The Invention of Rhythm by Darrell Smith Department of English Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Julianne Werlin, Co-Supervisor ___________________________ Maureen Quilligan, Co-Supervisor ___________________________ Joseph Donahue ___________________________ Fred Moten Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English in the Graduate School of Duke University 2016 i v ABSTRACT The Invention of Rhythm by Darrell Smith Department of English Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Julianne Werlin, Co-Supervisor ___________________________ Maureen Quilligan, Co-Supervisor ___________________________ Joseph Donahue ___________________________ Fred Moten An abstract of a dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English in the Graduate School of Duke University 2016 Copyright by Darrell Smith 2016 Abstract “The Invention of Rhythm” dismantles the foundational myth of modern English verse. It considers its two protagonists, Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, who together brought English poetry out of the middle ages: the latter taking the former’s experiments with Romance language verse forms and smoothing them into the first sustained examples of the iambic measures that would so strongly influence the Elizabethans, and in turn dominate English poetry until the coming of Modernism in the twentieth century. It considers their contrastively-oscillating critical reputations from the seventeenth century to the present day, focusing on how historically-contingent aesthetic and socio-political values have been continuously brought to bear on studies of their respective versification, in fact producing, and perpetuating the mythological narrative, with negligable study of the linguistic and rhythmical patterns of their poems themselves. It reconsiders their writing, in context of their manuscripts and the anthology by which they were received for most of this time, Tottel’s Miscellany, and through statistically-driven orthographic and paleographic analyses of over a half-dozen early- to mid-sixteenth-century manuscripts, as well as extensive historical, philological and grammatical comparisons, exhaustive stemmatological and polygenous derivational models, and several newly-developed analytical techniques, argues against the iv persistent Great Men narrative in favor of a democratic, collaborative picture of the invention of modern English versification. Finally, it presents a complete, transparent prosodic analysis of the over 3,200 lines of Wyatt and Surrey's verse in Tottel’s, and through statistical and philological analyses, demonstrates the congeniality of their received verses, their structural differences invented and exaggerated by the extra-prosodic studies that imagined, adjusted to their own ends, and continue to perpetuate the myth. v for Kaila Brown, who was close to us from far off seemed to have come into our uncanny homeland vi Contents Abstract .......................................................................................................................................... iv List of Tables ............................................................................................................................... viii List of Figures ............................................................................................................................... ix Acknowledgements ...................................................................................................................... x 1. Mythopoeia ................................................................................................................................ 1 2. The Invention of Surrey ......................................................................................................... 48 3. The First Heave ...................................................................................................................... 130 Appendix A ................................................................................................................................ 152 Appendix B ................................................................................................................................ 156 Appendix C ................................................................................................................................ 159 Bibliography .............................................................................................................................. 211 Biography ................................................................................................................................... 216 vii List of Tables Table 1: Rates of ‘es’ contraction in Hands P, E and Wyatt’s holograph ............................ 80 viii List of Figures Figure 1: BL Add. MS 36529, f. 85v ........................................................................................... 54 Figure 2: BL Add MS 36529, f. 55, line 21. ............................................................................... 55 Figure 3: BL Harley MS 78, f. 30v, line 13. ............................................................................... 55 Figure 4: BL Add. MS 28636, f. 71v ........................................................................................... 56 Figure 5: Secretary hand of John Harington the Elder, from Cecil Papers 150, no. 75 ..... 59 Figure 6: BL Add. MS 36529, f. 56 ............................................................................................. 85 Figure 7: Monogenous derivational possibilities for extant sixteenth-century witnesses of ‘The great Macedon that out of Perse chased’ ...................................................................... 114 ix Acknowledgements In the first place, I thank Fred Moten, who from the beginning, from the time I sought him out in his office with half-formed provocations, gave me the space to fail and succeed on my own. If I have done anything, and have pressed this scholarship forward in any way, it is because he gave me the room and the confidence to do it. I am not the first, nor nearly the last person to say that he has casually, irreparably shaped the way I think about poetry and the poetic project. If I have any distinct thing to say, while discounting the value of my own work from the analogy, it is that he has been my Antoine Meillet. Secondly, I thank Maureen Quilligan, whom I only approached after long struggles with modern English poetry, and later, long struggles with manuscript research, and who first made me think of English manuscripts as I was taught, from the beginning, to think of Greek texts, not yet widely-enough done. One of my favorite memories in graduate school is sitting in her office, telling her that I'd gotten Duke to subscribe to the Cecil Papers, and how excited we were, together, about that. I thank Joe Donahue, who before I knew where I was going with Alicia Ostriker, postmodernist poetry, and backward to Emily Dickens, assumed that I saw it, and then helped me to see. Who was a constant, and never demanded that I work outside of my context, but put my work in conversation with a hundred years of English verse. If this x project doesn't exploit the prolepses, one day it will. As Pete Moore once said to me, he is the patron saint of the misfit writer. Finally, from my committee, I thank Julianne Werlin, who I came to at the thirteenth hour, and who took over my project, allowing me to finish. Despite my anxiety in her office, which I hadn't experienced in so long, she gave me credit enough to take me on, and then was more generous than anyone I've ever known in the academy. Her eagerness to put me in touch with other scholars who might appreciate what I was doing—and soft touch in challenging my constitutional, and institutionalized insularity—and their eagerness to help me make a new edition of Surrey’s poetry from this second chapter, has revitalized my quietude for this scholarship, and made me once again vicious in wanting to pursue it. In London, I thank Claire Matthews, who collaborated on the romance of of manuscripts: from Angel and Euston, The Lord Clyde, 18 Woburn buildings. "Dazzling how peaceful the streets feel despite being a block up from the hectic, transient noises of Euston road." Those places, stumbled on, their quiet and unquiet center, where once loitered titans, have made me, and make me, want to be a better scholar. I thank my families. My family in Durham, who I came to this place, above other places, to learn with: Calina, Colby, Kevin, Will, Allison, Sarah, Bill; and we read and fought together, and were so lucky, and knew it, and were so happy for a time. Later xi Fran, an irresistible force, who sparked our nights. And Lindsey, who preceded us, met us upon this, and in the end brought me back, after I thought I’d left entirely; she has instigated my place twice now, and I owe her twice over. Erika Wieberg, who could navigate, and disrupt the distance between Classics and English departments, with their concrete, artificial bulwarks, and who made me better at Greek, and is my vision of a scholar. Brenna, my roommate and friend, who put up with my writing outside, my second time around, falling upstairs and down, breaking bones wanting only to write. Her patience, and her friendship, have allowed me to finish.