University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations 2017 Unfolding Verse: Poetry As Correspondence In Early Modern England Dianne Marie Mitchell University of Pennsylvania, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Recommended Citation Mitchell, Dianne Marie, "Unfolding Verse: Poetry As Correspondence In Early Modern England" (2017). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 2477. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2477 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2477 For more information, please contact [email protected]. Unfolding Verse: Poetry As Correspondence In Early Modern England Abstract This project recovers a forgotten history of Renaissance poetry as mail. At a time when trends in English print publication and manuscript dissemination were making lyric verse more accessible to a reading public than ever before, writers and correspondents created poetic objects designed to reach individual postal recipients. Drawing on extensive archival research, “Unfolding Verse” examines versions of popular poems by John Donne, Ben Jonson, Mary Wroth, and others which look little like “literature.” Rather, these verses bear salutations, addresses, folds, wax seals, and other signs of transmission through the informal postal networks of early modern England. Neither verse letters nor “epistles,” the textual artifacts I call “letter-poems” proclaim their participation in a widespread social and material practice of sending verse through the post – a practice which has gone almost entirely unexplored, but which has important repercussions for the way we understand how poetic communication worked. Degree Type Dissertation Degree Name Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Graduate Group English First Advisor Peter Stallybrass Second Advisor Zachary Lesser Keywords Letters, Poetry, Renaissance This dissertation is available at ScholarlyCommons: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2477 UNFOLDING VERSE: POETRY AS CORRESPONDENCE IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND Dianne Mitchell A DISSERTATION in English Presented to the Faculties of the University of Pennsylvania in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2017 Supervisor of Dissertation Co-Supervisor of Dissertation ______________________ ________________________ Peter Stallybrass Zachary Lesser Annenberg Professor in the Humanities Professor of English and Professor of English Graduate Group Chairperson _______________________ David L. Eng, Richard L. Fisher Professor English Dissertation Committee Melissa E. Sanchez, Professor of English UNFOLDING VERSE: POETRY AS CORRESPONDENCE IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND COPYRIGHT 2017 Dianne Marie Mitchell This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/ iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am deeply grateful to the following people and institutions: The University of Pennsylvania, for the Ben Franklin Fellowship, King’s College Fellowship, and Dissertation Research Fellowship that funded my research. The Council for European Studies, for the generous CES-Mellon Dissertation Completion Fellowship which enabled me to finish this project. The members of the Penn Medieval/Renaissance community, including Meghan Hall, Alicia Meyer, Mariah Min, Daniel Davies, Shona Adler, Sarah Townshend, Alan Niles, Erika Harman, Rebecca Bushnell, David Wallace, and Rita Copeland, for their insight. Ian Petrie, for his sympathetic ear and for being my huzzah-man. Marissa Nicosia, Bronwyn Wallace, and Claire Bourne, for powerful female mentorship at every step of the way. John Pollack, for his generosity, unflagging enthusiasm, and for allowing me to write in the supportive environment of the special collections reading room. The indefatigable Peter Stallybrass, Zachary Lesser, and Melissa Sanchez, for sound advice, great conversation, and for being understanders as well as readers. Thomas Ward, for sharing my Sidney obsession. Ali Madani, for being a great colleague and for our “support group.” Jackie Burek, for commiseration, courage, and many beers along the way. Helen Chmura, for the trans-continental cross-discipline grad school chats. Emily Earl-Royal, for long walks, long talks, and the best fro-yo dates in Philly. Emily Casey, for checking in every day of the last year. Sarah Mass, for being there from the very beginning. Thomas Marsden, for the kind words that helped me finish. My parents, Ellen and Kevin Mitchell, for their encouragement, good humor, and faith. My sister Dorothy, for unconditional love and bad jokes when needed. And finally, Alex Russell, for giving my writing meaning. iv ABSTRACT UNFOLDING VERSE: POETRY AS CORRESPONDENCE IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND Dianne Marie Mitchell Peter Stallybrass Zachary Lesser This project recovers a forgotten history of Renaissance poetry as mail. At a time when trends in English print publication and manuscript dissemination were making lyric verse more accessible to a reading public than ever before, writers and correspondents created poetic objects designed to reach individual postal recipients. Drawing on extensive archival research, “Unfolding Verse” examines versions of popular poems by John Donne, Ben Jonson, Mary Wroth, and others which look little like “literature.” Rather, these verses bear salutations, addresses, folds, wax seals, and other signs of transmission through the informal postal networks of early modern England. Neither verse letters nor “epistles,” the textual artifacts I call “letter-poems” proclaim their participation in a widespread social and material practice of sending verse through the post – a practice which has gone almost entirely unexplored, but which has important repercussions for the way we understand how poetic communication worked. v TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT ....................................................................................................................... iv INTRODUCTION .............................................................................................................. 1 CHAPTER ONE. PRIVATE LETTERS .......................................................................... 27 CHAPTER TWO. ASTROPHIL TO STELLA ................................................................ 62 CHAPTER THREE. JOHN DONNE’S CABINET POEMS ......................................... 105 CHAPTER FOUR. CHANGING ADDRESS ................................................................ 146 BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................................................................................... 180 1 INTRODUCTION By the end of the sixteenth century and the first decades of the seventeenth century, English poetry was more accessible than ever before. Spurred on by the success of Tottel’s Songes and Sonnets (1557), publishers began to market lyric verse to a broad purchasing readership. Meanwhile, increasingly interconnected networks of court, country, university, and Inns of Court meant that manuscript poems circulated far beyond initial audiences of social intimates to reach the hands – and verse miscellanies – of unknown compilers. As the audience for English lyric grew, scholars have argued, poetry started to lose or even abandon a pretense of “social embededness.”1 Instead, it appealed to readers in new contexts as “literature.” But archival evidence suggests that this is not the full story. “Unfolding Verse” recovers a history of Renaissance poetry as mail. It argues that some of the most widely disseminated poems of the early modern period had a surprising parallel existence as postal communications to select readers. Though these epistolary versions have largely remained invisible to scholars, often lying unedited and uncatalogued as loose sheets among family papers, or hidden within manuscript verse miscellanies in transcribed form, these texts had a forceful presence in the poetic culture of their day. Their survival tells us that, far from being inherently “literary,” many early modern poems actually underwent a series of negotiations between posterity and intimacy. In fact, these negotiations helped shape what “literary” meant. 1 Arthur Marotti, Manuscript, print, and the English renaissance lyric (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 166. 2 The texts under consideration in “Unfolding Verse” strain our existing poetic vocabulary. Two terms normally employed in discussions of so-called epistolary poetry, “verse letter” and “verse epistle,” refer to poems which rely on epistolarity less as a site of formal meaning in its own right than as a pretense of intimate address which disguises the more public work of satire or praise.2 As Claudio Guillén points out, such generic “contamination” problematizes scholars’ use of “verse letter” and “verse epistle,” an issue which he and others have attempted to combat by reading epistolary verse along a spectrum of its resemblance to actual letters.3 But while these efforts to define the verse letter or verse epistle are useful in recognizing that some poems are more “letterary” than others, they tend to treat even the most letter-like elements of verse, such as allusions to previous or anticipated correspondence, as skillful devices which create a semblance of epistolarity. That a poem might not only borrow from features of correspondence but also attempt to reach its intended reader as an actual piece of mail