). In spite of these revisions to Petrarch, I am choosing to label both Astrophil and Stella and Amoretti as Petrarchan sequences because they uphold fundamental Petrarchan tenets more than they revise them.

18 value of peaceful mutuality” (Klein 188-189). Generally speaking, then, the critical attitudes towards Astrophil and Stella and Amoretti have considered the former to be a flawed representation of love that “is doomed to remain unfinished as long as it pursues physical consummation” while the latter is considered to propose a model of “respectful, empathetic love” that provides “a resolution to the sonneteer’s conventional preoccupation with love” via Protestant marriage (Campbell 90; Bell 181; Larsen 2). In spite of these differences, though, both sequences are highly canonical—Sidney’s for its primacy, remarkable narrativity, and tantalizing references to real-life interactions between Sidney himself and Penelope Rich—and Spenser’s for its reworking of the

Petrarchan tradition to include marriage and thus legitimize the desires of the lover.

While Astrophil and Stella and Amoretti are doubtlessly exceptional works of artistry, the effect of assigning such canonical status to Sidney’s and Spenser’s sequences has caused us to idealize each author and adopt critical attitudes that validate misogynist and hierarchical portrayals of love in each sequence.

We can trace the idealization of Sidney’s and Spenser’s poetry through recent publications. Authors such as Michael Spiller and Lisa Klein have noted that “Sidney was mythologised by his age,” celebrated both as a Protestant hero and a poet who

“legitimized, even inspired, the writing and publication of dozens of sonnet sequences before the [1590s] ended” (Spiller 104; Klein 18). Sidney’s status as a Protestant advocate and poet who developed a “nationalist poetics” via the “Englishing” of the sonnet sequence was not only prevalent in his own age, but has also informed our current estimation of the poet as an “exemplary figure” whose writings, “especially Astrophil and

Stella, helped to overcome the ‘stigma of print’ and to unleash the sonnets, elegies, and romances that continued to pay tribute to Sidney’s powerful example and to promote their own writers” (Klein 20). Indeed, the Norton Anthology of English Literature heralds Sidney as “the author of the most ambitious work of prose fiction [the Arcadia], the most important piece of literary criticism [The Defense of Poesy], and the most influential sonnet cycle of the Elizabethan Age,” thus defining Sidney as an outstanding writer to students of literature (Greenblatt et. Al 541). Regarding Spenser and the idealization of Amoretti, critics such as Michael Spiller, Kenneth Larsen, Lisa Klein, and

Ilona Bell have praised Spenser’s sequence for its formal complexity, liturgical references, and advocacy for Protestant companionate marriage. Spiller, for instance, states that Spenser’s formal choices such as “chained quatrains” and the emotional depth of his lyric persona renders Amoretti “the most coherent and highly developed sonnet sequence of all his contemporaries”; while Larsen celebrates Amoretti for its subtle and manifold scriptural references, which allow “layers of language” to be “intermingled” and produce “differing registers of voice and self-dialogue, so that humor, salaciousness, irony, parody, and ultimately travesty, are all revealed” (Spiller 143; Larsen 41).

Focusing on Spenser’s emphasis on marriage, Klein and Bell state that Spenser makes

“reciprocity central” to Amoretti, and that Spenser’s lyric persona “learn[s] to love

Elizabeth for the ‘frewil,’ the ‘power,’ the ‘self-assurance,’ the ‘virtues rare’ that undo all his efforts at mastery” (Klein 208; Bell 181). What is most interesting in the case of

Spenser—something which is not afforded to Sidney—is that many critics have overlooked problematic aspects of Amoretti in order to praise Spenser’s advocacy for

Protestant marriage. While Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella is often described as a sequence that is overpowered by Astrophil’s “egotism,” “self-absorption,” “‘manipulation,’” and

“‘self-deception,’” Amoretti is characterized as a sequence that is tempered by its speaker’s tone of “self-effacement,” “gentle authority,” “patience,” and “love”—even though Spenser’s lyric persona is arguably just as egotistical, self-absorbed, and manipulative as Astrophil (Dasenbrock 45; Sinfield qtd. in Levy 61; Klein 201, 208). For instance, when Amoretti’s speaker is rebuffed by the lady, he retaliates by defaming her as a “Tyrannesse” or “cruell warriour” who must be punished for her “pryde” and unwillingness to acquiesce (Spenser “Sonnet 10” 5; “Sonnet 11” 3; “Sonnet 31” 3).

Instead of viewing the speaker’s claims as misogynist, critics have often regarded such aggressive comments as ironic and “almost parodically Petrarchan in their depiction of the cruel fair and of the instability and restlessness of the love situation” (Dasenbrock

45). Indeed, the Norton Critical Edition of Edmund Spenser’s Poetry interprets Spenser’s aggressive sonnets as having a tone of “affectionate self-mockery” that does not tarnish his goal of promoting Protestant values (Prescott and Hadfield 669). While our celebration of Sidney’s and Spenser’s sonnet sequences pays homage to both poets’ virtuosity, this has also distorted our understanding of love in the Renaissance and what models of love deserve praise. Our excessive focus on Astrophil and Stella as the primary model of love in early modern England—and especially on Amoretti as a

Protestant, virtuous revision of this model—causes us to stop short of recognizing the diverse models of love in early modern lyric verse, and ultimately allows us to validate

21 and perpetuate problematic models of love instead of the more progressive models expressed by less-canonical or noncanonical poets.

In this analysis, I will conduct readings of Sidney and Spenser that recognize the misogynist and hierarchical elements of each sequence, as well as the problematic critical responses that have served to validate each author’s representation of love. This will especially be the case with Spenser, since he has been celebrated as a poet who refashions

Petrarchism to accommodate mutuality and companionate marriage—even though his speaker’s attitudes towards the lady are arguably more problematic than that of Astrophil.

While my goal is certainly not to invalidate critical perspectives that view Sidney and

Spenser as consummate poets, I do wish to point out that our tendency to celebrate and validate their poetry has reaffirmed their canonical power and created the impression that their models of love are morally valid and representative of Renaissance thought. In actuality, both Sidney and Spenser produce misogynist representations of love in their sequences by having their speakers objectify their beloveds, blame the beloveds for refusing their advances, and threaten violence against the beloveds when they refuse the speakers’ advances. Even Spenser, who purportedly transcends the sexually aggressive and objectifying nature of Petrarchism by advocating for marriage, fails to put forth a representation of egalitarian love since his speaker continues to objectify and force constraints on his beloved after she has accepted his hand. Because Astrophil and Stella and Amoretti put forth highly problematic representations of love that rely on the objectification and oppression of the beloved, we must alter our critical responses to recognize the problematic elements within each sequence, and most importantly

22 reconsider the canonical authority we give to Sidney and Spenser, and what authors we choose to uphold as champions of early modern literature.

The Objectification and Domination of the Beloved in Astrophil and Stella Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella presents readers with a model of love that relies on the objectification and oppression of Stella. Since Astrophil is only able to voice his desire for Stella through objectifying, idealizing, and vilifying her (as well as through his sexual aggression towards her), the sequence gives almost total control to Astrophil by having him define Stella through his verse. Astrophil’s objectification of Stella is found in poetic devices such as the blazon conceit, and is furthered by war metaphors which view

Stella as an object that must be conquered. Additionally, Astrophil’s oppression of Stella can be seen in sexually aggressive sonnets and songs where he perpetuates the misogynist notion that Stella’s body should belong to him since she has aroused his desire. We see an excellent example of the way Astrophil objectifies Stella in “Sonnet 29,” where he describes her not as a person, but as an accumulation of body parts that cause others to fall in love with her:

Like some weak lords, neighboured by mighty kings,

To keep themselves and their chief cities free,

Do easily yield, that all their coasts may be

Ready to store their camps of needful things:

So Stella’s heart, finding what power love brings,

To keep itself in life and liberty,

Doth willing grant, that in the frontiers he

Use all to help his other conquerings.

And thus her heart escapes; but thus her eyes

Serve him with shot, her lips his heralds are,

Her breasts his tents, legs his triumphal car,

Her flesh his food, her skin his armour brave;

And I, but for because my prospect lies

Upon that coast, am giv’n up for a slave. (Sidney 1-14)

Here, Stella’s beauty is described in terms of war: Stella is a “weak lord[]” who—when she realizes that Love may overpower her—agrees to “yield” her body to Love’s

“conquerings” as long as her heart will remain “free.” Stella’s body is then blazoned, and each part is described for its function in Love’s war. Her eyes “serve” Love as arrows, her lips are Love’s “heralds,” her breasts are Love’s “tents,” her legs are Love’s

“triumphal car,” her “flesh” is Love’s “food,” and her skin is Love’s “armour.” What is most significant about this sonnet is that Sidney’s use of the blazon conceit and war metaphor does not allow Stella to appear as an individual, but rather reduces Stella to a collection of military tools that Love uses to conquer men’s hearts. Astrophil’s choice to blazon Stella’s breasts as “tents” and her skin as “armour,” for instance, shows his objectification and dehumanization of her since he chooses to dissect her body into pieces rather than view her as a complete person. Furthermore, Sidney’s use of the war metaphor compounds the objectifying nature of the blazon since Stella’s body to belongs

Love and his “conquerings” rather than herself. While a traditional sonnet that employs the blazon will simply compare the lady’s body to various objects (such as Sidney’s

“Sonnet 9,” which compares Stella’s lips to “[r]ed porphyr” and cheeks to “[m]arbles, mixed red and white”), “Sonnet 29” does not allow Stella’s body to belong to her— instead, her body belongs to Love, her “flesh” his “food,” and her skin his “armour”

(“Sonnet 9” 6, 8). Sidney’s choice to have Stella’s body “[s]erve” Love in this sonnet furthers her disempowerment and also emphasizes our impression that Astrophil only views her as an object of beauty. Finally, while Astrophil attempts to depict a power dynamic where he is a “slave” to Stella’s beauty, readers are able to see through

Astrophil’s guise of disempowerment since he is the one who ultimately has rhetorical power by defining Stella as a series of objects. Astrophil’s choice to objectify Stella as an amalgamation of war materials supports Charles Levy’s claim that “Astrophil fails systematically to take Stella seriously as a moral and emotional being,” and shows readers that his expression of love relies upon the objectification and disempowerment of

Stella (Levy 57). While “Sonnet 29” shows how Sidney’s model of love gives almost total power to Astrophil while disempowering Stella, we see this model of love become even more troubling when Astrophil threatens sexual violence against Stella in the

“Second Song.”

Sidney’s “Second Song” depicts a scene where Astrophil kisses Stella while she is sleeping. While the action of kissing Stella while she sleeps is problematic in and of itself, Astrophil’s entitled rhetoric regarding Stella’s body is what strikes readers as the most alarming element of this poem:

Have I caught my heavenly jewel

Teaching sleep most fair to be?

Now will I teach her that she,

When she wakes, is too too cruel.

Since sweet sleep her eyes hath charmed,

The two only darts of love:

Now will I with that boy prove

Some play, while he is disarmed.

Her tongue waking still refuseth,

Giving frankly niggard ‘no’;

Now will I attempt to know

What ‘no’ her tongue sleeping useth.

See, the hand which, waking, guardeth,

Sleeping, grants a free resort;

Now will I invade the fort;

Cowards love with loss rewardeth.

………………………………

Yet those lips so sweetly swelling

Do invite a stealing kiss:

……………………………….

O sweet kiss—but ah, she is waking,

Louring beauty chastens me;

Now will I away hence flee;

Fool, more fool, for no more taking. (Sidney 1-16, 21-22, 25–28)

Here, Astrophil takes pleasure in Stella’s vulnerability, gleefully stating that he will

“play” with Cupid/Stella now that she is “disarmed.” While watching her sleep,

Astrophil mocks Stella and her refusal of his advances, declaring that he will “teach” her

(via a kiss) that her refusal of him is “too too cruel” and that her tongue will not able to say “no” while she is sleeping. Astrophil then espouses the flawed notion that Stella’s state of unconsciousness “grants a free resort” and “invite[s]” him to “steal[]” a kiss. At the end of the poem, Astrophil has kissed Stella, “flee[s]” when she awakens, and chides himself for taking “no more” than a kiss. What is significant about the “Second Song” is

Astrophil’s disturbing attitude of entitlement towards Stella’s body. Astrophil’s statement that he will “teach” Stella that she is “too too cruel” and that he will “attempt to know / What ‘no’ her tongue sleeping useth” shows complete disregard for Stella’s desire to remain left alone, since Astrophil’s playful tone trivializes Stella’s wishes and his use of the word “teach” implies that his desire to possess Stella is the correct point of view.

Furthermore, Astrophil’s claim that Stella’s “sleeping” hand “grants a free resort” and that he will “invade the fort” furthers his objectification of Stella, and even implies sexual violence. The fact that Astrophil compares Stella to a “fort” and aggressively states that he will “invade” her not only shows that he fails to see her as a human being, but it also shows that he is willing to perpetuate sexual violence. Indeed, Jocelyn Catty states that

27 the “Second Song”’s “rhetorical manipulation of female ‘subject’ by male poet…allows for an analogy with rape” (Catty 55). More than this, though, we also see that Astrophil lacks remorse when Stella “lour[s]” at him once she has awoken. Although Astrophil claims that her “[l]ouring beauty chastens” him, he ends the poem by regretting that he did not “take more” from Stella. What this finally shows us is that Astrophil has little concern for Stella’s own desires, and that the model of love in Astrophil and Stella is constructed almost exclusively to benefit Astrophil. At its lowest point, Astrophil and

Stella depicts a relationship where the lover distorts the beloved through verse and is willing to enact violence on the beloved so that he may gain personal satisfaction. There are, however, a few moments in the sequence where Stella is also allowed to express her desire, and these moments complicate the notion that Astrophil and Stella is entirely oppressive to the beloved.

Stella’s Agency While the majority of sonnets in Astrophil and Stella show Astrophil rhetorically and physically manipulating Stella for his own benefit, a few sonnets in the sequence suggest that Stella returns Astrophil’s affections and may have some agency within the sequence.

“Sonnet 57” and “Sonnet 58,” for instance, depict interesting scenes where Stella reads

Astrophil’s verse and sings it back to him, causing Astrophil to feel “ravishing delight,” and implying that Stella approves of Astrophil’s verse enough to sing it (“Sonnet 58” 13).

Additionally, “Sonnet 62” suggests that Stella does indeed love Astrophil since the poem relates her claim that she “love[s]” Astrophil, but with “a love not blind” (implying that she will not act on her desire for Astrophil lest it cause him to “decline / From nobler

28 course”) (6). “Sonnet 66” also hints at Stella’s desire for Astrophil, when, in the final couplet, Astrophil states that Stella blushes to look on him—an act which “guilty seemed of love” (14). Some of the most telling instances of Stella’s desire, though, occur from

“Sonnet 79” to “Sonnet 82.” In these sonnets, Astrophil voices his bliss that he has succeeded in kissing Stella. Far from the sexual violence of the “Second Song,” these sonnets suggest that Stella has kissed Astrophil willingly—and even though the poems primarily focus on Astrophil’s reaction to the kisses—they also imply that Stella has autonomy and is acting on her own desire. One poem which suggests Stella’s agency is

“Sonnet 79,” the first poem where Astrophil celebrates kissing her:

Sweet kiss, thy sweets I fain would sweetly endite,

Which even of sweetness sweetest sweetener art:

Pleasing’st consort, where each sense holds a part;

Which, coupling doves, guides Venus’ chariot right;

Best charge, and bravest retreat in Cupid’s fight;

A double key, which opens to the heart,

Most rich, when most his riches it impart;

Nest of young joys, schoolmaster of delight,

Teaching the mean at once to take and give;

The friendly fray, where blows both wound and heal;

The pretty death, while each in other live;

Poor hope’s first wealth, hostage of promised weal,

Breakfast of love—but lo, lo, where she is:

Cease we to praise, now pray we for a kiss. (Sidney 1-14)

In this sonnet, Astrophil lavishly describes Stella’s kiss, using poetic devices such as polyptoton to create the extravagant statement that her kiss is “of sweetness sweetest sweetener,” and using metaphor to compare the kiss to a “[n]est of young joys” and a

“schoolmaster of delight.” One of the more compelling aspects of this poem, though, is what is not explicitly written. Although Astrophil spends the entirety of the sonnet praising Stella’s kiss and asking for another, readers can infer the more provocative point that Stella has allowed him to kiss her and continues to do so through “Sonnet 82.” The fact that Stella has willingly kissed Astrophil implies that she reciprocates his desire and is demonstrating her agency with regard to her own sexuality. Indeed, Melissa Sanchez argues that Stella’s decision to see Astrophil in private after the “Second Song” and even kiss Astrophil “of her own accord” shows Stella “eschew[ing] the role of victim” and having “libidinal impulses…as intense and conflicted as Astrophil’s” (3,16). While

Stella’s choice to kiss Astrophil does not erase Astrophil’s highly problematic behavior towards her, the kissing sonnets, along with sonnets 57, 58, 62, and 66, begin to give us a portrait of Stella as an individual who has her own sexual desires and chooses to act on them. Critics such as Laura Kolb have even suggested that poems such as “Sonnet 57” and “Sonnet 58” show Stella resisting “being re-shaped by Astrophil’s desires or seduced by his poetry” since she takes control of Astrophil’s lyric representation of her by singing his verse, and thus shows herself as “a character external to Astrophil’s Petrarchan poetic practice” (80, 86). What we see in Astrophil and Stella, then, is that the sequence portrays a model of love that gives near-total control to Astrophil and relies upon the

30 objectification, rhetorical manipulation, and oppression of the beloved in order for the lover to express his emotions. There are, however, several moments within the sequence—such as “Sonnet 79”—that show Stella as an individual with her own desires, moments which complicate Astrophil and Stella’s unequal model of love. While

Sidney’s sequence is often considered a morally imperfect one (because of Astrophil’s excessive lust for the already-married Stella), we will also see that Spenser’s Amoretti suffers from its speaker’s problematic attitude towards his beloved.

