Poetry and Paternity in Renaissance England: Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne and Jonson

Poe t ry a n d Pat e r n i t y i n r e n a iss a nc e e ngl a n d

Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne and Jonson

in the english renaissance, becoming a father was the main way for a man to be treated as a full member of the community. yet patriarchal identity was by no means as secure as is often assumed: when poets invoke the idea of paternity in love poetry and other forms, they are therefore invoking all the anxieties that a culture with contradictory notions of sexuality imposed. This study takes these anxieties seriously, arguing that writers such as sidney and spenser deployed images of childbirth to harmonize public and private spheres, to develop a full sense of selfhood in their verse, and even to come to new accommodations between the sexes. shakespeare, donne and Jonson, in turn, saw the appeal of the older poets’ aims, but resisted their more radical implications. The result is a fiercely personal yet publicly committed poetry that would not be seen again until the time of the romantics. t om m ac fau l is lecturer in english at Merton college, University of oxford. He is the author of Male Friendship in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (cambridge, 2007) and many articles on renaissance poetry and drama.

Poe t ry a n d Pat e r n i t y i n r e na iss a nce e ngl a n d Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne and Jonson toM M ac FaU l

c a mbr idge u ni v er sit y pr e ss cambridge, new york, Melbourne, Madrid, cape town, singapore, são Paulo, delhi, dubai, tokyo cambridge University Press The edinburgh Building, cambridge cb2 8ru, uk Published in the United states of america by cambridge University Press, new york www.cambridge.org information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521191104 © tom MacFaul 2010 This publication is in copyright. subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of cambridge University Press. First published 2010 Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, cambridge A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data MacFaul, tom. Poetry and paternity in renaissance england : sidney, spenser, shakespeare, donne and Jonson / tom MacFaul. p. cm. isbn 978-0-521-19110-4 (hardback) 1. english poetry–early modern, 1500-1700–History and criticism. 2. Paternity in literature. 3. Fathers in literature. 4. Patriarchy in literature. 5. sex role–england– History–16th century. 6. sex role–england–History–17th century. i. title. pr535.p36m33 2010 821′.30935251–dc22 2010010732 isbn 978-0-521-19110-4 Hardback cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of Urls for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

For my parents

Contents

Acknowledgements List of abbreviations

page viii ix

1 Presumptive fathers

1

2 Uncertain paternity: the indifferent ideology of patriarchy

36

3 The childish love of Philip sidney and Fulke greville

63

4 spenser’s timely fruit: generation in The Faerie Queene

95

5 ‘We desire increase’: shakespeare’s non-dramatic poetry

130

6 John donne’s rhetorical contraception

160

7 ‘to propagate their names’: Ben Jonson as poetic godfather

188

coda: sons

226

Notes Bibliography Index

234 258 272

vii

Acknowledgements

My first debt of gratitude in the writing of this book is to richard Mccabe, who supervised my doctoral thesis on spenser, and who has continued to offer much-valued advice on spenserian and other matters. as an undergraduate, i was introduced to many of the authors considered here by Howard erskine-Hill and gavin alexander, and for that i continue to owe them a great deal. other friends and colleagues who have helped me clarify my thinking or given valuably of their time on matters of fact and interpretation include glenn Black, guy cuthbertson, ian donaldson, Katherine duncan-Jones, Hugh gazzard, steve gunn, amanda Holton, david norbrook, emma smith, Michael Whitworth and Kieron Winn. i am also very grateful to cambridge University Press’s readers for suggestions as to how the book might be improved – one of whom, Patrick cheney, having removed the veil of anonymity, i am glad to be able to thank by name. Many thanks are due to sarah stanton at cambridge University Press for having faith in the project, to rebecca Jones for seeing the book through the press, and to annie Jackson for careful copy-editing, which has saved me from many infelicities. in many ways, this book began as an attempt to answer some of the questions regularly raised by students when dealing for the first time with the poetry of the english renaissance: i’m immensely grateful to a large number of my students (too many to name here) for their enthusiasm, fresh perspectives and insight. in particular, i’d like to thank those who have taken special author papers with me on donne, spenser and Jonson. an earlier version of chapter 3, ‘The childish love of Philip sidney and Fulke greville’ was published as an article in Sidney Journal 24 (2006); i am grateful to the editor, Mary ellen lamb, for her advice on this piece, and for permission to use this work here. a brief section of chapter 6 has appeared as donne’s ‘The sunne rising’ and spenser’s ‘epithalamion’, in Notes & Queries 54 (2007); i am grateful to the editors for allowing me to republish this here. viii

Abbreviations

ELR NQ ODNB OED RES RQ SEL SP

English Literary Renaissance Notes & Queries Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Oxford English Dictionary Review of English Studies Renaissance Quarterly Studies in English Literature Studies in Philology

ix

ch apter 1

Presumptive fathers

When Ben Jonson wrote that his dead son was ‘his best piece of poetry’,1 he was not merely following a common convention of analogizing writing and fatherhood, but tapping into a deep well of feeling about children, poems and what they mean to one’s sense of selfhood. elizabethan and Jacobean poets make paternity a central preoccupation: it is a model for all forms of achievement (poetic, political and economic) and provides a way of imposing some unity on one’s life and one’s work. By figuring oneself as a father, or by focussing on biological generativity, one could create a sense of aesthetic order and literary authority, the idea or model of paternity also acting as a means of relating the public and private spheres. yet it is a mistake to think of this as being founded on a stridently confident and unified notion of patriarchy; male writers were anxiously aware that paternity was a position of presumption in tudor and stuart england: it was presumptive in that a man could never be entirely certain that he was a father; it was also presumptuous in that it involved taking on a role and name that was properly god’s (as Matthew 23:9 has it – see below). The idea of paternity, then, was alienated, never quite wholly possessed by an individual. owing to the presence of a virginal woman on the throne, taking the place of the ultimate patriarch, paternity was further marginalized in elizabethan england, despite being the central role of masculine identity. such tensions persisted into the reign of James i, even though that king developed an increasingly insistent paternalistic ideology. conceiving of themselves as fathers in various ways, poets from sidney to Jonson tried to resolve these tensions and, though they may have failed to develop the secure and unified self-images they sought, they succeeded in creating a literary tradition that was both highly personal and able to make significant interventions in the public sphere. Three major poetic purposes are served by focussing on paternity: poets create unified but alienated voices for themselves, use images of generativity to establish new accommodations 1

2

Poetry and Paternity in Renaissance England

between the sexes, and reflect on the different spheres into which an individual may invest himself. ‘Pater semper incertus est’, runs the roman legal proverb; ‘mater certissima’ – that is, paternity is always uncertain, but maternity is the most certain thing of all. This simple fact implies a tremendous effect on the whole of human psychology (and that of other species), as sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists have emphasized.2 if we are looking for a cross-cultural human ‘universal’, it is surely in this area that we will find it; yet it is also very much subject to cultural variation (as well as variation on the basis of individual peculiarities).3 Precisely because paternity is uncertain, an element of flexibility enters into male identity: one can choose one’s allegiances and the nature of one’s investments. Freud would suggest that this involves the masculine ‘renunciation of instinct’: an advance in intellectuality consists in deciding against direct sense-perception in favour of what are known as the higher intellectual processes – that is, memories, reflections and inferences. it consists, for instance, in deciding that paternity is more important than maternity, although it cannot, like the latter, be established by the evidence of the senses, and that for that reason the child should bear his father’s name and be his heir.4

yet instinct is not so easily renounced. Paternity involves a strange mixture of freedom and obligation, of uncertainty and fixity; an awareness of natural instinct cuts across cultural formations. any given social structure (but particularly a modern one) needs to police both the breeding and the sexuality of individuals;5 questions of reproduction and sexuality are always public matters, even though the feelings involved are to some degree individualistic. The pressures were particularly acute in elizabethan and Jacobean england, where a long-standing tradition of individualism was in conflict with an increasingly centralized and unified state,6 and where older customary practices were challenged by newly unified and textualized ideologies. one of the major functions of poetry may be to express the problems of negotiating the interaction between self and world in this case, giving meaning to individual desires within publicly negotiated structures, whilst seeking to shape those structures in ways which may better accommodate the individual’s desires. Various factors made this agenda seem particularly urgent in the period under consideration: a woman on the throne challenging normative ideas about relations between the sexes; competing religious and scientific ideas about generation; a greater consciousness of social mobility; and the rise of a semi-professional idea of authorship. all this meant that poets had to reflect deeply on their own masculinity, seeing that its foundations were changeable or even non-existent.

Presumptive fathers

3

anthony Fletcher’s account of renaissance notions of gender gives important reasons for masculinity being anxious and dependent: Their belief in the mingling of [a woman’s] seed with their own in the womb made it impossible for men to think of themselves as wholly gendered male beings until they had struggled free of maternal making and maternal influence. Thus the legacy of the galenic heritage was the notion of human singleness being achieved out of inherent doubleness. Men found their manhood through their sexual potency and through the act which started the same cycle of twinship and doubleness all over again.7

We might infer from this, however, that no notion of essential masculinity was available, and that masculinity was all process with no final result. This will not quite do: a male god, the ultimate sacred Father, and His representatives on earth, particularly kings and familial fathers, but also perhaps priests and educators, constituted, at least notionally, a dwelling place for the idea of the father – the sacred name of the father is therefore not merely to be treated as an object of conventional reverence, but as a guarantee of the full masculinity which is never quite realized in an individual’s life. in many societies, to become a father is to become a man in the full sense, but that full masculinity is challenged in a number of ways, not least by women. to be a man in most pre-feminist societies is to identify with the paternal line; the classic misogynistic trope attacking the proverbial mutability of women surely reflects male anxiety about women’s ability to interfere with this straightforward line, on the one hand by introducing the radical uncertainty of paternity, and on the other by altering a man’s sons – both in carrying and in nurturing them – so that the son is not an identical copy of the father. as sir Walter ralegh put it in his Instructions to His Sonne, ‘Wives were ordayned to continue the generation of men, to transferre them, and diminish them, eyther in countenance, or abilitie’.8 Women are necessary, but regarded as apt to translate men into diminished forms. denials of women’s contribution to offspring (based on aristotle’s On the Generation of Animals), making women out to be mere seedbeds for the transmission of masculinity, constitute an attempt to still this anxiety, and to pretend that masculinity is primary when there is a real suspicion that it is secondary. There is no doubt that much of the anxiety we see expressed in these poets is chauvinistic if not misogynistic; yet there are many varieties of sexism involved, some of which involve an awareness of their own absurdity and weakness, and many of which are rooted in more complex anxieties than mere prejudice against women.9

4

Poetry and Paternity in Renaissance England

nature itself (or herself) could come in for some criticism. in Fletcher and Field’s The Honest Man’s Fortune (c. 1613), lady orleans, suspected of infidelity by her paranoid husband, articulates an understandable female desire for men’s sense of feminine mystery to be dispelled: o Heaven, how gratious had creation been to women, who are borne without defence, if to our hearts there had been doores through with our husbands might have lookt into our thoughts, and made themselves undoubtfull. (i. ii. 21–5)10

By contrast, in the anonymous Swetnam, the Woman Hater (1620), the titular misogynist (aka Misogynos) argues Happy were man, had woman neuer bin. Why did not nature infuse the gift of Procreation in man alone, without the helpe of woman, euen as we see one seed, produce another? (B2r)

Though this character is the play’s villain, and though his misogyny will be confuted by the play’s conclusion, his position is merely an extreme version of the anxieties expressed in more normative discourse. it has often been noted that elizabethan poets appropriate images of pregnancy to depict their own creativity, but there has been some debate about the reasons for this.11 Katharine eisaman Maus postulates that it may simply be because ‘men envy women’s ability to give birth’, but thinks this insufficient given the renaissance tendency to denigrate maternity.12 The more profound reason, for Maus, may be that men want to appropriate some of the mysteriousness of femininity, and specifically of the womb.13 elizabeth d. Harvey similarly sees the appropriation of femininity as enabling writing but at the same time as making the writers appear helpless.14 Men in all cultures may envy the certainty of female creativity, and though it would be glib to suggest that this impels male artistic creation, an awareness of this aspect of the artist’s motivation is quite commonplace (it goes back at least as far as Plato); when such an awareness is allied with an active cultural disparagement of motherhood, the most thoughtful poets may have to respond by acknowledging the anxieties that lie behind the assertions of masculine primacy. When patriarchal manliness is taken as too absolute a value, the threats to it become all the more troubling, particularly if it is recognized as being founded on fictions; yet this frees poets up to create their own fictions – hoping to improve on the official ones. Whilst it is certainly true that reproductive sexuality was the cultural norm in elizabethan and Jacobean england, it was by no means

Presumptive fathers

5

an unproblematic norm. although the patriarchal nuclear family was increasingly valorized in the elizabethan era, it was challenged by a number of factors. Firstly an ideology of masculine friendship as the highest form of love made the family secondary.15 yet ‘homosocial’ attempts to exclude women from the father–son bond which is taken to be the fundamental basis of society are even more doomed than similar attempts to exclude women from amicable male society in an exaggerated ideal of friendship.16 The patriarchal and the homosocial are bound together, but are equally unrealizable ideals. it is the fact that both are unnatural that creates a genuine sense of confusion in the renaissance period. The male line ‘ought’ to be central and primary, but many men can see that it is really secondary and culturally formed. a second major challenge came from the anomalous position of the female monarch. The family had to be validated from on high by a woman who had no family at all.17 These factors in some ways marginalize the heterosexual, patriarchal family – and one might even argue that this marginalization contributed to a developing private sphere of the nuclear family. it is important to avoid imposing a modern dichotomy of public and private onto a period in which there was no such sharp dichotomy,18 but equally it is important to be aware that there was some distinction between the spheres, and a consciousness that it was growing. The decline of larger kinship and clientage structures, along with the emergence of the machinery of the modern nation state, meant that people were increasingly beginning to see their loyalties in terms of a division between nation and family, with less intermediate institutions blurring the lines.19 it is not surprising then that ‘natural’ familial urges become confused in this period; in fact, one could argue that monogamous procreative marriage is as confused a category as Foucault famously argued that sodomy is.20 Protestant ideology also had complex effects. Mary Beth rose argues that although Protestant sexual discourse retains much of the erotic skepticism of the dualistic sensibility, it nevertheless unites love with marriage and conceives of marriage with great respect as the foundation of an ordered society. Protestant discourse is not dualistic, but complex and multifaceted, and one of its most significant and far-reaching changes is a shift in the prestige and centrality granted to the institution of marriage.21

These ideas of marriage may not have been new, but as rose shows, they were more generally disseminated in elizabethan england than they had been before. she also challenges arthur Marotti’s notion that discourses on love are primarily a way of presenting other discontents: ‘whatever else

6

Poetry and Paternity in Renaissance England

it may be, love, definitely, is love.’ 22 one of my central enquiries here is to what extent love is sex – that is, to what extent poetic discussions of love are preoccupied by sexual generation, and how far anxieties about sex and childbirth inform poets’ attitudes to their art, and their sense of its significance in the public realm. Both sex and poetry are ways of guaranteeing the continuity of the self, preventing isolation in the here and now, and giving one an afterlife in the future, but both are also uncertain endeavours. The major stream of paternal imagery in elizabethan verse begins with Philip sidney, whose hugely influential sonnet sequence Astrophel and Stella commences with the struggles of male poetic parturition: loving in truth, and faine in verse my love to show, That the deare she might take some pleasure of my paine: Pleasure might cause her reade, reading might make her know, Knowledge might pitie winne, and pitie grace obtaine, i sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woe, studying inventions fine, her wits to entertaine: oft turning others’ leaves, to see if thence would flow some fresh and fruitfull showers upon my sunne-burn’d braine. But words came halting forth, wanting invention’s stay, invention, nature’s child, fled step-dame studie’s blowes, and others’ feete still seemed but strangers in my way. Thus great with child to speak, and helplesse in my throwes, Biting my trewand pen, beating myself for spite, ‘Fool’, said my muse to me; ‘look in thy heart, and write.’ 23

The tension between nature and art is deeply woven into the texture of the poem: from the initial pun on fain (wanting to, or feigning to), through the structural irony of such highly wrought rhetoric being used for the purposes of supposedly simple, true love, and the pen which is truant or true-ant (truth-making?) to the final pun on art/heart, sidney continuously expresses the self-confounding secondariness of masculine selfexpression. Though the idea of the poet as father to his words does not emerge until the sestet, it is suggested at the end of the octave, where the idea of being ‘fruitful’ prompts us to think of the ways in which an individual can come to fruition. The ways in which he may do so are many, and are at the centre of this book’s concern: he may mature, and this will involve giving fruition to his own father as well as himself; he may win the woman, and thus not only gratify himself but also beget children of his own; he may gain other kinds of grace than female favour – godly and royal; he may achieve things in the public world; finally, he may make a

Presumptive fathers

7

poem that lasts. yet the idea of fruition is not only complex in its results, but problematic as a process: however much one may want it to be a matter of hard work and study, it may also involve an element of passivity. Just like a fruit, one cannot force it: external influences must bring it steadily to ripeness (which is ‘all’ according to edgar in King Lear (v. ii. 11)); those influences are experienced as female – the Queen, nature, the beloved, the Muse – and they, paradoxically, make the process of masculine selfmaking feel feminine, like the apparently passive suffering of childbirth. The process of becoming fully masculine involves dealing with the feminine in ways that can fundamentally undermine one’s sense of masculinity. For this reason, hermaphroditism is a powerful notion, allowing accommodations to be made between the sexes. The common galenic model of sex-difference considered the body as flexible; able, through the influence of the humours, to acquire characteristics of either sex, femininity being the basic condition, and masculinity being something one had to strive for.24 This model sat side-by-side with an idea that masculinity and femininity (as abstractions, at least) were fundamentally different, but the hows and whys of that difference required much rhetorical fancy footwork, as in donne’s ‘air and angels’. in some ways, it was masculinity that was more the abstraction (being that which needed to be added), femininity being associated with nature, the body and the material world. any accommodation between the sexes, then, would have to be figured in a hermaphroditic manner. if offspring were a mixture of masculine and feminine, then so might be poems; for some poets that might even be a desirable result, allowing some redemption of condemned or repressed feminine elements in themselves. Mostly, however, poems are presented as male (though romances and translations might be considered as female, for reasons of genre and reflecting a sense of secondariness respectively). The ideal essence of the original poem is conceived as primarily masculine, but sometimes with feminine characteristics (such as mutability) that may enable a redemption of both sexes, or even a redemption of the anxieties created by sex-difference and masculine secondariness. For many poets, then, one of the major points of amatory verse is to negotiate better relations between the sexes and therefore between the masculine and feminine aspects of themselves. all this said, conceiving of literary work in paternal terms is usually intended as a mode of authorial assertion. The dedication of the printed text of Beaumont’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle (1607, pub. 1613) is unusual in deploying the paternal conceit on behalf of a play. The publisher

8

Poetry and Paternity in Renaissance England

Walter Burre writes, to robert Keysar, manager of the children of the Queen’s revels: sir, This unfortunate child, who in eight days (as lately i have learned) was begot and born, soon after was by his parents (perhaps because he was so unlike his brethren) exposed to the wide world, who for want of judgement, or not understanding the privy mark of irony about it (which showed it was no offspring of any vulgar brain) utterly rejected it; so that for want of acceptance it was even ready to give up the ghost, and was in danger to have been smothered in perpetual oblivion, if you (out of your direct antipathy to ingratitude) had not been moved to relieve and cherish it, wherein i must needs commend both your judgement, understanding, and singular love to good wits. you afterwards sent it to me, yet being an infant and somewhat ragged, i have fostered it privately in my bosom these two years, and now to show my love return it to you, clad in good lasting clothes, which scarcely memory will wear out, and able to speak for itself; and withal, as it telleth me, desirous to try his fortune in the world, where if yet it be welcome, father, foster-father, nurse and child, all have their desired end. if it be slighted or traduced, it hopes his father will beget him a younger brother, who shall revenge his quarrel, and challenge the world either of fond and merely literal or illiterate misprision.25

There may be several reasons for this: the play is an exceedingly unusual one, and had been a theatrical flop, and the printing is clearly an attempt not so much to cash in on a stage reputation as to find a different kind of audience in print, so that the paternal metaphor is used to assert the play’s status as a theatrical poem; Beaumont also was a man of considerably higher social status than most playwrights, and the paternal metaphor may be a way of endowing the play with some of this status. despite the play being published anonymously, as if it were a noble foundling, Beaumont, who would be buried in Westminster abbey near chaucer and spenser (in what would become Poets’ corner), is made into a theatrical poet by the publisher’s gesture: the paternal metaphor insists on both familial and poetic status and gives a sense of inherent social and aesthetic value to a man’s works. a play of the same year, edward sharpham’s Cupid’s Whirligig, also has a dedication using the paternal metaphor, the author telling his ‘friend’ robert Hayman I aime at you rather then the Reader, because since our trauailes I haue been pregnant with desire to bring foorth something whereunto you may be witnesse [a rather low-church term for godfather], and now being brought a bed if you please to be Godfather, I doubt not but this childe shal be wel maintained, seeing hee cannot liue aboue an houre with you, and therefore shall intreat you, when he is dead, he may be buried deepe enough in your good opinion, and he shall deserue this Epitaph:

Presumptive fathers

9

Heere lies the childe, who was borne in mirth, against the strict rules of all childe-birth: and to be quit, i gaue him to my friend, Who laught him to death, and that was his end.26

as the play centres on a man who castrates himself in order to test his wife’s chastity, the theme of paternity is rather grotesquely appropriate. an end to paternity and therefore to masculinity may be treated comically in the play, but to be laughed to death for a failure of one’s masculine creativity is a deep fear for many renaissance writers – there is a risk of humiliation in publication which might be considered a kind of emasculation. Paternal imagery is perhaps most commonly to be found in dedications and prefaces, where it frames the work and relates it to its author, often in rather ironic ways. When sidney calls the Arcadia ‘this child i am loath to father’,27 it is not just a modesty formula or an instance of a courtier’s reluctance to see his work in print (he was writing the dedication for a manuscript, after all), but rather a mark of the way in which fathering can mean acknowledging as one’s own, or even as a part of one’s self. His paternal reluctance may be as unaffectionate as the behaviour of the prime father in the text, euarchus, who sentences his son to death, but it shows how much of a commitment fathering a text might be. spenser’s dedication of The Shepheardes Calender (1579) to sidney is still more complex; he does not address sidney, but the book itself, presenting it as a child going out to be fostered: to His BooKe. Goe little booke: thy selfe present, As child whose parent is vnkent: To him that is the president Of noblesse and of cheualree, And if that Enuie barke at thee, As sure it will, for succoure flee Vnder the shadow of his wing, And asked, who thee forth did bring, A shepheards swaine saye did thee sing, All as his straying flocke he fedde: And when his honor has thee redde, Crave pardon for my hardyhedde. But if that any aske thy name, Say thou wert base begot with blame: For thy thereof thou takest shame. And when thou art past ieopardee, Come tell me, what was sayd of mee: And I will send more after thee. Immeritô.28

10

Poetry and Paternity in Renaissance England

The book is accorded a self and therefore an ability to act as well as speak in the world: it can move about in the world and, like Jonson’s poem on his son, it can be ‘asked’ about its origins. Those origins are ‘base’ for a number of reasons: the passage reflects spenser’s sense of his own lowly status (though given his desire to be connected with the spencers of althorp this may be modesty); it is also a literary modesty formula refusing to boast of his poem’s worth; it is linked to the supposed lowness of pastoral on the hierarchy of genres, and the social lowness of the shepherds central to that genre; finally, it reflects spenser’s decision to remain anonymous, thus in a sense bastardizing his poem. His preoccupation with foundlings in the later Faerie Queene would develop from this, suggesting that one needs to form one’s own identity in a way we would call meritocratic, before one’s paternity can be acknowledged. despite later becoming a publicly acknowledged poet (and implicitly acknowledging The Shepheardes Calender in the opening lines of The Faerie Queene), spenser would never put his name to the Calender, even in the five later editions published in his lifetime.29 This may be because, having dedicated the work to sidney, he no longer considered it his own. Poems, considered as children, take on a life of their own, and find their own way in the world like sons; yet the father’s very anxiety about them suggests how much of themselves is at stake. The circulation of poems in manuscript and the inevitable distortions this produced made it clear to authors that they were not in total control of their works any more than they could be in total control of their offspring; that uncertain model of reproduction even carried over into print, where an author had little control once he had handed over his text (or had it handed over – sometimes against his will).30 The author’s sense of investment in his text therefore, it may seem paradoxically, goes hand-inhand with a need to be phlegmatic about others’ appropriations of one’s text. The idea of paternity allows poets to express their ambivalent feelings about this state of affairs, and contributes to the need to play with voice: the text itself must be imagined as its own speaker, even as it channels the poet’s own voice.31 This is mainly an issue for the elizabethans and Jacobeans, fading as James’s reign goes on: as Jonson professionalizes authorship, making it a more secure alternative to paternal immortality, he does away with some of the anxieties associated with letting one’s poems go out into the world, reducing the metaphoric power of natural or artistic generativity, and thus of the investments poets make in it. The very confidence of his own voice militates against the tensions we find in earlier poets.

