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Elegy and Self-Presentation in Early Modern England a Dissertation

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Elegy and Self-Presentation in Early Modern England a Dissertation The Form of Selfhood: Elegy and Self-Presentation in Early Modern England A Dissertation SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Asa D. Olson IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY John Watkins, Dissertation Adviser June, 2018 © 2018 Asa D. Olson ALL RIGHTS RESERVED Table of Contents Introduction: A Worthless Genre 1 Chapter 1: Elegy, Not Epic Generic Polemic and Self-Presentation in Rome 21 Chapter 2: Shakespeare, the Ovidian Poet Disciplining Self-Presentation in The Two Gentlemen of Verona 67 Chapter 3: Donne, the Sincere Poet Interrogating Selfhood in John Donne’s Elegies 102 Chapter 4: Milton, The Grave Poet Exile from Idleness in the Elegiarum Liber 127 Conclusion 172 Bibliography 176 Appendix: Elegy’s Reception From Augustan Rome to Early Modern England 188 i Introduction: A Worthless Genre Haec ego mente olim laeva, studioque supino, Nequitiae posui vana trophaea meae. These trifles are the empty monuments of my idleness that I set down, at one time, with silly reason and negligent fire. —John Milton’s Epigraph to his Elegiarum Liber, ll. 1-2 The lines above conclude John Milton’s book of elegies as they are published in his 1645 Poems. Whether this epigraph’s opening lines refer to only the preceding poem (“Elegia Septima”) or the entire collection is a topic of contention; however, the reference to Milton’s subject of his nequitia stands out for several reasons. Milton uses the word with some contempt and is actually asserting his dutiful reformation of morals since his youth, but the word is one that the Roman love elegists Propertius and Ovid embrace in their own collections.1 In the opening poem of his second book of Amores, for example, Ovid declares himself to be “nequitiae Naso poeta meae,” “Naso, the poet of my wantonness” (Amores 2.1.2). Propertius likewise uses the word in his poem to Tullus, who invites him along on a journey for glory through arms (Prop. 1.6). Propertius rejects the honorable path for love, requesting from Tullus: “me sine, quem semper voluit fortuna iacere, / huic animam extremam reddere nequitiae,” “Give leave to me, whom fortune has always desired to lie in ruins, to surrender my dying breath to this worthlessness” (1.6.25-26). Even in the 9 extant lines of Gallus, the earliest of the Roman elegists, we find the word, seemingly attributed to his beloved Lycoris.2 Nequitiae, in its prominence, is intricately entangled with the definition of elegy. It denotes, as my 1 For a sense of how often the term is used, who uses it, and for what purposes, see Propertius 1.6.26, 1.15.38, 2.5.2, 2.6.30, 2.24.6, 3.10.24, 3.19.10. Ovid Amores 2.1.2, 3.1.17, 3.4.10, 3.11.37, 3.14.17; Ars Amatoria 2.392; Heroides 4.17, 17.29; Fasti 1.414; Tristia 2.280. 2 See Edward Courtney, The Fragmentary Latin Poets (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993): Nequitia … a Lycori tua (fr. 2.1). 1 translations so far have shown, a variety of meanings, including idleness, wantonness, and worthlessness. It can reflect the elegists’ embrace of otium (idle leisure) over officium (duty), their preference for love over anything else, and their apathy toward modern values. Indeed, “value” is what is at stake in these examples, which declare the genre’s worthlessness and request that the reader decide whether these poems do indeed have any value. In Roman elegy, one frequent topos in which the question of “worth” is raised is the recusatio or the refusal to write in a higher genre, especially epic. Prop. 1.6, for example, engages with this issue when contrasting the soldier with the lover. This contrast between the soldier and lover is no far cry from the contrast of the poet of war and the poet of love, the subject of the subsequent elegy, Prop. 1.7. The idea in such poems is that the epic poet justifies his literary activity by performing some act of civic duty by writing about politics or history, especially in early imperial Rome when epic material had much to do with issues of nationhood and sovereignty. To some extent, the epic poet could be seen as engaging in a form of civic officium or at least otium negotiosum (a busy, justified sort of leisure). In elegiac recusationes, however, the poet usually rejects a request or opportunity to compose epic in order to continue writing elegies and pursuing love, whose subject (especially in contrast with epic) appears to be rather trivial. This contention between epic and elegiac utility is the subject of the first chapter of this dissertation, where I suggest a reason for the polemic’s prominence; however, this contention exists today too in literary scholarship. With all our attempts to disrupt notions of generic hierarchy and concepts of the canon, epic still maintains that privilege over elegy, and in studies of classical reception—the appropriation and 2 adaptation of ancient Greek and Roman texts—scholars still