Spenser’s Reproduction of Petrarchan Tropes Much like Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella, the speaker in Amoretti relies on the objectification and oppression of the beloved in order to express his love for her. While

Sidney often disempowers Stella through blazoning her and having Astrophil view her as an object of beauty, Amoretti is striking for its violence towards the beloved. Many sonnets feature the speaker vilifying the beloved for her refusal of his advances and calling for violent action against the beloved (such as the “incessant battery to her heart”) in order to punish her (Spenser, “Sonnet 14” 10). While these sonnets display the speaker’s aggression towards the beloved and his restrictive attitude regarding the beloved’s own free will, critics have often taken these emotionally charged sonnets to be parodies of the despondent Petrarchan lover. Critics such as Larsen, for instance, have argued that Spenser’s aggressive sonnets have an “exaggeratedly histrionic” tone that can only be interpreted as irony (40). Larsen contends that Spenser’s intensely vitriolic tone reveals his “posturing as excessively plaintive” and “exposes both his courtly and poetic roles to caricature” (40). Contrary to the notion that these aggressive sonnets are

31 parodies of the frustrated Petrarchan lover, my goal in this analysis of Spenser will be to reexamine the problematic sonnets of Amoretti and show that their violent tone is sustained throughout the sequence—making them not a fleeting parody of Petrarch, but rather sonnets that expose the unequal model of love in Amoretti. One of the most aggressive sonnets that occurs early on in the sequence is “Sonnet 10,” where the speaker berates the beloved for her refusal of him:

Unrighteous Lord of love, what law is this,

That me thou makest thus tormented be?

The whiles she lordeth in licentious blisse

Of her freewill, scorning both thee and me.

See how the Tyrannesse doth joy to see

The huge massácres which her eyes do make

And humbled harts brings captives unto thee;

That thou of them mayst mightie vengeance take.

But her proud hart doe thou a little shake

And that high look, with which she doth comptroll

All this worlds pride bow to a baser make,

And al her faults in thy black booke enroll:

That I may laugh at her in equal sort,

As she doth laugh at me and makes my pain her sport. (Spenser 1-14)

In this sonnet, the speaker compares the beloved to a “Tyrannesse” who basks “in licentious blisse / Of her freewill” and “scorn[s]” both the speaker and Love itself. The

32 speaker states that the beloved makes “huge massácres” with her eyes (meaning that she captivates men by looking at them), and does so because she wishes for Love to take

“mightie vengeance” against the men who are captivated by her (i.e. she wishes for them to be afflicted with love). The speaker then asks that Love “shake” the beloved’s “proud hart” and make her “bow to a baser make,” while also asking that Love write all of the beloved’s “faults” in its “black booke” so that the speaker may “laugh at her” as much as she laughs at him and makes his “pain her sport.” What we immediately notice about this sonnet is the aggressive metaphor that the speaker employs. The speaker’s comparison of the beloved to a “Tyrannesse” along with his statement that she creates “massácres,”

“captives,” and desires “vengeance” connotes intense violence, and shows that the speaker vilifies the beloved when she chooses to “scorn[]” him of her own “freewill.”

Furthermore, the speaker’s statement that he wants the beloved’s faults written in Love’s

“black booke” implies that he will represent her negatively in his verse until she submits to him, showing that the speaker is willing to punish the beloved for rebuffing him.

Given the fact that the speaker vilifies the beloved and threatens to mar her reputation through his verse, this sonnet can be read as evincing a model of love that gives total control to the lover by having him disparage the beloved through his verse.

Critics, however, have taken this sonnet to be an ironic representation of the Petrarchan lover. Larsen, for instance, notices the “exaggerated and overstated” use of words such as “‘huge massacres, ‘mightie vengeance,’” and “‘humbled harts,’” and states that such

“hyperbolic” terms “can only be construed as good-natured teasing” (32-33). Lisa Klein also reads “Sonnet 10” as parodic, arguing that this sonnet shows “the lovers knowingly

33 and mockingly strike the conventional poses for each other,” while Prescott and Hadfield encourage readers to have “an ear out for affectionate self-mockery” since “[a] little exaggerated Petrarchism” may have been written with the intention of “amus[ing]” the beloved (Klein 198; Prescott and Hadfield 669). While Spenser’s representation of the lover and beloved in this sonnet is certainly over-the-top and can be read as leaning towards parody, the fact that Spenser sustains this “exaggerated” tone throughout the sequence suggests that “Sonnet 10” is not just a moment of “good-natured teasing,” but rather is one of many sonnets that demonstrates the speaker’s aggressive attitude towards the beloved. For instance, sonnets 11, 12, 14, 28, 31, 32, 36, 37, 38, 41, 47, 48, 49, 51,

56, and 57 either vilify the beloved, contain violent metaphors, or threaten to defame the beloved via the lover’s verse. We see “Sonnet 31” depict the beloved as “embrew[ing]” her “poor thralls” in “bloody bath” by captivating them with her beauty, while “Sonnet

32” has the speaker compare himself to a blacksmith who cannot get the beloved to accept him even though he “beat[s] on th’andvyle of her stubberne wit” (“Sonnet 31” 11-

12, “Sonnet 32” 8). Additionally, “Sonnet 47” continues the intensely violent rhetoric of

“Sonnet 10” when the speaker warns readers to “[t]rust not the treason” of the beloved’s

“smyling lookes” since she “slay[s]” men with “bloody hands” and “cruel pryde” (1, 7,

9). The lover’s desire to “beat” the beloved’s “wit” until she submits to him and his choice to represent her as a cruel murderer when she rejects him shows that the aggressive tone of “Sonnet 10” is the rule rather than the exception to Amoretti, and ultimately suggests that the model of love in Amoretti relies on a hierarchical power balance where the beloved must submit completely to the lover’s wishes. While these

34 violent sonnets occur before the beloved has accepted the lover’s hand in marriage, what is most important to note is that the speaker’s desire to control the beloved occurs even after she has accepted his hand—something which shows that Amoretti fails to present a model of egalitarian love.

The Failure of Mutuality in Amoretti While critics have often celebrated Amoretti for its vision of Protestant, mutual love, what readers actually see in the latter half of the sequence is that the speaker continues to use oppressive and objectifying rhetoric when he describes his relationship with the beloved. Combined with the violent sonnets in the first half of the sequence, the speaker’s possessive tone towards the beloved in the latter half of the sequence shows that the model of love in Amoretti is not one of reciprocity and mutuality, but rather is one that is founded on the disempowerment of the beloved. An excellent example of the speaker’s continued oppression of the beloved is “Sonnet 65,” where he attempts to assure the lady that her loss of liberty in marriage will be beneficial to her:

The doubt which ye misdeeme, fayre love, is vaine,

That fondly feare to loose your liberty,

When loosing one, two liberties ye gayne,

And make him bond that bondage earst did fly,

Sweet be the bands, the which true love doth tye,

Without constraynt or dread of any ill.

The gentle bird feels no captivity

Within her cage, but singes and feeds her fill.

There pride dare not approch, nor discord spill

The league twixt them, that loyal love hath bound:

But simple truth and mutuall good will

Seekes with sweet peace to salve each others wound.

There faith doth fearlesse dwell in brasen towre,

And spotlesse pleasure builds her sacred bowre. (Spenser 1-14)

In this sonnet, the speaker chides the lady for “doubt[ing]” her upcoming marriage, telling her that her “feare” of “loos[ing]” her liberty is “fond[]” and “vaine.” The speaker then tries to persuade the beloved that her loss of liberty is really no loss at all since she will “gayne” “two liberties” and “the bands” of “true love” will present no “constraynt” to her. The speaker continues by comparing the situation of the lady to that of a “gentle bird” in a “cage” who “feels no captivity” and joyously “singes and feeds her fill.” The speaker closes the sonnet by celebrating the “league twixt” husband and wife, stating that

“simple truth,” “mutuall good will,” and “spotlesse pleasure” are what the beloved can look forward to in marriage. Initially, “Sonnet 65” appears to endorse a model of egalitarian love since the speaker’s use of phrases such as “two liberties ye gayne,”

“mutuall good will,” and “salve each others wound” implies that both husband and wife will benefit spiritually from the marriage. However, if we take a closer look at the speaker’s rhetoric of bondage, we see that this sonnet seems to espouse the beloved’s restriction more than it does her equality with the speaker. For instance, the speaker’s use of language such as “bondage,” “bands,” and “tye,” emphasizes the restraints that marriage will place on the beloved. Furthermore, the speaker’s comparison of the

36 beloved to a “gentle bird” in a “cage” introduces the implication that the beloved will be severely restricted once she is married. The fact that the speaker directs restrictive rhetoric towards the lady (and not towards himself, since he addresses the sonnet to the lady and genders the “gentle bird” as “her”) shows that his model of love relies on the submission of the lady rather than mutuality. In support of this notion, we also see other sonnets—such as “Sonnet 67” and “Sonnet 71”—employ restrictive rhetoric towards the lady. “Sonnet 67,” for instance, is Spenser’s famous revision of Petrarch’s “Rima 190” and Wyatt’s “Whoso List to Hunt,” which presents the speaker as a hunter who has

“wonne” and “fyrmely tyde” the lady (12, 14). The speaker’s use of words such as

“wonne” and “fyrmely tyde” implies that the beloved is a prize to be enjoyed rather than a companion—an idea furthered by “Sonnet 71,” which presents the speaker as a

“Spyder” who has “caught” the lady (who he compares to a bee) in his “cunning snare” and “captivéd” her (5, 7). “Sonnet 67” and “Sonnet 71” both use language of captivity that mirrors the restrictive rhetoric in “Sonnet 65,” and these sonnets ultimately support the notion that Spenser’s relationship between lover and beloved—even in marriage—is one built on hierarchy rather than mutuality.

Critics, however, have been reluctant to label these sonnets as problematic. While

Ilona Bell comments that the caged bird metaphor in “Sonnet 65” is questionable—since

“[t]o the bird’s owner, it may look as if the bird ‘feeles no captiuity’; however, to the caged bird…a cage still ‘feeles’ like a cage”—Bell then goes on to state that Spenser’s speaker likely realizes that the beloved “may not like the prospect of being locked up in her husband’s house,” and thus “tries to make amends” with the lady by celebrating

“mutuall good will” at the end of the sonnet (Bell 175). Though Bell acknowledges the oppressive nature of the cage metaphor, she places too much weight on the notion that the speaker “suspects” that the lady does not appreciate his comparison—an idea which is inferred by Bell rather than explicitly stated or even implied in Amoretti. Other critics, such as Klein, Prescott, and Hadfield similarly give Spenser’s speaker the benefit of the doubt, stating that the speaker advocates for “mutual love” while also maintaining his

“authority,” and also stating that his use of the “Spyder” and “Bee” metaphor in “Sonnet

67” appeals to the lady’s “sense of play” (Klein 205-206; Prescott and Hadfield 669).

While these critics have interesting perspectives that speculate on how the lady

(presumably the real-life Elizabeth Boyle) would have reacted to Spenser’s poetry, there is no evidence in Amoretti which suggests that the beloved has reacted playfully towards the speaker’s violent or possessive verse—indeed, one of the defining features of the sonnet sequence is the beloved’s inability to respond to the poet, something which underscores the speaker’s power over the beloved. If we take the speaker’s rhetoric in

“Sonnet 65” at face-value—instead of guessing that the speaker may be attempting to amuse or respond to the beloved—we see that the speaker evinces a hierarchal model of love that expects the beloved to occupy a position of subordination in the relationship.

While this attitude may be expected from a sixteenth-century poet, it is not the model of mutuality or “reciprocity” that critics have celebrated it to be (Klein 208). What is most problematic about Spenser’s Amoretti, then, is not the speaker’s attitude towards the beloved—this is to be expected from a man in Spenser’s time—but rather our critical tendency to overlook the speaker’s misogynist language and view him as a reformer of

Petrarchan poetry and champion of companionate marriage. While we have tended to view Spenser as a poet who “fundamentally reworks the amorous Petrarchan sonnet he inherited from Sidney and his contemporaries,” we see that “Sonnet 65,” “Sonnet 67,” and “Sonnet 71” all reproduce the Petrarchan notion that the lady should relinquish her freedom and be bound to the lover (Klein 208). Furthermore, these three sonnets in the latter half of the sequence are not the only ones to show the failure of mutuality in

Amoretti. We also see additional poems, such as “Sonnet 77,” espouse objectifying rhetoric that parallels the traditional Petrarchan sonnet.

Although it occurs after the beloved has accepted the lover’s marriage proposal,

“Sonnet 77” is an objectifying portrait of the lady that presents her as a commodity of beauty rather than a partner in marriage. When describing how beautiful the lady is, the speaker states,

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

A goodly table of pure yvory:

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,

Or those which Atalanta did entice.

Exceeding sweet, yet voyd of sinful 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. (Spenser 1-14)

Here, the speaker presents us with a blazon of the lady’s breasts, likening her chest to a

“goodly table of pure yvory” and her breasts to “[t]woo golden apples of unvalewd price.” The speaker states that the lady’s apple-like breasts exceed the exquisite apples in the myths of Hercules and Atalanta, and he ends the sonnet by comparing the lady’s

“brest” to a “table…richly spredd,” which he “feeds” on with his “thoughts.” What is so striking about the speaker’s representation of the beloved is his choice to spend the entire sonnet blazoning the beloved’s chest as a “table…richly spredd”—something which reduces the lady from an individual to a mute table for men to enjoy. Although critics such as Dasenbrock have argued that Amoretti moves towards “a more stable kind of love” where the speaker properly treats “the love object,” who is really “no object at all,”

“Sonnet 77” shows that the lady is indeed objectified by the speaker and is treated as a prize rather than a woman with whom the speaker can share “a selfless and mutual concord” (46). Furthermore, while critics have been able to defend against poems such as “Sonnet 10” by labeling them as “parodically Petrarchan” and stating that Spenser writes these in order to expose the “instability of Petrarchism,” it is much more difficult to defend the speaker in “Sonnet 77” since this poem occurs near the very end of the sequence, where the speaker has supposedly transitioned to a model of “stable, reciprocal, and selfless marriage” (Dasenbrock 45-47). Indeed, the speaker’s choice to

40 represent the beloved as a “goodly table of pure yvory” bears more similarity to Levy’s critique that “Astrophil fails systematically to take Stella seriously as a moral and emotional being” than it does to Bell’s notion that Amoretti “refashion[s] some of the most treasured literary tropes” of Petrarchism (Levy 57, Bell 181). What we ultimately see in Spenser’s Amoretti is that the speaker uses violent rhetoric towards the beloved in the beginning of the sequence and continues to use restrictive and objectifying rhetoric in the latter half of the sequence—something which shows that Amoretti fails to truly endorse a model of love where husband and wife are companions, but rather reproduces a hierarchical model of love between lover and beloved.

Conclusion What we have seen in this analysis of Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella and Spenser’s

Amoretti is that both sequences portray hierarchical models of love that give the lovers substantial power over the beloveds. Although critics have tended to notice the hierarchical relationship between Astrophil and Stella, they have been inclined to hail

Spenser’s Amoretti as a model of egalitarian love, even though Spenser reproduces the

Petrarchan lover’s attitude of sexual aggression and ownership towards the lady. What is at stake in our critical perceptions of these authors—especially in our positive reception of Spenser—are what models of love we choose to validate, what authors we choose to canonize, and whose work we choose to make readily accessible to students of literature.

While Sidney and Spenser should be recognized for their poetic virtuosity and innovations on the English sonnet sequence, their current canonical status as spokesmen of the Renaissance gives the impression that their work is the apotheosis of early modern

41 poetry—and our critical affirmation of them serves to perpetuate the notion that their poetry is not only the best of the Renaissance, but, in Spenser’s case, morally valid.