Presumptive fathers

11

The analogy between poetry and paternity is so obvious that it can seem transparent: poets and fathers are both culturally privileged makers; yet, whilst the analogy may be intended to validate both roles, the effect tends to be much more complex, as neither role has as much real power as people would like. Privileged as fathers and poets were, they also knew that their privileges depended on an uncertain system that patronized them and put them in their place. Fathers remain uncertain that they are really fathers, and can see that their power within the family is subordinated to other power structures. Poets, particularly in a culture of print-publication without authorial copyright, know that they have relatively little control over the fate of their works, and are as aware of themselves as sons to a larger tradition as they are of their paternal relation to their poems. instead of providing mutual validation of two important roles, then, the analogy in fact enables the expression of anxieties about selfhood, even as the self tries to extend itself into the wider world and claim some of it for its own. The fact that such anxieties get expressed does, however, imply or even insist that the self may be transmitted into the world: some real and important part of one’s individuality is at stake in both poetry and paternity. However distorted – or even autonomous – the version of the self that comes out may be, some kind of organic connection with the world is established. among other things, then, the paternal analogy is a way for poets to signal their personal investment in their works. This notion needs to be approached with caution: teachers of literature probably find this issue to be the one on which we most frequently have to correct our students, so that it has become an automatic reflex to remind ardent youth of the impersonality of poetry. ‘it is not the poet speaking directly; we must refer to “the speaker of the poem” (however clumsy that may seem)’; ‘sincerity is not necessarily an aesthetic virtue’: these have become professional shibboleths, and up to a point this is right and proper; Harold Bloom’s suggestion that university gates should be adorned with Wilde’s dictum ‘all bad art is sincere’ might well save us a lot of time if adopted.32 yet there are occasions when we must consider that the student’s supposedly naïve perspective has something valuable in it. of course poets use masks of various sorts when they write, but then almost every speech-act can be treated in this way: ‘i’ is always alienated to some degree. it is one of the critic’s tasks to assess what degree of selfhood can be found in a work of art. of course, we may further contend that selfhood is an illusion and the attempt to fix it a bourgeois mystification, but these ideas are, i think, more useful as correctives than as foundational principles. let us rather start from the

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assumption that the poet feels himself to have some sort of self, illusory or not, and that he wants to communicate this to some degree. He may find that he can only confirm his feeling of selfhood by investing it in something he knows not to be himself, and the more sophisticated he is as an artist the more aware he may be of the paradoxical nature of this proceeding. Most of the poets examined here took their investment in their works very seriously even as they played with their poetic identities. The differing degrees to which they found satisfaction in this activity and the different modes by which they attained it will be central preoccupations of this study. none of this is to say that renaissance poets really anticipated the romantics in a preoccupation with subjectivity, or at least not in a straightforward way. They are interested in themselves, but they see themselves as divided into many spheres of interest. endowing their works with a sense of agency by regarding them as children may be an attempt to create some unity which resolves the divisions of selfhood. in that much, at least, they may have some resemblance to the coleridgean yearning for wholeness. some of the more important connections of poetry and paternity to selfhood can be captured in the connotations of the word ‘conceit’ or ‘concept’ (used quite interchangeably in the period): the OED gives the two main meanings of ‘conceive’ as ‘i. to conceive seed or offspring: with extensions of this sense’ and ‘ii. to take into, or form in, the mind’;33 yet the core meaning of the word points, i think, to an originating moment which gives some kind of unity to the productions of the self; the ultimate etymology of the word involves taking together, either within oneself or with someone else; it implies understanding and, through that understanding, making something new; though basically a subjective process, it can either be wholly internal or be linked, however tenuously, to the outer world. sidney and spenser could think of their works as having a ‘conceit’ from which all the various aspects of the whole ramify. sidney argues that ‘any understanding knoweth the skill of each artificer standeth in that idea, or fore-conceit of the work, and not in the work itself’.34 Here the reference is to the originating Platonic idea that allows the poet to conceive the whole, yet sidney must bolster this essentialism by an appeal (which is more than rhetorical) to truly insightful understanding. similarly, spenser, who repeatedly uses the word ‘conceive’ in describing his plan for The Faerie Queene, tells ralegh that his letter is intended ‘to direct your vnderstanding to the wel-head of the History, that from thence gathering the whole intention of the conceit, ye may as in a handfull gripe al the discourse’ (letter to ralegh, 82–3);35 the metaphors of origin and of unified grasping

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here are powerful indicators of the desire for conception to be single, contained within the mind, but focussed and communicable; nonetheless, spenser’s conceit is famously a ‘darke conceit’ (letter to ralegh, 3). such a conceit is mysterious because it is concealed in the writer’s mind but nonetheless is supposed to manifest itself throughout the work. a similar sense of mystery is found in thinking about biological conception, another form of conceit, which is also considered to reveal itself, however fitfully and uncertainly, in a child. The almost arrogant hopefulness and obsessiveness of this idea (which the modern word ‘conceit’ conveys) is often recognized by writers, who know that the unity they claim is elusive and may be illusory – that it may amount to an idol of the mind. nonetheless, it provides a valuable fiction of integrity – and, yes, even of sincerity – to the process of artistic creation. We need go no further than the works of shakespeare to demonstrate how the word ‘conceit’ is used to intimate the extraordinary and mysterious powers – for good and ill – of the mind’s creations, and to relate these to the idea of biological generativity. seemingly simple jokes link the idea of understanding to that of procreative conception, as in the comic exchange at the end of The Taming of the Shrew: WidoW: He that is giddy thinks the world turns round. petruchio: roundly replied. k atherine: Mistress, how mean you by that? WidoW: Thus i conceive by him. petruchio: conceives by me! How likes Hortensio that? hortensio: My widow says, thus she conceives her tale. (v. ii. 20–4)36

For her to conceive from him would indeed be to make her grow round; her understanding of Petruchio, limited as it is, is related to the difficulty of conceiving the world going round, unless one is as giddy as he is. Mutual incomprehension is at the heart of this linguistic play: people are always conceiving each other wrongly, but it is the only link they have with one another. in King Lear, goneril, having given hints of her desires to edmund, tells him ‘this kiss, if it durst speak, / Would stretch thy spirits up into the air. / conceive, and fare thee well’ (iv. ii. 22–4); he is bidden to make an imaginative leap, and to begin the growth of his fortunes; right understanding will enable self-development, the mysteries of the mind are presented as setting things in motion, for good or ill. When lorenzo, in The Merchant of Venice, tells Portia that she has ‘a noble and a true conceit / of godlike amity’ (iii. iii. 2–3), he is not just saying that she understands antonio’s true friendship for Bassanio, but that her understanding will be the driving force that saves him. gratiano had earlier said of antonio that

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he wanted to be ‘dress’d in an opinion / of wisdom, gravity, profound conceit’ (i. i. 91–2), making him seem like an oracle, and nicely expressing the idea that conceit is mysterious – comprehension involves something incomprehensible. such an idea is perhaps most satisfyingly found in Bottom’s discussion of his dream: ‘The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was’ (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, iv. i. 211–14); famously a parody of 1 corinthians 2:9,37 this synaesthetic garbling points to the difficulty of separating inward and outward conception and of drawing any crisp distinction between objective reality and the imagination. to conceive, which seems to involve not just understanding, but understanding of something fresh, is to bring something wholly into consciousness, but even as one does so it strikes one with a kind of unreality. Thus Macduff, having seen the murdered duncan, can only say ‘o horror, horror, horror! tongue nor heart / cannot conceive nor name thee!’ (Macbeth, ii. iii. 64–5); as with Bottom, conception is seen as something which might be felt inside the heart and expressible on the tongue, but which seems more often to be a matter of profound difficulty, if not error. othello, observing iago’s gnomic evasions, accuses him of having shut up in his brain ‘some horrible conceit’ (Othello, iii. iii. 115); already, we have the sense that othello understands this to be desdemona’s infidelity, but though he is right that this is what iago wants him to think, and though he is ironically right that iago has a horrible plot conceived (his ‘monstrous birth’, i. iii. 404), all this conceiving is only horribly in error. subjective, imaginative and erroneous though it may be, conceit has considerable power to impel action. This is forcefully communicated in titania’s description of the indian child’s mother: Full often hath she gossip’d by my side. and sat with me on neptune’s yellow sands, Marking th’ embarked traders on the flood; When we have laugh’d to see the sails conceive and grow big-bellied with the wanton wind; Which she, with pretty and with swimming gait, Following (her womb then rich with my young squire) Would imitate, and sail upon the land to fetch me trifles, and return again, as from a voyage, rich with merchandise. But she, being mortal, of that boy did die, and for her sake do i rear up her boy. (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ii. i. 125–36)

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The boy’s paternity here is strikingly ruled out: one might almost infer that she is pregnant with the winds like the sails of the ships she imitates. conception seems to come from nothing, enabling all sorts of real and imaginative movement and exchange, rather as imaginative metaphor or conceit carries things across seemingly unbridgeable distances; yet this conception is also lethal, and we cannot forget the dangers of mothers and sea-merchants; nothing is carried across without a price. The idea that such conceit involves pride before a fall is also present in Richard II where the imaginative king knows his own fate: within the hollow crown That rounds the mortal temples of a king Keeps death his court, and there the antic sits, scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp, allowing him a breath, a little scene, to monarchize, be fear’d, and kill with looks, infusing him with self and vain conceit, as if this flesh which walls about our life Were brass impregnable. (iii. ii. 160–8)

The idea of ‘self and vain conceit’, a willed and empty illusion of power, does not reduce the fact that it has power over others as much as it is ultimately fatal to the self. ophelia’s ‘conceit upon her father’ (as claudius puts it, Hamlet, iv. v. 45) is enough to drive her to madness and death; conceit here seems to imply obsession or oppression by an idea as well as mysterious understanding. Hamlet had earlier warned Polonius that ‘conception is a blessing, but as your daughter may conceive, friend, look to ’t’ (ii. ii. 184–6); the joke is primarily a sexual one, but the irony is that what she conceives from Hamlet is not a child but the idea of death. Juliet fears that she will go mad like ophelia if she wakes in the family tomb because of the ‘horrible conceit of death and night’ (Romeo and Juliet, iv. iii. 37); ironically, of course, she is conceiving of this in advance, anticipating and perhaps even in some sense causing her own doom. it is certainly felt that women are more subject to horrible conceit than men: as the ghost warns in Hamlet ‘conceit in weakest bodies strongest works’ (iii. iv. 114, speaking of gertrude). yet men are also subject to it: edgar fears (rightly, it turns out in the end) that his father’s ‘conceit may rob / The treasury of life’ (King Lear, iv. vi. 42–3). Most powerfully of all, Mamillius in The Winter’s Tale dies of ‘mere conceit’ (iii. ii. 144) of his mother’s danger; Paulina insists that his thoughts ‘cleft the heart / That could conceive a gross and foolish sire / Blemish’d his gracious dam’ (iii. ii. 196–8), but his father thought his decline caused by ‘conceiving

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the dishonour of his mother’ (ii. iii. 13); the irony that his conception of his parents’ misconceptions undoes his biological conception is inescapable. leontes is projecting his feelings onto his son, obviously, but such is the emphatic likeness between them that the projection really does make Mamillius ill. When his jealousy began, leontes sought reassurance from looking at his son, presumably and inevitably seeing more difference between them the more he looks: Thou want’st a rough pash and the shoots that i have to be full like me; yet they say we are almost as like as eggs; women say so – That will say anything. (i. ii. 128–31)

of course the son does not have his father’s grizzly hair; but what are these ‘shoots’? a double sense is suggested: on the one hand they might be young branches – i.e. potential offspring; on the other, they might be the cuckold’s horns that leontes now feels emerging. in this double meaning leontes is intimating that for a son to be a true copy of his father, he must be a father himself, and a cuckold and therefore uncertain father at that. Mamillius is made into a conceiving father, begetting self-destructive ideas. even more intensely than in Hamlet an imaginary hyper-identification between father and son has created tragedy. ideas, perhaps especially the idea of paternity, can destroy life. as with iago’s monstrous birth, when male characters in drama talk about conceiving things, they tend to be conceiving evil plots. lazarotto in The First Part of Jeronimo says that he has ‘mischiefe / Within my breast more then my bulke can hold, / i want a midwife to deliver it’ (iii. 7–9) – he simply has the potential for evil which will be realized in the schemes of his master lorenzo.38 a more notable example can be found in John day’s Law Tricks (1604, pub. 1608), where the villainous Horatio says in an opening soliloquy i turnd my thoughts into a thousand shapes: Moulded the fashion of ten thousand plots, lik’d and dislik’d so many, that my brayne The mother of invention grew barrayne, almost past bearing, still my labouring thoughts conceiu’d a yet more strange and quaint Idea, gaue it proportion, and i brought it forth. (lines 13–19)39

The language here is very sidneian (talk of invention and problems of proportion, for example), but it is treated very negatively (Horatio has plotted

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against the virtuous wife of his friend). The play’s heroine emilia, by contrast, has a more virtuous plot which is presented as a ‘huge birth of knauerie’ (line 284), and an ‘embrion’ (lines 298–9) wittily planning to test out her brother’s virtues. such imagery is developed in Middleton’s A Trick to Catch the Old One (c. 1606), where Witgood develops his plot with his whore Jane: What trick is not an embryo at first, Until a perfect shape come over it? jane: come, i must help you. Whereabouts left you? i’ll proceed. Though you beget, ’tis i must help to breed. speak, what is is? i’d fain conceive it. (i. i. 57–62)

Their plot, mischievous as it is, and deceptive to the play’s two usurers, leads ultimately to their reform, so that it can be said to make them perfect. The heroes of Mary Wroth’s Urania overhear a damsel singing a song that gives evidence of ‘a reasonable good conceit of love’: love peruse me, seeke, and finde How each corner of my minde is a twine woven to shine not a webb ill made, foule fram’d, Bastard not by Father nam’d, such in me cannot be. deare behold me, you shall see Faith the Hive, and love the Bee.40

The overhearing proves the woman’s honesty, laying her feminine mystery open in an assurance that no bastardy can come from her. The female poet-romancer seems eager in this way to dispel male doubts, but such good conceit does away with the mystery of female creativity that male poets ambivalently yearn to appropriate. Perhaps the most important sphere of authority for women – some women, at least – was the ability physically and verbally to examine pregnant women, particularly unmarried women;41 the appropriation of this authority – at least the verbal side – seems one of the major motivations of the poets we will consider. not all conceits, then, are destructive. They can be a mode of clearer understanding between the sexes. orlando, who says he ‘can live no longer by thinking’ (As You Like It, v. ii. 50), can gain access to life (and

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presumably procreation) with rosalind, because she decides he is ‘a gentleman of good conceit’ (lines 53–4); that she, of course, has conceived him and made him into such a good conceiver of her and of their children has been the central process of the play. Here, conception has been a blessing: a self and a fate have been made through the process of dramatic interaction, moving him away from writing poems to being a man. yet his earlier poems have proved something. Whilst drama can articulate and represent such processes of conception/conceit, it is only poetry that really is an instance of conceit. The generative meaning of ‘conceit’ is surely invoked in sir John davies’s gulling sonnets, where he speaks of clothing love in various witty ways, including supplying a ‘codpeece of conceite’ (gulling sonnet 6, line 9);42 though the primary meaning here is pride in phallic power, it also suggests the creation of odd ideas as well as procreation. richard Barnfield, in a poem printed as shakespeare’s in The Passionate Pilgrim, says that ‘spenser [is dear] to me, whose deep conceit is such / as passing all conceit needs no defence’ (8. 7–8); in praising spenser, he essentially suggests that his work is incomprehensible and that it therefore needs no critical justification. The idea of conceit becomes an aesthetic category involving depth and perfection: spenser is praised in this poem alongside the composer dowland, implying that really perfect conceit is the attainment of the condition of music in poetry. More thoughtful poets than Barnfield would see the real difficulty of attaining this, making great poetry out of the process of trying to convey their conceptions and imbue them with both depth and unity. edward de Vere, 17th earl of oxford’s ‘When werte thow borne, desyre?’ makes ‘good conceyte’ the father (reportedly) of the ‘sweet boy’ desire (lines 3–4).43 The poem plays very interestingly with voice, asking questions which are answered in a second voice which only gradually emerges as that of desire himself. it is as if the autonomous voice of desire is gradually being generated by the poet’s enquiries, and by the ‘sweete speech that lykte me best’, until it obtains an ‘i’ that can say ‘in gentle hearts i rest’ (lines 14, 16). such desire ‘likes to muse alone’ (line 20), but is immortal, being born and dying ‘ten thoWsande tymes a day’ (line 28). The idea – unsurprising in the holder of england’s oldest earldom – that true desire must be of high status is undercut by its lack of permanent integrity. as such, this voice seems very like the voice of poetry itself, floating free of its aristocratic begetter’s conceit and gaining immortality only at the cost of stability. shakespeare’s sonnet 15 takes this even further:

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When i consider every thing that grows Holds in perfection but a little moment; That this huge stage presenteth nought but shows, Whereon the stars in secret influence comment; When i perceive that men as plants increase, cheerèd and checked even by the selfsame sky, Vaunt in their youthful sap, at height decrease, and wear their brave state out of memory; Then the conceit of this inconstant stay sets you most rich in youth before my sight, Where wasteful time debateth with decay to change your day of youth to sullied night, and, all in war with time for love of you, as he takes from you, i engraft you new.44

The octave considers and perceives the impermanence of the universe, but at the sonnet’s volta this is made to amount to one unified conceit which brings a vision of the beloved to his mind, the poet’s conception of which allows the young man’s originating sap to be memorialized for ever: in the poet’s conceit, origin and memorial are one. in sonnet 26, the poet’s sense of his inadequate expression is compensated for by hope for ‘good conceit of thine’ (line 7) which will clothe his thought; full conceit cannot be just internal, but requires someone else coming to meet one half way. Mutual friendship, based on love and understanding, enables connections to be both growing and perfect, though perhaps only for a moment, and only in the imagination. This yearning for mutuality that will most fully express the unity of the self and that can transcend time reaches its richest expression in sonnet 108: What’s in the brain that ink may character, Which hath not figured to thee my true spirit? What’s new to speak, what now to register, That may express my love, or thy dear merit? nothing, sweet boy; but yet, like prayers divine, i must each day say o’er the very same, counting no old thing old, thou mine, i thine, even as when first i hallowed thy fair name. so that eternal love in love’s fresh case Weighs not the dust and injury of age, nor gives to necessary wrinkles place, But makes antiquity for aye his page, Finding the first conceit of love there bred, Where time and outward form would show it dead.

