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Tottel's Miscellany and the English Renaissance Copyright by Carol Dawn Blosser 2005 The Dissertation Committee for Carol Dawn Blosser certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Making “English Eloquence:” Tottel’s Miscellany and the English Renaissance Committee: _________________________ Frank Whigham, Supervisor _________________________ Wayne Rebhorn _________________________ Michael Winship __________________________ Dolora Wojciehowski __________________________ Brian Levack Making “English Eloquence:” Tottel’s Miscellany and the English Renaissance by Carol Dawn Blosser, B.A.; M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin August 2005 Acknowledgements This dissertation would not have been possible without the help of many wonderful colleagues, family, and friends. To begin with, I owe a debt of gratitude to my dissertation committee: my director, Frank Whigham, and my committee members, Wayne Rebhorn, Michael Winship, Dolora Wojciehowski, and Brian Levack. They are inspiring scholars and teachers, and I can only hope that my work reflects the standards of intellectual curiosity and rigor they imparted to me. Secondly, my dissertation reading group –– Vimala Pasupathi, Paul Sullivan, Suzanne Penuel, Doug Eskew, and Lois Kim –– read draft after draft of this project from its very beginning and tirelessly offered support, feedback, and camaraderie. Vim, Paul, and Suzanne also offered the support of friendship through the roughest times of this process. Without their strength, kindness, integrity, and intellectual understanding, I would not have been able to complete this dissertation, nor would I have known what it is to have a scholarly community: et in Arcadia ego. Thank you. My friends and family also have been there all along, cheering me on and providing their own forms of support, moral and otherwise. My parents Fred and Donna, my sister Susan, my grandmother Mozelle, and my aunts, uncles, and cousins never once doubted that I could do this. I believe they are as proud of me as I am of them. My fellow graduate students at the University of Texas at Austin, my colleagues at the Undergraduate Writing Center (especially Scott Blackwood, Vince Lozano, and Michele Solberg), and my “real world” friends have made the last seven years joyful, wonderful iv ones, both the good times and the bad. Finally, I must thank Doug for putting up with the poets and my obsession with them for the last two years and for making the rest of my life so rich. In the words of Lady Mary Wroth, “His sight giues life vnto my loue-rould [eyes], / My loue content, because in his loue lies.” v Making “English Eloquence:” Tottel’s Miscellany and the English Renaissance Publication No.____________ Carol Dawn Blosser, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2005 Supervisor: Frank Whigham The 1557 edition of Tottel’s Miscellany is commonly known as the publication event that began the Renaissance in England. This project regards the 1557 publication of this early and influential poetry anthology as a watershed moment in the formation of the English literary canon. It revises received accounts of Renaissance literary history by revealing the social and political processes behind the dissemination of courtly lyric poetry, as well as by interrogating the book’s canonization of courtly authors, such as Sir Thomas Wyatt and the Earl of Surrey, and of elite poetic forms, such as the sonnet. I argue that in the unstable political context of the 1550s, the Miscellany’s poems became desirable tools with which non-courtly readers could negotiate their own changing social and religious identities using poetic language and forms endowed with the authority of the court. After the iconoclasm of the Henrician Reformation and during the violence of the Marian Counter-Reformation, the Miscellany offered English readers new icons of cultural coherence – the courtier poets – and a new cultural identity, as members of a learned community dedicated to cultivating “English eloquence.” Nevertheless, I suggest, the book’s print features reveal how carefully it constructed literary values that favored the vi elite forms and authors, and its multiple voices and perspectives challenge the division between elite and popular culture it helped to construct. By understanding the relationship between this landmark book’s textual composition and its cultural context, we can appreciate more fully how the critical judgments of Tottel and his readers still actively shape the modern academic canon. vii Table of Contents Introduction….. 