What is important to note about our reception of Sidney and Spenser is that our tendency to celebrate the problematic poetry of male authors is quite extensive. In her analysis of

Milton’s Paradise Lost, Alison Bare notes that scholars “continue to advocate Milton as a pioneer of the idea of companionate marriage,” even though his representation of Adam and Eve’s relationship relies on “foundational sexual inequality underlying the marriage structure” (95-96). This critical propensity to validate misogynist and hierarchical representations of love, power, gender, and sexuality put forth by canonical male poets has limited our recognition of other poets who present differing representations of love— and has profoundly impacted what we consider to be valuable writing. As we turn to analyses of Richard Barnfield and Lady Mary Wroth, we will not only see that these authors adapt the Petrarchan tradition to produce more egalitarian and diverse models of love, but also that our recognition of their poetry can help reshape our understanding of love in the early modern period.

Chapter Three

“He straight perceav’d himselfe to be my Lover”: The Creation of a Homoerotic

Experience and the Cost of Voicing Homoeroticism in Richard Barnfield’s Cynthia

Sonnets

Introduction Richard Barnfield (1574-1620?) wrote some of the most homoerotic poems of the

English Renaissance. Barnfield authored three volumes of poetry, The Affectionate

Shepheard, Cynthia: With Certaine Sonnets, and Legend of Cassandra, and The

Encomion of Lady Pecunia, writing a considerable number of poems on the shepherd

Daphnis and his passion for the beautiful young man, Ganymede.6 Unlike other homoerotic poems of his time—such as Spenser’s The Shepheardes Calender, Marlowe’s

“The Passionate Shepherd to His Love,” and Shakespeare’s Sonnets—Barnfield’s

Daphnis and Ganymede poems are unabashedly homoerotic, ranging from Daphnis’s desire to love Ganymede for his “qualities divine,” to Daphnis’s explicit physical desire for Ganymede to “sucke” his “sweete” and “faire flower” (Barnfield, The Affectionate

Shepheard 97, 207). It is Barnfield’s bold assertion of a homoerotic experience that makes him such a fascinating figure of study in the English Renaissance, especially because Daphnis’s passionate desire to make Ganymede his “Bride” and isolate himself from women seems to challenge the critically accepted notion that same-sex desire in the

Renaissance was “not a sexuality in its own right” nor “the starting place for anyone’s

6 Barnfield may have also authored Greenes Funeralls and Orpheus His Journey to Hell, though his authorship of these volumes—especially the latter—remains in question.

43 self-definition” “in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries” (Barnfield 78; Bray 25;

Smith 10-11). However, Barnfield’s bold homoerotic themes—the very features that should make him a widely-studied author—have unsettled literary critics to the point where Barnfield occupies an extraordinarily minor position in our current literary canon.

Barnfield’s critical reception over the past four centuries has been filled with homophobia, which has led critics to either ignore Barnfield, criticize the “sexual perversion” of his poetry, or generally undervalue his skill as a poet (Brydges qtd. In

Klawitter 23). Following this, the reproduction of Barnfield’s poetry and the literary criticism surrounding him prior to 1990 have been scant and largely discriminatory.

However, since the 1990 publication of George Klawitter’s Richard Barnfield: The

Complete Poems, critical attitudes towards Barnfield have become more open, and

Barnfield is beginning to be seriously considered as a poet who works to confound and redefine our conceptions of homosexuality (or its equivalent) in the early modern period.

Even so, it is by no means settled that Barnfield’s work reveals the mentality of an early- modern “sodomite.” One common theme that still remains contested in Barnfield scholarship is the question of how much Barnfield really “meant” what he wrote in the

Daphnis and Ganymede poems, and what historical implications his poems have on our understanding of same-sex desire in the early modern period. If the sentiments in

Barnfield’s poetry are authentic—if Daphnis truly is a character who predominately or exclusively experienced same-sex desire and who knew that “it be sinne to love a lovely

Lad”—then we would be forced to reconsider the widely-accepted claim that homosexuality did not exist in the English Renaissance (Barnfield 11).

To give an overview of critical attitudes surrounding Barnfield’s homoeroticism

(and how some of these attitudes are problematic), we can start with Alan Bray and Bruce

Smith, who were some of the first critics (in 1982 and 1991, respectively) to seriously consider Barnfield’s poetry. Operating under social-constructionist standpoints and emphasizing the lack of a homosexual identity in the English Renaissance, Bray and

Smith dismiss Barnfield’s poems as mere “literary exercises” and “poems of masturbation” that “never get beyond sexual desire” and are ultimately “spoof[s]” and

“parod[ies]” of heterosexual eclogues and sonnets (Bray 61; Smith 104, 112). Notably,

Bray and Smith center their readings of Barnfield on shaky and incorrect biographical data, with Bray arguing that Barnfield’s “robustly pornographic and entirely heterosexual” commonplace book (later shown not to be Barnfield’s)7 proves that

Barnfield’s homoerotic poems are a rhetorical pose, and with Smith arguing that

Barnfield writes The Affectionate Shepheard and the Cynthia sonnets in order to entertain his contemporaries at the Inns-of-court (no biographical data definitively places Barnfield at the Inns-of-court).8 Allowing more consideration for the authenticity of Barnfield’s homoerotic verse than Bray or Smith, George Klawitter, in 1990, acknowledges that

Barnfield’s homoerotic desire may be authentic, but places this desire in an ancient-

7 See Andrew Doyle’s “Richard Barnfield: The Overlooked Autograph.” 8 Though Bray and Smith do not explicitly mention this in their respective readings of Barnfield, it is important to note that incorrect biographical data surrounding Barnfield (placing Barnfield in a country home in Staffordshire with a wife and at least one child) was accepted at the time of Bray’s and Smith’s publications, and may have influenced their dismissal of Barnfield’s homoerotic verse (Worrall 370). See Andrew Worrall’s “Richard Barnfield: A New Biography” for more information on Barnfield’s life.

Greek context, stating that Barnfield’s “message is…more Greek than it is homosexual because the man-boy dalliance is a prelude to a heterosexual commitment” (47).9

Gregory Bredbeck, in the 1992 publication of Homosexuality in Renaissance and

Enlightenment England, treats the topic of Barnfield’s homoerotic poetry more seriously than Bray, Smith, or Klawitter by acknowledging that Barnfield’s poetry “indicates the possibility of the sodomite in [early-modern] society,” and thus Bredbeck introduces the notion that there may have been men who exclusively or predominately experienced same-sex desire during the early modern period (44). Following those scholars who began to take Barnfield’s work more seriously, critics who contributed to the 2001 collection of essays on Barnfield in The Affectionate Shepherd: Celebrating Richard

Barnfield give much more credence to Barnfield’s homoeroticism, viewing Barnfield as someone who reshapes Bray’s and Smith’s formulation of sexuality in the early modern period. These essays amend the incorrect biographical data on Barnfield and feature authors such as Andrew Worrall, Julie Yen, and Kenneth Borris who take seriously the effects that Barnfield’s writings may have had on his life and who explore how

Barnfield’s poetry serves to re-inform our ideas regarding homosexuality in the

Renaissance. For instance, Andrew Worrall posits the idea that Barnfield’s writings may have had very real effects on his personal life—“depriv[ing] him of his birthright as a country gentleman and apparently also of patronage as poet”—while Julie Yen argues that Barnfield’s poetry “is inflected with the anxieties that are inevitably occasioned by

9 Klawitter, too, writes his critical introduction to Barnfield’s poetry using incorrect biographical data.

46 desire and the indeterminacies of the Renaissance concept of sodomy” (Worrall 32; Yen

131). Taking a step further than Worrall and Yen, Kenneth Borris argues that Barnfield adopts the “Renaissance pastoral to serve prohomoerotic purposes…promot[ing] male same-sex love contrary to Elizabethan orthodoxy,” and “seeking to enhance

[homoeroticism’s] social status and currency” (Borris 194, 207). Finally, more recent works on Barnfield written by critics such as Sam See have followed the critical tendency to take Barnfield’s homoerotic verse at face value, arguing that Barnfield “attempts to establish a tradition of homoerotic literature in the English language” (See 64).

While it is encouraging to see that critical texts on Barnfield have become more progressive throughout the years, there are still problematic elements to even the most recent criticism on Barnfield. A scholar like Borris, for instance, attempts to do too much with Barnfield’s poetry, representing Barnfield as a wholly unproblematic poet who portrays homoeroticism and heteroeroticism as equally perfect forms of love. Although

Borris’s positive treatment of Barnfield is commendable, this leads him to elide troubling issues within Barnfield’s poetry, such as Barnfield’s hostile treatment of women and perpetuation of misogynist notions. Sam See similarly idealizes Barnfield, arguing that

Barnfield is “both a writer of imaginative literature and a historian of sexuality in the truest Focauldian sense” (66). See’s idealization of Barnfield as “a historian of sexuality” gives too much credit to Barnfield by assuming that the poet was completely aware of early-modern ideologies, and by eliding problematic elements within Barnfield’s poems that show him struggling to represent a homoerotic experience in heterosexual verse forms. While criticism around Barnfield is certainly moving in the right direction by

47 taking Barnfield’s passionate portrayal of homoeroticism at face-value, it seems that we need more tempered approaches to Barnfield’s work. We must find a way to celebrate

Barnfield’s portrayal of same-sex love while also acknowledging the problematic moments in Barnfield’s poetry, and how these problematic moments are indicative of the struggle to assert a homoerotic experience in early modern England.

In this analysis of Barnfield, my goal will be to examine Barnfield’s version of homoerotic love in the Cynthia sonnets and show that Barnfield uses the Petrarchan mode to validate and assert a homoerotic experience while simultaneously capitulating to problematic Petrarchan conventions in order to make homoeroticism legible to his heterosexual culture. To briefly outline the sequence, Barnfield’s Cynthia sonnets comprise a short, twenty-sonnet cycle that continues The Affectionate Shepheard’s theme of Daphnis attempting to woo Ganymede. Similar to the ways that Sidney and Spenser represent their beloveds, Barnfield represents Ganymede as an unattainable young man who “loves to be belov’d, but not to love,” and participates seminal Petrarchan conceits such as the blazon (“Sonnet X” 14). Unlike the sonnets of Sidney and Spenser, though,

Barnfield also innovates on Petrarchan conceptions of love, revising the genre’s tendency to blame the beloved for refusing to reciprocate, transforming the genre’s use of war metaphors, and presenting a level of equality between Daphnis and Ganymede that is not present in most Elizabethan heterosexual sequences. Barnfield’s Cynthia sonnets give us both a number of sonnets that reshape the hierarchical power balance of traditional

Petrarchan sonnets, and a number of sonnets that reaffirm the hegemonic power balance between lover and beloved (and that also resort to defending homoeroticism through

48 misogynistic notions surrounding the inferiority of women’s love). While it may seem odd for Barnfield to present such progressive and yet such conservative attitudes within the span of only twenty sonnets, I suggest that Barnfield does so in order to vocalize an experience of love that will be legible to his largely heterosexual audience. Although

Barnfield begins to envision an egalitarian homoerotic love, he likely centers this love in problematic Petrarchan rhetoric so his readers can equate homoeroticism to heterosexual love. By evoking the connotations of courtly love through the Petrarchan mode and innovating on several Petrarchan conceits, Barnfield is able to legitimize and empower homoerotic experiences; however, Barnfield’s use of the Petrarchan mode also requires him to write Daphnis’s and Ganymede’s homoerotic love in a problematic heterosexual discourse, ultimately making his expression of homoeroticism one that begins to cultivate a unique identity but is still shaped by heterosexual ideologies.

Homosexuality in Early Modern England Before discussing Barnfield’s representation of homoerotic love in the Cynthia sonnets, I will first discuss critical conceptions of homosexuality in early modern England, as well as the critical approach I will be using to shape my discussion of Barnfield. To begin our critical survey, Alan Bray’s Homosexuality in Renaissance England was the first study of its kind to examine the issue of homosexuality through early-modern documents such as religious texts, legal records, and pamphlets. As mentioned in the introduction, Bray uses such records to emphasize that there was no equivalent to modern-day homosexuality in the English Renaissance. Bray makes the case that the Renaissance term “sodomy”

(which modern readers usually associate with sexual intercourse between men) was a

49 comprehensive term for sin and disorder, encompassing bestiality, incest, intercourse between men—even “sorcery” and “Popery”—thus complicating the idea that there existed in the Renaissance a category of experience referring solely to intercourse between men (Bray 21). More significant than the multitudinous definitions surrounding sodomy, though, is Bray’s claim that early moderns believed that anyone (not just those with same-sex desire) could succumb to sodomy, making the term “not a sexuality in its own right, but…a potential for confusion and disorder in one undivided sexuality” (25).

Finally, Bray argues that the intense fear and hatred surrounding sodomy made it nearly impossible for men who did engage in same-sex intercourse to realize that their behavior differed from the heterosexual norm. For Bray, “the intense hostility homosexuality aroused when it was visible and its influence on a widely shared mythology” made it so that “the individual certainly had a motive for avoiding a clear definition of his aberrant sexual behavior” (70, 78). What we have in Bray’s formulation, then, are three primary circumstances that preclude the existence of a homosexual identity in the English

Renaissance: firstly, the multitude of acts designated by the term “sodomy” makes it difficult to assert there was an early modern category of experience solely for male same- sex intercourse; secondly, the fact that early moderns believed that anyone could succumb to sodomitical behavior shows that men who did engage in same-sex activity were not thought to have a unique sexual orientation; and lastly, the extreme hostility and sinful connotations surrounding sodomy made it exceedingly difficult for men with same- sex desire to identify as sodomites. Bray’s view is reaffirmed in Bruce Smith’s

Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare’s England: A Cultural Poetics, where Smith makes

50 clear that “distinguish[ing] ‘homosexual’ men from ‘heterosexual’ men is…a distinctively twentieth-century way of constructing sexuality,” and that “[n]othing in

Renaissance theology, philosophy, or jurisprudence suggests that individuals found their identity [through sexuality]” (12).

Bray’s and Smith’s formulations have grown to become the prevailing notions regarding homosexuality in the early modern period; however critics such as Claude J.

Summers, Joseph Cady, and Kenneth Borris have challenged this social-constructionist view of homosexuality. Claude J. Summers, for instance, argues against Bray’s conception of homosexuality in the Renaissance, stating that “[social constructionism] certainly should not be interpreted to mean that before the nineteenth-century individuals were never categorized on the basis of their sexual behavior or…of the gender of their sexual object-choices” (4). Summers states that “to deny subjectivity and awareness to individuals who participated in same-sex sexual behavior [is]…misguided and unwarranted, an example of the deleterious effects of the anxiety of anachronism, one that is as misleading…as the anachronism itself” (5). Taking a step farther than

Summers, Joseph Cady argues that “the Renaissance [w]as an era in which a definite awareness and language for a distinct homosexuality existed” (12). Focusing on the term

“masculine love” and its appearance in four Renaissance texts,10 Cady argues that the cross-cultural use of “masculine love” shows that “the term was entrenched and pervasive in Renaissance culture as a designation for what we would now call ‘a male homosexual

10 These texts are: Bacon’s New Atlantis, Heywood’s Pleasant Dialogues and Dramas, Pierre de L’Estoile’s Mémoires-Journaux, and a marginal comment written by Michelangelo the Younger in his granduncle’s Rime.

51 orientation’” (27). Similarly wishing to show the “formation of protohomosexual affiliations and identities” in the Renaissance, Kenneth Borris argues that the term

“sodomy” was not as “diffuse a term” as Bray suggests, stating that “the central cultural function of ‘sodomy’ in Barnfield’s time was pejorative denotation of male-male sex,” and that men who participated in same-sex acts “could not have become dissociated from the sin of sodomy” because the term’s primary connotation was male-male sexual intercourse (197, 200).

When it comes to choosing a critical lens for analyzing homosexuality in early modern England, I will be using a perspective closer to that of Summers, Cady, and

Borris than that of Bray or Smith. My choice to follow Summers’s, Cady’s and Borris’s approaches stems from two primary motivations: firstly, these approaches allow for the possibility of a protohomosexual identity in the Renaissance—something that frees us from Bray’s and Smith’s limiting claims that men who participated in same-sex acts did not recognize themselves as “sodomites,” or that “[t]he structures of knowledge [in the

Renaissance]…did not ask a man who had sexual relations with another man to think of himself as fundamentally different from his peers”—and secondly, a more relaxed social- constructionist standpoint will allow for greater discursive possibilities as it pertains to my reading of Barnfield (Smith 11). Though this analysis of Barnfield will rely on a more open-minded perspective on homosexuality in the Renaissance, I certainly do not mean to suggest that same-sex desire in early modern England existed as it does today or that there even was a definitive homosexual identity in the early-modern period (although

Joseph Cady’s exploration of signifiers such as “masculine love” is indeed compelling). I

52 do, however, believe that there is enough evidence to cast doubt on Bray’s and Smith’s rigid social-constructionist views. For instance, Julie Yen’s chapter on Barnfield

(although it does not place itself in direct opposition to Bray) examines Barnfield’s repeated use of the word “sinne” when he describes Daphnis’s passion for Ganymede, and also examines Barnfield’s prefatory note to Cynthia, where he attempt to deflect criticism by stating that The Affectionate Shepheard was a mere imitation of Virgil’s second eclogue. Yen suggests that Barnfield’s repetition of words such as “sinne”11 and his prefatory note are indicative of “anxieties” surrounding sodomitical behavior, something that inherently complicates Bray’s notion that Renaissance men could not associate their behavior with sodomy. A reading like Yen’s shows Barnfield recognizing how Daphnis’s behavior is “sinful” in the context of his culture, and thus warrants a critical perspective that allows us to view Barnfield as not only recognizing the marginal position of men with same-sex desire, but also validating a homoerotic experience in his positive representation of Daphnis’s love for Ganymede. Finally, when it comes to my use of terminology in this analysis, I will be using the terms “homosexual” and

“heterosexual” to refer to same-sex and opposite-sex desire (although I realize that these ideas did not exist during Barnfield’s time), but I will primarily use the term

“homoerotic” to refer to the sentiments in Barnfield’s verse so as to avoid suggesting that there was a definitive homosexual identity in early modern England.