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The theological language here reaches to the ultimate origin of love to refresh expression of self and love; the idea of making anew in the moment (‘now’) of poetic creation captures the very essence of the life-giving property of poetry, thus rivalling even god’s creation (with a mixture of extraordinary arrogance and self-deprecating modesty). This perfect conception, which is both origin and end of the poetic process, can be so selfsufficient only because women have been ruled out (along with necessity, mutability and the material world, all perhaps associated with femininity). it works for the moment, but the Sonnets’ ultimate failure to achieve their erasure (probably hinted at in the poem’s final word) will be the subject of chapter 5, below. The problem is that one cannot simply brush women aside, as many renaissance men seemed keen to do; men could perhaps try to be friends without mediating women, but they could hardly become fathers without them. Men would have liked to think of the father–son line as perfect, without feminine interference, and mothers, wives and daughters were therefore continual causes of barely repressed anxieties in a number of ways: wives and mothers could, for instance, be regarded as either unreliable or effeminizing, daughters could compromise a man’s honour; loved as they often were, women were reckoned to be fundamentally inferior, especially in their intellects45 – an ideological position that must surely have come under some evidential pressure. as david cressy demonstrates, ‘the mystery of childbirth’ was an exclusively feminine sphere (perhaps really the only one), men not being allowed into the bedchamber during labour.46 This accentuated male jealousies of female reproduction; the one area in which men were explicitly disempowered may partly be appropriated in order to compensate for those jealousies, but a clear effect of that appropriation is to reveal and even revel in disempowerment. anthony Fletcher argues that men’s long-established and traditional conception of womankind as the weaker vessel, it seems, left them [women] in possession of sources of power which men found mysterious and threatening. Meanwhile men’s overall conceptions of gender, in terms of hierarchy rather than incommensurable difference, gave them an insufficiently competent means of imposing a patriarchal order rooted in nature.47

Poetic considerations of fatherhood, then, offered the opportunity to entrench paternity on a more solid basis, but only by admitting the feminine side of the writer himself. as we will see in more depth in chapter 2, paternity was both uncertain and in some important ways optional, and these factors had an important

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effect on masculine self-conception. eve Keller demonstrates that over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries women became more tightly identified with their wombs and their reproductive capacities;48 men may concomitantly have become more dissociated from reproduction, thus prompting a desire to find an alternative form of paternity in poetry. certainly a woman was more likely to be reduced to a mere carrier of a womb, which was thought to have some sort of life of its own, than a man was to be considered as a walking penis.49 as Keller observes, ‘Much of the vernacular bio-medical literature of sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century england perpetuates the fundamental components of galenic anatomy and physiology but, even as it does so, it insistently rewrites their workings to support a notion of subjectivity more nearly aligned with masculinist and Humanist ideals.’ 50 Keller sees increasing medical efforts to deny the mother’s role in procreation and to intellectualize the father’s role as enabling the emergence of a modern mode of selfhood and subjectivity that is strongly gendered as male: of course, whilst this more explicitly involves children’s autonomy from the mother, it also at least implies autonomy from the father. The fact of male identity being dependent on such problematic figures as women seems to some almost intolerable,51 but it is also one of the major reasons for the brilliant complexity of elizabethan and Jacobean verse. every assertion of paternal masculinity must be accompanied by a new configuration of men’s relation to women, and even to their own femininity. We have seen that the idea of paternity involves considerable personal investment, but the nature of this investment was very much optional (just as the time and resource investment of a father always seems to be more optional than that of the mother). Whilst figuring oneself as a father indicates a yearning for unity, and the investment of one’s selfhood into some form of creation, there are several spheres in which this might operate. We can identify four central modes of generativity that occupied elizabethan and Jacobean minds: the biological, the poetic, the political and the economic. The spheres are fairly distinct, but because of analogies operating between them, which are often taken to be more than analogies, there can be real (and creative) confusion. each mode is quite complex in itself. The biological ought to be relatively simple, as it is after all the core category by which the others are understood, but there was considerable doubt as to how it actually worked (see chapter 2, below), and it develops further complexity, not least owing to infection by ideas and problems emerging from the other categories. The poetic may include the sphere of artistic achievement in general, but perhaps also involves the educative – what richard

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dawkins would call the ‘memetic’.52 The political includes all achievement for the nation and public success for oneself – though there seem to be potential conflicts here; many authors (perhaps most notably spenser) use paternal imagery as a way of suggesting that public and personal interests may harmonize; in a similar way, the use of biological imagery to represent economic success constitutes an attempt to naturalize the making of money and to distinguish good thriving from supposedly unnatural modes such as usury. although the various aspects of this paternal nexus might be conceived as mutually validating, in practice there were conflicts between the various spheres. some thinkers of the time considered that people only had a certain quantum of fertility, that energies put into the family would reduce one’s political or poetic achievement and so on. in Marston’s Sophonisba (1606), when Masinissa is called away to war, interrupting his wedding night with the titular heroine, she tells him Fight for our country; vent thy youthful heat in fields, not beds; the fruit of honour, fame, Be rather gotten than the oft disgrace of hapless parents, children. (i. ii. 219–22)53

The sense of children as frequently disappointing alternatives to fruits in other fields is powerfully articulated – all the more so in that it comes from a woman. Thomas cogan concludes The Haven of Health (4th edn, 1636) with a chapter ‘of Venus’, in which he decides that sexuality is natural to man, as the production of seed (both male and female) is the natural consequence of eating: and the commodities which come by moderate evacuation thereof are great. For it procureth appetite to meate, and helpeth concoction, it maketh the body more light and nimble, it openeth the pores and conduits, and purgeth flegme, it quickneth the mind, stirreth up the wit, reviveth the senses, driveth away sadnesse, madnesse, anger, melancholy, fury. Finally it delivereth us utterly from lecherous imaginations, and unchaste dreames. (p. 280)

The problem for cogan is that his text is ‘chiefely gathered for the comfort of students’, who have no legitimate means of procuring such ‘evacuation’ (cogan considers masturbation an odd and exotic practice only performed by diogenes).54 He therefore has to propose cures; other than a few herbal remedies for concupiscence, there are three main approaches: prayer, avoidance of women and hard work. The second point is a clear instance of the fact that people thought sexual desires could only exist in the presence

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of an object. The last, however, is particularly important, as it implies that erotic energies can be diverted into such spheres as ‘earnest study’ (p. 285). Francis Bacon has a similar sense of competition between the modes of (re)production, arguing that The perpetuity by generation is common to beasts; but memory, merit, and noble works, are proper to men. and surely a man shall see the noblest works and foundations have proceeded from childless men, which have sought to express the images of their minds, where those of their bodies have failed. so the care of posterity is most in them that have no posterity.55

More gnomically, Ben Jonson stated that ‘samuel daniel was a good honest Man, had no children, bot no poet’,56 rather implying that having no children ought to have helped him be a poet. Montaigne, whose own children had died in infancy, argues for the superiority of brainchildren to biological ones: now if we shall duly consider this simple occasion of loving our children, because we have begotten them, for which we call them our other selves. it seemes there is another production comming from us, and which is of no lesse recommendation and consequence. For what we engender by the minde, the fruits of our courage, sufficiencie, or spirit, are brought forth by a far more noble part, than the corporall, and are more our owne. We are both father and mother together in this generation: such fruits cost us much dearer, and chiefly if they have any good or rare thing in them. For the value of our other children, is more theirs, than ours. The share we have in them is but little; but of these all the beautie, all the grace, and all the worth is ours. and therefore doe they represent, and resemble us much more lively than others.57

Montaigne’s desire to be both father and mother reflects a common envy of the one sphere belonging to women. His desire for absolute possession of value, meanwhile, hints at the totalizing but futile possessiveness of authorship. There is a yearning here for the preservation of the self in perfect form, without the distorting interference of a mother, which is common in the poets of the time, most notably in shakespeare’s Sonnets. The masculine need to distribute one’s eggs (should that be seeds?) carefully between different baskets complicates the use of imagery of biological generation for poetic and other achievement, as we shall repeatedly see. The Protestant emphasis on all forms of work as spiritually equal may have been disingenuous (and would rarely regard poetry as work), but it had certain important effects:58 if every man was to discover his honourable vocation, and any kind of productivity was pleasing to god, it behoved each individual to think hard about how he might best use his talents. sir John davies’s epigram ‘in cosmum’ (on cosmus) nicely captures the

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idea of competition between various spheres of activity in a procreative metaphor: cosmus hath more discoursing in his head, Then Jove when Pallas issued from his braine, and still he strives to be delivered, of all his thoughtes at once, but all in vaine. For as we see at all the play house dores, When ended is the play, the daunce and song: a thousand townsemen, gentlemen, and whores, Porters and serving-men togither throng, so thoughts of drinking, thriving, wenching, war, and borrowing money, raging in his minde, to issue all at once so forwarde are, as none at all can perfect passage finde.

Though basically a simple satire of inarticulacy, the poem neatly expresses disorder in terms of class mixture: the separate functions of the different orders of society need to be kept separate if any is to thrive. The poem’s irony operates in a double sense: occupying oneself with so many matters is obviously very different from the wisdom Jove supposedly gave birth to with Pallas, yet we may also infer that wisdom is holistic for a god and not for a human; if man wants to gain any perfect issue, he must focus his endeavours. alexandra shepard has argued, coherently and convincingly, that ‘manhood and patriarchy were not equated in renaissance england, and should not be elided by gender historians. While men were often better placed to benefit from them, patriarchal imperatives nonetheless constituted attempts to discipline and order men as well as women.’ 59 There were ‘alternative meanings of manhood . . . independent of patriarchal manhood, and not solely defined in its shadow’;60 poetry may be one of the most important of these alternative spheres of meaning. at times, poetry seems to emerge as the result of failure in other fields of action. george gascoigne’s ‘gascoignes lullabie’ presents his sorrowful losses as ‘wanton babes . . . Which must be stilld with lullabie’ (lines 7–8); his sufferings have feminized him so that he must ‘sing lullabie, as women do’ (line 1).61 He has lost his youth, his gazing eyes and his wanton will, and must even say goodnight to his ‘loving boye’, his ‘little robyn’ (i.e. his penis – lines 33–4) going to its rest. such poetry seems self-cancelling even as it urges us to ‘remembre’ his song (line 48). Verse replaces phallic potency, and its associated procreative capacities, yet it is only in losing his amorous capacities that they have become ‘babes’. creation is necessarily a kind of loss, as the creation itself is the being with the voice.

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analogized but differentiated, the four main modes of personal fruition are in creative competition: this set of ideas and images, which we might call the procreative nexus, comes into prominence in later elizabethan verse – it is simply not present in earlier tudor poets nor, i think, in medieval or continental writing. Though there are hints of a preoccupation with patrilineal identity in latin poets of antiquity (such as statius’s ‘epicedion in patrem suum’ (Silvae, v. iii)) the roman practice of adoption made it less intense.62 The nexus is most prominent – though it is very varied – in the poets who have become the most canonical, and one might speculate that it is one reason for these poets’ canonicity. They are staking the main part of their selves in their writing, as poets had not before. in establishing a paternal relationship to their poetic works, sidney and later poets made a claim on posterity that is emotional and political as well as poetic. They are not, however, engaged in some timeless Bloomian agon:63 their desire to invest themselves in their works is persistently inflected by the circumstances in which they lived, as we will see in the next chapter. Most of what follows will deal with works that we would consider poems – lyrics, epics, elegies, etc., principally in verse (though sidney and others thought that prose fiction might be a poem). This is because these works have a voice, and it is through a voice that the poet can directly or indirectly present himself as a father, or present the poem as a son. Whilst prose tracts and sermons will also be examined, their more declarative voices will rarely reach the same intensities as poetry. drama is more problematic: the plays of shakespeare, Jonson and their contemporaries are full of fathers and sons, and it would be foolish not to listen to their voices as appropriate, but there are good reasons for minimizing our attention to them. Firstly, drama always seems able to keep these voices at a distance: we are always conscious that actors are mere parts of a dynamic whole, and usually conscious that they are playing a role; the sense of authorial investment is bound therefore to seem attenuated, however much some authors may have cared about their plays. secondly, it is rare for characters in plays to make anything; dramatic action is largely human interaction rather than creation, so that there is no room for the striking analogies and tensions between the various forms of creativity that we find in poems. Finally, owing in part to the nature of dramatic types, a character who is a father is almost always completely determined by his paternity; i plan in a future study to explore why this might be, but may it suffice here to observe how far this shows that being a father was the primary role a man could have.

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Poetry and Paternity in Renaissance England

However, the centrality of fatherhood was challenged by the emergent importance of education: the new learning characteristic of the renaissance shook up traditional notions of patriarchy. education enabled men at least to rise above their parents; whilst the contents of that education very frequently privileged filial piety – most notably Virgil’s Aeneid – other texts, such as ovid’s Metamorphoses, seemed to run against the central Virgilian model by emphasizing modes of continuity that work very differently from the dynastic. additionally, Plato’s works presented the private family as a lesser point of allegiance than the state (in the Republic) or the amicable education system (in the Symposium). cicero, the most esteemed of all classical authors, joined these views together, making the oligarchical, educated in-group the central point of allegiance, and subordinating patriarchy to meritocracy. The result of all this is that there was a considerable variety of available models to which an individual may choose to attach himself, making paternity only at best a primus inter pares of models for individuality, and allowing people to choose what kind of relation they would have to a paternalistic system. Heather dubrow has suggested that ‘the loss, real or feared, of a schoolboy’s father may help to explain the extraordinary impact of those paternal surrogates, the Humanist schoolmasters’;64 it may also help explain the need to make poetry, as it was a core element of the Humanist curriculum, into a surrogate for paternal and filial feeling. one of the central ideas derived from both cicero and Plato, and which is perhaps always implicit when education is highly valued, is the superiority of cultural to biological transmission – in dawkins’s terms, memetic rather than genetic inheritance. We have already seen this idea expressed by Francis Bacon; add to this a growing sense of a continuous poetic tradition, in which poets such as spenser can take chaucer or Virgil as their forebears, and poetry becomes one of the crucial means by which men can meditate their position in relation to the possible models of individuality. This meditation is further complicated, of course, by the centrality of amorous material to that poetic tradition. amorous poetry, then, both provides a sense of entering into a wider, non-familial culture, and allows writers to meditate on their own origins. This will be a central focus of this study, but a few examples here will demonstrate the complexity of feeling involved in texts with less explicit ideological agenda than we will find in prose tracts. The perilous likelihood of early paternal (and maternal) death, along with high levels of infant mortality, tended to add an element of pathos

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to all parent–child relationships, something which is often exploited for amorous purposes. it is in texts which exploit the pathos of orphancy that we can see some of the fullest developments of poetic individuality. Michael Witmore describes renaissance children, who were regarded as in some senses not quite human (because not rational), as ‘living ambassadors for the realm of the imagination’ and ‘agents without interests’,65 rather as poems may be; this gives an important pair of reasons for the use of imagery of children in referring to poetic creativity, allowing the poem to be both in need of rational correction and aesthetically autonomous, whilst also investing it with pathos as needed. samuel daniel’s presentation of writing as masculine parthenogenesis involves a desire to find a mother for his work; indeed writing is figured as a means by which the cruel woman’s instinctive maternal pity can be evoked: goe, wailing verse, the infants of my loue, Minerua-like, brought foorth without a mother: Present the image of the cares i proue, Witnesse your Father’s griefe exceedes all other. sigh out a storie of her cruell deedes, With interrupted accents of despaire: a Monument that whosoeuer reedes, May iustly praise, and blame my loueless Faire. say her disdaine hath dryed up my blood, and starued you, in succours still denying: Presse to her eyes, importune me some good. Waken her sleeping pitty with your crying, Knocke at that hard hart, begge till you have mou’d her, and tell th’ vnkinde, how deerely i haue lou’d her. (Delia, sonnet ii)66

The poem as child is a representation of the father, but tells the story of the mother, bringing her both credit (for beauty) and disgrace (for cruelty). as the poem is consequently a product of both man and woman, it is clear that it really does have a mother and that daniel is asking her to acknowledge her maternity. as such, it is an inversion of the more normal desire of a woman to have her illegitimate child acknowledged by its father. The pathos of the poem becomes a mediation between the poet and his beloved, and also calls upon the wakening of pity, a characteristically feminine emotion. The wailing of the verse itself indicates that it may be feminine (if not female), for tears were considered to be manifestations of feminine humours.67 even as he makes demands on the woman, then, daniel is also making some recognition of a feminine element in his creativity.

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Poetry and Paternity in Renaissance England

By contrast, robert greene’s Menaphon gives voice to an abandoned mother, sephestia, for whom her ‘poore babe was the touch-stone of his mothers passions’: Weepe not, my wanton, smile vpon my knee, When thou art olde, there’s grief inough for thee. Mothers wagge, pretie boy, Fathers sorrow, fathers ioy. When thy father first did see Such a boy by him and mee, He was glad, I was woe: Fortune changde made him so, When he left his pretie boy, Last his sorowe, first his joy. (vi: 42–3)68

it is instructive that the first reaction of the father is joy (whereas the mother’s is woe, both in her labour-pains and in her sense of shame at her unauthorized marriage), but the poem gives no fuller explanation of the sorrow the father finally feels – is it sorrow at leaving, or sorrow that causes him to leave? Perhaps the point is that the mother doesn’t know which, fortune having caused Maximus to leave her. yet the turning of the verse in the lines that become the poem’s refrain results in ‘joy’ being the final word. However much pathos there may be in the reversal of fortune, there is an ultimate assertion of joy in paternity, leaving a silver lining to the poem’s clouds of misery. The mother is subsequently consoled by her attendant, and the work as a whole is presented as a consolation to the widowed dedicatee lady Hales. The use of a child as a touchstone enables hope to emerge. a similarly pathetic tack is taken, in much more extravagant terms, in sir Walter ralegh’s Ocean to Scinthia, which encapsulates so many uses of the idea of paternity that it deserves extended attention here, not least as it demonstrates fascinating revisions of the idea of paternity as the elizabethan era gave way to the Jacobean. The poem is an elizabethan Waste Land, filled with images of frustrated fertility. it was probably written some time in 1592/3, when ralegh was in disgrace after the Queen discovered his marriage to her lady-in-waiting elizabeth Throckmorton (Bess); as such, it is a kind of counter-epithalamium, a lament for marriage. obviously, in writing to the Queen ralegh presents his feelings in very different terms from those he might use to his wife, but the emotional situation as presented does mingle his private and his public selves. The poem we have is fragmentary, our only witness being an incomplete and apparently unfinished manuscript in ralegh’s own hand; it purports to

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be the 21st and 22nd (or 11th and 12th – this is much debated) books of a longer work which was probably never written. it is possible that it is a deliberately fragmentary artefact whose form mimics its central idea – that after losing the Queen’s love and favour, he, like his poem, is merely the ‘withered leves left on the tree’ (line 470).69 Poetic, amorous and political fruition, then, have been thwarted, and the poem’s images of biological fruition may simply be a way of focussing the feelings of the poet and his royal audience; on the other hand, we must remember that it was Bess’s pregnancy that precipitated ralegh’s marriage, so that the biological element – which naturally in any case attaches to the idea of amorous fruition – is also to be taken literally, even if ralegh may be using it for purposes we would call political. ralegh and his wife were both sent to the tower in august 1592; the husband was released in september, but Bess stayed there until late december. Was their son damerei with her? Born in March, damerei disappears from the record during 1592; whether he died at nurse, or in the tower, it is possible that the Queen’s clemency to Bess was prompted by his death.70 of course, we are warned not to believe in very strong feelings for fragile infants in the renaissance period, but surely in the circumstances the death of a son would have affected ralegh as something of a last straw; the only fruit he had got from the whole misadventure was lost. i think that the poem’s pathos relies in part on this; in a strong sense, if the poem was written after the son’s death, ralegh is making it part of his appeal for pity to the Queen. This may strike us as cynical, but it would not be out of character, and it may well have worked, in that the Queen did at least release his wife. even if the poem was written before damerei’s death, the fear of infant mortality might well be enough to prompt morbid thoughts, and thoughts about his child are an important part of ralegh’s poetic construction of his feeling. in catherine Bates’s reading of the poem, the fragmentation of an overdetermined notion of male subjecthood is the Ocean’s real focus,71 but the idea of a son allows this fragmented subject to be reunified, at least imaginatively. Perhaps the most striking feature of the poem is the sense of life persisting beyond the point of no return – ralegh/ ocean is a mill-wheel still spinning though the motive force of the stream has been taken away (lines 81–4). The Queen, who is generally presented as the moon/cynthia, is in this passage presented rather as the sun, the ultimate source of life: as the yearth yeven in cold winter dayes left for a tyme by her life geving soonn,

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Poetry and Paternity in Renaissance England douth by the poure remayninge of his rayes produce sume green, though not as it hath dunn. (lines 77–80)

This may be an attempt to accommodate his marital fertility to the supposed death of all fruition in the withdrawal of the Queen’s favour; the son may be the ‘sume green’ (and is therefore not to be imagined as dead yet), and may also be punned on in the reference to the sun. The fragility of his fertility is clear, and this is emphasized in the passages where ralegh identifies himself as a son to the Queen, appealing to her maternal pity. He says that he is one that loved her both, by fancy, and by nature that drew yeven with the milke in my first suckinge affection from the parents brest that bare mee. (lines 321–3)

This reminder that natural affection comes from being breast-fed by one’s own mother might just be an appeal to let damerei be nursed by his mother; this also, like the passage in which ralegh likens himself to a lamb, newly weaned from its mother’s (the Queen’s) affections (lines 71–2), identifies ralegh with the pathos of infancy. The most salient characteristic of the poem is that ralegh does not fix the relationships in it, however. He calls his mind ‘widdow of the joyes it once possest’ (line 86), so that we are to imagine him, at this moment, having been once married to the Queen; this may also bring up the issue of separation from his wife. The figurations point to both the public and the private self, as if he could be married in two ways. rather as the Queen has two bodies, public and private,72 so her ‘lover’ has two too: he is lover and son, married to two different elizabeths in two different ways; and he has lost all this. He has also lost a political position. in fact, some would go so far as to say that the ‘love’ in this poem, despite its varieties, is almost entirely a figure for political ambition.73 i think however that ralegh knows this (and knows that the Queen knows this); he is engaged in a genuine confusion of feeling which accounts for the poem’s form. He knows that his political advancement and his love (whatever its character) are in lock-step; they make up a virtuous circle that has now turned vicious, even infecting the remembered bliss of past days. He can hardly bear to remember ‘the many deere achivements that befell / in thos pryme yeares and infancy of love’ (lines 168–9). The words are loaded here: ‘dear’ suggests affection, financial advantage and the cost of his effort; ‘infancy’ is filled with hope, but is also inarticulate. if it doesn’t grow to manhood what has been the point? He develops this thought further on:

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all is desolvde, our labours cume to nought nor any marke therof ther douth indure no more then when small dropps of rayne do fall uppon the parched grounde by heat up dried no coolinge moysture is percevd at all nor any shew or signe of weet douth byde But as the feildes clothed with leves and floures the bancks of roses smellinge pretious sweet have but ther bewties date, and tymely houres and then defast by winters cold, and sleet, so farr as neather frute nor forme of floure stayes for a wittnes what such branches bare butt as tyme gave, tyme did agayne devoure and chandge our risinge joy to fallinge care. (lines 235–48)

The common sentiment of the transience of things, a favourite idea of ralegh’s, is here given added force if we ally feeling about his offspring to his feeling about the cancellation of his political advancement – in simple terms, there is nothing to show for all of this, nothing to show for his love of the Queen, and perhaps nothing to show now for his love of Bess. The use of ‘our rising joy’, as well as ideas of ‘labour’ and ‘fruit’, may well suggest this latter interpretation. The whole poem, however, contains an idea of crazy, futile persistence which may be allied with a sense of biological fruition. The most powerful instance of this gives a georgic quality to the feeling: as a feilde wherin the stubbell stands of harvest past, the plowmans eye offends hee tills agayne or teares them up with hands and throwes to fire as foylde and frutless ends and takes delight another seed to sow (lines 275–9)

There is an implication here not only of a persistent desire to recover the Queen’s love/favour, but also of the possibility of having another child, and the two ideas are rather uncomfortably mingled; indeed, whatever happened to damerei, the raleghs had another son, Walter, in november 1593. ralegh’s later poem to this unruly son Walter constitutes a rather grim joke about the dangers that might face a promising son: Three thinges there be that prosper vp apace and flourish, whilest they growe a sunder farr, But on a day, they meet all in one place, and when they meet they one an other marr; and they bee theise, the wood, the weede, the wagg.

