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Silencing the Sirens: Patronage and the New World in Spenser, Daniel, and Shakespeare A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY John Christian Sievers IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Professor John Watkins, Advisor October 2011 © John Christian Sievers 2011 Acknowledgements This dissertation owes its existence to a steady stream of people in my life who have encouraged me to read and to think carefully about what I read. It started with my parents Dennis and Celeste, and continued through important High School teachers like Mr. Handlen, and life-changing undergraduate professors like Dr. Jesse Swan. It culminated with the insights and invaluable support of my dissertation committee: John Watkins, Shirley Nelson Garner, Gordon Hirsch, and Kelley Harness. Thanks for your guidance in my life and the part you played in helping me complete this project. As I have worked on this dissertation, I have become the proud father of two lovely daughters, Eleanor and Abigail. Even as they have learned their first words, they‘ve helped me think about sirens, or as Eleanor prefers mermaids, in new ways. Thank you Eleanor and Abigail for making the best of the times that I couldn‘t take you to the park, play dress up, or eat your imaginary culinary delights. For her encouragement, her patience, and her unwavering faith in me, I thank my wife, Beth. Though certainly not a siren, you are, after all, the only temptation I shall ever pursue. i Dedication To Beth, Eleanor, and Abigail: the inspirations for my songs. ii Abstract The sirens‘ place within the reason/passion antithesis has been the subject of several important scholarly inquiries about Early Modern English literature. While scholars have considered how early modern authors used sirens to explore the dangers of poetic expression, they have largely ignored the siren‘s place within the era‘s ideas about the New World. As early modern poets explored the sirens‘ ability to incriminate their poetry‘s capacity to please the senses, they also encountered the sirens‘ newest abode, Virginia, England‘s foothold in the New World. This study argues that the New World context for sirens creates unexpected resonances within the works of early modern authors who explore the siren songs‘ criticism of sensual pleasure within their works. This project expands the understanding of sirens in early modern English texts by suggesting that they often reveal the poet‘s uncertainty about the sensual and passionate nature of poetry, and that they also frequently include a connection with England‘s imperial expansion in the Americas. In particular, this study focuses on close readings of three authors: Edmund Spenser, Samuel Daniel, and William Shakespeare. The study is based on cross-disciplinary scholarship that includes literary analysis, historical research, and musical analysis to examine several genres ranging from lyric poetry to drama and from epic poetry to the Elizabethan air. After establishing an Early Modern context for sirens, this text explores book II of The Faerie Queene, ―Ulysses and the Syren,‖ and The Tempest. This dissertation argues that Spenser‘s New World praise of Queen Elizabeth self-critically reveals itself as sirenic flattery, and in a iii sense might act as Spenser‘s own poetic pursuit of temperance; that Daniel‘s poem, with its eloquent ability to please patrons with contrasting attitudes about the New World displays an eloquence that silences itself, and that this silencing reflects Daniel‘s concern over poetry‘s appeal to the senses; and that Shakespeare reveals how his play might be read as a sirenic temptation that acts as propaganda for English imperial expansion in America. iv Table of Contents Acknowledgements i Abstract iii List of Figures vi Introduction: Peter Pan‘s Neverland and Early Modern Mermaids 1 Chapter 1 ―We Mermayden‘s Clepe Hem Here‖: Sirens in Early Modern England 10 Chapter 2 ―Where Many Mermayds Haunt‖: Flattery and Vanity in Book II of The Faerie Queene 56 Chapter 3 Samuel Daniel, Lady Margaret‘s Privateer, and a Prince: Silent Eloquence 106 Chapter 4 ―The Clouds Methought Would Open and Show Riches‖: Shakespeare, A New World Siren 151 Conclusion 221 End Notes 214 Works Cited 231 v List of Figures Figure 1: Sirens, illustration from Geffrey Whitney‘s A Choice of Emblems (London, 1586) 13 Figure 2: Siren on shield, illustration from John Bossewell‘s Workes of Armorie Devyded into Three Bookes (1572) 20 Figure 3: Title page from The Decades of the Newe Worlde or West India (1555) 46 Figure 4: Adam and Eve Before the Fall, from A Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (1590) 49 Figure 5: Map of Virginia, from A Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (1590) 51 Figure 6: ―Full Fathom Five,‖ from Cheerfull Ayres or Ballads First Composed for One Single Voice, and Since Set for Three Voices. (1660) 187-188 Figure 7: . ―Where the Bee Sucks,‖ from Cheerfull Ayres or Ballads First Composed for One Single Voice, and Since Set for Three Voices. (1660) 204 vi Introduction Peter Pan’s Neverland and Early Modern Mermaids Overhearing me talking about mermaids, my three-year-old daughter asked, ―Daddy, you mean Peter Pan‘s mermaids?