11 While Barnfield’s repeated use of the word “sinne” to describe Daphnis’s passion for Ganymede can be taken as a rhetorical pose (one that Sidney uses in “Sonnet 14”), Barnfield’s unique situation of writing passionate verses from one man to another demands that we consider the possibility that Barnfield realizes that Daphnis’s passion for Ganymede would be condemned as sinful behavior by his contemporaries.

Asserting a Homoerotic Experience Barnfield writes a number of sonnets in the Cynthia sequence that both employ the

Petrarchan mode to legitimize homoeroticism while simultaneously subverting

Petrarchism’s problematic power balance between lover and beloved in order to assert a unique homoerotic experience. It is in these sonnets that Barnfield is best able to realize the goal of validating homoeroticism through the Petrarchan mode while also striving toward a model of love that looks beyond the inequality within heterosexual Petrarchism.

We see the first example of Barnfield innovating on the Petrarchan mode in “Sonnet I,” where Daphnis describes Ganymede as a thief that has stolen his heart:

Sporting at fancie, setting light by love,

There came a theefe and stole away my heart,

(And therefore robd me of my chiefest part)

Yet cannot Reason him a felon prove.

For why his beauty (my hearts thief) affirmeth,

Piercing no skin (the bodies fensive wall)

And having leave, and free consent withall,

Himselfe not guilty, from love guilty tearmeth,

Conscience the Iudge, twelve Reasons are the Iurie,

They finde mine eies the beutie t’have let in,

And on this verdict given, agreed they bin,

Wherefore, because his beauty did allure yee,

Your Doome is this: in teares still to be drowned,

When his faire forehead with disdain is frowned. (Barnfield 1-14)

In this sonnet, Barnfield takes up the conventional theme of describing how the beloved has used beauty to captivate the lover and is consequently responsible for the lover’s pain. The first three lines of this sonnet, which label Ganymede as a “theefe” that has

“robd” Daphnis of his “heart,” initially echo Sidney’s “Sonnet 36”—where Stella is described as a commander who “assault[s]” Astrophil with “[w]hole armies of [her] beauties”—and Spenser’s “Sonnet 12,” where the lady is described as “captiving” the speaker with her “hart-thrilling eies” (Sidney 4; Spenser 1, 11). Barnfield’s use of words such as “theefe” and “robd” bears significant similarities to Sidney’s and Spenser’s use of

“assault” and “captiving” to describe their respective beloveds, since all of these descriptors carry negative connotations that lay blame on the beloveds. The first three lines of Barnfield’s sonnet, then, make use of Petrarchism’s tendency to represent the beloved as an assailant upon the lover’s emotions, and thus Barnfield opens his sequence with a highly traditional sonnet that tells of the first moment the lover’s “heart” was

“stole[n]” by the beloved. The effect of such an opening is to align Daphnis’s love for

Ganymede with traditional Petrarchan relationships and render Daphnis’s love equivalent to the heterosexual relationships that are venerated in Petrarchan lyrics. By employing such a conventional opening, Barnfield is able to compare Daphnis’s homoerotic love to that of heterosexual Petrarchan lovers, and validate the homoerotic experience by making it legible to his heterosexual society. However, Barnfield reshapes the tradition of representing the beloved as a “theefe” in the remainder of the sonnet. Instead of continuing to represent Ganymede as being guilty of stealing Daphnis’s heart, Barnfield

55 instead has Daphnis say that “Reason” cannot “prove” Ganymede a “felon,” since

Ganymede’s “beauty” did not “pierce” Daphnis by force, but was rather let in with “free consent.” Furthermore, Daphnis’s “Conscience” and “Reason” form a “Iudge” and

“Iurie,” and find Daphnis guilty of “let[ting] in” Ganymede’s beauty, telling Daphnis that his punishment for being “allure[d]” to Ganymede is to be “drowned” in his own “teares” when Ganymede responds to him with “disdain.” What we see in these lines is that

Barnfield significantly revises the Petrarchan tendency to blame the beloved for the lover’s desire. Barnfield has Daphnis reflect on his passion for Ganymede, and

Daphnis’s reason and conscience tell him that he is the one responsible for his own attraction to Ganymede—a revision of the Petrarchan tradition that is significant for two primary reasons. Firstly, Daphnis’s recognition that he is responsible for his own sexual desire dissolves the power dynamic that blames the beloved for the lover’s desire (and expects the beloved to submit to the lover), which disrupts the patriarchal notion that men deserve reciprocation for their desire. Secondly—and most significantly—Barnfield’s revision of Petrarchan tropes shows that he is voicing a homoerotic experience that is not completely confined by early modern heterosexual power dynamics. Barnfield can use the Petrarchan mode in the first three lines of this sonnet in order to show that Daphnis’s love for Ganymede is just as significant as Astrophil’s love for Stella and Spenser’s love for his wife, but Barnfield is also able to transform Petrarchan conventions and show that

Daphnis’s love for Ganymede is not bound by the hierarchy of other heterosexual sequences. By revising the Petrarchan tradition, Barnfield begins to voice a homoerotic experience outside of early modern heterosexual relationships.

We see another example of Barnfield utilizing and revising the Petrarchan mode in “Sonnet V,” where Daphnis represents himself and Ganymede as soldiers on the battlefield:

It is reported of faire Thetis Sonne,

……………………………………..

That when the Trojan wars were new begun,

Whos’ever was deepe-wounded with his speare,

Could never be recured of his maime,

Nor ever after be made whole againe:

Except with that speares rust he holpen were.

Even so it fareth with my fortune now,

Who being wounded with his piercing eie,

Must either thereby finde a remedy,

Or els to be releev’d, I know not how,

Then if thou hast a minde still to annoy me,

Kill me with kisses, if thou wilt destroy me. (Barnfield 1, 4-14)

In this sonnet, Daphnis compares himself to a soldier during the Trojan war and compares Ganymede to Achilles (Thetis’s son). Daphnis states that just as Achilles

“wounds” soldiers with his “speare,” Ganymede has “wounded” Daphnis with his

“piercing eie,” and Daphnis craves a “remedy” for his wound just as soldiers could be

“made whole againe” with the rust of Achilles’s spear. This sonnet, like “Sonnet I,” makes use of traditional Petrarchan conceits while simultaneously voicing a homoerotic

57 experience that pushes back against problematic power dynamics. We see Barnfield evoking the Petrarchan tradition in his use of war metaphors, which poets like Sidney and

Spenser use frequently when describing the conflict between their lover’s desire and their beloved’s refusal to reciprocate. For instance, Barnfield’s choice to represent Daphnis’s love for Ganymede as being like the Trojan War is similar to Sidney’s “Sonnet 29,” where Stella is described as aiding Love in his “conquering[]” of Astrophil, and to

Spenser’s “Sonnet 10,” where the lady is described as a “Tyrannesse” who makes

“massácres” by captivating men with her eyes (Sidney 8; Spenser 5-6). Barnfield’s description of Daphnis as “wounded” soldier signifies that Daphnis’s love for Ganymede is similar to the love expressed in both Astrophil and Stella and Amoretti, and thus

Barnfield uses the Petrarchan mode in order to validate homoeroticism. However,

Barnfield’s use of war metaphors also allows him to revise the Petrarchan tradition and assert a homoerotic experience that does not abide by the unequal power dynamics in heterosexual sonnet sequences. Firstly, Barnfield’s choice to represent Daphnis and

Ganymede as two soldiers on the battlefield—particularly his choice to represent

Ganymede as a soldier (Achilles) who has “pierced” Daphnis with his “speare”—has distinct homoerotic connotations that heterosexual sonnets do not. Barnfield’s use of the war metaphor allows him to create a male environment (since war in Barnfield’s time was largely a male enterprise), and also allows him to connote sexual intercourse between men with phallic language such as “pierce” and “speare.” By using war metaphors to create a male space and insinuate male-male intercourse, Barnfield is able to take advantage of the war metaphor to code his sonnet as a homoerotic space. More than this,

58 though, Barnfield also revises the Petrarchan war metaphor in order to gesture towards a more equal model of love than sonneteers like Sidney or Spenser express. For instance, while Sidney and Spenser use war metaphors in order to describe their beloveds as

“fort[s]” that must be “invade[d]” or “cruell warriour[s]” who must be punished for their refusal to reciprocate, Barnfield does not describe Ganymede as an object to be conquered or subdued by Daphnis (Sidney “Second Song” 15; Spenser “Sonnet 11” 3).

Instead, Ganymede is placed in a position of agency since he is the one who “pierces”

Daphnis and is invited by Daphnis to “kill [him] with kisses” at the end of the poem.

Because Ganymede is figured as a powerful soldier who is invited to “destroy” Daphnis

(instead of Daphnis desiring revenge on Ganymede), this sonnet inverts the typical power dynamic where the beloved is either figured as an object to be won or an opponent to be defeated. By granting Ganymede agency and having Daphnis submit to Ganymede’s choice to either “kill [him] with kisses” or leave off, this sonnet gestures towards a model of love that does not give the lover inordinate power over the beloved. What we have seen in “Sonnet I” and “Sonnet V” is that Barnfield uses the Petrarchan mode to place homoerotic love on the same rhetorical level as heterosexual love sonnets, while also revising traditional Petrarchan conceits in order to gesture towards a homoerotic experience that does not follow problematic power structures. While “Sonnet I” and

“Sonnet V” show Barnfield straddling the line between traditional Petrarchan poetry and a more progressive model of love, Barnfield goes even further in his portrayal of a unique homoerotic experience midway through his sequence.

Barnfield’s “Sonnet XI” departs more significantly from the Petrarchan tradition than any of the other sonnets in the Cynthia sequence. This sonnet presents us with a highly narrative moment where Daphnis confesses his love directly to Ganymede, showing readers an egalitarian model of love that gestures towards a homoerotic identity.

Barnfield writes,

Sighing, and sadly sitting by my Love,

He ask’t the cause of my hearts sorrowing,

Coniuring me by heavens eternal King

To tell the cause which me so much did move.

Compell’d: (quoth I) to thee will I confesse,

Love is the cause; and only love it is

That doth deprive me of my heavenly blisse.

Love is the paine that doth my heart oppresse.

And what is she (quoth he) whom thou dost love?

Looke in this glass (quoth I) there shalt thou see

The perfect forme of my faelicitie.

When, thinking that it would strange Magique prove,

He open’d it: and taking off the cover,

He straight perceav’d himselfe to be my Lover. (Barnfield 1-14)

In this sonnet, Daphnis recalls a conversation where he confesses his affections to

Ganymede. Daphnis states that his “sigh[s]” prompt Ganymede to “con[jure]” him “by heavens eternal King” to “tell the cause” of his “hearts sorrowing,” and Daphnis replies

60 by saying that “[l]ove is the cause” of his emotional turmoil. Ganymede then asks who

“she” is that Daphnis loves, and Daphnis replies that Ganymede can see “[t]he perfect forme of [his] faelicitie” by looking into Daphnis’s mirror. Although Ganymede believes that “strange Magique” will show the image of a woman in the glass, he ultimately sees his own reflection, and realizes that he is Daphnis’s “[l]over.” What we immediately notice about this sonnet is that in only the span of fourteen lines, Barnfield is able to relay a remarkable amount of narrative detail and insight into the relationship between Daphnis and Ganymede. Beginning from the first line, we see that Daphnis and Ganymede occupy a position of friendship: Daphnis’s statement that he is “sighing” and “sitting” next to Ganymede implies that both men are comfortable with being in close proximity and displaying emotions to one another. This sense of friendship is furthered in the next three lines when Ganymede invokes the name of God (“heavens eternal King”) in order to demand that Daphnis tell him the truth about his emotional suffering. These lines show that Ganymede cares for Daphnis (at least as a friend), since he is willing to make

Daphnis swear on God to tell the truth about his heartache. What these first four lines give us, then, is a description of Daphnis’s and Ganymede’s friendship which confounds the traditional relationship between lover and beloved in Petrarchan sequences. Instead of describing Ganymede as a distant ideal on “the height of Vertues throne,” Barnfield humanizes Ganymede, illustrating a scene where Daphnis and Ganymede sit together and converse as equals, and where Ganymede seems to have interest in the wellbeing of

Daphnis (Sidney “Sonnet 40” 5). Barnfield further cultivates an egalitarian relationship between Daphnis and Ganymede in the final couplet, where Daphnis states that

Ganymede “perceav’d himselfe to be” his “Lover.” Sam See notes that the syntax of this couplet converts Ganymede from “object” of Daphnis’s love to “subject” of the love— that is, Ganymede is put into the subject position as “lover” instead of object position as the “beloved” (76-77). While it is admittedly Daphnis who labels Ganymede as his

“Lover” (we do not know whether Ganymede approves of this or not), See is right to note that the more active connotations surrounding “Lover” give Ganymede agency. That

Ganymede discovers Daphnis’s affection for him through direct conversation and is represented as Daphnis’s active “Lover” grants him far more agency than traditional

Petrarchan beloveds, and ultimately shows Barnfield gesturing towards an egalitarian relationship between Daphnis and Ganymede.

In addition to departing from the Petrarchan tradition by representing a more equal model of love, this sonnet also gestures towards a homoerotic identity. We see

Barnfield referring to the homoerotic experience as one that is separate from socially acceptable experiences of love in line nine, where Ganymede asks who “she” is that

Daphnis loves. Ganymede’s assumption that Daphnis loves a woman reveals the heteronormative ideology of early modern England, and simultaneously highlights the fact that Daphnis’s passion for Ganymede does not fit this model. Barnfield’s choice to include Ganymede’s assumption during Daphnis’s amorous confession shows the poet

“positing the centrality of…same-sex attraction while at the same time depicting its marginality in a predominantly heterosexual world,” and shows that Barnfield is presenting the homoerotic experience as one that is separate from the heterosexual norm of his time (Charles 179). While this cannot prove that there existed a homosexual

62 identity in the Renaissance, Barnfield’s demonstration that Daphnis’s love for Ganymede does not fit a social norm contradicts Bray’s notion that early-modern men would not have associated their own same-sex behavior with social aberrance, and thus suggests that there was more recognition of same-sex desire in the Renaissance than social- constructionists have posited. On the whole, Barnfield’s “Sonnet I,” “Sonnet V,” and

“Sonnet XI” create an egalitarian relationship between lover and beloved and also gesture towards a homoerotic identity. At his best, Barnfield uses the Petrarchan mode to validate homoeroticism while also departing from this tradition in order to assert a homoerotic experience that does not abide by hierarchical power distributions within heterosexual relationships. However, while Barnfield’s adoption of the Petrarchan mode allows him to “give same-sex love a status equal to its heteroerotic counterpart,” there are also consequences to voicing a socially marginalized experience in a heterosexual lyric form (Charles 187). While a number of Barnfield’s sonnets strive towards creating a more egalitarian relationship between lover and beloved, other sonnets display problematic notions which ultimately signify the difficulties of voicing homoerotic desire in a heterosexual culture.

The Cost of Homoerotic Expression A number of sonnets in Barnfield’s Cynthia sequence feature problematic ideas regarding women and the objectification of the beloved. Sonnets “VII” and “XVII” respectively contain misogynistic ideas about women’s destructive presence and participate in objectifying Ganymede through the blazon conceit. While this is by no means the only interpretive possibility for Barnfield’s most troubling sonnets (there is, in fact, a real

63 possibility that Barnfield was a misogynist and endorsed objectifying rhetoric), we can use these sonnets to explore the notion that Barnfield’s misogynistic comments and his objectification of Ganymede can be attributed to the “cost” of voicing a homoerotic experience in a heterosexual verse form that is part of a larger heterosexual culture.