favor the politics of epic over all that elegy offers, at least as it pertains to early modern England.3 We might consider the multitude of books on the reception of Virgil’s Aeneid and his other hexameter verse poems (the Eclogues and Georgics)4 or the special attention to Ovid’s only epic, the Metamorphoses, over his numerous elegiac collections: the Amores, Ars Amatoria, Heroides, Fasti, Tristia, and Epistulae Ex Ponto.5 Yet, early modern writers knew many of these texts just as well as they knew Virgil’s Aeneid or Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and a modern scholar can be justified in wondering how many Renaissance writers actually read the Aeneid from cover to cover without hesitating to assume their close familiarity with, for example, the Heroides. In this dissertation, I want to challenge modern understandings of elegy’s role in the classical world and, especially, early modern England.6 Following Tibullus’, Propertius’, and Ovid’s lead, as they 3 For representative books on the reception of epic, see David Quint, Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); Richard Helgerson, Self- Crowned Laureates: Spenser, Jonson, Milton, and the Literary System (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983); Patrick Cheney, Spenser’s Famous Flight: A Renaissance Idea of a Literary Career (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993); Colin Burrow, Epic Romance: From Homer to Milton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); Thomas M. Greene, The Descent from Heaven: A Study in Epic Continuity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963). 4 For representative books on the reception of Virgil in this period, see Margaret Tudeau-Clayton, Jonson, Shakespeare and Early Modern Virgil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); John Watkins, The Specter of Dido: Spenser and Virgilian Epic (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995). For the Eclogues, see Annabel M. Patterson, Pastoral and Ideology: Virgil to Valery (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987); Helen Cooper, Pastoral: Mediaeval into Renaissance (Ipswich: Brewer, 1977). For the Georgics, see J. Chalker, The English Georgic: A Study in the Development of Form (Baltimore: John Hopkins Press, 1969); Anthony Low, The Georgic Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985). Several other scholars are worth mention here for their work on reception, though they do not directly address the period, including Craig W. Kallendorf’s works on Virgil, and the works of Thomas K. Hubbard, E. Kegel-Brinkgreve, and Thomas G. Rosenmeyer on pastoral. 5 Charles Martindale, John Milton and the Transformation of Ancient Epic (Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble Books, 1986); R. J. DuRocher, Milton and Ovid: Paradise Lost and the Metamorphoses (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985); K. L. McKinley, Reading the Ovidian Heroine: ‘Metamorphoses’ Commentaries, 1100-1618 (Leiden: Brill, 2001). 6 Studies on the reception of elegy is relatively scattered. For a book-length study of Ovid’s love elegies, see M. L. Stapleton, Harmful Eloquence: Ovid’s Amores from Antiquity to Shakespeare (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996) and for a study of Catullus see Julia Haig Gaisser, Catullus and his Renaissance Readers (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993). Barbara Boyd gives some attention to reception in 3 asserted the utility of elegy over epic, I argue that while writers and scholars trumpeted epic as a genre of nationhood and empire, schoolmasters, students, and poets silently transform elegy into a preeminent form of selfhood, which is to say that elegy plays a principal role in disciplining, constituting, and interrogating selfhood in early modern England. Elegy, I should clarify, was not the genre of funeral lament with which we associate it today, although this meaning did become more popular in the late 16th century. Rather, elegy (in Augustan Rome) was a genre of love poetry written in the first- person from the perspective of the poet. Its defining feature, if one can ever assert a defining feature for a genre, was its meter: the elegiac couplet. The canon of elegists (as they declare them and as they are received) include Gallus, Tibullus, Propertius, and Ovid, and their poems were often directed to a particular beloved, a puella (i.e., girl, girlfriend, sweetheart), but were sometimes directed to male friends, rivals, or patrons too. Through these relationships, the elegists present themselves in a sort of counter- cultural manner, though they never truly challenge the status quo. They embrace ideals of leisure, wantonness, femininity, and servitude to women; yet in doing so they also affirm Ovid’s Literary Loves (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1997), 203-224; and Cheney discusses the reception of Ovid’s career in Marlowe’s Counterfeit Profession: Ovid, Spenser, Counter- Nationhood (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997).
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