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Poetry and Paternity in Renaissance England The wood is that, which makes the gallow tree, The weed is that, which stringes the Hangman’s bagg, The wagg my pritty knave betokeneth thee. Marke well deare boy whilest theise assemble not, green springs the tree, hempe growes, the wagg is wild, But when they meet, it makes the timber rott, it fretts the halter, and it choakes the childe. Then bless thee, and beware, and let vs praye, We part not with the at this meeting day.

The ‘green springs’ which seem hopeful point to a terrible fate which can only be averted by the paternal blessing – yet the mood of that verb is problematic; ralegh does not quite say ‘i bless you’, but suspends the words between the imperative, the optative and the performative indicative, further complicating things by introducing a first-person plural which might speak for both parents, the whole family (including the son) or the human race in general. The voice of paternal authority is thus abstracted from individual feeling and thus seems to dissipate some of its force, ending rather hopelessly. in The Ocean to Scinthia, ralegh’s other main means to console himself is to try to feel contentment in others’ fruition: i love the bearinge and not bearinge sprayes Which now to others do their sweetnes send th’ incarnat, snow driven white, and purest asure who from high heaven douth onn their feilds dissend fillinge their barns with grayne, and towres with treasure. (lines 306–10)

These lines assert that love is above concern with fruition – whether biological or political – and at the same time insist that fruition is to be valued, unselfishly; both the bearing and not-bearing sprays seem to be filling up people’s barns. This willed turn to impersonality and altruism is founded on the idea of the persistence of the natural cycle, and it therefore relates again to the idea of having children oneself. The 22 lines of The end of the bookes, of the Oceans love to Scinthia, and the beginninge of the 12 Boock, entreatinge of Sorrow, concerned as they also are with ‘others happines’, are worth quoting in full: My dayes delights, my springetyme ioies fordvnn, Which in the dawne, and risinge soonn of youth Had their creation, and weare first begunn, do in the yeveninge, and the winter sadd, Present my minde, which takes my tymes accompt, The greif remayninge of the ioy it hadd.

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My tymes that then ran ore them sealves in thes, and now runn out in others happines, Bring vnto thos new ioyes, and new borne dayes. so could shee not, if shee weare not the soonn, Which sees the birth, and buriall, of all elce, and holds that poure, with which shee first begvnn; levinge each withered boddy to be torne By fortune, and by tymes tempestius, Which by her vertu, once faire frute have borne, Knowinge shee cann renew, and cann create green from the grovnde, and floures, yeven out of stone, By vertue lastinge over tyme and date, levinge vs only woe, which like the moss, Havinge cumpassion of vnburied bones cleaves to mischance, and vnrepayred loss. For tender stalkes –

elizabeth/cynthia is put above the economy of generation here, but that last half-line contains a hint of hope, if not for ralegh then for his offspring. of course this final section may merely mean ‘you are Queen; you can create anyone; make me a powerful man again’; but the mention of the Queen seeing the birth of others also constitutes a reminder, if one were needed, that she is not generative and perhaps does not understand ordinary people’s needs to make these tender stalks, which need care from their father, their mother, and their Queen. ralegh tinkered with these lines when he made a plea to the next Queen, and in doing so made these sentiments about Queen elizabeth more explicit. agnes latham describes the ‘conjectvral First draft of the Petition to Queen anne’ as ‘an intermediate stage between Cynthia and the Petition to Queen Anne’; it was written while ralegh was in the tower again (this time from 1603 to 1616, having had a death sentence for treason commuted); the version eventually sent to the Queen loses all the Scinthia material, but also loses two final stanzas from the interim version that makes a contrast between Queens elizabeth and anne: to whom then shall i crie, to whom shall wronge cast downe her teares, or hould vp foulded handes? to her to whom remorse doth most belonge, to her that is the first and may alone Be called impresse of the Brittaines. Who should haue Mercie if a Queen haue none? Who should resist stronge hate, fierce iniurie, or who releiue th’ oppressed state of truth, Who is companion else to powerfull Maiestie

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Poetry and Paternity in Renaissance England But you, great, godliest, powerfull princesse, Who haue brought glorie and posteritie Vnto this widdowe land and people hopelesse? (lines 40–52)

The presentation of anne as empress remains in the final version, but ralegh thought better of emphasizing her relationship to the King and her generativity. He is still relying in the interim version on the faint idea of maternal pity, implicitly contrasted with masculine ‘powerful majesty’; this time, he thinks at first, a real mother will know what to feel. He is thinking of his own ‘posterity’, both in terms of his achievements and in his family. The fact that ralegh was tutor to anne’s eldest son Prince Henry may be in play here – they share an investment in future glory.74 in the final version he makes this appeal differently, hoping That i and myne maye neuer murne the misse of her wee had, but praise our liuing Queene, Who brings us equall, if not greater, Blisse. (lines 40–2)

The flattering contrast with Queen elizabeth is underpinned by a personal sentiment which replaces the amorous feeling of the poems to the earlier Queen – here it is familial feeling, ‘i and myne’, which makes the appeal. ralegh needed to use a transitional poem to move from amorous to familial feeling, but the familial, paternal feeling was already implicit in the earlier poem. redeploying apparently heartfelt poetry for different royal audiences, and possibly even using the death of his first son for political advantage, ralegh looks like a poster-boy for poetic opportunism and cynical insincerity. yet he is undoubtedly invested in his verse, desperately trying to create a unified image of selfhood which brings together familial, national and personal feeling into one conceit. The fact that his conceit cannot be wholly his own, but is always pulled apart by the powers of the monarch causes ralegh’s sense of individuality to be ultimately tragic. no other poet considered in this study would find their poetic conceptions to be quite so powerfully affected by outside forces, but all would have to wrestle with circumstances beyond their control in conceiving their poetic and political identities: sidney’s political projects were thwarted by the Queen; spenser’s attempt to fashion an epic national destiny foundered partly because of royal military caution; shakespeare, less directly involved in politics, fears the destructive effects of an excessive valuation of social status; donne’s courtly career was destroyed by his ill-advised marriage; only Jonson was able to summon a self-sufficient image of himself as poetic

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father, but he did so after losing his biological sons (in all likelihood), and had to create an attenuated emotional self in order to do so. like ralegh, all of these poets use images of paternity and generativity in order to invest themselves in their poems, and all represent women and monarchs as the forces that prevent the self being fully unified or harmonized with the outside world as they would desire. sidney presents himself as infantilized by the Queen, unable to become adult and paternal because of her influence over him; and Fulke greville despairingly completes his friend’s work by imagining all human activity as necessarily childish in the face of god the Father. spenser develops sidney’s work in a different direction by conceiving of a masculine selfhood that is always in hopeful progress towards full and paternal adulthood. in his non-dramatic verse, shakespeare conjures an aesthetic realm that trumps biological and political generativity, but concedes the necessity of the non-aesthetic. donne rejects paternity in favour of a self that can only be completed in union with a woman or with god; yet he worries endlessly about how much of that self may be split or spilt in living in the world, and in reproducing there. all of them move towards their solutions, however partial, by trying to refashion the relations between the sexes on their own terms. Jonson struggles to create a detached paternal self, but in doing so he loses some of the passionate energy of his predecessors, and also pushes women very much to the margins. after the difficulties the other poets had evinced, it is understandable that Jonson should want to create a less emotive poetic persona, but the effect of this was that few poets in subsequent generations would be quite as engaged in their verse as sidney, spenser, shakespeare, donne and even the lesser elizabethans had been. The poets’ attitudes all constitute different models of authorship as well as of selfhood, and the Jonsonian won out for the rest of the seventeenth century, but traces of the others also persisted; in choosing what sort of father to be, one could choose what sort of poetic legacy to leave. Before we consider these authors in detail, however, we need to explore in more detail the ideological difficulties they were all confronting, and the range of possible models of paternity they could draw on. That will be the subject of the next chapter.

ch apter 2

Uncertain paternity: the indifferent ideology of patriarchy

Poetry is by no means the only literary medium of the english renaissance which tries to textualize the idea of paternity. There is a considerable range of prose writing in the elizabethan and Jacobean period which attempts to create an ideology of patriarchal fatherhood. Whilst the common theme of this is a rather dull and pious insistence on religious, domestic and social duties, the very fact that fatherhood needs to be so discursively entrenched implies certain anxieties. Medical, religious and politico-social tracts overlap in some of their concerns, but they also have their own distinctive emphases. What they have in common is the desire to fashion a settled and harmonious order in which paternal identity can happily rest: given our current belief that they involve condescension, it is worth noting that the concepts of paternalism and patriarchalism, with their affective connotations, were always regarded in such texts as basically benign. yet it is also clear that patriarchy was more limited in practice than in theory. different genres present different views of familial duties: political texts emphasize obedience, but more pragmatic household manuals emphasize more consensual modes of family organization.1 Mothers are thus given a certain amount of authority in the household, but their primary role was of course biological. natural science and theology are presented as the ultimate authorities for the centrality and importance of paternity, but controversies within (and between) both fields mean that no really secure basis can be found: the very meaning of the word ‘father’ is a matter of considerable uncertainty. despite the contradictions between classically inspired science and christian theology, most writers would like to pretend that they reinforce one another. ideas of paternity resonate in almost every arena of renaissance life, and might initially seem to be a way of uniting them all. yet as we look more closely at attempts to forge a unified ideology we will find contradictions and anxieties in almost every sphere. although what we would call biology (more likely to be called ‘natural philosophy’ at the time) and theology were the primary discursive 36

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fields in which paternity was rooted (and contested), social, emotional, political and educational matters, though supposedly founded in god and nature, developed their own relatively autonomous agendas, and therefore impinged on people’s understanding of the meaning of fatherhood. tangled up as all these issues are in the renaissance mindset (if we can speak of such a thing), i will attempt to separate them in the interests of clarity. looked at in this way, we can see an extraordinary range of uncertainties and tensions involved in the attempt to found an ideology of patriarchalism. The poets considered in the later chapters all responded to these uncertainties, their imaginative solutions or resistances being vastly more subtle, self-aware and nuanced than those promulgated by prose writers. a model which was constructed with the aim of creating familial, social and even national unity in fact enabled a remarkable variety of ways of connecting the self and the world, and this was exploited by the major poets of the time, even when most of them shared at least some aspects of the prose writers’ agendas. Biology first: Thomas Phaer’s The Boke of Chyldren (1545) begins by saying that it would be ‘expedient’ to discuss ‘the generacion, the being in the wombe, the tyme of procedynge, the maner of the byrth’, etc., but ‘forasmoch, as the moost of these thynges are verye tryte & manifest’ and because ‘for the reuerence of the matter not mete to be disclosed to euery vyle person’, he lets them all pass (B1r–v). There is an oddly mixed sense of the ‘trite and manifest’ and the secretive here which resembles the way people thought about sodomy;2 generation was a subject about which people knew remarkably little; the slowly developing medical profession’s desire to take masculine control of a crucial arena which might be considered a frustratingly feminine mystery was hampered by the fact that evidence was in very short supply, and by the contradictions between the major classical authorities. Whilst ideas about reproduction may have seemed straightforward and commonsensical, they were often in practice more complex. This is largely due to there being two key influences on renaissance thinking about reproduction: the aristotelian, which considers women merely as seedbeds (but as influencing the shape of the child in the womb), and the galenic, which sees a mingling of both parents in the offspring; whilst the latter belief seems to have been more commonly held, the fact that there were doubts about this matter reflects at once a desire to assert the primacy of paternity and a feeling that this assertion may presume too much. conduct books and medical treatises frequently encourage breastfeeding by the biological mother, as this was thought to be healthier, thus

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implying some fundamental connection between mother and child; but the precise nature of a woman’s connection to her offspring was ambiguous or even mysterious. Women’s sexual pleasure was thought to be necessary for reproduction, but it was unclear whether female orgasm involved the contribution of a ‘seed’ to the child. one effect of this is a strong association in people’s minds between female orgasm and conception: adulterous women, allegedly, often wanted to have children by their lovers; and it is hard to say whether the desire for sexual satisfaction or for children by the lover was primary.3 The corollary of this is that begetting children was a proof not only of virility but of sexual competence.4 The role of women in reproduction was often treated with awkward comedy: in lording Barry’s Ram-Alley (pub. 1611) the idiotic elder brother Thomas smal-shanke decides to marry, and is mocked by his friends: gentleman: Why sir, what should you doe with a wife, that are held none of the wisest? youle get none but fooles. thomas: How fooles, why may not i a foole get a wise child as well as wise men get fooles: all lyes but in the agility of the woman: introth i thinke all fooles are got when their mothers a sleepe; therefore ile neuer lye with my wife but when she is broad-waking. (g2v–g3r)

The male contribution here is downplayed, but other forms of thinking tried to increase the father’s role: for instance, sex during pregnancy was thought to help fashion the child.5 Men desperately wanted to leave their mark, but were unsure as to how they might best do so. renaissance theories of reproduction were uneasily poised between (thin) scientific evidence, ancient authority and a folk wisdom that was coming under increasing suspicion.6 Writing about it therefore has an apologetic, obfuscatory and defensive tone. like fathers who suspect they may not really be fathers, medical writers worry that they do not really know their subject. This mixture of arrogance and uncertainty may find its way, more subtly, into poetic thinking about fatherhood. a similar problem for thinking about reproduction was the issue of ensoulment, which is somewhere between a biological and a theological matter: was the soul transmitted from god at the point of ‘quickening’, when the mother perceived the foetus’s first movement?7 or was the soul transmitted from the parents, implying that all of humanity had been contained in adam (and perhaps also eve, though she was allegedly his daughter as well as his wife)? The former view was more common, and underpinned the idea that for the mother to terminate her own pregnancy before quickening was merely a venial sin and rarely to be punished. However, the latter view seems to have developed some currency with

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reformers such as luther (but not, significantly, calvin), and was considered more reasonable by medical thinkers like sir Thomas Browne who preferred the idea of direct infusion, but argued that ‘if the soul of man be not transmitted and transfused in the seeds of the parents, why are not those productions merely beasts, but have also an impression and tincture of reason [in the supposed offspring of man–beast copulations]?’ 8 clearly such a position made it easier to imagine the transmission of original sin, but this view, known as traducianism, also implies that there are souls within the individual ready to be made or not made. if combined with an aristotelian view of the father as the sole true parent it implies that men have within them a considerable number of potential souls. it also may make it seem that a father has more direct responsibility for one’s soul, for good or ill. arguably the most crucial insight we can gain from Browne’s thinking about traducianism, however, is that the debate on this matter is one of the ‘things indifferent’ or άδιάφορα which should not cause fundamental disagreements between members of the same community, and this may also apply to the debate between aristotelianism and galenism as to the contributions of parents to their offspring. as an area in which there was no official dogma, there could be no certainty; logical thinking and empirical evidence could therefore be the more reasonably adduced, and even the imagination might be allowed to play upon the subject; contradictory ideas might be held, moreover, by one individual. one could think about children, and the nature of their relation to their parents, rather flexibly. James Vi and i gives a fine example of this in Basilicon Doron in arguing that young courtiers should be chosen ‘of a good and vertuous kinde [family]’, For though anima non venit ex traduce [the soul does not come by traduction], but is immediatly created by god, and infused from aboue; yet it is most certaine, that vertue or vice will oftentimes, with the heritage, be transferred from the parents to the posteritie, and runne on a blood (as the Prouerbe is) the sickeness of the minde becomming as kindly [natural] to some races, as these sicknesses of the body, that infect in the seede.9

eating his cake and having it still, James concedes the supposed truth about the generation of souls, and then argues from exactly the opposite premise. The view which is considered natural or empirical trumps, in practical matters, the abstract doctrine to which one gives lip-service. such an attitude, of course, is also likely to inflect theological thinking at a time when ideas were shifting more radically than ever before. The reformation had a number of crucial effects on attitudes to fatherhood.

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luther’s notion of ‘the priesthood of all believers’ may have meant in practice that fathers gained spiritual authority in the household; priests or ministers had a consequently diminished ability to intervene in the family.10 on the other hand, this authority may have been merely theoretical, and was compromised by the more radical idea that each individual had a relatively unmediated relationship with god (mediated only through the Bible). on this latter view, paternal authority rested only with god the Father, and therefore became more abstract. The tension between the two views is expressed in readings of Matthew 23:9, which states ‘call no man your father upon the earth: for one is your Father, which is in heaven’. Fathers may have found themselves having to live up to an almost impossibly overloaded, overvalued role, but which could only be an imitation of the true Father. Paternity therefore becomes a supreme fiction, but a fiction that may be acknowledged as such – and this effect is particularly manifested in shakespeare’s Sonnets, as we shall see. Protestantism also valorized marriage over celibacy, making fatherhood an aspiration for every man. although many church of england priests may have chosen not to marry, the position of celibacy no longer had a particular cachet. english Protestantism pulled in several directions regarding the dignity of marriage and sexuality: following luther and other continental reformers, it denied that marriage is a sacrament; but it made marriage the highest state/condition, denying the catholic privileging of virginity; yet virginity was privileged in a different way by having a fetishized maiden Queen on the throne. Marriage came, furthermore, to be seen as a civil rather than a church matter, but the church courts retained control of it, and there was a general attempt to enforce marriage in church ceremonies rather than private contracts. There also seem to have been some genuine confusions about marriage: a promise of marriage verba de praesenti – that is, uttered in the present tense – was taken as binding, and people often had sex after such betrothals, though the church tried to make church weddings pivotal.11 Marital sex (and consequent reproduction) therefore came to be based on verbal bonds rather than sacerdotal magic, making it more the subject of rhetorical negotiation than of unifying symbolism; poets therefore found themselves in a position – or even having an obligation – to create their own images of unification, replacing ritual magic with their own verbal formulations. The calvinist idea of election, which most english Protestants in the sixteenth century seem to have accepted, however grudgingly, had another important effect on attitudes to family. no longer could status be seen as solely dependent on blood; rather, one’s self-valuation could seem to come

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directly from god, compromising any gratitude to parents. Heinrich Bullinger, in The Christen State of Matrimony (1546) argues that to haue children is the greatest treasure that may be. For in the children do the parentes lyue (in a maner) euen after their death. and if they be wel and luckely broughte vp, god is honoured by them the publique welth is auaunced, yea al men their parentes also fare the better for them. (fol. xxv v)

Unlike the unbeliever, who fears that he will have too many children, the faithful’s ‘hart and lust is set with his mariage to please god, and to plante, and bring forth profitable frute vnto men’ (fol. xxv v). Wives are exhorted not to complain at fertility which makes them ‘haue al theyr daies much great payne, trauayle, laboure & dysquietnesse’, but to accept it as a blessing, a source of prosperity, honour and wealth (fol. lxviiiv). The Protestant ethic extends to the ‘work’ of making children. William gouge’s Of Domesticall Duties (1622) is particularly emphatic about paternal dignity and authority: no title can be more honourable then that which is most proper and vsuall, Father to one parent, and Mother to the other. god taketh the title of Father vnto himselfe, as a title of great dignity. Obiect. This title is so proper to god, as We are to call none on earth Father [citing Matthew 23:9]. Answ. This is not simply to be taken of the title it selfe, but of the minde of him that giueth or affecteth that title. if it be affected to obscure gods Fatherhood, or to make a man a Father of himselfe without dependance on god, or reference to him, who is properly the father of all, it is an impious and sacrilegious title. But otherwise lawfull and warrantable. (p. 433)

alongside the apparently ludicrous godly scruple about using the title of father, there is an important sense here of the need to attribute all honour to god. god in fact sometimes deliberately withdraws election from the children of the godly, so that they may not think election comes rather by ‘naturall propagation from the parent, then by free donation from god’ (p. 503). Paternity is dignified but subordinated – it does not have the power to save the soul; yet its exhortatory force – like that of the sermons Protestants deemed so important12 – may in some obscure way have contributed to salvation. and the poet’s words might have a similar obscure power. richard greenham, in A Godlie Exhortation and Fruitfull Admonition to Vertuous Parents and Modest Matrons (1584), develops the calvinist line on generation: he argues that whilst fathers tend to be ashamed of having ‘naturall fooles’ or offenders against the civil laws for sons, they are

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too indulgent to impiety. This reveals ‘their great hipocrisie, in that neither their ioy, nor their griefe is sound to their children, and that they loue themselues more in their children then eyther their saluation or the glorie of god’ (a3r). He attributes this misguided affection to ‘carnall copulation’ (a3v) (like that of a horse and mare, as in Venus and Adonis) – which needs to be corrected by prayer and motivated by ‘care to increase the church of christ and the number of the elect’ (a4r). in his reading of the Bible, figures like adam, abraham and isaac got better sons at later attempts because they prayed more effectively; unless we pray adequately we will pass on our sins, which may be mitigated if the right approach is taken. not all of the elect will have good sons, but even if one has one good descendant amongst a thousand the covenant will not be broken. The manufacture of the elect is a painstaking business, with a lot of wasteproduct in terms of damned offspring, but it’s worth it in the end. such thinking, even if one doesn’t wholly subscribe to it, is bound to raise the stakes involved in paternity; and turns it into work rather like that of the artist. The reformation also changed people’s relation to the community beyond this life. The Protestant abolition of Purgatory, it has been argued, had a tremendous effect on the arrow of orientation in people’s thinking about their family and identity.13 When people invested a great deal of money, effort and time in praying for their dead parents and ancestors, in order to speed them through Purgatory to Heaven, it was clearly in looking backward through the generations that people felt the strongest allegiance; once this was no longer necessary, they might come to invest more in their children. on the other hand, this may also have removed one reason for having children – now there was no need to ensure that someone would pray for you. Michael neill, however, argues that the absence of services for the dead put a great deal of pressure on individuals to remember their dead.14 as with marriage, ceremonial bonds give way to internal or verbal ones, putting pressure on poetry to do the psychic work the church had once performed. These changes were accentuated by Protestant thinking about the end of the world. instead of worrying about a long, problematic afterlife, many people would have worried about what their children’s fate would be as the world came to its end. The idea of apocalypse is both prevalent and frustratingly hard to pin down in reformation england. Vast and learned commentaries abound, but their main concern seems to be the detection of the antichrist (he pretty much always turns out to be the Pope). in the elizabethan and Jacobean eras, writers are keener to prove that prophecies