1 Chapter One…..32 Chapter Two…..87 Chapter Three…..144 Chapter Four…..246 Conclusion…..329 Appendix A: Chapter Three Poems…..352 Appendix B: Chapter Four Poems…..364 Works Cited…..376 Vita…..394 viii Introduction The Beginning of Modern English Verse? Tottel’s Miscellany and the English Renaissance Works are produced within a specific order that has its own rules, conventions, and hierarchies, but they escape all these and take on a certain density in their peregrinations –– which can be a very long time span –– about the social world. Roger Chartier, The Order of Books (x) “It is my belief that culture is more important to people than political institutions.” Norman Davies, “The Breakup of the United Kingdom” On June 5, 1557, a law printer named Richard Tottel published the first edition of Songs and Sonnets, written by the right honorable Lord Henry Howard late Earl of Surrey, and others, a poetic anthology that included poems by Surrey, Sir Thomas Wyatt, Nicholas Grimald, and a host of anonymous poets. The book went through at least eight more editions until 1587, and all but the last two were produced by the original publisher (Rollins 2.6). By the nineteenth century the book was known more commonly as Tottel’s Miscellany, after its printer, and since that time it has been widely regarded as the book that heralded the beginning of the English Renaissance. In his 1929 edition of the Miscellany, still the standard critical edition (rev. 1965), Hyder Rollins calls the book 1 “epoch-making” (3) and “one of the most important single volumes in the history of English literature,” a judgment supported by numerous critics (4). Even earlier than Rollins, John Berdan identified the Miscellany as “the gateway through which the courtly poetry of Henry VIII passed on to the Elizabethans” (343). More recently Roland Greene has referred to the book as a “canon-making anthology of mid-century English verse” (250); Wendy Wall agrees “it certainly was the handbook for Elizabethan poets” (24). Regardless of how they regard its contents, these critics all acknowledge the impact that the book had on its culture. Alongside this picture of the book as an epochal text, however, runs the commonplace that the publication of the Miscellany was little more than an act of poaching, the theft of poems that rightfully belonged to the aristocracy and were released to a gossip-hungry and status-worshiping readership of social upstarts. One of the seminal works to take this position, J.W. Saunders’s classic essay “The Stigma of Print: a Note on the Social Bases of Tudor Poetry,” claims that the aversion gentlemen had to printing their literary works created a culture in which “the printer was able to take unscrupulous advantage of a Court poet by piracies which could not with dignity be prevented” (140). According to Saunders, an example of this kind of situation is the publication of Tottel’s Miscellany, through which the “unimportance of the printed-book audience is proved conclusively by the time-lag between the composition of most Tudor 2 poetry and its appearance in print” (139). Saunders notes that “Wyatt died in 1542, but... the bulk of his work remained in manuscript until the publication of Tottel’s Miscellany in 1557” (139). For Saunders, the fact that some of the poets in this monumental book were dead before they were published, while others were satisfactorily anonymous, supports his hypothesis that all Tudor poets scorned print and his implication that the Miscellany itself was an act of misappropriation and deception. To be sure, Tottel’s act of publishing poems that aristocrats may have felt belonged to them carried certain risks. We do not know for certain how Tottel acquired the poems he printed in the Miscellany; no surviving source manuscript conveniently groups the poems of Surrey and Wyatt with those of Nicholas Grimald and anonymous courtly poets. The probability remains that Tottel acquired the poems from a variety of sources, either by purchasing them or through outright theft, and invented the arrangement and framing material. Understanding how even Tottel’s purchase of the poems may have been perceived by those in the court as an act of theft, however, requires us to look more carefully at the concepts of privacy, purchase, and piracy that circulated in sixteenth century manuscript and print culture, as I do in the first chapter of this study. The risks that Tottel ran in printing poems that were, at least according to some, “pirated” were substantial. In the sixteenth century and particularly during the religious violence of the 1550s, books were regularly recalled and suppressed; as the printer 3 assumed the bulk of the responsibility for publishing controversial material, a lack of circumspection could be serious. Although not a printer, the stationer James Bainham was burned at the stake in Smithfield in 1532 for espousing William Tyndale’s radical Protestant ideas (Blayney 32). Perhaps it was for this reason that it was not until the late 1530s and 1540s, when the climate was safer, that English printers began to produce Protestant works in London (Hellinga and Trapp, “Introduction” 26-27). In 1553, however, Tottel’s father-in-law, the Protestant printer Richard Grafton, was deprived of his office as royal printer for printing a proclamation under the name of Queen Jane Grey (Neville-Sington, “Press, Politics, and Religion” 602).
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