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Licentious Rhymers: John Donne and the Late-Elizabethan Couplet Revival

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Licentious Rhymers: John Donne and the Late-Elizabethan Couplet Revival Licentious Rhymers: John Donne and the Late-Elizabethan Couplet Revival Rebecca M. Rush ELH, Volume 84, Number 3, Fall 2017, pp. 529-558 (Article) Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2017.0021 For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/668785 Access provided by Boston College (6 Jan 2018 15:48 GMT) LICENTIOUS RHYMERS: JOHN DONNE AND THE LATE-ELIZABETHAN COUPLET REVIVAL BY REBECCA M. RUSH To modern readers accustomed to encountering couplets in the poems of John Dryden, Alexander Pope, and their imitators, the form seems to represent the Enlightenment in miniature. The relentless chime of the end-rhymes and the perfect balance of the clauses seem tailor-made to transmit eighteenth-century views of rational judgment, discipline, and order.1 But the prominence of the staid eighteenth- century couplet has obscured an earlier, more risqué reputation of the form. Prior to 1600, iambic pentameter couplets were disdained by sophisticated English poets, who associated the rhyme scheme with loose verse and libertine thought. Though in the early seven- teenth century Ben Jonson and his literary progeny converted the pentameter couplet into a form congenial to neo-classical restraint and balance, sixteenth-century poets and critics connected couplets with The Canterbury Tales and with an outmoded kind of verse they deemed merry, light, and vulgar. In the mid-1590s, a group of boisterous young poets revived and reimagined the couplet precisely because of its reputation as an ancient and licentious form. Reacting against the elaborateness of Elizabethan stanzaic poetry, these poets took up the couplet in order to flout newly established poetic laws and return English poetry to its original state of liberty. The couplet poets—Christopher Marlowe, John Donne, Everard Guilpin, Joseph Hall, John Marston, and Thomas Middleton—belonged to what can be loosely described as a new school of poetry that arose in the 1590s. Most of the poets who belonged to this school were in their twenties and many were students or residents at the Inns of Court. They defined themselves in opposition to a slightly older generation of poets who saw Edmund Spenser and Sir Philip Sidney as their modern masters, held up Virgil and Petrarch as their poetic forefathers, and favored genres like pastoral and the sonnet.2 The new poets of the 1590s instead chose to imitate witty and urbane Roman poets like Horace, Ovid, Martial, and Juvenal. They tested the limits of sexual propriety in love elegies and erotic epyllia and deflated the pretensions of polite society in satires and epigrams.3 And, while ELH 84 (2017) 529–558 © 2017 by Johns Hopkins University Press 529 their older contemporaries preferred to write in stanzaic forms and interwoven rhyme schemes, the new poets chose to revive a form that had been used intermittently over the course of the previous century: iambic pentameter couplets. Donne played a formative role in this late-Elizabethan trend for writing in what Marlowe calls “looser lines.”4 In fact, Donne produced the largest and most varied body of couplet poetry in the 1590s. Donne’s status as a couplet poet has long been overlooked since the portion of his early corpus favored by modern readers, his “Songs and Sonnets,” consists largely of stanzaic poems.5 But nearly everything else Donne wrote in the 1590s—his elegies, satires, epigrams, and most of his verse letters—is in iambic pentameter couplets.6 Even in the “Songs and Sonnets,” where Donne rarely repeats a rhyme scheme, continuous couplets are by far the most frequently used verse form, occurring in 11 of 55 poems, including such well-known poems as “The Flea.” Moreover, as I show below, the few records that remain of Elizabethan and Jacobean engagement with Donne’s verse indicate that early readers did not privilege the “Songs and Sonnets” as we do and that they may have actually preferred his couplet verse. By considering Donne’s early experiments with the couplet, I aim to provide a new perspective on a period of Donne’s career that has often proved elusive for several reasons: the lack of surviving Elizabethan manuscripts of Donne’s verse, Donne’s reserve about his verse practice and poetic influences, and the diversity of personae and moral positions that he adopts in his early poetry. Attending to verse forms can shed new light on Donne’s youthful thought as well as the cultural controversies that embroiled the Inns of Court in the 1590s because Renaissance poets and theorists did not isolate formal questions from social, political, and ethical concerns and, in fact, they often endeavored to defend and recommend the art of poesy by attributing larger implications to formal features like rhyme and meter. They recognized that verse forms, like genres, carry considerable ideological freight along with them and allow poets to associate themselves implicitly with particular figures and epochs in literary history. In the last