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from daniel, revelation and the apocryphal elias have been fulfilled than to show what is likely to happen next;15 understandably, people did not want to be too definite in their predictions of the end of history. one basic division does exist, though – between those who thought the end was relatively nigh, and those who believed a lot needed to be accomplished before it could happen. it is also worth noting that millenarianism – the heretical, chiliastic belief in the thousand-year rule of the saints upon earth, which had been popular in the medieval period – did not regain currency until the 1640s.16 richard Mccabe comments that ‘almost unanimous assent was gained for the . . . theory that the common course of history would extend for no more than a mere six thousand years. By the sixteenth century the allotted time was rapidly running out’.17 a common view was that ‘1600 would be a very important date’, luther and Melanchthon thinking the world could not last long beyond then;18 obviously, people writing after 1600 had to revise such expectations. in the absence of an official ideology, it was up to individuals to work out their own attitude to the end of the world, but they could not express their views directly. apocalyptic thinking may have subtle but pivotal effects on the different attitudes to paternity we can see in the period: spenser sees the apocalypse as rather indefinite, perhaps taking place in some separate temporal sphere (following st augustine), so that he retains his interest in ‘what on earth was donne’ (The Faerie Queene, vi. xii. 35. 6); shakespeare believes in the preservation of some beautiful human essence, which perhaps even forestalls or transcends apocalypse, jumping the life to come; donne frequently imagines the end of the world, seeing apocalypse as a way of focussing the individual’s experience; Jonson wants to preserve the world as it is, without any apocalyptic change. sidney’s thinking on this matter is hard to discern, but Fulke greville completes his friend’s work with a sense of eagerness for apocalypse. These attitudes fit with their attitudes to paternity: spenser wants to fill the world with virtuous individuals; shakespeare wants to preserve beauty through the right sort of generation, perhaps even hoping to jump the life to come by such preservation; donne wants closure, and fears what will happen to offspring; Jonson only wants there to be children to stabilize the world, or society. as the later chapters of this book will demonstrate, all this has knock-on effects on their attitudes to the role of poetry. a familial or poetic line might stretch out until the crack of doom, but the significance of that really depended on when the crack would come. given these anxieties, the Protestant valuation of marriage needed to be quite insistent, using biblical precedent: principally, this took the form

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of insisting that marriage existed in prelapsarian eden, though this in itself tended to act as a reminder of the consequent Fall.19 a characteristic ambivalence can be found in anthony nixon’s catechistic The Dignitie of Man (1616), which takes a pessimistic view of marriage: Q. What merry dayes are in Mariage? a. two: The wedding day, and the day of the wiues death. (p. 111)

He therefore has to offer ‘defences’ of marriage – that it was instituted by god in eden, and endorsed by christ at cana; that ‘it is Ingratitude to deny that to those which are to come, which we hold of them that are past’; that ‘By meanes of our succession, we liue when we are dead’; and that it causes ‘increase’ of friends and allies. reproduction, then, becomes part of an economy of obligation, involving the family in the community rather than creating a monolithic institution. William Perkins’s Christian Oeconomie (translated from latin, 1609) sees the family as ‘the seminarie of all other societies’ (a3r) in that the ‘first coniunction of Adam and Eue . . . [was] the roote wherein mans whole posteritie was virtually contained’ (a2r), suggesting that Perkins, though a calvinist, takes a traducian position on soul-transmission. Because there was no church or state before the Flood, ‘the whole frame of their policie both ciuill and ecclesiasticall was confined within the precincts of priuate families’ (a3v), but it is notable that the father does not have such absolute authority as christ has over the church or the magistrate over the people (p. 128), and therefore cannot physically chastise his wife. Whilst the first duty of marriage is propagation of the species, and the second ‘the procreation of an holy seed, wherby the church of god may be kept holy and chaste’ (p. 13), Perkins is coy about sexual matters: he writes of the first ‘due beneuolence’ 20 of marriage as the right and lawfull use of their bodies, or of the marriage-bed, which is indeed an essentiall dutie of mariage. The mariage-bed signifieth that solitarie and secret societie, that is betweene man and wife alone. and it is a thing of it owne nature indifferent; neither good nor bad. (p. 111)

This ‘secret society’ seems very much like an emergent ideology of the nuclear family, but at this stage it seems embattled and rhetorically defensive, not the monolithic ‘institution’ it has supposedly become in the modern world. as an underpinning for poetry it is indifferent at best. The grandest attempt to fix the patriarchal family as an institution is William gouge’s Of Domesticall Duties, which derives to some extent from Perkins; like Perkins, gouge is keen to emphasize the relationship

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between family and state, arguing that ‘a familie is a little church, and a little common-wealth, at least a liuely representation thereof, whereby triall may be made of such as are fit for any place of authoritie, or of subiection in church or common-wealth’ (p. 20). ironically, one of the effects of this analogy is to draw a clearer line between family and state, the public and private worlds, than had heretofore been obtained. gouge, whose notion of duties often has a ciceronian turn, has to argue that private and familial duties are as much ‘necessarie duties’ for a man as public ones (p. 20). The sense of the family as foundational to one’s conformity to ‘the whole law’ (p. 145) gives the family a central importance (as, incidentally, does writing a 693-page treatise on it). yet the family is also presented as creating separate spheres: one aim of marriage is ‘That the world might be increased, and not simply increased, but with a legitimate brood, and distinct families, which are the seminaries of cities and common-wealths’ (p. 209). Whilst marriage is the root of this distinctness, it is justified in terms of social priorities; private feeling is not good in itself (it is at best indifferent), but has to be validated in other terms. We have to be very careful when considering the nature of these feelings, as there has been considerable debate about the emotional bonds between parents and children in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. lawrence stone contends that high infant mortality tended to attenuate parental feeling and that the prevalence of wet-nursing and fostering out may have distanced children from parents; others such as alan Macfarlane and Keith Wrightson have questioned this position; the difference may be based on the different evidence examined: stone is more interested in elite families, the others in the middle classes, particularly Puritans (whose diaries are often their focus).21 The consensus has turned against stone: families did matter, however precarious they were. Their importance, moreover, was not simply emotional. Wrightson and Macfarlane both observe that childlessness was not seen as a stigma,22 but this view has recently been disputed: often owing to implications of impotence, a childless man might not be thought a ‘proper’ man, and would have to work to establish his patriarchal identities in other spheres.23 after Queen elizabeth’s death Bacon could present childlessness as felicity: childless she [elizabeth] was indeed, and left no issue of her own; a thing which has happened to the most fortunate persons, as alexander the great, Julius caesar, and others; and which has always been a moot-point and argued on both sides; some taking it for a diminution of felicity, for that to be happy both in the individual self and in the propagation of the kind would be a blessing above the

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condition of humanity; others regarding it as the crown and consummation of felicity, because that happiness can only be accounted perfect over which fortune has no further power; which cannot be where there is posterity.24

This is an unusual thought, however – typical as it is of the childless Bacon (compare the passages from the Essays cited on p. 23, above). childlessness is presented here as a kind of autonomy or independence, raising one above fortune and the vagaries of history, yet the perfection it brings also means that one can have no voice in the future: having children was a risk, but gave one a stake in the world, rather as writing poems did. it is clear that men in particular feared their children would not care for them, in many cases with good reason. The idea that sons (particularly eldest sons) would not mourn the death of fathers became a commonplace paradox in the early seventeenth century: it is expressed with an almost excessive frequency in Jacobean drama,25 and is then turned around in richard corbett’s ‘an elegy upon the death of his own Father’ (pub. 1647) – ‘straunge sorrow, not to be beleiv’d, / When the sonne and Heire is griev’d’ (lines 51–2).26 in effect, corbett is commending his own piety in writing the poem in his father’s praise; the praise of the father therefore redounds to the poet’s credit, with the effect that it seems rather smug, ending as the poem does with an insistence that both the father and the verse commemorating him will survive better than their less virtuous readers. corbett also wrote a poem to his son, Vincent, expressing a similar self-satisfaction, and wishing the boy ‘all thy mothers graces, / Thy fathers fortunes, and his places’ (lines 10–11). such poetry replaces emotion with piety in order to secure continuity. By contrast, in robert armin’s The Two Maids of More-Clacke (c. 1606), Humil, speaking to his disguised father, whom he thinks dead, gives a much more revealing portrait of a son’s attitude to the patriarch he ought to revere: He loued me as a king in a play his seruant, who nere seeing him giues him kind applause, but small vtilitie: my father in my child-hoode loued me and left me to the worlds eie, in bold necessitie, i thanke him for it, since he di’de my mother hath her chance, mine wants the proofe, stand by times minion and inconstancie. oh.

This fine speech reeks of social observation, and the father can only respond ‘Haue patience’ (c2v–c3r).27 such a father–son relationship is fraught with anxieties that go beyond the pious and complacent model seen in corbett, but real, ambivalent emotions are stirred even as the fundamental continuities implied by a model of father–son identification are erased. The

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feelings come from the lack of the pious feeling that ought to be there, and from the need for the individual to prove himself. a recognition of autonomy is paradoxically at the centre of such a paternal relation. children were also seen as a source of joy and pleasure; they were not welcomed for personal economic reasons; neither as children nor as adults were they expected to support their parents, even if increase of population was seen as a marker of national prosperity, but they were seen as a ‘comfort’.28 This last term is splendidly vague: it could have economic connotations, or connotations of pleasure or emotional support; its more general application may have been, however, to imply that children shored up one’s identity, warding off gloomy thoughts of mortality, or even that they firmed up the bond between husband and wife. People invested heavily in their children, at least economically (and probably emotionally), but had to be prepared to keep them at a certain distance, as the dominant christian discourses disapproved of excessive affection, and their all-toolikely deaths made commitment dangerous. They therefore incurred a complex sense of emotional as well as financial cost, involving considerable self-sacrifice. Poems, like children, might be considered as a gain to the nation but a cost (if a comforting one) to the individual. in the end, what we can learn from debates in social history, combined with readings of the literature in prose and verse, is that people were simply different, and that the official ideology was largely indifferent: it allowed considerable latitude to individuals to choose how much affection they gave their children, and to model their relationships with them in a variety of ways. of course deference was a central model, as it was in the whole of society. The third commandment is of course the key text cited about attitudes to parents: ‘Honour thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the lord thy god giveth thee’ (exodus 20:12 – King James Version). as st Paul comments, this is the first of the commandments with a reward attached: children, obey your parents in the lord: for this is right. Honour thy father and mother; (which is the first commandment with promise;) That it may be well with thee, and thou mayest live long on the earth. (ephesians 6:1–3)

Filial affection therefore seems rather conditional or transactional, but children were expected to revere their parents, expressing this by kneeling in their presence.29 The internalization of this expectation explains cordelia’s horror at lear kneeling before her, but we must be wary of

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seeing this as merely conventional or a mark of humility. it may reflect rather an attempt to represent, and perhaps to compensate for, the assumption, characteristic of (and peculiar to) england at this time, that emotion would flow down the generations much more than up; this was unusual in europe, and is related to the assumption that children would be a net cost in england’s proto-capitalist economy, rather than a resource as they would be in traditional peasant societies. This assumption also accords with what we have seen of the effects of the removal of Purgatory: the future became crucial. gouge emphasizes marriage’s value for the individual: it ‘is the most effectual means of continuing a mans name and memory in this world, that can be. children are a liuing monument and liuely representations of their parents’ (p. 210). children’s love of parents is not presented as a straightforward matter: ‘there is a necessitie of loue in children to their parents, lest for want thereof, their subiection (which of all others ought to be most free) should turne into slauish seruitude’ (p. 429). children must work hard to love parents, for love in this direction is less naturally fervent: ‘by nature they are nothing so prone to loue their parents, as their parents are to loue them. loue is weightie, and, as weighty things, it descendeth’ (ibid.). gouge characteristically twists scripture to license it: ‘Where christ forbiddeth an excessiue loue in children to their parents, he implieth that parents are a fit obiect for children to loue (so as their loue be wel moderated:) yea he implieth that it is an affection euen by nature ingrafted in children to loue their parents’ (ibid.). some fairly obvious legerdemain is required to license the supposedly natural. The transmission of paternal attributes was conceived in social, cultural and economic terms as well as in natural ones. The desire to inherit and the desire to pass things on to one’s children are clearly crucial to parent– children relations in almost all societies – and these things are not simply economic. Many writers suggest that men in particular want to transmit their ideologies and achievements through their sons, and thereby gain a measure of immortality on earth. in more strictly economic terms, a change to inheritance law in the 1530s had meant that fathers had greater control over the disposal of their lands and wealth in their wills;30 although this right was rarely exercised to disinherit disobedient sons,31 it gave at least a theoretically greater power to fathers, who had previously had little leverage over their eldest sons in particular. Perhaps the more important effect of this was that sons would now see their inheritance as coming directly and more conditionally from their fathers, rather than from a longer familial line and as a matter of right. it is also important that, in a society

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of increasing social mobility, people were perhaps more eager to pass on status, which might in many cases be very much a hard-won improvement. This could work in decidedly odd ways: the classic instance being the glover’s son William shakespeare acquiring the status of gentleman and a coat of family arms for his father;32 this status gain would then descend to shakespeare himself, his possession of it as ‘plain and right’ as Prince Hal’s possession of the throne his father won (Henry IV Part Two, iv. v. 222). Whatever element of double-think is involved in such transactions, it is clear that they indicate a strong identification of the self-made individual with the paternal line, an anxiety at the precariousness of that line, and a need to underscore its development textually. Macfarlane argues that companionate marriage was central to english individualism, but also that it was the relationship between husband and wife that was crucial to this, with children being a pleasant but inessential benefit.33 This idea is certainly supported by alexander niccholes’s A Discourse of Marriage and Wiving (1615), which insists that women are the seed and seminary [of the world], and . . . haue maintained that lasting, and yet vn-ended, war against those two arch, and vnwearied aduersaries of Mankind, Time and Death, the wasters thereof, and consumers of all sublunary things, which began their siege against the first man that liued, and haue euer since held on without league, or imparlance, for the space of those 5500 yeares and vpwards, and which shall go on and continue the siedge to the end thereof, and consummation of all things. (a3v)

in a text which is concerned with the choice of a wife, and dedicated to Thomas edgeworth (who has recently experienced ‘the happy fruition of his vertuous wife’ (a3r)), niccholes, who was not married himself (but says he may marry one day), expatiates on the duty to produce ‘sonnes for the earth, and saints for heauen’ (a3v). yet he sees marriage mainly as a necessary part of individual development: he that hath no wife is said to be a man vnbuilt that wanteth one of his ribbes, a sleepe as Adam was till his wife was made, for marriage awaketh the vnderstanding as out of a dreame; and he that hath no wife is said to be a man in the midst of the sea, perishing for want of his ship to waft him to shore. (p. 6)

This idea of marriage as the completion of the (male) individual is not accompanied by immediate interest in offspring. Marriage is not just a means to an end, but is primary. There is also a continuous development from this central point out to the commonwealth: all kindred and affinity in the world take their birth from this roote, without which men would liue dispearsed like sauage beasts and irrational creatures,

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without distinction or separation of tribe or family, which are the first parts of a common-wealth. (p. 6)

This must be founded on love rather than lust, which he thinks the besetting sin of his age. He wittily points out that ‘increase and multiply’ is the best-kept of god’s commandments, but that most people obey out of lust, desiring the means rather than the end (p. 8). The motive, in both marital love and reproduction, is crucial. Though women were commonly disparaged, they were necessary, and not only for reproductive purposes. indeed, it was often argued that marriage made men complete; marriage, then, was a major component of men’s social credit, a point asserted even by the unmarried Francis Bacon.34 if a wife was more important than children to the completion of an individual self, that would clearly attenuate the need to care for children; it certainly seems to be true in the case of someone like John donne, as we shall see. However, more puritan views tended to decry such ‘uxorious’ feeling, and to emphasize the primary responsibility of the paterfamilias to care for the spiritual welfare of children, who might be future saints. yet this was also a period in which increasingly large numbers of people never married (up to a fifth of the population in the early seventeenth century). Many people could therefore see themselves as non-persons, and sought alternative structures of meaning for themselves, some of which may have involved seriously remodelling the relationship between the sexes. The very need for an explicit ideology of paternalism suggests that many felt they had to contain the runaway individualism and reproductive caution these attitudes might imply.35 The implicit centralization of women in the life of the individual and that of the nation therefore causes anxiety. as richard Mccabe comments, ‘enshrined in the definition of “mother” is the power to sustain or overthrow the entire social edifice by validating or repudiating its systems of succession and inheritance – an awesome power to invest in a sex whose name is “frailty”.’ 36 The power of women can be seen in edmund tilney’s A Briefe and Pleasant Discourse of Duties in Mariage, Called the Flower of Friendship (1577), which does not much emphasize procreation, and which does concede that virginity is ‘the purest estate’ (p. 15) – perhaps because it is dedicated to Queen elizabeth; the text’s central female voice isabella, however, in arguing that men should obey women as much as women men, states that ‘women haue soules as wel as men, and more apt for the procreation of chyldren then men’ (p. 63). she may simply mean that women are to be obeyed in matters relating to children, but the statement implies that procreation is somehow a feminine business. such ideas provoke an understandable pressure for men to

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appropriate this sphere. Women may help the self develop, but they also constitute a man’s primary connection to the outside world. Men feared that their sexual unreliability might result in the production of illegitimate offspring, causing their property to go to another man’s children, but this was only one aspect of men’s dependency on women: a wife’s words and actions could fundamentally alter a man’s status.37 Poems written to them therefore become a central mode of communication between the private individual and the larger public sphere. Beyond the family, a different kind of allegiance came from the fact that children were, at least in lower-class families (and often much higher up the social ladder), often fostered out in their teenage years.38 This meant that adolescents found themselves in second households, under the paternal control of something like a second father; it was an introduction to the system of patronage and clientage that would be so important to success in life, particularly for young men, for winning the approval of surrogate father-figures was the key to advancement in almost all walks of life.39 systematic feudal patronage may have been on the decline, but more ad hoc modes of patronage remained important. it is instructive to note, however, that patrons were almost never addressed as fathers, despite the etymological link; they were rather addressed as godfathers, friends or coparents: from this, one must deduce that the identity-signal of fatherhood was too important and too unified to be bandied about in compliments.40 in a society that was tremendously competitive over matters of honour and precedence,41 with various competing models of status, literary works became counters in that competition. an author could appropriate a higher status by writing works which praised those higher up the ladder – or even simply by writing about people of higher status. competitive and increasingly centralized patronage had its effect on the development of individualism in england in the renaissance period, and this might cut across familial loyalties. Put simply, nationalism and its associated ideologies – particularly the ideology of Protestantism – created a large-scale sense of loyalty that may have attenuated loyalties to family, and made the individual more isolated. lawrence stone makes the important point that there was a shift in the period from collective familial responsibility before the law to a sense of the individual being solely responsible for his own actions.42 Whilst stone is right that late tudor and stuart monarchs did not actually punish whole families for the actions of one individual, Queen elizabeth at least tended to distrust whole families on the basis of distrust of one family member. Upwardly mobile men, conversely, may have wanted to be valued on their own merits, but there

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remained a normalizing pressure to remind people of whence they had come, insisting that the fathers’ status be their own: as spenser puts it in ‘Visions of the Worlds Vanitie’, ‘if that fortune chaunce you vp to call / to honours seat, forget not what you be’ (lines 165–6); being and identity remain essentially given at birth. individualistic social mobility, then, was often derided. as Thomas nashe put it, one should be wary of the characteristic modern individual, the untrustworthy man or ‘him that is resolute to doe or suffer anything rather than to endure the destinie whereto he was borne; for he will not spare his owne Father or Brother, to make himself a gentleman’.43 on the other hand, it was at least politic for individuals to share their success with their families. We have already seen shakespeare’s concern to elevate his father, but such concerns operated at higher levels too: sir christopher Hatton, early favourite of Queen elizabeth, was able to weather vicissitudes of royal favour because he had managed to have his family members advanced at court, thus providing himself with an invaluable support structure. The later favourite, ralegh, whose rise was more meteoric, was vulnerable to the Queen’s displeasure partly because he had not done similarly, and found himself very quickly isolated. nowhere, then, was the power of patronage more important or more uncertain than at court, which was increasingly the centre of national life, with the power of local magnates having diminished considerably during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. even for those whose lives were distant from the court, its procedures could be an explicit or implicit model. Though people in general and poets in particular may have sought patronage from a variety of sources, they were aware that those sources were never really independent of the court. Before the tudors, there had been a number of competing hierarchies and systems of loyalty in england, but Henrys Vii and (particularly) Viii had centralized power and sources of wealth. Henry Viii had also made england a thoroughly independent imperium by his break with rome. Before the reformation, the Pope had at least a theoretical authority over at least the souls of englishmen and women; after it, the monarch had no competitor or spiritual overlord. The King had become the Pope (Il Papa), or ultimate father of his own kingdom – except that, after 1558, that father was a woman. The psychological effects of female rule were enormous, and my assessments of them will be woven throughout this study. suffice it here to say that the authority and value of paternity is surely undermined by having a woman as its ultimate model – whether the corollary is an increased estimate of maternity is, however, very much in doubt. elizabeth’s virginity

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(mostly celebrated after the failure of her last courtship in 1581) hardly made the celebration of her as a mother particularly apt. it also produced uncertainty about the succession, and therefore about the religious future of the nation, causing Protestants to worry about the fate of their offspring’s souls. all investment in the future, including the poetic, therefore came to seem precarious. in Henry VI Part 3, which clearly reflects lateelizabethan fears of future civil war, the War of the roses is symbolized by ‘A son that hath kill’ d his father’ and ‘A father that hath kill’ d his son’ (ii. v. sd, 54, 78). each of those symbolic figures of chaos has not known his father or son in killing him; even the wise child cannot know his own father in these times (or vice versa); the son speaks of the wars as ‘heavy times, begetting such events’ (line 63) – the paternal metaphor ironically underpinning the idea that all this suffering comes when a king is an inadequate father, reflecting a belief that strong patriarchal lineages could protect the nation from catastrophe. This is more a matter of anxiety than of confidence in the power of paternity, though: aware as any reasonably informed person must have been of the radical discontinuities of recent english history, and fearful of such discontinuities in the future as anyone scanning the horizon in the 1590s would be, securely transmitted paternity came to be an object more of nostalgia than present comfort. although elizabeth was mourned – and later became the subject of a rather revisionist nostalgia – there was considerable relief on her death. This was mainly due to the unexpectedly smooth succession of James i, but there was also pleasure in a return to the supposedly natural order of things in having a man on the throne. yet the transition also had some surprising effects: on the public stage, at least, there is considerably less respect for fathers in Jacobean than in elizabethan plays; it seems that Queen elizabeth’s anomalous position meant that private fathers had no real competition for patriarchal authority, thus enhancing their sense of self-respect. no play before 1603 expresses serious doubts about paternity, but after that date there is a growing anxiety about bastardy; again, the Queen’s position may have been crucial, in acting as an imaginative guarantor of female chastity and reliability.44 Paradoxically, under the Virgin Queen marriage tends to be seen as a very desirable goal, but under the married father James there tends to be a much greater cynicism. initially comforting as the succession of James was, then, it also opened the door to the expression of new or repressed anxieties. James actively promoted the image of himself as a father to the nation, and he was the father of two sons (and a daughter), thus securing the nation’s future. Until 1612, his heir, Prince Henry, was a figure of vast hope,