‖ The mermaids I mentioned were the five sisters Edmund Spenser described plying their ―continuall trade‖ in The Faerie Queene (II.xii.30). At the time, wanting to avoid an elaborate explanation that included a topic I hoped there would be no need to address with my daughter for years, I smiled and told her she was very smart, and that yes, of course, I was talking about Peter‘s mermaids. Retrospectively, my glib response to her innocent question seems to reveal a common lineage between the mermaids inhabiting the imaginations of twentieth-century authors like Sir James Mathew Barrie and early modern authors like Spenser. In Barrie‘s famous novel Peter and Wendy (1911), Wendy begs Peter Pan to postpone his return to Neverland with a simple promise: ―‘Don‘t go, Peter,‘ she entreated, ‗I know such lots of stories‘‖ (42). Considering this promise the narrator claims, ―There can be no denying that it was she who first tempted him‖ (42). Peter Pan in turn entices Wendy with his own promise: ―‘Wendy, there are mermaids.‘‖ To which Wendy replies, ―‘Mermaids! With tails?‘‖ (43). With Wendy and Peter‘s reciprocal enticements, Barrie‘s novel includes a thread of inquiry that has resurfaced again and again within literary works. This inquiry revolves around the topos of the traveler‘s encounter with the sirens and what such an encounter implies about the moral value of ―lots of stories.‖ In the initial exchange between Peter and Wendy, it is difficult to discern who is being tempted and who is tempting. Wendy‘s stories entice Peter, and Peter‘s Mermaids, with 1 their ―tails,‖ entice Wendy. Both Wendy and Peter are drawn by the siren call of ―stories.‖ Wendy is attracted to Peter because he presents as real the literal ―tails‖ of mermaids that make up Wendy‘s imagined tales. Peter is attracted to Wendy because her imagination helps create his Neverland. Wendy and Peter‘s mutual enticement reflects a concern over the sensual pleasure created by stories and the words that form them. Such a concern dwells in the danger that a sensual pleasure in words might eclipse reason. Peter‘s Neverland represents the ability of the senses to overthrow reason. Looking back on her first encounter with Peter Pan as an old woman who has forgotten how to fly, Wendy recalls that Peter, ―flew us all away to the Neverland and the fairies and the pirates and the redskins and the mermaid‘s lagoon‖ (236). Peter Pan‘s Neverland, a realm where stories and words overcome reason, brings together seemingly disparate strands that were interwoven by authors long before Barrie. Barrie‘s works have sometimes been compared to Shakespeare‘s. For instance, R. D. S. Jack claims, ―Between 1901 and 1904 Barrie produced three major plays [Quality Street, The Admirable Crichton, and Peter Pan] all of which followed the pattern of…Shakespearian romances.‖ Jack continues, making a direct link to Shakespeare‘s The Tempest: ―Once the central issue has been defined these plays test it out imaginatively in their equivalent of Prospero's island in The Tempest.‖ Jack‘s comparison points to similarities between Peter‘s Neverland and the Neverland Shakespeare created on Prospero‘s Island 300 years earlier. Prospero‘s Island, as many scholars have noted, 1 clearly reflects a topic that was difficult to ignore in Shakespeare‘s 2 day: England‘s place in the New World. As Barrie‘s Neverland juxtaposes fairies, pirates, redskins, and mermaids within a land that consists more of imagination than reason, he echoes early modern English authors like Shakespeare who explore the tensions created by the reason/passion antithesis in an era being redefined by exploration and settlement in the Americas. Mermaids, or sirens as they were first named in Homer‘s Odyssey, are the traveler‘s perpetual foes, but they are also embodied representations that show the power of sensual pleasures to overcome reason. These sirens mediated the crossroads created in early modern England by New World exploration and anxiety about the poet‘s place within England‘s New World encounters. The close relationship between the sirens‘ tempting song and poetry in early modern England created a problematic situation. Those who defended poetry, like Sir Philip Sidney in The Defense of Poesy, continually claimed that poetry could teach through its ability to please the senses. For example, Sidney claims that poetry can ―teach goodness, and delight the learners of it‖ (30).

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