While Barnfield is able to capitalize on the lofty connotations surrounding Petrarchan lyrics in order to elevate the marginalized experience of homoerotic desire, Barnfield’s use of the Petrarchan mode may also require him to include certain heterosexual lyric conventions in his representation of Daphnis and Ganymede. Furthermore, we can also view the socially marginalized position of homoeroticism as a factor that compels

Barnfield to voice misogynistic ideas, since he may be better able to legitimize same-sex love if he plays to his audience’s belief in the inferiority of women. Barnfield’s use of misogynistic tropes and the blazon conceit can be viewed as the poet’s struggle to represent homoeroticism in a culture that marginalizes such an experience as well as in a verse form that defines love as an experience where the beloved is an object for the lover’s pleasure.

We see Barnfield employ misogynistic tropes in “Sonnet VII,” where Daphnis voices his anxiety about women:

Sweet Thames I honour thee, not for thou art

The chiefest River of the fairest Ile,

Nor for thou dost admierers eies beguile,

But for thou hold’st the keeper of my heart

For on thy waves, (thy Christal-billow’d waves,)

My fairest faire, my silver Swan is swimming:

Against the sunne his pruned feathers trimming:

Whilst Neptune his faire feete with water laves,

Neptune, I feare not thee, not yet thine eie,

And yet (alas) Apollo lov’d a boy,

And Cyparissus was Silvanus ioy.

No, no, I feare none but faire Thetis, I,

For if she spie my Love, (alas) aie me,

My mirth is turn’d to extreame miserie. (Barnfield 1-14)

In this sonnet, Daphnis praises the river Thames for “hold[ing]” Ganymede on its

“waves,” describing Ganymede as a “silver Swan” that is “swimming” in Neptune’s realm. Echoing Marlowe’s Hero and Leander, where Neptune “play[s]” with Leander’s

“tresses” and “steale[s] a kisse” from the young man while he is swimming, Daphnis describes Neptune as doting on Ganymede by “lav[ing]” his “faire feete” with water as he swims (Marlowe qtd. in Yearling 62). Although Neptune can be seen as a rival for

Ganymede’s love, Daphnis makes clear that he does not “feare” Neptune’s attentions towards Ganymede, explaining that he is comfortable with same-sex relationships such as

Apollo’s love for Hyacinth and Silvanus’s love for Cyparissus. Instead of fearing these same-sex attractions, Daphnis states that he “feare[s]” “faire Thetis” who he believes, if she “spie[s]” Ganymede, will turn all of his “mirth” “to extreame miserie.” What

Daphnis is conveying in these lines is his anxiety that women will destroy homoerotic attachments. While Daphnis is comfortable in an all-male environment, he fears that the

65 presence of a goddess like Thetis will displace him as Ganymede’s lover, and thus bring

“miserie” to his life. Daphnis’s anxiety surrounding Thetis once again displays the marginality of homoeroticism (and consequently the predominance of heterosexual relationships), but his “feare” of Thetis also has a misogynistic undertone. Daphnis’s desire that Thetis be excluded from a male homoerotic environment has the unfortunate implication that women should be excluded from the dealings of men. This implication becomes more prominent if we contextualize Daphnis’s statement about Thetis with his negative characterizations of women in The Affectionate Shepheard. While Daphnis’s hostility towards Thetis is relatively subdued, Daphnis’s description of Queen

Guendolen—who is his primary rival for Ganymede’s love in The Affectionate

Shepheard—reveals to a much larger extent Daphnis’s anxiety regarding women. In an attempt to convince Ganymede that Guendolen is an unsuitable match, Daphnis invokes misogynist ideas about women, stating that Guendolen’s heart is “more changeable than

Fortunes wheele” and that her love for Ganymede is inferior to Daphnis’s since she only desires Ganymede for “hir pleasure” (Barnfield 66, 209). Daphnis’s statement that

Guendolen’s heart is like “Fortunes wheele” and that she only desires Ganymede for sexual pleasure plays into early modern notions that women are fickle and have foul sexual appetites. In the context of The Affectionate Shepheard, Daphnis’s use of misogyny allows him to imply that female love is inferior to male love, and thus Daphnis is able to elevate the status of a homoerotic relationship by implying that same-sex love is more authentic than opposite-sex love. If we contextualize “Sonnet VII” with Daphnis’s comments in The Affectionate Shepheard, we see that Daphnis may be employing a

66 similar strategy with regard to Thetis. By wishing that a woman like Thetis be excluded from an all-male environment, Daphnis perpetuates the misogynist notion that women should be excluded from society with men, and Daphnis does so in order to protect his relationship with Ganymede. My primary goal in recognizing Daphnis’s misogynistic comments is not to point out that Barnfield was a misogynist (though that may have been the case), but rather is to show the difficulty of voicing a homoerotic experience in a heterosexual culture. In order for Daphnis to legitimize his love for Ganymede, he must take advantage of his society’s suspicion towards women, and either insult or exclude women from his vision of homoerotic love. In this sonnet then, women must pay the price for the legitimization of homoeroticism. While “Sonnet VII” shows Barnfield capitulating to his culture’s misogyny in order to elevate the status of homoerotic attachments, we also see sonnets where Barnfield capitulates to heterosexual constructions of love in order to make homoeroticism more legible to his audience.

Barnfield’s “Sonnet XVII” is a traditional Petrarchan sonnet that makes use of the blazon conceit in order to celebrate Ganymede’s beauty. While Barnfield’s use of this conceit shows Daphnis voicing his desire to physically possess Ganymede, it also raises questions about the ways in which heterosexual models of love influence homoerotic relationships:

Cherry-lipt Adonis in his snowie shape,

Might not compare with his pure Ivorie white,

On whose faire front a Poets pen may write,

Whose rosiate red excels the crimson grape,

His love-enticing delicate soft limbs,

Are rarely fram’d t’intrap poor gazing eies:

His cheekes, the Lillie and Carnation dies,

With lovely tincture which Apolloes dims.

His lips ripe strawberries in Nectar wet,

His mouth a Hive, his tongue a hony-combe,

Where Muses (like Bees) make their mansion.

His teeth pure Pearle in blushing Correll set.

Oh how can such a body sinne-procuring,

Be slow to love, and quicke to hate, enduring? (Barnfield 1-14)

In this sonnet, Daphnis extravagantly blazons Ganymede’s body, comparing the young man’s features to a wealth of objects, fruits, and plants. Very much following in the footsteps of traditional Petrarchan lovers, Daphnis spends the first eight lines stating that

Ganymede’s “snowie shape” is more perfect than the “Ivorie white” on which “a Poets pen may write,” that Ganymede’s sanguine skin “excels the crimson grape,” and that

Ganymede’s “cheekes” are so beautiful that the “Lillie and Carnation dies” in comparison to them. Daphnis then spends the next four lines comparing Ganymede’s lips to

“strawberries in Nectar wet,” his mouth and tongue to a beehive, and his teeth to

“Pearle[s],” and then finishes the sonnet by lamenting that Ganymede’s body, so “sinne- procuring,” is “slow to love, and quicke to hate.” Daphnis’s passionate blazon of

Ganymede certainly has its merits a bold expression of homoerotic desire; however,

Barnfield’s use of the blazon conceit is problematic since this sonnet ultimately reduces

Ganymede to a collection of body parts that are likened to objects such as pearls and ivory-white vellum. Furthermore, Daphnis’s use of the word “sinne-procuring” to describe Ganymede’s body implicitly lays blame on Ganymede for tempting Daphnis, and thus perpetuates the notion that the beloved is responsible for satisfying the lover’s desire. On the whole, this sonnet participates in the traditional Petrarchan dynamic that disempowers the beloved by objectifying Ganymede and blaming Ganymede for refusing

Daphnis’s advances.

While this traditional use of Petrarchism may be Barnfield’s way of showing

Daphnis’s physical desire for Ganymede, we also must wonder how much this utterance is shaped by the heterosexual lyric forms and cultural dynamics of early modern England.

If “Sonnet VII” shows Barnfield employing misogynist tropes in order to legitimize love between men, is Barnfield’s use of the blazon conceit a way for him to legitimize the homoerotic experience? In spite of the blazon’s problematic legacy as a trope that dehumanizes the beloved into a series of objects, the blazon also has a rich history of being associated with noble, aristocratic, and courtly love. Barnfield may be taking advantage of these lofty connotations and representing Daphnis’s passion for Ganymede in terms of the blazon in order to legitimize the homoerotic for his audience. In other words, although the blazon conceit robs Ganymede of his agency and promotes hierarchical power dynamics between lover and beloved, Barnfield may realize that his audience will only validate Daphnis’s love if it “looks” like the heterosexual love put forth in Petrarchan sonnets, and thus employs the blazon to make homoeroticism legible to his audience. Consequently, this sonnet also brings into question how much power a

69 heterosexual culture has over representations of homoerotic or otherwise marginalized forms of love. Even if Barnfield did not consciously employ the blazon conceit to legitimize Daphnis’s and Ganymede’s love, it is possible that Barnfield employs such a conceit because he has limited discourses available to him with regard to voicing a homoerotic experience. While Barnfield is able to capitalize on Virgil’s classical model of homoeroticism in The Affectionate Shepheard, Barnfield’s use of the Petrarchan mode in the Cynthia sonnets emphasizes that he is writing in a heteronormative culture and has inherited heteronormative discourses regarding love. Daphnis’s blazoning of Ganymede may in fact reveal that heterosexual models of love have a profound shaping force on the expression of marginalized experiences of love—something that is beyond Barnfield’s control. Although scholars such as Sam See and Kenneth Borris have chosen to elide the issues of misogyny and objectifying rhetoric within Barnfield’s work, acknowledging that Barnfield capitulates to misogynistic stereotypes and unequal models of love shows the difficulties of voicing a homoerotic experience in the early modern period, and perhaps anticipates the difficulties of asserting such experiences in the centuries following Barnfield.

Conclusion Barnfield’s poetry provides readers with a history of how early moderns conceived of and expressed homoerotic desire. That Barnfield’s poems use heterosexual verse forms and commonplace ideologies to validate homoeroticism while also departing from these ideologies in order to assert a unique homoerotic experience demands that his work occupy a larger space in our study of early-modern poetry. Although scholarship on

Barnfield has grown throughout the years, his position in the canon remains marginal.

Influential volumes such The Norton Anthology continue to exclude Barnfield from their repertoires,12 and thus prevent students from discovering Barnfield’s positive treatment of same-sex relationships. The fact that Barnfield creates an unprecedented expression of homoerotic desire yet still remains a marginal figure in our literary canon can perhaps be attributed to the sway that centuries of homophobic prejudice still have on our perception of Barnfield’s work. Indeed, Sam See argues that Barnfield’s minor canonical position betrays how “literary expressions of sexuality” are largely shaped by “particular readers’ reactions to those expressions,” and how “critical desires for hermeneutic power have obscured the desires of Barnfield’s poems themselves” (82). The virtuosity, complexity, and singularity of Barnfield’s poetry demands that we as readers and scholars reevaluate our criteria for canonical literature. The continued study of Barnfield will not only give his work the critical attention that it deserves, but will also reshape our perceptions of which models of love we give merit, and why we have chosen to celebrate certain representations of love over others.

12 Although the ninth edition of The Norton Anthology of English Literature includes two of Barnfield’s sonnets from Cynthia, the tenth edition removes Barnfield entirely.

Chapter Four

“Hee may owr profitt, and our Tuter prove”: Refashioning Petrarchan Conceptions of

Love in Lady Mary Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus

Introduction Heir to the Sidney family legacy, Lady Mary Wroth (1587?-1651?) was celebrated by her contemporaries as an “ingenious Ladie,” the “inheritrix of the Divine Wit of her Immortal

Vncle,” and was often the recipient of dedicatory epistles that lauded her as a patron of the arts (Peacham qtd. in Roberts 52; Heywood qtd. in Roberts 52). Her sonnet sequence,

Pamphilia to Amphilanthus (1621), was published alongside her prose romance, The

Countess of Montgomery’s Urania, and was the first amatory sonnet sequence written by an English woman. Although Wroth’s writing was published and circulated among contemporaries—eliciting spirited responses from many of them13—the ensuing centuries have caused her work to become critically unnoticed until about 1983, when Josephine

Roberts published a scholarly edition of Wroth’s poetry. After Roberts’s publication, critical analyses of Wroth’s work have flourished, with opinions on Wroth ranging from

Elizabeth Hanson’s claim that “Mary Wroth’s poetry is indeed boring,” to Paul Hecht’s claim that “we should read her poetry as punk rock,” to Mary Moore’s claim that Wroth can “depict[] a suprarational, spiritual love that transcends logical categories and structures, including those of gender” (Hanson 167; Hecht 92; Moore 117). With regard to Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, most critical commentary has focused on Wroth’s

13 See Edward Lord Denny’s claim that Wroth ought to “leave idle bookes alone” since “wise and worthyer women have writte none,” and Ben Jonson’s oft-quoted claim that Wroth’s verse made him a “better lover, and much better Poët” (Denny qtd. in Roberts 33; Jonson qtd. in Lewalski 247).

72 construction of “female subjectivity,” and how Wroth’s self-expression is significant since she was the first woman to write a Petrarchan sonnet sequence in a male-dominated society. To briefly introduce the sequence before further discussing critical attitudes towards it, Pamphilia to Amphilanthus is comprised of 83 sonnets and 20 songs that represent Pamphilia’s struggle to reconcile her love for the unfaithful Amphilanthus.14

Although Wroth’s use of Greek names15 and her alternation between sonnets and songs may call to mind her uncle’s Astrophil and Stella, the content of Wroth’s sequence differs markedly. While Sidney’s sequence is characterized by many mentions of Stella, frequent blazons, and references to real-life persons and occurrences (such as the “rich” sonnets), Wroth’s sequence has very few of these moments. Instead, Wroth’s sequence primarily focuses on the interiority of Pamphilia, forgoing Petrarchan moves such as the blazon conceit and refusing to name Amphilanthus altogether. That Wroth employs a female speaker who refuses to participate in such seminal male-constructed conceits has caused critics to interpret Pamphilia to Amphilanthus as a uniquely female utterance of love that carves out a space for female subjectivity to be created and safely expressed. In other words, critics have taken Pamphilia to Amphilanthus to represent a woman’s version of love that inherently differs from that of her Elizabethan predecessors and

Jacobean counterparts. Naomi Miller, for instance, argues that we must “read Wroth’s constructions of female subjectivity in light of Luce Irigaray’s celebration of woman as

14 Wroth’s eponymous characters are also featured prominently in her Urania, and we can view the sonnet sequence as a continuation of Pamphilia’s feelings towards Amphilanthus in the prose romance. 15 Pamphilia’s name means “all-loving,” while Amphilanthus’s name means “lover of two” (Roberts 50).

73 the speaking subject of difference,” so that we may recognize that Wroth “offer[s] alternatives…of direction to the gendering of agency and subjectivity in early modern

English discourses” (4-5). Similarly, Jeff Masten argues that Pamphilia to Amphilanthus

“gestures” towards female subjectivity and “articulates a woman’s resolute constancy, self-sovereignty, and unwillingness to circulate among men” (69, 80). Even critics who do not explicitly argue for Wroth’s construction of female subjectivity seem to work from the base assumption that Wroth is vocalizing a specifically female experience. For instance, Jennifer Munroe—although exploring needlework and gardening as socially acceptable pastimes for early modern women—works from the assumption that Wroth’s sequence “sought alternative frameworks more suitable for women’s self-expression”

(36). Similarly, Madeline Bassnett—although primarily concerned with comparing

Wroth’s sonnets to Adrienne Rich’s poetry—also works with the idea that Wroth’s sonnets “pull[] the reader into the darkness of the marginal and dangerous otherworld of women’s desire” (55). Although these critical perspectives do important work in highlighting how significant Wroth’s writing was during her time, they also focus heavily on Wroth’s gender, and primarily explore how Wroth’s poetic expression is shaped by the social constraints placed on early modern women. While it is important to explore how Wroth’s gender has affected what discourses are available to her—how Wroth’s

“form and syntax at least suggests the difficulty of fitting female erotic experience into forms created to suit the shapes of male erotic desire”—the critical tendency to read

Wroth in this fashion has had the effect of relegating Wroth’s poetry to a space of

“female subjectivity” or sexual difference that isolates Wroth from the larger poetic

74 tradition, and does not allow her the same canonical impact as male sonneteers (Moore

110). Although we should read Wroth’s position as a woman as a force that undoubtedly shaped her writing, we must wonder, is this the only way to read Wroth?

