Pragmatic Readings of the Letters of Joan and Maria Thynne, 1575-1611 with Diplomatic Transcriptions of Their Correspondence

Pragmatic Readings of the Letters of Joan and Maria Thynne, 1575-1611 With Diplomatic Transcriptions of Their Correspondence Graham Trevor Williams Presented in Submission for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy July, 2009 Department of English Language Faculty of Arts University of Glasgow © Graham Trevor Williams; 2009. Abstract This is a study of the letters of Joan and Maria Thynne, 1575-1611. It achieves in bringing together archival research, close reading and socio-historical context with the methods and concepts from historical pragmatics. This cross-disciplinary and multi- dimensional approach is demonstrated to be a valuable way of providing more nuanced readings of the letters and of extracting their communicative forms and functions. These documents reward close scrutiny, and the findings of this study offer significant and important contributions to the fields of historical linguistics, early modern rhetoric, paleography, women’s history and letter-writing, as well as for the Thynne family more specifically. Following the theoretical introduction and a short biography of the Thynne family, there are five analytical chapters. The first, Chapter 3, asks how the letters’ prose was organized into meaningful units of information – describing a variety of pre-standard uses for punctuation as well as the organizational and elocutionary functions of other pragmatic markers. Chapter 4 examines the sociopragmatic significance of performative speech act verbs such as beseech and confess and shows how individual manifestations of these forms actually reflect and reiterate larger aspects of early modern English culture and sociability. Chapter 5 compares Joan’s holograph letters and those prepared for her by scribes, exhibiting the social, graphic and linguistic implications of using a scribe. The only direct correspondence from the letters – consisting of two letters sent between Joan and Lucy Audley (Maria’s mother) in 1602 – is the topic of Chapter 6, which discusses rhetoric, language and text as ways of negotiating an awkward relationship, concluding that these features must be considered in respect to one another and in relation to the other letter in order to fully describe their significance. Chapter 7 extends a discussion on ‘sincerity’ begun in Chapter 6 by considering it alongside other ‘voices’ in Maria’s letters – namely sarcasm and seriousness – which are described as interrelated communicative styles dependent upon an anxious awareness of the gap between expression and meaning. The sum of these analyses not only proves historical pragmatics to be a productive method of investigating and systematically describing meaning in individual letter- collections from early modern England, but also suggests a range of new questions, which are presented in the conclusion. Newly prepared diplomatic transcriptions of all the letters are provided in Appendix 1. 2 Acknowledgements I am very grateful for the scholarships and bursaries I have received from the Overseas Research Student (ORS) fund, the Faculty of Arts and the Department of English Language at the University of Glasgow to help fund my studies and the research which is presented in this thesis. I would also like to express my respect and gratitude to Jeremy J. Smith and Alison Wiggins for all the support and supervision they have provided me over the last three years – for that I am ever indebted. And for their valuable feedback, thank you to my examiners, Robert Maslen and Irma Taavitsainen. To friends made while writing in Scotland: Juulia Kirsikka Ahvensalmi (Mä pidän mansikasta), Nina Bacos, Allan and Linda Burnett with little Hannah, Fabienne Collignon, Cindy Courtillier, Konstantina Georganta, Dorian Grieve, Christin Lee, Anne-Marie Millim, Christine Obondo, Salla Sariola, Joel and Heather Shaver, and Keiko Sumiki. To friends elsewhere, who I have missed: Eric Amling, Nina Kassa, Matt LaFleur, Marit Posch + Christoph Rosol with Käthe ‘La Crotte’ (and another on the way), Ms. Jocelyne O’Toole (one of the few who still writes actual letters by post!) and Ginette Sze. Hugs and hi-fives to Grandma, Pop and Aunt Candy for all the thoughts, notes, letters and clippings over the years. But especially to my parents, Trevor Richard and Patricia Anne, and my sister, Jessie Allyne Williams – your love is the greatest. Oh, and to Shulamith, the cat. A fine book-reading companion I left behind to come and write this thesis. 