decade, a wave of edited volumes with variants of the words “form” and “Renaissance” on their title pages has heralded the rise of a new movement within Renaissance studies dedicated to correcting the excesses of both New Criticism and New Historicism by attending to the ideological implications of forms.7 Each of the essays in these volumes offers a distinctive way of conceptualizing the relationship between form and ideology while also pushing critics to resist thinking of forms as mere 530 Donne and the Late-Elizabethan Couplet Revival “containers for extrinsic ideological content.”8 Building on recent work in media theory and reception studies, Stephen Cohen invites readers to imagine form as a kind of “mediation” between “text and social context as well as author and audience.”9 Joshua Scodel and Douglas Bruster consider how familiar concepts from historical scholarship such as source, intertextuality, and allusion can be used to illuminate the ways in which forms import ideologies from other texts.10 And Raphael Lynn takes a “cognitive approach” to his analysis of Shakespeare’s stanzaic poetry, describing “how form is shaped by the characteristics of human thinking.”11 Yet, none of these essays directly addresses the question of what distinguishes early modern formalism from the interpretive methods of other periods. One of the aims of this study is to demonstrate that the peculiarities of early modern verse neces- sitate distinctive hermeneutic tools. We can begin to develop these tools by scrutinizing the reading practices employed in a vast archive of poetic treatises, prefaces, notebooks, and marginalia as well as in early modern verse itself. Reading practices can never be entirely disentangled from one another, but it is nevertheless useful to divide early modern formal analysis into three primary methods: reading for craft, reading histori- cally, and reading analogically. The first two interpretive methods are immediately legible to modern critics. Early modern theorists dedi- cate considerable time to the intricacies of poetic craft, describing the architectonics of stanza forms and meters and explaining how poets achieve particular sonic and verbal effects. Trained in humanist methods of classical philology, they also read form in historical or genealogical ways, tracing how particular meters, rhyme schemes, and genres derive from ancient or Middle English sources and how they import associations from their historical contexts. But one of the most common methods of early modern formal reading is perhaps the most alien to modern critical sensibilities. Early modern poets posited an analogical relationship between forms and ideas and maintained that the visual and verbal patterns inscribed in verse could be mapped onto social, moral, or cosmic structures.12 The numerological work of critics like A. Kent Hieatt and Alastair Fowler has revealed the mind- boggling lengths to which Renaissance poets could take this idea that verse should reproduce the intricate structural patterns of the cosmos.13 This analogical manner of reading form is not only unfamiliar to critics practiced in the art of reading historically and for craft, but runs athwart two assumptions that underlie much post-romantic poetic criticism: that mimetic theories of literature are rigid and reductive, Rebecca M. Rush 531 and that verse is most compelling when form and ideology are in tension rather than in harmony. Both of these evaluative principles are on display, for example, in Simon Jarvis’s influential work on “verse thinking,” which crystalizes a central doctrine of new formalism: that verse has its own logic and can never be reduced to the prose summary of its content.14 In order to clear the way for attention to the manifold ways in which poets think in verse, Jarvis has repeatedly attempted to banish “the doctrine of verbal mimesis” from poetic criticism, even as he acknowledges that two foundational figures in English poetics, Dryden and Pope, espoused this doctrine.15 In “The Melodics of Long Poems,” Jarvis maintains that Pope’s most compelling verse works against Pope’s own mimetic theory. In a reading of “Essay on Man,” Jarvis argues that the poem’s “continuous explosions of wit . think back against, detonate, those inert cosmological and moral schemas which they should, according to Pope’s own poetics, meekly exem- plify.”16 By reducing the concept of mimesis to the placid, unthinking reproduction of hidebound schemes, Jarvis makes it all too easy to dismiss a methodology that defined poetic interpretation for centuries. As Jonathan Culler has argued, literary criticism was dominated by “mimetic poetics” for most of its history until a revolutionary shift to “expressive poetics” occurred in the period between the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.17 Before this critical break, poets and critics insisted that (in Sidney’s Aristotelian formulation) “Poesie” is by definition “an Art of Imitation.”18 And they argued that the patterns poets strive to represent in verse—whether the workings of the mind or the dance of the cosmos—are not “inert” but elaborate and dynamic.
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