This brings us to the question of gender. How significant was Wroth’s gender in shaping her poetry, and should we read her sequence as being representative of such broad categories as female subjectivity and sexual difference? Though Wroth’s position as a woman in early modern England would doubtlessly have informed her social experience, education, and writing, it may be misguided to analyze her poetry solely through a gender-based lens and assume that Wroth’s poetry is completely confined by the discursive limitations placed on early modern women. Wroth’s unique status as an educated, aristocratic woman from the Sidney family complicates the idea that she is forced to present a poetic self who is “constrain[ed] as well as contain[ed]” by male poetic forms and social prescriptions (Moore 116). As Heather Dubrow states, Wroth’s

“status as a Sidney may well be as important as her status as a woman,” and thus it would be fallacious to assume that “gender is necessarily the overriding determinant of subjectivity” in Wroth’s work (144). Indeed, if we consider the exceptional opportunities afforded to Wroth, namely her education and the existence of a female literary role model in her “vertuous and learned Aunt,” Mary Sidney, we see that Wroth had a strong literary foundation as “a Sidney woman,” and also had “a clear sense of poetic authority in her lineage,” which gave her “legitimacy as a writer” (Denny qtd. in Hannay 20; Hannay 16).

If we focus on Wroth’s education, literary heritage, and the positive female role models in her life, then we see that Wroth’s writing may be vested with the poetic authority of a

Sidney just as much as it is mediated by her experience as a woman, and therefore her writing does not have to be solely defined by her gender. By viewing Wroth as a literary innovator—a writer who expresses more than female subjectivity and who has the empowerment to defy social strictures regarding women’s writing—then we open up new possibilities for reading Wroth, and ultimately allow her a literary impact that extends beyond the gender-based category of “women’s writing.” In this analysis of Pamphilia to

Amphilanthus, my goal will be to push feminist analyses of Wroth beyond gender and read Wroth’s ideas against her male counterparts in order to broaden her impact on the literary canon. By taking the focus off Wroth’s gender, I hope to show that her extraordinary revision of the archetypal sonnet sequence works to reshape the English

Petrarchan tradition.

The tradition that Wroth responds to is the English adaptation of Petrarch’s Rime

Sparse, which was pioneered by Wyatt, Surrey, and Sidney, and later revised by poets like Spenser. This particular iteration of the Petrarchan sequence is defined by the lover’s fluctuating emotions (from celebration to denigration) towards the beloved, and the lover’s desire to physically possess the beloved and consummate his love for her.

The lover’s varying attitudes towards the beloved and his obsession to physically dominate her makes the English Petrarchan sequence one that is characterized by the objectification, idealization, vilification, and silencing of the female beloved. Or, as

Naomi Miller puts it, the Petrarchan sequence is one that “serves both to perpetuate male desire and to allow masculine constructions of [the beloved’s] identity that are not limited by any professed subjectivity on her part” (29). Because Wroth’s Pamphilia to

Amphilanthus notably does not include such rhetorical moves as the blazon conceit—and refuses to even name the beloved Amphilanthus—critics such as Jeff Masten have suggested that her sequence is not “really” a Petrarchan sequence, and that it instead speaks “an almost inscrutable private language” (67). Although Wroth does refuse to participate in Petrarchan conceits such as the blazon, I argue that her sequence is still fundamentally Petrarchan, and her simultaneous revision and refusal of Petrarchan tropes shows her harkening back to the Elizabethan sonnet vogue while also reshaping the genre’s representations of power structures in love. For instance, Wroth’s choice not to blazon or name Amphilanthus shows her revising the Petrarchan tradition by refusing to represent a relationship that is based on an unequal power distribution where the lover asserts dominance over the beloved by distorting and objectifying them through the blazon conceit. Furthermore, Wroth’s crown of sonnets interrogates the purpose of love, and argues for a spiritual, self-enriching form of love that is often absent from the male- authored Petrarchan sequence. In simultaneously adopting and revising the Petrarchan sequence, Wroth puts her work in dialogue with the larger Petrarchan tradition and is ultimately able to refashion the genre’s conceptions of love by presenting readers with a model of love that defies hegemonic power structures, and instead aspires to equality, spirituality, and self-enrichment.

Reproducing Petrarchan Discourses Before we examine how Wroth refashions Petrarchan conceptions of love, I would first like to discuss some of Wroth’s more typically Petrarchan sonnets in order to push back against the idea that her writing is inherently different than that of her male counterparts,

77 and to demonstrate how she centers her sequence in the Petrarchan tradition and implicitly connects herself to the larger poetic tradition. Although Jeff Masten claims that Wroth creates a “relentlessly private” sequence that “refus[es] to speak in the public, exhibitionist voice of traditional Petrarchan discourse,” we see that Wroth actually reproduces many Petrarchan tropes and thus puts herself in dialogue with her male predecessors (69). Indeed, Heather Dubrow explores Wroth’s connection to Petrarchism in Echoes of Desire, where she argues that Wroth’s adherence to Petrarchan tropes makes her sequence not a wholly triumphant counterdiscourse of female subjectivity, but rather a “volatile admixture of control and contradiction, strategy and self-deception,” a sequence that wavers between submission to Petrarchan ideals and female agency (160).

While Dubrow’s purpose in drawing parallels between Wroth and Petrarchism is to argue that Wroth is not entirely exceptional in her composition of the sequence—that she does not automatically transcend the problematic aspects of Petrarchism because she is a female author—my goal in drawing these parallels is to emphasize Wroth’s exceptional revision of Petrarchan discourses. By recognizing how Wroth reproduces Petrarchan discourses, we see that she adopts a highly conventionalized form used by some of the most well-respected poets of the Elizabethan era—making her ultimate deviation from this form a sign that she actively participates in transforming the representations of love in the Petrarchan tradition.

We see Wroth employ a quintessential Petrarchan trope in [P20],16 where

Pamphilia laments that neither day nor night brings her relief from love:

16 I will be using Josephine Roberts’s numbering when I refer to Wroth’s sonnets.

Which should I better like of, day, or night

Since all the day I live in bitter woe

Injoying light more cleere my wrongs to know

And yett most sad, feeling in itt all spite;

In night, when darknes doth forbid all light

Yett see I griefe aparant to the show

Follow’d by jealousie whose fond tricks flow,

And on inconstant waves of doubt allight, (Wroth 1-8)

In this sonnet, we see Pamphilia complaining that she is tormented by love both day and night, since the light of day makes her “wrongs” more “cleere,” while the darkness of night allows for “jealousie” to play “fond tricks” on her mind. Significantly, Pamphilia’s constant pain through day and night is a typical Petrarchan attitude and has a striking similarity to Sidney’s “Sonnet 89,” where Astrophil complains that “no night is more darke than is my day, / Nor no day hath less quiet than my night” (Sidney 10-11). That

Wroth seems to directly reference her uncle’s sonnet so early in her sequence shows that she is in dialogue with other sonneteers, causing us to push back against Masten’s claim that Wroth creates a “private” space that precludes interaction with Petrarchan discourses.

Wroth includes an even more obvious signifier of the Petrarchan tradition in [P68], where

Pamphilia likens herself to a tempest-tossed ship:

Like to a Ship on Goodwines cast by wind,

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

Till she bee lost; so am I, in this kind

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

Lost, shipwrackt, spoyl’d, debar’d of smallest hope, (Wroth 5-9)

Here, Pamphilia describes herself as a ship stuck in a sandy shoal, and Wroth’s use of the ship analogy immediately calls to mind such notable poems as Petrarch’s Rima 189,

Wyatt’s “My galley,” and Spenser’s Amoretti 34, “Lyke as a ship that through the Ocean wyde.” Similar to Wroth’s description of Pamphilia being beset by love both night and day, Wroth’s use of the shipwrecked motif connects her poetry to that of her male predecessors and yet again signals to the reader that Pamphilia to Amphilanthus is part of the Petrarchan tradition. What is more, [P20] and [P68] are only a few examples of how

Wroth connects her sequence to the male-authored poetic tradition. Another example includes Wroth connecting her first sonnet to Dante’s Vita nuova, where Pamphilia describes a dream vision in which Cupid places a burning heart in her chest (which is highly reminiscent of Dante’s first sonnet, where Dante’s speaker dreams that Love sets his heart aflame). In addition to this initial sonnet, Wroth’s sequence is filled with emotional fluctuations typical of the Petrarchan lover. Sonnets [P11] and [P12] present contradictory emotional states (with the former presenting Pamphilia as “wrought” with

“bliss,” while the latter presents her as being in “sharpe distress”), while [P19] describes

Pamphilia’s emotional state as “burn[ing], and yett freez[ing]” (Wroth [P11] 8; [P 12] 6;

P[19] 14). These emotional fluctuations connect Wroth to a poet like Spenser, who

features intense emotional revolutions in Amoretti,17 and, of course, to Petrarch, who coined the burning and freezing metaphor.

While I am certainly not the first to acknowledge Wroth’s use of Petrarchan tropes (Barbara Lewalski describes Wroth as “enter[ing] into dialogue with both

Petrarchan and contemporary love poetry,” and even Jeff Masten briefly acknowledges that Wroth “writes in Petrarchan discourse to write against it”), I am making the unique point that Wroth’s participation in the Petrarchan tradition shows that her sonnet sequence is not an isolated female utterance, but rather is an active reshaping of the

English sonnet tradition (Lewalski 257; Masten 71). By viewing Wroth as participating in the male-authored Petrarchan tradition, we are able to view her as an author that actively innovates the poetic tradition rather than one who creates a secluded space for a female speaker.

Refashioning Petrarchism While many critics have formed their readings of Pamphilia to Amphilanthus based on

Pamphilia’s interiority, I will be focusing my analysis on Wroth’s portrayal of the relationship between the lover and beloved. As mentioned earlier, Wroth’s sequence is exceptional in how it does not name or blazon Amphilanthus. Instead, Wroth has

Pamphilia address herself to abstractions such as Hope, Grief, Sorrow, Night, Time,

Love, Cupid, and Venus. By addressing the majority of her sonnets to these abstractions,

Pamphilia is able to express the states of love, grief, anger, and blame that are usually

17 See Amoretti 58 and 59, where Spenser juxtaposes two sonnets that have opposite viewpoints on the lady’s self-assurance.

81 addressed to the beloved. While Barbara Lewalski and Heather Dubrow view Wroth’s use of abstractions and omission of Amphilanthus as a way for Wroth to “silence[] the male beloved even more completely than is usually the case with the Petrarchan lady” and “dismember[] [Amphilanthus] so that he can be less painfully remembered,” I view

Wroth’s use of abstractions as a way for her to circumvent the inherently problematic nature of the Petrarchan sequence where the beloved is constantly oppressed by the speaker (Lewalski 253; Dubrow 149). For instance, sonneteers such as Sidney and

Spenser address the majority of their sonnets to their respective ladies and oscillate between celebrating these women as paragons of virtue, decrying them as cruel mistresses, or objectifying the ladies through the blazon conceit. While it is true that

Sidney’s and Spenser’s speakers display realistic emotional vacillations, their sequences are constructed so that the male speaker may express himself at the expense of his beloved. In simultaneously celebrating, denigrating, and blazoning the beloved, the male lover silences, distorts, and objectifies the lady, thus making the male-authored sonnet sequence one that inherently relies on a hegemonic power structure that favors the male speaker. Indeed, one of the great ironies of a sequence like Spenser’s Amoretti is that it promises to “eternize” the female beloved through verse, but only gives readers sketches of the lady based on the speaker’s fluctuating emotions, and we hardly gain any insight into the woman’s character—the sequence only succeeds in “eternizing” the male lover’s power over the beloved by having the woman defined by the man’s verse (Spenser 11).

By contrast, Wroth’s refusal to name Amphilanthus or address the majority of the sonnets to him makes it so that she implicitly refuses to objectify, blame, or silence the beloved.

Thus, Wroth fundamentally changes the oppressive power structures within the

Petrarchan sonnet sequence—producing a sequence that does not rely on the exploitation of the beloved in order for the speaker to express herself. One sonnet that characterizes

Wroth’s refusal to unfairly blame the beloved is [P31], where Pamphilia addresses her anger towards Hope rather than Amphilanthus:

Fy tedious Hope, why doe you still rebell?

Is itt nott yett enough you flattered mee?

Butt cuningly you seeke to use a spell

How to beetray, must thes your trophies bee?

I look’d from you farr sweeter fruite to see

Butt blasted were your blossoms when they fell,

And those delights expected from hands free

Wither’d, and dead, and what seem’d bliss proves Hell.

Noe towne was wunn by a more plotted slight

Then I by you, who may my fortune write

In embers of that fire which ruind mee,

Thus Hope, your faulshood calls you to bee tride

You’re loth I see the triall to abide;

Prove true att last, and gaine your liberty. (Wroth 1-14)

Here, Pamphilia accuses Hope of “flatter[ing]” her and causing her to believe that her love for Amphilanthus would yield “sweet[] fruite” when it has actually “wither’d.”

Pamphilia then states that Hope must be tried for its “faulshood,” but that it may “gaine”

“liberty” if Pamphilia’s relationship with Amphilanthus improves. What we may notice about this sonnet is how it seems to take up the Petrarchan attitude of blaming the beloved for the lover’s pain. Wroth’s use of words such as “flattered,” “cuningly,”

“spell,” and “beetray” initially seem to echo sonnets such as Spenser’s Amoretti 37, where the beloved is admonished for her bewitching power over the lover. Additionally,

Wroth’s use of the war metaphor—where she describes a town set aflame (the common aftermath of “armies convinc[ing] towns to surrender, only [for the towns] to be burned and razed”)—also aligns her sonnet with that of Amoretti 12, where the lover complains that the beloved has “ambush[ed]” him, and he vows to “gaine” “justice” for her wrongs

(Hecht 106; Spenser 6, 14). In spite of these similarities, though, Wroth’s sonnet differs from conventional sonnets such as Spenser’s because her addressee is Hope, and not the beloved. By addressing Hope instead of Amphilanthus, Wroth has Pamphilia blame herself for her attachment to Amphilanthus: Pamphilia is “flattered,” bewitched,

“beetray[ed],” and “ruind” by her own hope rather than Amphilanthus being responsible for the “delights” that Pamphilia “expected.” Removing the blame from Amphilanthus and placing it on Pamphilia’s own hope is a significant revision to the Petrarchan tradition of unfairly blaming the beloved for failing to fulfill the lover’s desires, and can be seen as Wroth gesturing towards a more equal model of love where the lover does not have to oppress the beloved in order to chronicle her feelings through verse.

We see another significant example of Wroth revising the power dynamics between lover and beloved in “Song 5,” where she addresses Petrarchan conceits to Time instead of Amphilanthus:

Time only cause of my unrest

By whom I hop’d once to bee blest

How cruell art thou turned?

That first gav’st lyfe unto my love,

And still a pleasure nott to move

Or change though ever burned;

Have I thee slack’d, or left undun

One loving rite, and soe have wunn

Thy rage or bitter changing?

That now noe minutes I shall see,

Wherin I may least happy bee

Thy favors soe estranging.

……………………………….

Then stay thy swiftnes cruell time,

And lett mee once more blessed clime

To joy, that I may prayse thee:

Lett mee pleasure sweetly tasting

Joy in love, and faith nott wasting

And on fames wings I’le rayse thee: (Wroth 1-12, 19-24)

In this song, Pamphilia blames Time for being the “cruell” “cause of [her] unrest” and asks Time if she has caused such cruel behavior by inadvertently “slack[ing]” her “loving rite[s].” At the end of the song, Pamphilia pleads with Time to “stay” its “cruel”

“swiftnes,” promising that she’ll “rayse” Time on “fames wings” if she is allowed to

“once more blessed clime / To joy.” Similar to [P31], this song employs Petrarchan conceits that are usually addressed to the beloved. Pamphilia’s lamentation of Time’s

“cruell” nature echoes traditional Petrarchan sonnets that chastise the lady for her unwillingness to pleasure the speaker, and Pamphilia’s statement that she will “rayse”

Time on “fames wings” takes up the famous conceit that the poet will make the beloved immortal through his verse. However, these conceits are yet again addressed to an abstraction and not the beloved, and thus preclude the representation of an unequal power dynamic between Pamphilia and Amphilanthus. For instance, when a poet like Spenser invokes this kind of conceit, he tells the lady to “[c]hoose rather to be praysd for dooing good, / Then to be blamed for spilling guiltlesse blood,” and implicitly threatens to mar her reputation if she does not return his advances (“Sonnet 38” 13-14). Wroth, on the other hand, directs Pamphilia’s frustration towards the temporal aspects of her relationship—how Pamphilia is disappointed that the relationship has not deepened with the passing of time—and not to Amphilanthus’s lack of response, allowing Pamphilia to express her frustration without infringing on Amphilanthus’s own freedom. What is more, [P31] and “Song 5” are only two instances where Wroth changes the oppressive

86 power dynamics between the lover and beloved. Sonnets [P18], [P32], [P33], [P66], and

[P69] direct their anguish towards Sleep, Grief, Joy, Suspicion, and Jealousy in place of

Amphilanthus, and even the few sonnets that do address Amphilanthus refuse to name him—suggesting an overall reluctance to bring Amphilanthus into the sequence as an object of desire for Pamphilia to manipulate. In the larger context of Petrarchan poetry,

Wroth’s substitution of abstractions for Amphilanthus pushes back against the tradition where the beloved is simultaneously blamed, idolized, and disparaged by the lover, and

Wroth instead presents readers with a lyric sequence that does not rely on the oppression of the beloved in order for the speaker to express the experience of love. Wroth’s revision of Petrarchan tropes, then, allows her to create a sequence that places the lover and beloved in more equal positions than the male-authored sequences that precede her.