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particularly for ‘forward’ Protestants: Henry was a generous patron of the arts and a sound Protestant, and projected a more masculine and military image than his father.45 Widespread grief for his untimely death reflected this; it also reflected the sense that masculine (even macho) preoccupations were harder to project onto his younger brother charles: short, shy and even sickly, the succession of the future ‘king and martyr’ did not prompt much excitement. He might have been a satisfactory insurance policy for his brother, but once he was in the front line, he did little to fire the imagination. Plans to marry him off to a catholic princess (first to the spanish infanta, eventually – and successfully – to Henrietta Maria of France) even put the religious heritage of the nation in doubt again. James himself was not much loved: his own predominant homosexual inclinations were not much admired; and it was felt that he created a decidedly louche moral atmosphere at his court. His favouritism and inattention to business also made him a less than appealing model for the fathers of the kingdom.46 yet he did try to be a model father. one of the major new features of the renaissance attitude to education was that fathers were to take a stronger interest in their sons’ education from a very early age.47 This led to the creation of a new genre, the letter of paternal advice;48 though these do suggest a yearning for intimacy between father and son, most are very conventionalized, and repeat formulae we can find in conduct books, but the most significant published instance of the genre was James’s Basilicon Doron (privately printed, 1599; published in both edinburgh and london, 1603), which combines paternal advice of the conventional kind with a treatise on paternalistic monarchy; in doing so, it firms up the connection between private fatherly feeling and the paternal model of politics more powerfully than any other text. James claims, probably with some truth, that he only had the work printed for his son’s private consumption, and that only its unauthorized circulation led him to publish it. The act of publication, though, was very helpful to James’s self-presentation, particularly in his prospective new kingdom of england: allowing himself to be as it were overheard in his private communication to his son, he could show what kind of king he would be, whilst emphasizing the paternal voice as his central role. calculated as the act of publication may be, the text itself does provide some access to the King’s private preoccupations. James himself, as the son of a father killed and a mother stained, exiled and executed, had known the perils of being without paternal advice, and the importunities of those who would take his parents’ place.49 in casting his paternity, even including his fatherly blessing, in textual form, he

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explicitly attempts to circumvent the uncertainties of life and to fix the image of fatherhood for his son and the nations he would rule: Receiue and welcome this Booke then, as a faithfull Præceptor and counsellor vnto you: which, because my affaires will not permit mee euer to bee present with you, I ordaine to be a resident faithfull admonisher of you: And because the houre of death is vncertaine to mee, as unto all flesh, I leaue it as my Testament and latter will unto you.50

The personification of the book and the use of performative language together suggest an anxious desire to impose his will on his son, but there is more to it than that: the text is a preservation of the ideal self just as the son is. With a rather coy humour, James adds to the commonplace list of ‘horrible crimes that yee are bound in conscience never to forgive’: Here would i also eike another crime to bee vnpardonable, if i should not be thought partiall: but the fatherly loue i beare you, will make mee breake the bounds of shame in opening it vnto you. it is then, the false and vnreuerent writing or speaking of malicious men against your Parents and Predecessors.51

The danger of having one’s parents slandered is something of which James, of course, was keenly aware: he refers to his ‘owne experience’ in this precept, as allegations against Mary Queen of scots had imperilled James’s succession to the english throne, and he was very sensitive about her memory. additionally, James is desperately keen to have his own memory honoured, whatever the vagaries of his behaviour. The contradictions between James’s sober precepts and his extravagant behaviour as King of england have often been commented on;52 i would suggest that James was aware of his own propensities to dissipation, and that Basilicon is as much a self-exhortation as a message to Prince Henry. James exhibits, in particular, a superstitious attitude to sexuality and familial fate in advising his son to be chaste: because wee are all of that nature, that sibbest examples touch vs neerest, consider the difference of successe that god granted in the Mariages of the King my grand-father, and me your owne father: the reward of his incontinencie, (proceeding from his euill education) being the suddaine death at one time of two pleasant yong Princes; and a daughter onely borne to succeed to him, whom he had neuer the hap, so much as once to see or blesse before his death: leauing a double curse behinde him in the land, both a Woman of sexe, and a new borne babe of aage to reigne ouer them. and as for the blessing god hath bestowed on mee, in granting me both a greater continencie, and the fruits following there-upon, your selfe, and sib folkes to you, are (praise be to god) sufficient witnesses: which, i hope the same god of his infinite mercie, shall continue and increase, without repentance to me and my posteritie.53

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as he goes on to say, his grandfather James V’s adultery produced the rebellious earl of Bothwell, but it is not just practical consequences that concern him: one may detect a fear of a persisting familial curse here, even in the midst of his self-congratulation. There may also be a glance at Queen elizabeth’s childlessness (perhaps suggesting a fairly obvious parallel between James V and Henry Viii). immediately afterwards, issues of succession (glancing at James’s hopes in england) are again considered: adultery should be avoided because marriage ‘is no oath made in iest, that giueth power to children to succeed to great kingdomes’;54 only marriage can make a king – no illegitimate child can come to power (elizabeth was certainly considered illegitimate by some). Henry is then warned, ‘if god giue you not succession, defraud neuer the nearest by right, whatsoeuer conceit yee haue of that person’;55 this statement also seems directed at elizabeth, insisting on his own right to succeed her. This mixture of anxiety and self-assertion, of concern for the son and for one’s own image are typical of attitudes to paternity of the time, but are writ all the larger for the kingdoms at stake. if James, the national father who validated paternity for common people, had anxieties about familial succession, it is hardly surprising that poets in his reign continued to be as anxious about it as those who wrote under elizabeth. The problems inherent in the idea of royal succession are sharply presented in shakespeare and Fletcher’s Henry VIII, performed in 1613, immediately after the death of Prince Henry, particularly in the King’s exchange with the old woman who has attended elizabeth’s birth: king: is the Queen deliver’d? say ay, and of a boy. old l ady: ay, ay my liege, and of a lovely boy. The god of heav’n Both now and ever bless her! ’tis a girl Promises boys hereafter. (v. i. 162–6)

after her false declaration, there is surely a pause for the King’s delight and the audience’s puzzlement – could history be rewritten? yet we also know that even the old lady’s positive spin on the misfortune of a girl will not be accomplished. she goes on to tell the King ‘’tis as like you / as cherry is to cherry’ (lines 168–9); these words echo leontes’s ambivalent affirmation of his resemblance to his son: ‘yet they say we are / almost as like as eggs; women say so – / That will say anything’ (The Winter’s Tale, i. i. 129–31), but the resemblance of one particular egg or cherry to another is no guarantee of its origins – and the ambiguity is increased by the difference of sex. For this statement Henry VIII’s old lady is given 100 marks,

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but it is undermined immediately as she is disappointed with the small fee: ‘said i for this, the girl was like to him? / i’ll have more, or else unsay’t’ (lines 174–5). The dependence of royal status on unreliable (and bribable) female speech is nowhere more acute, reminding us of an anxiety that all men had – female authority over issues of paternity.56 cranmer’s grand prophetic speech on the Princess at the play’s end may go some way to redeeming this ambiguity, but we have become acutely aware that dynastic matters are rhetorically controlled rather than being really rooted in nature. He celebrates elizabeth as a bringer of peace, presumably on the basis that this was James i’s self-image: nor shall this peace sleep with her; but as when The bird of wonder dies, the maiden phoenix, Her ashes new create another heir as great in admiration as herself, so shall she leave her blessedness to one (When heaven shall call her from this cloud of darkness) Who from the sacred ashes of her honour shall star-like rise as great in fame as she was, and so stand fix’d. (v. iv. 39–47)

These tediously celebratory lines (probably by Fletcher, who also admittedly seems to have produced the play’s best moments) as it were jump over elizabeth to James, and this strategy is accepted by King Henry as absolutely right; he tells cranmer ‘Thou hast made me now a man!’ (line 64). cranmer has obviously not made Henry a father, but his rhetorical strategy has given him a son of a sort, thus making him a man; the line’s ambiguity also allows the possibility that he has also made James for Henry. James i of course was not a lineal descendant of Henry Viii, and the idea of grandpaternity is very weak in the drama of the period – in fact, Titus Andronicus is the only play i can think of which presents three male generations simultaneously; this fact is due perhaps to the need to make the father–son bond powerful, and not to dissipate it into larger familial commitments. But Henry VIII makes this leap, because of the problem of elizabeth. only a long way beyond the horizon of the play can manhood be fully affirmed, and only by obviously unconvincing strategies to exclude women. daughters, all this implies, were much more problematic than sons.57 Whilst one might entrench one’s status-gains by marrying a daughter off to an eminent man, that daughter would take her status entirely from her new husband, along with his name. in that sense, daughters could never be as much a part of the self as sons. They also prompted considerable

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anxiety: whilst they might be resources who could effectively be sold to the highest bidder, a father might also fear that these resources be stolen (in seduction or elopement). Unable to provide for themselves by entering a profession (and no longer disposable in nunneries), daughters needed particularly careful attention from their fathers if anything was to be made of them. in addition, daughters could obviously not be regarded as copies of their fathers as sons could. in The Winter’s Tale, responding to leontes’s insistence that Perdita is Polixenes’s daughter, Paulina takes on the role of authoritative female speaker about paternity, though with some persuasive and affective inflections that go to the heart of the issue: it is yours: and might we lay th’ old proverb to your charge, so like you, ’tis the worse. Behold, my lords, although the print be little, the whole matter and copy of his father – eye, nose, lip, The trick of ’s frown, his forehead, nay, the valley, The pretty dimples of his chin and cheek, his smiles, The very mould and frame of hand, nail, finger. and thou, good goddess nature, which hast made it so like to him that got it, if thou hast The ordering of the mind too, ’mongst all colours no yellow in ’t, lest she suspect, as he does, Her children not her husband’s. (ii. iii. 96–108)

The use of a metaphor from printing suggests how textual and what we would call genetic transmission of characteristics are both faithful and apt to be distorting:58 the child is a kind of precis or epitome of the paternal text which nonetheless preserves the ‘matter’, but in this word there is a pun that reminds us of the mater or mother who may have been the distorting influence, and whom a daughter is more apt in any case to resemble. Though it may be conventional to use a male pronoun of a female infant, to do so here is to raise the problem of a female child being the exact copy of her father; the insistence that the baby looks exactly like him becomes absurd as Paulina seems to insist that leontes has pretty dimples. Her evident affection for the baby is in considerable tension with her condemnation of the tyrannical father, yet her condemnation relies on the similarity between the two. This absurdity reaches its fullest extent at the end when she expresses the puzzling hope that the girl will never have cause to doubt the paternity of her child: obviously she could hardly doubt her maternity (mater certissima, after all), but this compromise wish is hardly persuasive, for the only way it could happen would be if the girl became sexually

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promiscuous – and in doing so, she would resemble leontes’s version of her mother Hermione. This amounts to a continuation of Paulina’s first thought: the more like leontes she is, the worse she may be, and therefore the less reliable she is as a transmitter of his bloodline; this vicious circle of thought shows how the notion of paternity as copying is apt to deconstruct itself. The transmission of masculinity through women, whether they be wives or daughters, is a matter of considerable emotional and political anxiety that will be fully exploited by the major poets of the era. every time a woman enters the frame, a sense of risking one’s masculinity seems to emerge. if one can suppress such anxieties for a moment, however, the idea of a son can be a powerful fantasy – particularly in the elizabethan period. sons were images of Hope, and hope is the characteristic paternal emotion in the writing of the period. in Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, after being told of his son Horatio’s martial deeds, Hieronimo tells the King That was my son, my gracious sovereign, of whom though from his tender infancy My loving thoughts did never hope but well, He never pleas’d his father’s eyes till now, nor fill’d my heart with overcloying joys. (i. ii. 116–20)59

as in Jonson’s ‘on My First son’ (see chapter 7, below), love and hope are connected, but true parental pleasure and pride can only come from public deeds. The King gives Hieronimo a ‘share’ (line 125) in his victory on his son’s account; the play makes the happiness of fathers dependent on the actions of their sons. an image of a royal son as a support to his father is powerfully deployed in a painting of edward Vi (c. 1570, King Edward VI and the Pope, national Portrait gallery, london), in which the boy-king is shown next to his dying father; already seated on his throne, he crushes the Pope beneath it, thus vindicating his father’s reformation, but by the time the image was painted that son was dead and a woman was on the throne, with no obvious prospects of having sons of her own; the substitution of male for female is as radical as that we have seen in Henry VIII, though less ironic. similarly assertive sons can be found in Henry VI Part 3, where the Prince’s claim, though unsuccessful, is nonetheless dramatically powerful. The Prince heroically tries to reassert legitimacy (as he sees it), addressing the crowned and triumphant King edward: speak like a subject, proud ambitious york! suppose that i am now my father’s mouth: resign thy chair, and where i stand kneel thou. (v. v. 17–19)

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For this splendid defiance (refusing even to call york’s throne a throne), based on the belief that one can become one’s father, he is stabbed by King edward and his brothers. The Prince here is a symbol of national unity, the yorkist brothers of division (as will be clearer in Richard III). Written at a time when an ageing and childless woman sat on the throne, provoking fears that civil war would ensue on her death, the play reflects a yearning for secure paternalism at both the private and public level. The prince’s tragedy indicates that such yearnings may be merely naive and nostalgic. The idea of a son as a figure of hope or even redemption is exposed as fanciful. yet in Marlowe’s Edward II, the final scene’s assertion of legitimate royal succession plays on elizabethan anxieties about the Queen’s childlessness, and drives out Mortimer’s attempt to climb the throne, as it were on the left-hand side. Just as the gaining of power through edward ii’s homoerotic favouritism is driven out, so the younger Mortimer’s gaining of power through an affair with the Queen is repelled by the remarkable and reassuring image of an assertive child on the throne. edward iii manages to be an avenger of his father, telling Mortimer: traitor, in me my loving father speaks and plainly saith, ’twas thou that murd’redst him. (v. vi. 40–1)60

This surely echoes the Prince in Henry VI Part 3, but it is much more effective as edward has power and is sitting in the throne. He is even able to condemn his mother to the tower, overcoming his filial ‘pity’ for her (line 85) and proving his manliness. given that his father was not so decisive and manly, it may seem odd that he proves himself his father’s son by this means, but that is one of the paradoxes of patriarchal manliness: it is the idea of a masculine father that impels a son’s emulation, not the reality of the person or relationship. Paternal hope is always very abstract, uncertain and precarious, though it is needed to provide underpinning to male identity, and to relate the individual to the future. When paternal hopes are challenged, poetry can offer compensations. in The Spanish Tragedy, Hieronimo laments his son because he has not lived to see the economic and social gains he has earned: o poor Horatio, what hadst thou misdone, to leese thy life ere life was new begun? o wicked butcher, whatsoe’er thou wert, How could thou strangle virtue and desert? ay me most wretched, that have lost my joy, in leesing my Horatio, my sweet boy! (ii. v. 28–33)

The great pity here, it seems, is that Horatio has not had the rewards – either financial or sexual – for his martial merit; things have not come to

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their due fruition. in fact, as this play is under the aegis of revenge, true fruition will be in suffering. revenge himself stresses this at the end of the act, responding to andrea’s complaint that the death of his friend can only ‘increase my pain’ (ii. vi. 1): ‘Thou talk’st of harvest when the corn is green: / The end is crown of every work well done’ (lines 7–8). This is personal and vindictive, but Hieronimo’s revenge will serve the public to some extent in that he is doing his duty as Knight-Marshal. This duty, however, will be undertaken against his ruler and the nation’s generativity, in killing the heirs to the throne; it will also, finally, be artistic. Belimperia insists at the beginning of the final act that Hieronimo get some ‘fruits’ of his woe (iv. i. 3); he must, rather perversely we might think, avoid ‘ingratitude’ to his son (line 16). He is able to take his revenge because ‘When i was young, i gave my mind / and plied myself to fruitless poetry’ (lines 71–2); here, despite the sidneian formula treating poetry as fruitless and childish play, poetry is going to make something happen, as his play is used as cover for the revenging murders. as Hieronimo has no son, and can get no reward for public service, only poetry can get him his harvest. Poems are a real alternative to sons when one is feeling alienated from the public sphere. art can compensate for the failures of the paternal lines, as it does in the posthumous portrait of edward Vi. a concern about enfeebled paternity drives the search for alternative models of self-validation. Michael drayton worries (or affects to worry) that love is less constant in his england than in other countries or older times; he queries ‘is nature growne lesse pow’rfull in their Heires, / or in our Fathers did she more transgresse?’ (Idea (1619), sonnet 27, lines 7–8).61 This dual concern with natural decline and paternal sinfulness conveys a striking anxiety not so much of influence (earlier ages had ‘lesse art’: line 6) as of infection: original sin can be not only transmitted by fathers, but made worse. This differs from ralegh’s sense that it is women who diminish men (see chapter 1, above), but it still feminizes the sinfulness, rooting any decline in a transgressive, translating connection between the sexes. The sense of detachment from nature, which pervades drayton’s sonnets, is founded on a fear that one cannot live up to one’s father, and that it may be one’s father’s fault. as such, all generation risks further decline, and only poetry can hope to prevent this. Uncertainty, then, permeates virtually every style of thinking about paternity, but with this uncertainty, this sense that it is an indifferent thing, comes the possibility of choice, with associated glimmers of hope – something that must be worked through in poetry. Poets can deploy ideas and images of paternity to explore the nature of their relation to the world, as it provides a generalized sense of unity and harmony between

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the individual and larger public spheres, whilst leaving it open to the individual how he models his relation to the public world and to women. The following chapters tell the story of how five major poets responded to this possibility, but they were also responding to each other: sidney was a model (in different ways) to all his successors; spenser, profoundly influenced by his contemporary sidney, and forging the most powerful model of public poetry before Milton, in turn provoked subtle revisions in shakespeare and profound resistances in donne; Jonson, in creating a new, more urbane model of public poetry, was influenced by them all, but tried to erase the more troubling uncertainties the others had confronted. yet all use their engagements with paternity to suggest that there is a great deal at stake in the writing of poetry.

ch apter 3

The childish love of Philip Sidney and Fulke Greville

Philip sidney was not only the origin (or father) of the stream of paternal imagery that enters english poetry in the 1590s, but was treated as a fatherly example by many poets who followed him; he could be considered in this way for a number of reasons: his early death in war made him a powerful model of martial masculinity; he had been an important patron, and as such could be used after his death to criticize the inadequately paternal patronage of later grandees; his social status and unimpeachable Protestantism gave a certain cachet and licence to the writing of poetry, an art which was derogated for a number of reasons; the posthumous publication of his work even gave a certain licence to the idea of appearing in print; finally, the exploratory openness of his work invited later writers to develop or finish the poetic projects he had begun.1 sidney became a kind of absent (and therefore necessarily benign) father to many poets who succeeded him, even including writers of his own generation such as spenser. in turn, his own preoccupations with the difficulties of poetic fatherhood are shaped by his response to Queen elizabeth. The derivation of identity from a father was of great personal significance to sidney: much of the respect he was accorded on his continental journeys came from the fact that his father sir Henry was lord lieutenant of ireland, a role that was often (mis)understood in europe as sufficiently viceregal to make sidney himself into a prince of sorts.2 However, his status in england derived from a different source: as the presumptive heir to his maternal uncle the grandee and favourite the earl of leicester, he stood to inherit not only considerable wealth but also a central position of political and artistic patronage.3 This dual position created some division of loyalties, but its primary effect was to make sidney recognize the tenuous or even fictional nature of patrilineally founded identity: he knew that his father’s viceregality was more curse than blessing, and that his future wealth could easily be taken away, as when leicester fathered a son in 1581. Being a son was a position of uncertain dependency for sidney, but whilst 63

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he may protest against the limitations of the role, he is also able to exploit it as allowing some freedom before he has to take on the role of father himself. as a figure of ‘great expectation’ (Astrophel and Stella, 21. 8), he is even able to act as a father to himself, full of characteristically paternal hope for the future, but this is thwarted by a love that makes him stay childish, and by the semi-maternal presence of Queen elizabeth. His work presents a tentative process of growth into the unity of adult fatherhood, but that process also constitutes a critique of paternalistic rule, whether that be fatherly or motherly; a better kind of union between the sexes is sought. one of the central features of the ‘old’ Arcadia is the contrast between its two father-and-king figures: the amorously foolish and timid Basilius is significantly the father to two daughters, which suggests the femininity and dividedness of his rule; the good euarchus has only one male heir, but is overly harsh in his preparedness to execute both his son and his nephew. The figure of Basilius may well act as an oblique critique of Queen elizabeth,4 but euarchus is much more puzzling: his name means good ruler, but in his harsh judgement of the heroes he is accused of being ‘tyrannical’ by his nephew Musidorus.5 The princes may be guilty of eloping with the princesses, but it does seem that the father here is being made to represent justice without the balancing mercy that would make him a truly rounded ruler.6 a female ruler might be expected to exhibit such mercy, but it turns out in sidney’s other works that mother-ruler figures are just as problematic. For these reasons, one ultimate, if never finally realized, aim of sidney’s work is to create a model of selfhood and rule that integrates the best of both the paternal and the maternal. The ‘new’ Arcadia introduces a large number of other father-rulers who misjudge their sons (e.g. the Paphlagonian unkind king on whom gloucester in King Lear is partly based), and they can only be redeemed by the friendly action of the princely heroes; sidney here implies that friendship may be a valuable replacement for paternity as the ultimate model of human connections and power; it is certainly considered better than the amorous model of power promulgated by elizabeth at her court, and explored in Astrophel and Stella. elizabethan love poetry registers two crucial aspects of the Queen’s selfpresentation that came to seem increasingly inappropriate, and that forced spenser into presenting her in ‘mirrours more then one’ (The Faerie Queene, iii. Proem, 5–6) – her roles as a youthful object of amorous devotion, and as a mother to the nation. The former role was largely a matter of flattery, though it did have important political implications: by pretending that