3 Table of Contents 1. Introduction 7 2. The Familial Backdrop 24 3. ‘Ruling’ and ‘Chunking’: Punctuation and Pragmatic Markers as 35 Text-Organizing Forms 4. The Sociopragmatic Significance of Performative Speech Act Verbs 68 5. ‘yr Scribe Can proove no nessecarye Consiquence for you’?: The 99 Social and Linguistic Implications of the Holograph/Scribal Distinction in Joan Thynne’s Letters 6. A Negotiation of Terms: Rhetoric, Politeness and Text in the Letter 129 Exchange between Joan Thynne and Lucy Audley 7. ‘I haue trobled wth a tedious discours’: Sincerity, Sarcasm and 161 Seriousness in the letters of Maria Thynne, c. 1601-10 8. Conclusion and Directions for Future Research 189 Appendices: 1. Diplomatic Transcriptions of the Letters 202 Joan Thynne’s Letters, 1575-1611 208 Maria Thynne’s Letters, c. 1601-1610 247 Lucy Audley’s Letter to Joan Thynne, 1602 258 2. Three Selected Facsimile Reproductions 260 3. A Summary of Brown and Levinson’s Politeness Theory 263 Bibliography 268 4 Abbreviations and Notes on Citation Practice OED – Oxford English Dictionary (Online) CEEC – Corpus of Early English Correspondence CEECS – Corpus of Early English Correspondence Sampler My citation practice throughout the chapters of this thesis differs from my transcription policy. In the transcriptions of the Thynne women’s letters located in Appendix 1 (where the transcription policy is described in detail), lineation and deletions are represented as faithfully as possible in accordance with the manuscripts themselves. In the chapters lineation is not preserved, nor are other marks that represent additions and deletions, however, features such as original spelling and punctuation are maintained throughout. For ease of reference, I refer to letters using their volume and folio numbers from the manuscript collection of the Thynne Papers held at Longleat Library, Wiltshire. The volume number is given as a roman numeral and the folio in cardinal numbers (e.g. VIII.34 for ‘volume eight, folio thirty-four’). This is also the first number in the reference heading of each letter in Appendix 1. There has also been a need to emphasize different aspects of text throughout different parts of the thesis, for which I have employed italics and boldface. The use of italics is used primarily for two purposes. The first is to mark important theoretical terminology when they are first mentioned, e.g., ‘the field of sociopragmatics’. The second use corresponds to referencing particular linguistic items, usually speech act verbs, e.g., ‘the performative use of pray’. To facilitate easier reading, the use of boldface is limited to citations from the Thynne letters or other period texts. For example, when discussing the performative pray, specific examples are marked thus: ‘Sr I pray yow let this bearer be entertayned’ (V.18). Footnotes are self-contained within each chapter; therefore, each chapter begins with footnote ‘1’. The first time a reference is cited in a chapter, it is given in full in the footnotes and abbreviated thereafter. Finally, while reference is made to letters from the Thynne Papers written by writers other than Joan and Maria Thynne, unless otherwise noted, all the manuscript references given in footnotes refer to letters contained in this archive. 5 The total network and the individual pulses of affection relate dialectically to each other. Only in the frame of the whole can we see what the letters really said; only in the individual units of such communication can we sense what the Elizabethan ideological sphere felt like from the inside. -Frank Whigham (1981: 869) 6 CHAPTER 1 Introduction Research Objectives This thesis brings together socio-historical and linguistic approaches, while performing the type of close analysis developed predominantly in literary study to provide pragmatic readings of a major corpus of material hitherto comparatively little examined by either social historians or historical linguists: the letters written by Joan and Maria Thynne in late Elizabethan and early Jacobean England. The decision to analyze these letters from this perspective can be seen in the context of a larger development in scholarly interest. On the one hand, specific groups of early modern familiar letters, many written by individuals and families otherwise unheard of, with few or no literary affiliations and less perceptible contributions to historico-political events, are increasingly being exploited by social, cultural and intellectual historians to produce individual accounts of period life and experience. Yet despite burgeoning interest in women’s letters in particular, social histories, and even historical biographies, offer little reflection on the written documents and historically distant language which ultimately underpin their completion. From a distinct disciplinary perspective, oftentimes using editions created by historians, letters are also being incorporated into larger electronic corpora and used to search for predetermined data in quantitative historical linguistic studies.1 And while these corpus studies have offered a great deal of information

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