This, however, does not mean that Wroth completely transcends problematic power structures within sonnet sequences. There are several sonnets and songs that show a problematic power dynamic between Pamphilia and Amphilanthus. For instance, [P56] ends with Pamphilia wishing that any woman who treats Amphilanthus with “least scorne” have her “hart torne,” while “Song 6” shows Pamphilia calling Amphilanthus the

“rule[r]” of her “lyfe,” and [P72] represents Pamphilia as being “solde” “to lovers slaverie” ([P56] 13-14; “Song 6” 7; [P72] 6). These poems show Pamphilia’s desire to possess Amphilanthus, and also suggest that she may see herself as a “slave” to

Amphilanthus. While we can defend against these poems by stating that Pamphilia is experiencing a human moment of jealously in [P56] and may be invoking a Petrarchan conceit (where the speaker is represented as a slave to the beloved) in “Song 6” and

[P72], these poems nonetheless show that Wroth cannot completely escape from the unequal power dynamics within Petrarchan poetry. Even so, these poems are exceptions to Wroth’s sequence, and the overall tone of her sequence has the tendency to advocate for a mode of love that allows the lover to express herself without such expression being at the expense of the beloved. While I have explained how Wroth revises the oppressive power dynamic between lover and beloved, Wroth goes even further in her revision of

Petrarchan poetry by reconceptualizing the value of love in her crown of sonnets.

Reconceptualizing Love Wroth interrogates the significance of love in her “crowne of Sonetts dedicated to Love”

(also known as the corona), where she presents readers with a fourteen-poem sequence that venerates Cupid and employs a poetic form where each sonnet begins with the last line of the preceding sonnet. Wroth opens her crown by having Pamphilia ask “[i]n this strang labourinth how shall I turne?,” immediately foregrounding Pamphilia’s relationship to Amphilanthus as a labyrinth in which “danger,” “suspition,” and “shame” threaten to misguide Pamphilia, and where “the thread of love” (like Ariadne’s thread) is the only way out of the labyrinth ([P77] 1,4-6, 14). In taking this thread of love,

Pamphilia spends the next twelve sonnets meditating on the power of love and celebrating Cupid, calling love the “shining starr of blessings light” and stating that one who “shunns love doth love him self the less” ([P78] 9; [P83] 14). Because of the labyrinthine motif (both thematic and structural)18 within Wroth’s crown, critics have

18 We can view Wroth’s corona as structurally labyrinthine in the way that its repetition of lines encloses Pamphilia—the repeated lines at the beginning and end of each sonnet can be seen as forming the “walls” of a poetic labyrinth.

88 tended to read this portion of Wroth’s sequence as a space of feminine enclosure where

Pamphilia can explore her own subjectivity. Mary Moore, for instance, states that

Wroth’s corona “formally embodies enclosure through reiterative opening and closing lines, creating a closed poetic crown, dramatically engaging the readers in the female sense of self that Wroth depicts” (110; emphasis mine). I, however, read this portion of the sequence as Wroth’s most poignant reshaping of the Petrarchan tradition.

Pamphilia’s meditations on love focus on the spiritual and intellectual growth that both the lover and beloved experience, fundamentally changing the definition of love in

Petrarchan poetry. As mentioned in the introduction, we can view love in Petrarchan poetry (specifically in the English adaptations of Petrarch) as the speaker’s aspiration to physically possess and dominate the beloved, reinforcing the notion that love is contingent upon the man’s possession and oppression of the woman. A poet like Sidney, for instance, focuses on the physical consummation of love, having his sequence culminate in the kiss between Astrophil and Stella in “Sonnet 79.” Even a poet like

Spenser—who attempts to transcend the licentious nature of Petrarchan poetry by focusing on marriage—has his sequence culminate with his speaker kissing the lady in

“Sonnet 64,” and, in fact, has his speaker’s celebration of companionate marriage be contingent upon the lady’s submission to him since the speaker’s attitude radically changes from aggressive to celebratory after he has kissed the lady in Amoretti. Wroth, on the other hand, does not have Pamphilia’s veneration of love rely on physical reciprocation from Amphilanthus, and instead she has Pamphilia meditate on the spiritual and self-enriching benefits of love—thus reconceptualizing the purpose and value of love

89 in Petrarchan poetry. Wroth introduces love as a way to better the self in the second sonnet of the crown, writing,

Is to leave all, and take the thread of love

Which line straite leads unto the soules content

Wher choyse delights with pleasures wings doe move,

And idle phant’sie never roome had lent,

When chaste thoughts guide us then owr minds ar bent

To take that good which ills from us remove,

Light of true love, brings fruite which none repent

Butt constant lovers seeke, and wish to prove;

Love is the shining starr of blessings light;

The fervent fire of zeale, the roote of peace,

The lasting lampe fed with the oyle of right;

Image of fayth, and wombe for joyes increase.

Love is true vertu, and his ends delight;

His flames ar joyes, his bands true lovers might. (Wroth [P78] 1-14)

In this sonnet, Pamphilia argues that taking “the thread of love” will lead “straite…unto the soules content” and will provide the lover with rewards such as “the fervent fire of zeale” and “the roote of peace.” For Pamphilia, the “delights” and “pleasures” of love

90 are not connected to the possession of Amphilanthus, but rather are connected to the

“soules content”—the possession of “zeale,” “peace,” moral rightness, “fayth,” joy, and

“vertu.” And even though Pamphilia invokes the Petrarchan conceit of calling the

“bands” of love “true lovers might,” (a conceit that Spenser employs when he reassures the lady that her loss of liberty merely represents “the bands” with which “true love doth tye”), we see that the constraints of love are not represented as tying her to

Amphilanthus, but are instead represented as tying her to Love itself, which confines the lover by banning “idle phant’sie” and unchaste thoughts (Spenser “Sonnet 65” 5). The confining and freeing power in this sonnet, then, is Love itself. By focusing on what the individual lover gains (“fayth,” joy, “peace,” etc.), Pamphilia implicitly defines love as a phenomenon that heightens an individual’s spirituality and character. While most

Petrarchan poets such as Sidney express love in physical terms—how their “desire[s]”

“cry” for “food” (i.e. physical consummation)—Wroth elides the physical component of love and instead emphasizes the emotional benefits that the individual gains— consequently challenging the Petrarchan representation of love as a physical experience where the lover dominates the beloved (Sidney “Sonnet 71” 14).

Wroth makes even more explicit her definition of love as a spiritual and self- enriching experience in [P82], where Pamphilia argues that love has positive impacts on the self:

Hee may owr profitt, and our Tuter prove

In whom alone wee doe this power finde,

To joine two harts as in one frame to move;

Two bodies, butt one soule to rule the minde;

Eyes which must care to one deere object bind

Eares to each others speech as if above

All els they sweet, and learned were; this kind

Content of lovers wittniseth true love,

Itt doth inrich the witts and make you see

That in your self, which you knew nott before,

Forcing you to admire such guifts showld bee

Hid from your knowledg, yet in you the store;

Millions of thes adorne the throne of Love,

How blest bee they then, who his favours prove. (Wroth 1-14)

In this sonnet, we see that Pamphilia characterizes Cupid as a “tuter” who will “joine” the lovers’ “harts” and “soule[s]” and teach the lovers how to experience “true love.” For

Pamphilia, “true love” consists of “inrich[ing] the witts” and recognizing latent powers in the self that one “knew nott before.” Although Pamphilia puts emphasis on the union of lovers (by celebrating how love gives “two bodies…one soule to rule the minde”), the sonnet’s primary focus is on love’s potential to reveal inner “guifts” that are “hid from” one’s “knowledg” until one cultivates a relationship with love. It is here that Pamphilia most explicitly states that the purpose of love is to “inrich” the lover, and this sonnet

92 characterizes Pamphilia to Amphilanthus as a sequence that focuses on the spiritual, self- enriching properties of love. Furthermore, what is most significant about Wroth’s representation of love is that it transcends the characterizations of love put forth by her male predecessors. Even Spenser, who attempts to expand his definition of love beyond the physical by admiring the lady’s “vertues manifold,” fails to put forth a definition of love that is not contingent on the domination of the beloved (“Sonnet 15” 14). If we read

Wroth’s representation of love against her male predecessors, we see that her definition of love is not an isolated expression of female subjectivity, but rather is a revision of

Petrarchan tropes that works to reshape the definition of love in early modern lyric poetry.

There are, however, some limitations to Wroth’s portrayal of love, just as there are limitations to her portrayal of the relationship between Pamphilia and Amphilanthus.

Although Pamphilia seems confident in her celebration of a spiritual, self-enriching love in the first thirteen sonnets of the corona, we see that the final sonnet returns us to the labyrinth motif and reveals Pamphilia’s faltering belief in the power of love. In the final four lines of this sonnet, Pamphilia laments,

Curst jealousie doth all her forces bend

To my undoing; thus all my harmes I see.

Soe though in Love I fervently doe burne,

In this strange labourinth how shall I turne? (Wroth [P90] 11-14)

In spite of Pamphilia’s confident endorsement of love, these lines show that she is still susceptible to “jealousie” and finds herself lost in the labyrinth where she began (notably, the last line of this sonnet repeats the first line of the first sonnet, formally enclosing

Pamphilia in a space of uncertainty). Because of Pamphilia’s ultimate uncertainty at the end of the corona, it is important to acknowledge that Wroth does not present her conception of love as infallible. However, her presentation of love as spiritually enriching goes far beyond that of other Petrarchan poets and shows Wroth reacting against traditional conceptions of love that rely on the oppression of the beloved.

Conclusion Although Lady Mary Wroth has often been read through her gender, reading her against canonical Petrarchan poets allows us to view her writing within the larger English poetic tradition, and allows Wroth to impact the literary canon beyond the genre of “women’s writing.” While critics have often relegated Wroth to the “world of interiority, where everyday life is deferred and excluded,” reading her poetry as actively participating in the

Petrarchan tradition gives Wroth more agency by viewing her as equal to her male counterparts, and underscores Wroth’s accomplishment of challenging and revising the problematic constructions within Petrarchism (Fienberg 180). Wroth’s choice to place

Amphilanthus at the edges of her sequence revises the traditionally oppressive relationship between lover and beloved, and ultimately facilitates Wroth’s representation of love as an experience of personal growth rather than physical possession. Indeed, the exceptionally egalitarian model of love in Wroth’s sequence (compared to that of her male counterparts) makes it imperative that we read Wroth next to the male poets of the

Renaissance rather than designate Wroth to the dubious space of “female subjectivity” and texts of difference. If the early modern period is a historical time where modern notions of capitalism, humanism, family, and love were in their infancy, then sonnet sequences such as Rime Sparse, Astrophil and Stella, Delia, Ideas Mirrour, and Amoretti represent notions of love that we may still hold on to—indeed, our modern tendencies to view love in terms of physical possession hearken back to these early modern notions of love. Reading Mary Wroth as a contributor to the early modern poetic tradition not only challenges the models of love represented by male poets, but also challenges some of our contemporary ideas regarding power in love.

Chapter Five

Conclusion: The Renaissance Literary Canon and its Impact on Modern Culture

The Elizabethan sonnet vogue produced a multitude of lyric sequences that allow us to view how early moderns conceived of power, gender, and sexuality within amorous relationships. In this study, we have surveyed four such sequences by Philip Sidney,

Edmund Spenser, Richard Barnfield, and Mary Wroth, and have explored how each author represents love in each of their sequences. My revisionary reading of Sidney and

Spenser shows that each poet puts forth hierarchical and misogynist representations of love, and argues that while we may consider each poet to display exemplary skill, we must be careful of validating their problematic models of love and viewing these poets as representing “standard” ideas of love during the English Renaissance. My analysis of

Barnfield’s poetry takes us away from the highly canonical work of Sidney and Spenser, and introduces us to a more diverse form of love via Barnfield’s representation of the homoerotic. I explore how Barnfield creates a more egalitarian model of love in his sequence while also acknowledging that Barnfield capitulates to misogynist and objectifying rhetoric in some of his sonnets. I suggest that some of Barnfield’s flawed representations of love (which are characteristic of traditional Petrarchan sequences) may be attributed to the power the heterosexual verse forms have over marginalized forms of love, though I realize that there are interesting connections between homoerotic and misogynist discourses that I do not have time to explore in this study. Finally, my chapter on Lady Mary Wroth argues that Wroth provides us with a progressive form of love that sharply contrasts with the hierarchical models of love in Sidney and Spenser.

By having Pamphilia refuse to objectify or blame the beloved for her unrequited love,

Wroth is able to reshape the Petrarchan tradition in order to put forth a more egalitarian vision of love that her male counterparts do not achieve. In my analyses of Sidney,

Spenser, Barnfield, and Wroth, I hope to have shifted our focus away from “standard” poets such as Sidney and Spenser and to have drawn our attention to the more diverse conceptions of love in Wroth and Barnfield. By focusing on Wroth’s and Barnfield’s reimaginings of love, we are able to recognize that more varied (and also more progressive) models of love existed outside of the canonical, male-authored sonnet sequences of the English Renaissance, and that we should direct our view to these models of love in order to gain a more consummate understanding of love in the English

Renaissance.

Gesturing towards the larger implications of this project, we will notice that my study has not only explored the various formulations of love in the sonnets of Sidney,

Spenser, Barnfield, and Wroth but it has also explored the canonization of these authors, and how their place in the canon effects our perceptions of their work. Our continuous validation of Sidney and Spenser as exemplary poets has signaled to scholars and students of literature that each poet’s verse is worthy of study because it is the “best” of the Renaissance and, in the case of Spenser, morally valid literature. Conversely, our lack of attention to Barnfield and our relegation of Wroth to the space of “women’s writing” has signaled to readers and scholars that a poet such as Barnfield must be inferior in talent to Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Donne, etc. and that Wroth’s literary talents are limited because she was a woman in an intensely patriarchal society.

The effect of placing Sidney and Spenser in the center of Renaissance literary studies has been to allow Sidney’s and Spenser’s poetry and prose to enjoy a myriad number of critical analyses and a wide range of interpretive possibilities, ranging from “self- fashioning,” to Protestantism, to representations of women. On the other hand, placing

Barnfield at the fringe of early modern literary studies has caused Barnfield to receive far less critical attention than Sidney and Spenser and has caused the critics who do analyze

Barnfield to face the challenge of convincing the reader of Barnfield’s literary merit.

Similarly, the effect of placing Wroth in a subfield of women writers has been to limit the critical conversation surrounding Wroth so that it is focused primarily on the rhetorical constraints that Wroth faced due to the patriarchal culture of early modern England

(something which may be intended to acknowledge the creative struggles that women writers faced during this period, but which can also re-inscribe the gender binary by suggesting that women’s writing is inherently different than men’s). Although critics have made great strides in their attempts to include traditionally marginalized authors, our continued tendency to exclude or limit the critical focus on writers such as Barnfield and Wroth shows us that we still have work to do when it comes to revising the literary canon and producing new literary criticism.

As I hope to have shown in my chapters on each author, our process of canonization (or lack thereof) of each poet has little to do with actual literary merit and has much more to do with the fact that we have lived (and continue to live) in a patriarchal society that has historically valued men’s work over women’s, has discriminated against non-heterosexual forms of love, and, even when it has become

98 more tolerant of women’s writing and same-sex desire in literature, has allowed these writings less space to flourish than male-authored texts. Our choice to canonize certain authors over others can be seen as arbitrary (i.e. not based on inherently “good” texts) in the sense that our historically patriarchal culture has favored male-authored texts, has trained readers to value certain stylistic and thematic features of these texts, and has labeled nonconforming works as “other.” While I certainly do not mean to suggest that we should remove poets such as Sidney and Spenser from the canon—or even decrease the frequency with which they are taught or the number of their poems included in anthologies—I do wish to suggest that we reconsider our criteria for canonizing authors as well as our treatment of traditionally marginalized authors so that we can create a larger and more welcoming space for authors like Barnfield and Wroth to be analyzed. I not only advocate for revising the literary canon for the benefit of marginalized poets, but also because our canonical choices impact modern culture.

Marjorie Garber opens her book, Shakespeare and Modern Culture, by stating that “Shakespeare makes modern culture and modern culture makes Shakespeare” (13).

Providing examples of the ways that Shakespeare appears in popular culture (through references in media, art, advertisements, etc.), Garber shows that we have inherited many ideas from Shakespeare, arguing that “Shakespeare has scripted many of the ideas that we think of as ‘naturally’ our own and even as ‘naturally’ true,” such as “ideas about human character,” “individuality and selfhood,” “government,” and “men and women” (14).