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the Queen was young (and presenting her as increasingly so in visual art) people could convince themselves that she would live on and thus forestall an anticipated succession crisis. The presentation of her as a mother, particularly given fears about the succession, was much more problematic. it was a crucial aspect of Marian iconography that could not really be transferred onto the Queen – at least not as easily as virginity could – but ideas about the Queen’s maternal impact could be indirectly expressed in poems apparently addressed to other women. as Helen Hackett has convincingly argued, the glorification of elizabeth ‘was produced by far more complex and variable processes than just a desire to replace the Virgin Mary’; it was created ‘in reaction to repressed anxieties at the disruption of hierarchy and the physical otherness which a powerful woman represents’.7 This chapter shows how Philip sidney adapted and used ideas of the Queen as a mother in order to present himself as childish and to put off his own masculine maturation; this strategy was then further adapted by his friend and literary executor Fulke greville into a rejection of the whole material and maternal world. a generation older than sidney, ralegh, spenser and greville, Queen elizabeth could plausibly be figured as a mother, especially as she was the nurturing source of all bounty, able to create or destroy a man’s fortunes. The figuration of her as mother was in fact more common early in her reign: in camden’s account of elizabeth’s answer to a 1559 commons petition that she marry, the Queen says ‘reproach me so no more . . . that i have no children: for every one of you, and as many as are english, are my children and kinsfolks, of whom, so long as i am not deprived and god shall so preserve me, you cannot charge me, without offense, to be destitute’.8 The main problems with maternal images for the Queen were twofold and obvious: she wasn’t actually a mother, a fact of immense dynastic and political (as well as religious) significance; and she didn’t like to be reminded of her age. a further problem was that sixteenth-century discourse tended to disparage motherhood; mothers were thought to coddle their sons and prevent them from growing into proper men. sidney’s presentation of elizabeth as a mother gives him a certain licence to speak out and act, as his speech could be treated as blameless infantile wailing, his action as childish play or truancy, deserving of loving chastisement perhaps, but not of serious punishment or withdrawal of affection. additionally, and often simultaneously, presenting elizabeth as a mother licensed sidney to seek a younger mistress, thus declawing the Queen’s jealousy of younger women, who will never be as good as the mother (such as sidney’s stella, only a star besides the moonlike Queen), yet who are likened to the mother and

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thus presented as maternal themselves (as well as being potential mothers to the poet’s offspring). an apparently unflattering comparison between the ageing Queen and the beautiful young women around her could thus be made flattering, in that they are only reflections of the Queen’s glory, accommodated to a narrative in which the mother will always be loved best. at the same time, elements of the Queen’s supposed maternal tyranny and inhibition of masculine endeavour or maturation can be displaced onto the younger women. such displacement strategies pull in two directions – on the one hand they carve out a space in which the male poet-courtier can act, can mature, and can even reproduce, away from the stifling presence of the Queen; on the other hand, the elements of the Queen that are carried over to the other women mean that even this space of apparent masculine maturation is infected by the Queen’s maternal intransigence. if one licenses masculine action by presenting it as play, that action may come to seem futile. The presentation of the beloved as a maternal figure in elizabethan love poetry has some points of contact with Freud’s narrative of the development of love and its elaboration by lacan. Philisides’s lament in the Fourth eclogues of the Old Arcadia (a piece meant to be taken as vaguely autobiographical) anticipates Freud’s narratives of human sexual development; sidney appears to invent the Freudian super-ego in referring to ‘an inward father’;9 but this comes in a passage of admiring contemplation of a feminine nature, an idyll before the onset of sexual passion: my calmy thoughts i fed on nature’s sweet repast, as healthful senses led. Her gifts my study was, her beauties were my sport; My work her works to know, her dwelling my resort. Those lamps of heav’nly fire to fixed motion bound, The ever turning spheres, the never moving ground; What essence dest’ny hath; if fortune be or no; Whence our immortal souls to mortal earth do flow; What life it is, and how that all these lives do gather, With outward maker’s force, or like an inward father.

From the simple, primal bliss of natural maternity, sidney moves on to pondering the problem of paternity, hoping that it is an externally guaranteed or divine force, but fearing that it is merely a self-created fiction. His consequent division and alienation cause further multiplicity of desire. The sexual passion that emerges, and its attendant sufferings, are brought about because of Philisides’s preference for the handmaid Mira over the queenly goddesses Venus and diana. This anticipates spenser’s preference

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for his wife, ‘the handmayd of the Faery Queene’ (Amoretti 80, line 14) over the Queen herself. sidney’s choice of the ordinary or ‘other’ woman would be repeated in Astrophel and Stella, but in both cases that woman is as frustrating as the maternal monarch without being her. Freud argues that all love is a ‘refinding’ of the prototypical love between nursing mother and child; to this nostalgia Freud attributes the ‘oceanic feeling’ of religious experience.10 Theresa M. Krier argues that this Freudian vision of primal plenitude is ‘a false, even disabling fantasy’, and that trapped in the melancholia of unperformed mourning for a fusion that we do not allow ourselves to know we have never exactly had, we consign ourselves to the pathos of nostalgia for an idealized first home.11

such an image of course is complicated when the mother-figure is only metaphorically a mother, and is in fact a powerful queen whose most salient characteristic is her failure to be a mother. Being a woman with the heart and stomach of a king (but not the womb?), elizabeth exemplifies the wrong kind of union between the sexes. There is further complication when the poet insists on his own right to procreate, and to escape from the stifling presence of the mother; in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud argues that The tie of affection, which binds the child as a rule to the parent of the opposite sex, succumbs to disappointment, to a vain expectation of satisfaction or to jealousy over the birth of a new baby – unmistakable proof of the infidelity of the object of the child’s affections. His own attempt to make a baby himself, carried out with tragic seriousness, fails shamefully.12

The mother in this model is both treacherous and the enemy of the child’s creative self-realization. Maternity, always more certain than paternity, may be something all male poets envy. conceiving of their work in generative terms is a way to appropriate some of the power of motherhood, but also to be something more than a limited male subject, futile as that aim may be: by imagining oneself as having both male and female characteristics, a poet can be more complete, and have a more consequential relation to the universe. language, lacan suggests, is masculine, but only a second-order mode of creativity, based on the ‘paternal mystery’ of metaphor and substitution; hence the need to insist on an original father who can underpin identity and trump feminine creativity: ‘the attribution of procreation to the father can only be the effect of a pure signifier, of a recognition, not of the real father, but of what religion has taught us to refer to as the name-of-theFather.’ 13

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The paternal mystery was more acute in the metaphorical family dynamic of the elizabethan court, as the patriarchal system lacked a father at its head; this left young poets with the desire to take a masculine, paternal place, but at the same time making claims on a queen who would never exactly be a mother or a wife. catherine Bates questions the lacanian reading of courtly poetry: ‘Jacques lacan suggests that the courtly lover fools himself, disavowing the lack by which he, like all subjects, is constituted by displacing it onto the woman whom he sets up as an object of imaginary fulfilment.’ 14 she argues that most readings of this poetry do ‘exactly the same thing’, and that a firmer recognition of fragmentation or abjection on the poets’ part is required. sidney’s abjection, however, is more playful than Bates suggests, and as its futility becomes clear, it comes to operate as a critique of a courtly world that feels like a nursery. derek B. alwes argues that the use of female audiences in the works of courtly authors gives men a certain authority, but that this is undermined by the supposed frivolity of writing for women; the ‘generous reception’ the poets hope for from maternal figures is deflected when the Queen is imagined as the mother, or when the maternal figure is imagined as queenly. Ultimately, for alwes, masculinity is maintained, but without the poets being able to identify with their fathers.15 i would suggest that rather than preserving masculinity or abjecting oneself in a feminine way, sidney tries to take the best from both male and female, a position that avoids either mastery or abjection. it would take spenser to finish this task, however. greville goes in the other direction, taking the posture of abjection still further, but ultimately reasserting god as a paternal figure who can destroy a maternal world. louis a. Montrose may be right to argue that the royal cult was a way of dealing with ‘internal residues of [men’s] relationships to the primary maternal figures of infancy’,16 but it is also a conscious strategy to domesticate the Queen, and thereby to come to a new accommodation with femininity. at a particularly acute crisis in elizabethan england, when the Queen seemed seriously to be planning marriage to the French duc d’alençon and anjou, sidney participated in and probably helped to devise the pageanttournament commonly called ‘The Four Foster-children of desire’. This offers some typically peculiar and elusive models of parenthood and filial allegiance. in presenting themselves as children who have been brought up by desire, sidney and his cohorts (arundel, Windsor and greville) leave their parenthood in doubt (ought the Queen to be a parent to them?) and, through their childishness and alienation from their natural identities, license their playful rebellion. The licence that children have is

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nicely conveyed in the fact that the foster-children’s boy page addresses the Queen ‘without making any precise reuerence at all’ (aiiiv–aiiiir).17 as Michael Witmore points out, the use of children in such pageants enabled the speeches to evade normal patterns of courtesy, and suggested that the words came from some abstract realm rather than being the responsibility of any adult individual;18 although sidney’s group were obviously adult themselves, they also took on some of the irresponsibility of children in this pageant. in assaulting the Fortress of Beauty on behalf of their fosterparent, the children are displacing their desire onto desire, thus denying that they actually desire the Queen themselves; on the other hand, they are asserting their right to have desires: they claim ‘right of inheritaunce’ to the Fortress (aiiir), but it is not clear whether their inheritance is a birth-right or derived from their fosterage by desire. The poem demands that the Fortress yield claims that it was built for ‘just desires true children’ (aviiiv) but, given their failure to take it, this raises the questions of whether they are true children and whether the desire is just. Their fosterage has given them decidedly mixed blessings: on the one hand they have been suckled with ‘infectiue milk’, but on the other hand it has made them ‘hopeful’, presumably both in the sense of them having hopes of success and others having hopes on their behalf. These hopes being ultimately dashed, it becomes clear that their dry-nursing by despair has had more influence than desire’s inculcation of their rights. The defender of the Fortress sir Francis Knollys gives the clearest account of why the foster-children must fail: of all affections that are desire is the most worthie to woe, but least deserves to winne BeaWtie, for in winning his sainct he looseth him selfe, no soner hath desire what he desireth, but that he dieth presently: so that when BeaWtie yeeldeth once to desire, then can she never vaunt to be desired againe: Wherefore of force this principle must sta[n]d it is conuenient for desire euer to wish, necessarie & that he alwaies want. (Bviv)

This is intended as a message to the Queen in her marriage-negotiations, warning her that she will no longer be desired if she accepts a husband. The opponents, presented as ‘legitimate sonnes of despaire, brethren to hard mishappe, suckled with sighes, and swathed vp in sorow, weaned in wo, & drie nurst by desire’ are, despite the disdain into which they claim to have recently fallen, victorious over desire’s forces, who end up ‘heires onely to misfortune’ (civ); abstracted away from being a force in any individual, desire is finally presented as a failed (if in some way valid) claimant to the throne, and the legitimacy of despair is paradoxically asserted. The message here is immensely complex, partly because it is a collaborative

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endeavour, partly because the courtiers cannot openly oppose the Queen’s proposed marriage: they present themselves as having some legitimate claim on her whilst insisting that they will not push it through to fulfilment. The fact that the Queen has no children means that everyone has a claim on her whilst at the same time that they all lack true parentage. The challengers become ‘bondmen by those bondes, whiche the losse of life can onely loose’ (ciir), only demanding that they be rewarded according to their merit; the Queen is asked to be a fair mother to them, but without becoming a mother through marriage. similarly alienated and unfulfilled desire also finds a voice in sidney’s lyrics. The song ‘sleep, baby mine’ is the only poem to survive in sidney’s own hand,19 and it is therefore ironic that it has the most bafflingly elusive voice of all his works; apparently sung by a beautiful woman, it nonetheless articulates cries of male desire which cannot be contented: sleepe, Babie mine, desire, nurse Beautie singeth: Thy cries, ô Babie, set mine head on aking: The Babe cries ‘way, thy love doth keepe me waking’. lully, lully, my babe, hope cradle bringeth Unto my children alway good rest taking: The babe cries ‘way, thy love doth keep me waking’. since, babie mine, from me thy watching springeth, sleepe then a litle, pap content is making: The babe cries ‘nay, for that abide i waking’. (Certain Sonnets, 6)

When we are told ‘nurse beauty singeth’ this seems to imply that the singer is female, but the fact that she says so alienates her voice from herself; if she is the nurse, then the baby is not really hers, despite the possessive claims with which she tries to settle the wailing child. of course, it is merely a matter of observable realism that a nurse should say ‘mine’ of a child, but in doing so she is ventriloquizing the voice of the biological mother, and our awareness of this fact may help to account for the unstillable nature of the baby’s crying. other possessive pronouns further accentuate the sense of inadequate possession that drives desire: when the baby repeats ‘thy love’ the ambiguity of the genitive is played on very nicely – is it the baby’s love for the nurse/mother, or the nurse’s love for the baby or for someone else that keeps the baby awake? The way in which the speaker is responsible for the baby’s watching is therefore left very cloudy. of course, we also need to see that the poem is an allegory and that the baby is really just a figure for desire and that the speaker and the nurse (who represents Beauty) are therefore not necessarily to be identified; in fact, reading this way, Beauty’s nursing of the babe not only fails to satisfy him but brings

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him into being, in provoking and increasing his desire. if the speaker is male, and the baby’s father, then he is as responsible as the nurse Beauty for the baby’s wailing. The elegant translation of the wailing into language – ‘Way, thy love doth keepe me waking’ – seems an odd thing for desire to say: why would desire want the thing it loves to go away? Here a third meaning must be entertained: that it is the speaker’s love, which has nothing to do with the baby, that keeps the baby awake. This indeed sets one’s head on aching. The crying child is a brilliant figure for the indeterminacy of desire: it is not clear whose desire it is, who feeds it, what or who the desire is for or what it wants. The speaker insists that to feed desire will be to make it contented, but the baby concludes the poem with the perverse assertion that it is staying awake because of the breast; that which ought to bring content brings only more desire. The baby’s voice is a remarkable example of the way self-assertion derives from resisting dependency. This discontented infant is a long way from Freud’s primal plenitude. as any attentive parent knows, infants are often a lot less blissful than in Freud’s fantasy. such alienations of voice, recognizing the frustrating autonomy of poetry, are often (and rightly) treated as playful: yet they also reflect a real discontent at the disunion of selfhood. The ideas involved here are commonly imitated. sidney’s niece lady Mary Wroth’s Urania (1621) has a song ‘love, a child, is ever criing’ – but this is merely a poetry of statement,20 condemning the needy folly of love, without her uncle’s extraordinary manipulations of voice. sidney’s enemy edward de Vere, 17th earl of oxford, writing around the same time as his courtly rival, presents a much more powerful articulation of the way in which poems, like desire, get out of the poet’s control (see chapter 1, above). The imagery of parenthood, then, is a brilliant figuration of restlessness in the making and unravelling of a unified identity. sidney, his ‘thoughts in labour’ (Astrophel and Stella, 37. 2) frequently presents his thoughts as creatures that ‘struggle forth’ from him (50. 3), as if they were his children – the most obvious example is his image of being ‘great with child to speake’ in the sequence’s first sonnet (line 12 – see chapter 1, above). in a simple sense this is masculine appropriation of the pains and risks of childbirth along with its fecundity, all in an attempt to give a natural validity to poetic creation. it also operates as a response to a female monarch whose position inverts gender roles, making the male poet feel feminine and passive, whilst at the same time allowing some masculine self-assertion; the poet is more a mother than the Queen will ever be. Masculine poetic procreation is, however, thwarted by feminine figures, many of whom are figurations

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of his attitude to the Queen, whose unprocreative nature is touched upon, along with her perceived tendency to stifle masculine heroic endeavour. The sense of helplessness caused by this, i shall argue, enables a conscious strategy of ironic self-assertion for sidney, and is adapted by greville as a way to reject the world completely. as soon as astrophel’s thoughts have their birth, he witnesses their ‘weake proportion’ (50. 7) and ‘those poore babes their death in birth do find’ (line 11). This is more than a modesty formula regarding the weakness of sidney’s poetic creations; like the ‘ioyes abortiue, perrisht at their byrth’ at the end of samuel daniel’s Delia (lx. 11),21 it expresses a larger frustration at a world centred on an ageing Queen whose fetishized virginity is so unmaternal. The Queen is an absent presence throughout Astrophel and Stella, obliquely invoked as the cause of all astrophel’s frustration with stella. The violent ‘step-dame studie’ of the first sonnet (line 10) may glance at lettice Knollys, stella/Penelope devereux’s mother, newly married to the earl of leicester, to whom sidney had been in the position of son and heir until she produced a son;22 but the figure also surely glances at the Queen, who might at one stage have married leicester. in the face of this complicated familial dynamic, sidney’s assertion that his invention is ‘nature’s child’ (1. 10) constitutes a yearning for straightforward reproductivity, but, as this seems impossible, he settles for a yearning for maternal affection. The Queen herself had insisted in 1563 ‘that though after my death you may have many stepdames, yet shall you never have any more [natural] mother than i mean to be unto you all’.23 sidney’s initial invocation of a stepmother hints that he lives in a world where natural maternity has failed, whether through the Queen’s failure to reproduce or through her failure to be generous to him. in the Third eclogues of Old Arcadia, which are a marriage sequence, geron tries to persuade Histor of the need to marry and reproduce: nature above all things requireth this: That we our kind do labour to maintain; Which drawn-out lines doth hold all human bliss. Thy father justly may of thee complain, if thou do not repay his deeds for thee, in granting unto him a grandsire’s gain. Thy commonwealth may rightly grieved be, Which must by this immortal be preserved, if thus thou murder thy posterity. His very being hath he not deserved Who for a self-conceit will that forbear Whereby that being ay must be conserved.24

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‘self-conceit’, an almost masturbatory focus on one’s individuality, is set against true procreative and creative being, which is associated with continuity and the public sphere. The very strong emphasis here on paternal obligation and continuity, in the voice of an old man (invoking – unusually – the idea of grandpaternity), implies the frustration of masculinity in an age when maternity seems to have given way at the nation’s centre. david glimp argues that sidney’s writing at such times suggests a deep need for reproduction (of the right sort) to contribute to national success; at other times, however, the New Arcadia ‘locates pleasure elsewhere – in delay, in the play of “fruitless” passion, in the failure or conflict between ethical forms, in the myriad diversions from governed generation’.25 Astrophel and Stella as a whole is full of the latter desire, part of which may be a proto-Freudian nostalgia for some (imaginary) primal plenitude; but part of it also surely involves a desire for the Queen to act as an affectionate mother to her younger courtiers. on the other hand, as elizabeth Mazzola puts it, ‘sidney seeks to rewrite the rules of [elizabeth’s] maternal dynamic by reinventing infantile power and constructing his own language of the family, aiming to win the queen’s love without remaining her child.’ 26 yet the futility of this double desire can only end in frustrated self-assertion, a cycle of joys and annoys that goes nowhere (Astrophel and Stella, 108), because fully realized or paternal masculinity cannot be achieved. However hard one tries, one cannot father oneself. astrophel envies cupid’s closeness to stella not so much in erotic as in infantile terms – ‘in her breast thy pap well sugred lies’ (12. 5); the affection desired is maternal and nutritive rather than sexual. a few sonnets later, poets’ desire for immortality is cast in similar terms – ‘if . . . your name / you seeke to nurse at fullest breasts of Fame’ (15. 13–14); such demands for nourishment may well be courtly tropes expressing the desire that the Queen look after sidney and his fellow poets, giving them the sort of financial nourishment she gave her favourites (through monopolies for example). according to a conventional and oft-cited image from isaiah (49:23), ‘kings shall be thy nursing fathers, and their queens thy nursing mothers’; the passage’s original context in fact involves the humiliation of gentile rulers, but it was generally taken to imply the duties of the monarch. sidney’s invocations of maternity imply a desire for better fortune, even when he knows that this may be delusory: dorus in Old Arcadia talks of his ‘motherly destinies’ when he falsely believes that the stars are favouring him in love.27 The maternal tends to hold out false hopes, but this does not mean that one should abandon hope.