Though Garber focuses entirely on Shakespeare in her book, I would like to expand her framework to show that Renaissance literature as a whole has a profound impact on

99 modern ideas. Our contemporary culture often aligns itself with the Renaissance through conscious references and inherent social structures, since the Renaissance is usually credited with the emergence of “the individual” (a popular ideal in our society) as well as the emergence of capitalism and the nuclear family unit, which are common cultural features in our society. As Margaret Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy Vickers state in their introduction to Rewriting the Renaissance, the early modern period is aligned “more closely to our own [modern culture] than to the Middle Ages” since emerging notions of capitalism and the gradual separation of men and women into work and home environments mirrors our own society more than it does pre-Renaissance societies (xvii). Furthermore, although notions about individualism in the Renaissance may be more fiction than fact (since scholars like Davis and McDonald point out that

“social relationships and identities” in the Renaissance were privileged over “personal ones” and the “absence of privacy helped to delay the emergence of ‘the individual’ as a psychological category”), the popular notion that the Renaissance birthed “the individual” and that modern men and women should strive to be a “Renaissance man” or

“Renaissance woman” shows, to use Garber’s formulation, that the Renaissance “makes” modern culture (by influencing our perception of what an individual should look like) and that modern culture “makes” the Renaissance (by attributing to the period an exaggerated portrait of a free-thinking, well-educated “individual”) (Davis xv; McDonald

271). Because we identify with the Renaissance and idealize it as a period where some of the greatest thinkers existed and where some of the greatest art was produced, we can

100 infer that Renaissance literature has impacted modern thought—and most importantly— that the literature we choose to celebrate continues to impact contemporary culture.

As Roland Greene shows in Post-Petrarchism: Origins and Innovations of the

Western Lyric Sequence, the Petrarchan lyric form has impacted fiction centuries after the

Renaissance and represents a mode of discourse that fulfills our fundamental need for

“making fictions” (3). Greene, for instance, explores Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella for its modes of characterization, and argues that Sidney’s sequence presents a foundation for other lyric poets to revise well after the early modern period. To expand on Greene’s notion that the Petrarchan lyric has influenced fiction for centuries, I suggest that

Petrarchism has also influenced modern conceptualizations of love in addition to literary representations of love. We do, after all, see the Petrarchan model of love—one which shows a male lover constantly chasing after and desiring to physically possess a female beloved—represented in popular culture. Although we have attempted to move away from a patriarchal model of love that shows the man as an active participant and the woman as a passive receiver, representations of love in modern media still often center around men who pursue women, and women who must remain coy enough so they are considered modest. This modern representation of love as a “chase” that must end in physical consummation is one that mirrors the Petrarchan aesthetic—and though we do not consciously think of ourselves as mimicking the love relationships in Petrarchan poetry—the similarity between Petrarchism and modern representations of love suggests that our ideas of love may be influenced by the Petrarchan lyric. The impact that

Renaissance literature can have on our modern ideas makes it all the more important that

101 we are careful of who we choose to canonize. If we uphold Sidney and Spenser as poets who are exemplary and whose work reveals the human condition, then we may unconsciously model some of our ideas after them. However, if we give the same canonical status to more progressive and diverse writers like Wroth and Barnfield, then we may see our ideas on love—and what constitutes good writing—begin to change.

102

Works Cited

Bare, Alison. “Feminism Regained: Exposing the Objectification of Eve in John Milton’s

Paradise Lost.” English Studies, vol. 99 no. 2, 2018, pp. 93-112, doi:10.1080/

0013838X.2017.1405324. Accessed 29 November 2019.

Barnfield, Richard. The Affectionate Shepheard: Containing the Complaint of Daphnis

for the Love of Ganymede. Richard Barnfield: The Complete Poems, edited by

George Klawitter, Susquehanna University Press, 1900, pp. 78-111.

———————. Cynthia With Certaine Sonnets, and the Legend of Cassandra. Richard

Barnfield: The Complete Poems, edited by George Klawitter, Susquehanna

University Press, 1900, pp. 113-147.

Bassnett, Madeline. “‘Injoying of True Joye the Most, and Best: Desire and the Sonnet

Sequences of Lady Mary Wroth and Adrienne Rich.” English Studies in Canada,

vol. 30, no. 2, 2004, pp. 49-66. https://ojs.lib.uwo.ca/index.php/esc/article/view/

10038. Accessed 17 September 2019.

Bates, Catherine. “Desire, Discontent, Parody: the Love Sonnet in Early Modern

England.” The Cambridge Companion to the Sonnet, edited by A. D. Cousins and

Peter Howarth, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2011, pp. 105–124.

Bell, Ilona. “Spenser’s Amoretti.” Elizabethan Women and the Poetry of Courtship,

Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp. 152-184.

103

Borris, Kenneth. “‘Ile hang a bag and a bottle at thy back’”: Barnfield’s Homoerotic

Advocacy and the Construction of Homosexuality.” The Affectionate Shepherd:

Celebrating Richard Barnfield, edited by Kenneth Borris and George Klawitter,

Susquehanna University Press, 2001, pp. 193-248.

Bray, Alan. Homosexuality in Renaissance England. Gay Men’s Press, 1982.

Bredbeck, Gregory. “Tradition and the Individual Sodomite: Barnfield, Shakespeare, and

Subjective Desire.” Homosexuality in Renaissance and Enlightenment England:

Literary Representations in Historical Context, edited by Claude J. Summers, The

Haworth Press, 1992, pp. 41-68.

Cady, Joseph. “‘Masculine Love,’ Renaissance Writing, and the ‘New Invention’ of

Homosexuality.” Homosexuality in Renaissance and Enlightenment England:

Literary Representations in Historical Context, edited by Claude J. Summers, The

Haworth Press, 1992, pp. 9-40.

Campbell, Marion. “Unending Desire: Sidney’s Reinvention of Petrarchan Form in

Astrophil and Stella.” Sir Philip Sidney and the Interpretation of Renaissance

Culture, edited by Gary F. Waller and Michael D. Moore, Croom Helm, 1984, pp.

84-94.

Catty, Jocelyn. “‘The subiect of his tyrannie’: Women and Shame in Elizabethan Poetry.”

Writing Rape, Writing Women in Early Modern England: Unbridled Speech, St.

Martin’s Press, 1999, pp. 55-90.

104

Charles, Casey. “Barnfield’s Lover’s Discourse.” The Affectionate Shepherd: Celebrating

Richard Barnfield, edited by Kenneth Borris and George Klawitter, Susquehanna

University Press, 2001, pp. 174-192.

Cleaver, Robert. “A Godly Form of Household Government: For the Ordering of Private

Families.” Sexuality and Gender in the English Renaissance: An Annotated

Edition of Contemporary Documents, edited by Lloyd Davis, Garland Publishing

Inc., 1998, pp. 183-211.

Dasenbrock, Reed Way. “The Petrachan Context of Spenser's Amoretti.” PMLA, vol. 100,

no. 1, 1985, pp. 38–50. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/462199. Accessed 20

February 2020.

Davis, Lloyd. “Introduction.” Sexuality and Gender in the English Renaissance: An

Annotated Edition of Contemporary Documents, edited by Lloyd Davis, Garland

Publishing Inc., 1998, pp. xiii-xxiii.

Doyle, Andrew. “Richard Barnfield: The Overlooked Autograph.” Notes and Queries,

vol. 50, no. 1, 2003, pp. 70–74. https://doi-org.proxy.lib.csus.edu/10.1093/

nq/500070. Accessed 4 January 2020.

Dubrow, Heather. “Petrarchan Executors: Sidney, Shakespeare, Wroth.” Echoes of

Desire: English Petrarchism and its Counterdiscourses, Cornell University Press,

2018, pp. 99-162. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.7591/j.ctt207g5n1.8. Accessed

17 September 2019.

105

Ferguson, Margaret, et. al. “Introduction.” Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of

Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, The University of Chicago Press,

1986, pp. xv-xxxi.

Fienberg, Nona. “Wroth and the Invention of Female Poetic Subjectivity.” Reading Mary

Wroth: Representing Alternatives in Early Modern England, edited by Naomi J.

Miller and Gary F. Waller, University of Tennessee Press, 1991, pp. 175-190.

Garber, Marjorie. “Introduction.” Shakespeare and Modern Culture, Pantheon Books,

2008, pp. 13-35.

Greene, Roland. “Introduction: Post-Petrarchism: Toward a Poetics of Lyric and the

Lyric Sequence.” Post-Petrarchism: Origins and Innovations of the Western Lyric

Sequence, Princeton University Press, 1991, pp. 3-21.

Hannay, Margaret. “‘Your vertuous and learned Aunt’: The Countess of Pembroke as a

Mentor to Mary Wroth.” Reading Mary Wroth: Representing Alternatives in

Early Modern England, edited by Naomi J. Miller and Gary F. Waller, University

of Tennessee Press, 1991, pp. 15-34.

Hanson, Elizabeth. “Boredom and Whoredom: Reading Renaissance Women’s Sonnet

Sequences.” The Yale Journal of Criticism, vol. 10, no. 1, 1997, pp. 165–191.

Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/yale.1997.0004. Accessed 17 September 2019.

Hecht, Paul. “Distortion, Aggression, and Sex in Mary Wroth’s Sonnets.” Studies in

English Literature 1500-1900, vol. 53, no. 1, 2013, pp. 91-115. Project MUSE,

doi:10.1353/sel.2013.0000. Accessed 20 September 2019.

106

Ingram, Martin. “The Reform of Popular Culture? Sex and Marriage in Early Modern

England.” Popular Culture in Seventeenth-Century England, edited by Barry

Reay, St. Martin’s Press Inc., 1985, pp. 129-165.

Kennedy, William J. “European Beginnings and Transmissions: Dante, Petrarch and the

Sonnet Sequence.” The Cambridge Companion to the Sonnet, edited by A. D.

Cousins and Peter Howarth, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2011, pp.

84–104.

Klawitter, George. “Introduction.” Richard Barnfield: The Complete Poems, edited by

George Klawitter, Susquehanna University Press, 1900, pp. 11-58.

Klein, Lisa. The Exemplary Sidney and the Elizabethan Sonneteer. University of

Delaware Press, 1998.

Kolb, Laura. “Stella’s Voice: Echo and Collaboration in Astrophil and Stella 57 and 58.”

Sidney Journal, vol. 30 no. 1, 2012, pp. 79-100.

Larsen, Kenneth. “Introduction.” Edmund Spenser’s Amoretti and Epithalamion: A

Critical Edition, Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1997, pp. 1-66.

Levy, Charles. “Sidneian Indirection: The Ethical Irony of Astrophil and Stella.” Sir

Philip Sidney and the Interpretation of Renaissance Culture, edited by Gary F.

Waller and Michael D. Moore, Croom Helm, 1984, pp. 56- 66.

Lewalski, Barbara Kiefer. “Revising Genres and Claiming the Woman’s Part: Mary

Wroth’s Oeuvre.” Writing Women in Jacobean England. Harvard University

Press, 1993, pp.243-307.

107

Masten, Jeff. “‘Shall I turne blabb?’: Circulation, Gender, and Subjectivity in Mary

Wroth’s Sonnets.” Reading Mary Wroth: Representing Alternatives in Early

Modern England, edited by Naomi J. Miller and Gary F. Waller, University of

Tennessee Press, 1991, pp. 67-87.

Miller, Naomi J. “Dark Lady: This Self Which is Not One.” Changing the Subject: Mary

Wroth and Figurations of Gender in Early Modern England. University Press of

Kentucky, 1996, pp. 18-63.

McDonald, Russ. “Men and Women: Gender, Family, Society.” The Bedford Companion

to Shakespeare: An Introduction with Documents, Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2001, pp.

253-277.

McSheffrey, Shannon. “Making a Marriage.” Marriage, Sex, and Civic Culture in Late

Medieval London, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006, pp. 17-47. ProQuest

Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csus/detail.action?docID

=3442152. Accessed 4 April 2020.

Moore, Mary. “The Labyrinth as Style in ‘Pamphilia to Amphilanthus.’” Studies in

English Literature 1500-1900, vol. 38, no. 1, 1998, pp. 109–125. JSTOR, www.

jstor.org/stable/451083. Accessed 20 September 2019.

Munroe, Jennifer. “‘In This Strang Labourinth, How Shall I Turne?’: Needlework,

Gardens, and Writing in Mary Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus.” Tulsa

Studies in Women's Literature, vol. 24, no. 1, 2005, pp. 35–55. JSTOR,

www.jstor.org/stable/20455210. Accessed 3 October 2019.

108

Peters, Christine. “Gender, Sacrament and Ritual: The Making and Meaning of Marriage

in Late Medieval and Early Modern England.” Past & Present, no. 169, 2000, pp.

63–96. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/651264. Accessed 20 March 2020.

Prescott, Anne Lake, and Andrew Hadfield. “Editors’ Note.” Edmund Spenser’s Poetry,

edited by Anne Lake Prescott and Andrew D. Hadfield, W.W. Norton and

Company, 2014, pp. 667-670.

Ray, Sid. “‘Those Whom God Hath Joined Together’: Bondage Metaphors and Marital

Advice in Early Modern England.” Domestic Arrangements in Early Modern

England, edited by Kari Boyd McBride, Duquesne University Press, 2002, pp. 15-

47.

Roberts, Josephine. “The Life of Lady Mary Wroth.” The Poems of Lady Mary Wroth,

edited by Josephine A. Roberts, Louisiana State University Press, 1983, pp. 3-40.

——————. “The Nature of the Poetry.” The Poems of Lady Mary Wroth, edited by

Josephine A. Roberts, Louisiana State University Press, 1983, pp. 41-60.

Sanchez, Melissa. “‘In My Selfe the Smart I Try: Female Promiscuity in Astrophil and

Stella.” ELH, vol. 80, no. 1, 2013, pp. 1–27, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/23356

365. Accessed 12 January 2020.

See, Sam. “Richard Barnfield and the Limits of Homoerotic Literary History.” GLQ: A

Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, vol. 13 no. 1, 2007, p. 63-91. Project MUSE,

muse.jhu.edu/article/207534. Accessed 4 January 2020.

109

“A Sermon against Whoredom and Uncleanness.” Sexuality and Gender in the English

Renaissance: An Annotated Edition of Contemporary Documents, edited by Lloyd

Davis, Garland Publishing Inc.,1998, pp. 5-16.

Sidney, Philip. Astrophil and Stella. Sir Philip Sidney: The Major Works, edited by

Katherine Duncan-Jones, Oxford University Press, 2008, pp. 153-211.

Smith, Bruce. “Sexuality and the Play of Imagination.” Homosexual Desire in

Shakespeare’s England: A Cultural Poetics, The University of Chicago Press,

1991, pp. 1-29.

—————. “The Passionate Shepherd.” Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare’s England:

A Cultural Poetics, The University of Chicago Press, 1991, pp. 79-115.

Spenser, Edmund. Amoretti. Edmund Spenser’s Poetry, edited by Anne Lake Prescott and

Andrew D. Hadfield, W.W. Norton and Company, 2014, pp. 617-652.

Spiller, Michael. “The Elizabethan Sonnet Vogue and Spenser.” The Development of the

Sonnet: An Introduction, Routledge, 1992, pp.123-148, ProQuest Ebook Central,

https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csus/detail.action?docID=179371. Accessed

12 January 2020.

—————. “Wyatt, Surrey and Their Legacy.” The Development of the

Sonnet: An Introduction, Taylor & Francis Group, 1992, pp. 81-100. ProQuest

Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csus/detail.action?docID=17

9371. Accessed 21 August 2019.

110

Summers, Claude J. “Homosexuality and Renaissance Literature, or the Anxieties of

Anachronism.” South Central Review, vol. 9, no. 1, 1992, pp. 2–23. JSTOR,

www.jstor.org/stable/3189384. Accessed 2 December 2019.

Worrall, Andrew. “Biographical Introduction: Barnfield’s Feast of ‘all Varietie.’” The

Affectionate Shepherd: Celebrating Richard Barnfield, edited by Kenneth Borris

and George Klawitter, Susquehanna University Press, 2001, pp. 25-38.

—————. “Richard Barnfield: A New Biography.” Notes and Queries, vol. 39, no.3,

1992, pp. 370-371.

Wroth, Mary. Pamphilia to Amphilanthus. The Poems of Lady Mary Wroth, edited by

Josephine A. Roberts, Louisiana State University Press, 1983, pp. 85-142.

Yearling, Rebecca. “Homoerotic Desire and Renaissance Lyric Verse.” Studies in

English Literature, 1500-1900, vol. 53, no. 1, 2013, pp. 53-71. JSTOR, www.jstor

.org/stable/41818883. Accessed 14 November 2019.

Yen, Julie. “‘If it be sinne to love a sweet-fac’d Boy’: Rereading Homoerotic Desire in

Barnfield’s Ganymede Poems.” The Affectionate Shepherd: Celebrating Richard

Barnfield, edited by Kenneth Borris and George Klawitter, Susquehanna

University Press, 2001, pp. 130-148.