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What sidney considers the ill-gotten – or at least undeserved – wealth of Penelope devereux’s husband lord rich is expressed in an image of grotesque, non-mammalian maternity: riche fooles there be, whose base and filthy hart lies hatching still the goods wherein they flow; and damning their owne selves to Tantal’s smart, Wealth breeding want, more blist, more wretched grow. (24. 1–4)

The nutrition sidney wants is different from this. sidney’s desire for pity relies at times on presenting himself as an orphan; he refers to his ‘orphan sense’ which yearns for an ‘inward sight’ (88. 10), and bemoans the ‘orphane place’ which stella has left (106. 3); both images may suggest a nostalgia for primal plentitude, but rather than implying a desire for sexual satisfaction, they call on someone to mother him. even when desire speaks out, bursting through astrophel’s virtuous repression, its demand is ‘give me some food’ (71. 14). The ‘sobs’ that are transformed to joys in stella’s ‘court of blisse’ (44. 11–14) seem like infantile wailing rather than the adult ‘words’ that ‘do well set forth my mind’ with which the poem began; as in ‘sleep, baby mine’, desire turns the articulate man into an infant (infans, not speaking), whose frustration at being misunderstood is brilliantly (and paradoxically) articulated in this poem. The ‘true sighes’, ‘uncalled teares’ and ‘dumb eloquence’ (61. 1–2) articulate astrophel’s ‘infelt affection’ (line 5) and make him forgo ‘all selfeness’ (line 7) in the interest of the woman. The imagery of this poem’s octave seems affectionately maternal, as he ‘learnes’ desire from his ‘saint’ (lines 6–8); yet such desire is unpleasing to its object (as in ‘Four Foster-children’), and must be unlearned because it is ‘sophistrie’ (line 13). He needs cupid to intervene, or must concede ‘That i love not, without i leave to love’ (line 14). The slight ambiguity here allows the line’s primary meaning – ‘i can’t really love unless i give up unlicensed (oedipal?) desires’ – to be infected with another resonance – ‘i can’t love unless i’m given leave/permission to do so’ – investing the woman with maternal power. she is full of love, in that she is the object of desire, but the love she possesses is, in the next poem, presented as ‘unfelt’ (62. 3). The conclusion of that poem ‘dear, love me not, that you may love me more’ (line 14) constitutes a demand for erotic rather than maternal love, for love on the man’s own terms. at times sidney tries to reset the balance of love, in order to return to infant innocence, but there is always a fall. in the First song, stella is presented as very much a maternal figure: ‘Who hath the breast whose milke doth passions nourish, / Whose grace is such, that when it chides doth cherish?’ (lines 17–18). Feminine affection is needed to make the masculine

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individual. in the ninth song, sidney reverses the model of affection, in an image that Thomas roche calls ‘ludicrously inappropriate’:28 Stella . . . more love hath proved, in this caitife hart to be, Then can in good eawes be moved toward Lamkins best beloved. (lines 22–5)

even the sequence’s central kiss may be more nutritive than sexual (perhaps that’s why he takes no more than a kiss in the second song). The ‘hungrie bit’ that appears to be astrophel’s sin against stella (82. 11) may reflect a moment of weaning, where the infant’s own teeth force the separation; the promise that ‘i never more will bite’ (line 14) comes too late. in more figurative terms, this may constitute a promise to the Queen not to bite her again (as he had in writing against her marriage plans in his Letter to Queen Elizabeth of 1579), if she continues to feed him. astrophel’s recognition of his ‘fault’ as the ‘child of my blisse’ (93. 1) suggests that the fall is the inevitable consequence of nourishment, with the figurative language hammering home the point that the only children to be produced by this relationship are sins. infanticidal grief is the further consequence: sorrow comes with such maine rage, that he Kils his own children, teares, finding that they By love were made apt to consort with me. (95. 9–11)

if the woman will not pity him, as is only proper for her sex, a violent masculinity will emerge, which is characteristically figured as paternal. although sidney’s relationship with his own father seems to have been very good, fatherhood in his works seems to be associated (as in the case of euarchus) with harsh judgements. The rage of sorrow, despite its displacement from astrophel himself, is nonetheless an aspect of his own frustrated masculinity, and may contain a threat: if he cannot gain maternal nutrition from the Queen, his sorrow will turn to manly rage. This threat contrasts strongly with another aspect of sidney’s presentation of astrophel as a child that has been evident throughout the sequence – his playfulness. sidney called his Defence of Poetry an ‘ink-wasting toy’,29 and Arcadia ‘this child i am loath to father’;30 his literary works could be both children and toys, almost interchangeably; the poet could be both child and father. in such cases it is important to recognize that, as Katherine duncan-Jones points out, ‘all sidney’s poetry is early poetry’.31 in Astrophel and Stella the ‘boyish kind’ (11. 1) of cupid’s actions allows a certain licence to a lover’s actions. as with the infantile sobs we have seen in other poems, this figure allows the lover to evade rational discourse. By

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playing with the ‘guilded leaves or colourd Velume’ (line 6) of a book rather than reading it, cupid ignores its substance, the ‘fruit’ of the writer’s mind (line 8). This image has its own resonance, which develops a further aspect of childishness in love; a boyish lover cannot be expected to produce sexual or reproductive fruit. Being himself a child, his sexuality is not adult and procreative. as this sonnet develops into its sestet, there seems to be a procreative element as we are told that cupid looks ‘babies in her eyes’ (line 10). This common image is, however, explicitly non-procreative, babies meaning dolls – imitations of children rather than real children (which would usually be called babes). The denial of true procreation in this image resembles donne’s in ‘The ecstasie’ – ‘pictures on our eyes to get / Was all our propagation’ (lines 11–12).32 Mere reflection, despite the traditional topos of eye-propagation (which even gives rise to the word pupil, meaning little doll), is only playing at procreation, as the rest of the poem suggests: cupid plays ‘bopeepe’, ‘Playing and shining in each outward part’ (lines 13–14). infantile love is a fruitless game, like courtiers’ courting of the Queen – a game sidney refused to play. implicit in all of this play is a desire to grow up, and to see a balanced relation between the sexes that would allow a proper foundation for the individual self and therefore for the nation. a different game is played in sonnet 17, whose narrative needs to be quoted in full: His mother deare Cupid offended late, Because that Mars, growne slacker in her love, With pricking shot he did not throughly move, to keepe the pace of their first loving state. The boy refusde for feare of Marse’s hate. Who threatned stripes, if he his wrath did prove: But she in chafe him from her lap did shove, Brake bow, brake shafts, while Cupid weeping sate: till that his grandame Nature pittying it, of Stella’s browes made him two better bowes, and in her eyes of arrowes infinit. o how for joy he leapes, ô how he crowes, and straight therewith, like wags new got to play, Fals to shrewd turnes, and i was in his way.

This fable is more complex than that of the Freudian family romance: not wanting to be enthralled to women, the macho stepfather war-god, becoming less martially potent, has threatened disapproval if the boy restores his sexual potency, but this has merely led to the sexualized mother castrating her son. Fortunately a regression to a more primally affectionate mother (imagined as a grandmother) is possible, re-enabling the boy’s

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phallic potency; but this potency is only play, however serious its effects on astrophel. despite attempts to escape into the masculine martial world, sidney is trapped in the infantile world of love, where even phallic potency is dependent on women. The poem’s playful comedy allows the reassertion of a truly feminine nature, which may be an ultimate model for the reconciliation between the sexes, but which at the moment seems an arbitrary power acting on male figures who are unable to grow up. astrophel elsewhere is disappointed in his efforts to recruit cupid on his own side, as the boy’s play is dependent on his mother and stella (sonnet 43), and he is therefore not on the side of men. astrophel tries to make a sympathetic pact with the boy, thinking stella is tyrannizing over him in sonnet 47 (line 3). she has become the boy’s cruel schoolmistress (reminding us surely of ‘step-dame studie’), but the boy may ‘myche’ – i.e. play truant – ‘to desire’ (line 13). The fundamental burden of this difficult poem is the boy’s lack of desire, which bewilders astrophel; the boy’s infantile asexuality is used as a mediating figure to explain stella’s apparent frigidity, and insofar as stella becomes a maternal figure, she may become undesirable. This idea of asexuality is developed fully in sonnet 73: Love still a boy, and oft a wanton is, school’d onely by his mother’s tender eye: What wonder then if he his lesson misse, When for so soft a rod deare play he trie? and yet, my starre, because a sugred kisse in sport i suckt, while she asleepe did lie, doth lowre, nay, chide; nay, threat for only this: sweet, it was saucie Love, not humble i. (lines 1–8)

cupid is childishly sexless (indicated by his rod’s softness) and astrophel protests that he is too; he wanted to suck like a baby, not fuck like a man (suck looking like fuck in renaissance script). He only wants nutrition, and a certain childish licence to play. ironic as this obviously is, the sophistry involves a kind of kidding on the level. What astrophel does not want is a really sexual woman, but she appears anyway: But no scuse serves, she makes her wrath appeare in Beautie’s throne; see now who dares come neare Those scarlet judges, threatning bloudy paine? (lines 9–11)

of course, this is just a matter of stella blushing, but the terms in which she does so (‘bloudy paine’) introduce more serious thoughts, perhaps even of the pains of childbirth; the man may think of sexual desire as childish play, but it is a more serious matter for a woman. This woman is also

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invested with the traditionally masculine power of a judge – as was Queen elizabeth, who often cast herself in the role of the biblical judge deborah. Whilst he still wants to kiss this angry woman, astrophel also wants to allay his fear of feminine power by keeping things playful, repressing ideas of sex and reproduction in order to have a maternal beloved who can nourish him and let him play like a wanton cupid. sidney’s self-ironizing tone here recognizes that the male refusal of adult responsibility is as much the problem as the arbitrariness of female rule – a point that will be picked up by spenser: masculinity is mere play unless it can come to a proper accommodation with women. The dangers of this childish play are fully spelled out by sidney’s closest friend Fulke greville, who offers his own mostly negative if brilliant solutions. His love poetry makes constantly creative use of the image of cupid, often conceived with a certain pederastic desire, to represent the frustrations of a courtly eroticism that cannot fully mature. even if the poems are not all directly written to Queen elizabeth, much of the poetry’s sense of his being kept in a state of infancy and inaction may be attributed to the maternal but unprocreative queen. in Caelica xxv greville presents the loss of Myra’s love as a weaning (line 7), but there is no escape from the ‘vnconstant mother’ (7. 14) nature who is the ground of greville’s imagination.33 like ralegh in The Ocean to Scinthia, greville’s weaning only leads to the persistence of desire: mich like the gentell lamm, though lately waynde playes with the dug though finds no cumfort ther. (lines 71–2, see chapter 1, above)

This courtly poetry does not involve a Freudian desire for some primal plenitude. it expresses resentment for the impossibility of either action or procreation in the face of a mother/queen who represses courtiers’ desires to marry whilst not being procreative herself, and who stalls masculine endeavour; as Wallace Mccaffrey puts it: The difference between the horizons which bounded the world of essex or ralegh and those of the Queen could hardly have been wider. The spacious skies of the two men’s vision looked down on a universe of far-reaching splendours, rich in untold – and undiscovered – wealth, and of empires yet to be conquered. The Queen cast her eyes no further than her own domains, a housewife glumly surveying her empty cupboards and bare rooms, distrustful of her neighbours and apprehensive of thieves at the door. essex dreamed of conquest, a new english empire; the Queen sought nothing more than survival.34

to imagine elizabeth as a housewife is surely to buy into the sexism of the forward Protestants; but the Queen herself sometimes wished she were a

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‘milkmaid’, and it is clear that sidney’s party used her femininity against her whenever they felt she was acting timidly.35 as we have seen, sidney’s opening sonnet of Astrophel and Stella presents ‘step-dame studie’ as that which one needs to escape in order to express the truth of one’s heart, possibly glancing at the Queen. Theseus, in the opening of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, expresses his frustration that he must wait for the death of the old moon before he can marry, surely with a glance at Queen elizabeth, by now an ageing moon-goddess: o, methinks, how slow This old moon wanes! she lingers my desires, like to a step-dame, or a dowager, long withering out a young man’s revenue. (i. i. 3–6)

There may be a pun here on weans/wanes (probably pronounced the same at the time), and the lines express a general frustration at the unmaternal withering figure of the Queen who, in the 1590s, so frustrated male endeavours to influence the nation’s future imperial role, and who jealously tried to prevent her courtiers from marrying. The need to be weaned from this woman was felt by many poets, and greville continually presents the associated sense of repression as fear and, most forcefully, childishness. in the Arcadia sidney’s Pyrocles/Zelmane/cleophila considers the childishness of love and of love: This is thy work, thou god forever blind; Though thousands old, a boy entitled still. Thus children do the silly birds they find With stroking hurt, and too much cramming kill.36

The lines stand as an implicit (though not intended) rebuke to the eavesdropping Basilius, an old man made childish by love; the 17-year-old Pyrocles is more licensed to be a lover than the old ruler. When astrophel appeals to ‘fellowship’ with the moon (sonnet 31), he similarly hints that the Queen’s amorous disposition is more inappropriate for her age than for his, and his sense of feminine disregard for his virtue is surely a statement of courtly frustration. The sense of frustrated courtly ambition in elizabethan love poetry has been forcefully demonstrated by arthur Marotti, who shows that love is a figure for ambition in sonnet sequences; he argues that sidney wittily reconverts the language of ambition into the language of love. But the effect is to signal the connection between the two. The pretense that love and ambition are separate either in courtly life or in the lover’s motives is a thin one . . . [and that] at the end of the sonnet sequence the lover is left disgraced and exiled in a state that characterizes sidney’s own political frustration and

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disillusionment. The central irony of Astrophil and Stella is that the heterocosm of love to which the poet-lover has fled from the viciously competitive world of the court is no compensation for sociopolitical defeat. instead it is the locale for a painful repetition of the experience in another mode.37

alwes also argues that sidney is engaged in a critique of elizabeth’s ‘Petrarchan policy’, ‘exposing it as a form of tyranny’ and Marotti sees greville as bringing this mode of courtly writing to an end.38 greville continued to write Caelica after Queen elizabeth’s death and resolves his sequence in a very different way from his predecessors, but it is a way that is suggested by his imagery from the first. sidney could only end Astrophel and Stella in frustration, but with an abiding sense of self-worth;39 spenser, in Amoretti, could resolve frustrations by the fulfilment of his own marriage, moving into the satisfactions of the private sphere; but greville moves away from the erotic, seeing it as fundamentally worthless; unlike spenser he refuses to accept procreative generation as the fulfilment of desire, and sees spiritual regeneration, detached from women, as the true end of desires that will always be frustrated, whether they are erotic or political. Caelica lxii is perhaps the clearest presentation of frustrated aspiration as childishness. The poem begins with the straightforward suggestion that the cult of love is fundamentally pederastic – ‘Who worships Cupid, doth adore a boy’ (line 1). Whatever greville’s erotic leanings – and there is evidence that he had homoerotic attachments, particularly to the servant who killed him40 – the suggestion here is of the non-adult, nonprocreative nature of desire at court. initial desire may be ‘earnest’ (line 2) but soon gives way to a sequence of dissatisfactions. love here is figured as childish because it is only ‘play’ (line 5). Krier has argued, following d. W. Winnicott, that we ought to see a desire for spaces of play as more important to self-development and the development of mutuality in love than some Freudian/lacanian notion of nostalgia for plenitude,41 but play in this poem is figured as frustration and futility – ‘They cry to haue, and cry to cast away’ (line 6). We might expect martial success to be a more fulfilling alternative to this play – as we suspect it was for sidney – but, perhaps looking back on sidney’s death, greville knows that no real fulfilment can be found in that sphere: Mars is an idoll, and Mans lust, his skye; Whereby his glories still are full of wounds, Who worship him, their fame goes farre and nigh, But still of ruine and distresse it sounds. yet cannot all be wonne, and who doth liue, Must roome to neighbours and succession giue. (lines 7–12)

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The ‘succession’ of future generations prevents any sense of perfection for the individual; rather than validating love, then, the idea of procreation merely unsettles any sense of achievement. even artistic achievements are produced for the satisfaction of future generations rather than the self: ‘like the Masons, whose art building well, / yet leaues the house for other men to dwell’ (lines 17–18). There is no sense that these ‘other men’ are greville’s or the masons’ own offspring; the alienation of artistic achievement is complete. all these species of human achievement are presented as But humane idols, built vp by desire, Fruit of our boughs, whence heauen maketh rods, and babyes too, for child-thoughts that aspire: Who sees their glories, on the earth must prye; Who seeks true glory must looke to the skye. (lines 20–4)

all our achievements come back to beat us; any form of aspiration is childish, toy-like and self-perpetuating. The turn to heaven at the end of the poem gives us in miniature the movement of the whole sequence: a sense of frustration in the erotic sphere, so often a figure for other aspirations, translates into the spheres of those other aspirations and taints them. Theseus, at the end of shakespeare and Fletcher’s The Two Noble Kinsmen argues that For what we lack We laugh, for what we have are sorry, still are children in some kind. (v. iv. 132–4)

This model of childish dissatisfaction, for greville, is less a matter of resignation than it is for Theseus. it infects the whole sequence, which cannot imagine any form of earthly satisfaction or human maturity. Helen Vincent argues, rightly i think, that there is no programmatic attempt in Caelica to put amorous discourse under pressure from a calvinist viewpoint, though, as she acknowledges, there are traces of that calvinist position throughout the sequence. discussing Caelica xci, she concludes, ‘This is the labyrinth of error greville has constructed in Caelica. He has created the world of love to deal with the field of mutability; now he condemns it, defining it precisely as mutability itself, “which lives but to move”, not rewarding the religious devotion he has lavished on it.’ 42 Having licensed himself to speak through figuring himself as a child, greville finds himself in a double bind, in that anything he says is dismissed as childishness or play. Caelica xi is on the face of it quite a simple poem, using the common trope (e.g. Astrophel and Stella 8) that love in a cold english climate is slower to develop but causes more suffering due to the frigidity of english

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women’s hearts. yet greville complicates this with reflections on love’s childishness which make the figure of cupid more vivid and pertinent than it is in most Petrarchan poetry: Iuno, that on her head Loues livery carried, scorning to weare the markes of Io’s pleasure, Knew while the Boy in Æquinoctial tarried, His heats would rob the heauen of heauenly treasure, Beyond the Tropicks she the Boy doth banish, Where smokes must warme, before his fire to blaze, and children’s thoughts not instantly grow Mannish, Feare keeping lust there very long at gaze: But see how that poor goddesse was deceiued, For Women’s hearts farre colder there than ice, When once the fire of lust they haue receiued, With two extremes so multiply the vice, as neither partie satisfying other, Repentance still becomes desires mother.

The use of Juno here provides a figure of feminine power that differs from normal presentations of Queen elizabeth as diana or images of the maternal, threateningly erotic Venus. Juno is known for her jealousy, and for her retarding of masculine imperial endeavours in the Aeneid, as well as being the goddess of childbirth, an aspect that is reinforced in the poem’s enigmatic final lines. greville presents england as a place where desire cannot be fulfilled because of fear, a word he repeatedly uses to suggest the way in which royal power oppresses courtiers’ imaginations. as david norbrook observes, this concept demonstrates greville’s sense that the political order of his times is irrational and deceitful, ‘held together by fear rather than love’.43 in Caelica ix greville argues that ‘Tyrannie counsell out of feare doth borrow’ (line 5); in xxvii he concludes that love’s arrows are headed and feathered with fear (line 14); and in lix he considers the dangers from ‘the Monarchy of Feare’ (line 2). Fear prevents men from growing up, from realizing their masculinity: if ‘Women, and children are not farre at odds’ (xxvi. 14), greville’s love for a woman makes him persist in ‘child thoughts’ (line 5). Female power, whether it be in love or in politics, makes men childish, and therefore unable to realize their desires and beget children, either literally, or more figuratively, by begetting virtuous actions. like donne, for whom ‘love childish is’ (‘loves exchange’, line 18), but only in the sense of making one infantile, greville can only see the infantilizing side of this eroticism. Caelica xi then ends with a very odd image of maternity. rather than allowing any true procreation, rather than allowing any christian narrative in which desire produces repentance, it ends

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with a cyclical maternity which figures repentance as persistently leading to new desire. The childishness of greville’s amorous poetry is not procreative but a desperate repetition compulsion. Freud allied such a compulsion with the death instinct, or at least with a desire to return to an earlier state (of infancy?); here, it seems more like a self-assertive defiance of the mother, ruling out femininity in favour of radical masculinity. Caelica lxi illustrates the problems of childish love and play particularly acutely. greville roots ambivalent desire in infantile love of the mother, or at least of the nurse. it is clear that it was possible to think of the nurse as the original love; ralegh, advising his son invokes the idea: remember when thou wert a sucking child, thou diddest loue thy nurse, and that thou wert fond of her, after a child thou didst loue thy dry nurse, and didst forget the other, after that thou didst also despise her, so will it be in thy liking in elder yeares; & therefore, though thou canst not forbeare to love, yet forbeare to linke, and after a while thou shalt find an alteration in thy selfe, and see another far more pleasing than the first, second, or third one.44

The pattern of love and despising is understood to be a continuous one in the life of an elizabethan gentleman, licensing a certain promiscuity even as one regrets each infidelity. The first stanza of Caelica lxi keeps us in the present moment, controlled by the use of while: Caelica, while you doe sweare you loue me best, and euer loued onely me, i feele that all powers are opprest By loue, and loue by destinie.

Here is a moment of fullness (lines 1–2) in which the present love revises the past into perfect harmony, but this is itself open to revision in the next lines, where the result is knotty and ambivalent as only greville can be. it is ‘all powers’ not all my powers that are oppressed by love. We might unfurl these lines as follows: all powers – which might normally be oppressive – are cancelled out by your love for me, but unfortunately that includes my own powers, so that what ought to be a moment of liberation from larger external forces just makes me feel passive and reminds me of the larger forces, which we call destiny, and which ultimately, in the grand scheme of things, make love irrelevant.

This is a lot for two lines to do, but i think we need the whole force of this feeling to carry us into the lovely second stanza: For as the child in swadling-bands, When it doth see the nurse come nigh,

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The recollection of infantile impotence here is provoked by the feeling in the first stanza. (The memory of swaddling bands here is a brilliant figure for impotence, but only a figure i think; the feeling does not rely on them, and we do not need to assume that sixteenth-century child-rearing practices caused the feeling of impotence.) an emphasis on the nurse rather than on the mother proper is significant in that it suggests a slight dislocation from the original mother. The nurse, as a substitute mother, is obviously in some sense not really the mother and yet is more real, more physically nurturing, than an absent aristocratic mother. Harvey points out that ‘the elite woman’s use of a wet-nurse would have heightened her fertility’ (because of the removal of the contraceptive effect of breastfeeding);45 so mothers’ handing over their sons could be seen as a double betrayal. on the other hand, the mother can play the role of nurse, and thus oddly be substituting for herself. at this the mind boggles a bit, i admit, but the point is that even in the Freudian primal plenitude there is an issue of substitution – has the Fall into the ‘symbolic order’ ‘always already’ taken place, as lacan would argue? The nursing mother is also the functional opposite of the proverbially cruel stepmother deployed by sidney. greville identifies his persistent feeling of being carried along by fate with the feelings provoked by the women in his life who best exemplified fate – the women who had to him been be-all and end-all: the nurse and Queen elizabeth. in the first poem of Caelica greville had treated the Queen as the ‘only she’ (line 18) who ‘set[s] all [other] women light’, and is the ‘one creature’ (line 6) in whom nature has placed all love, delight, virtue and reason. greville’s poems to Queen elizabeth persistently wrestle, like ralegh’s Ocean to Scinthia, with the problem of such an overdetermined figure, a figure which is perfect but nonetheless capable of change. greville often realizes that the change is as much in himself as in the beloved, though it feels like the change is in her; in lxi he identifies this feeling with the change in the nurse and in the infant’s feelings for her. The third stanza brings in the poem’s main theme – the same as Caelica viii – that ‘she once was faire’ (line 12); the Queen/nurse has been marked by constant love, and thus made less beautiful, but for that reason she is the more to be loved: When i see in thy once-beloued browes, The heauy marks of constant loue,

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i call to mind my broken vowes, and child-like to the nurse would moue;

This turns immediately into the fourth stanza: But Loue is of the Phoenix-kind, and burnes it selfe, in selfe-made fire, to breed still new birds in the minde, From ashes of the old desire: and hath his wings from constancy, as mountaines call’d of mouing be.

The uniqueness and self-regeneration of the phoenix made it a powerful figure for elizabeth,46 but the feeling about the phoenix is allied here with greville’s own very personal sense from the third stanza that love rekindles precisely through remembrance of what it once was. The integrity of the self is put in doubt by this, because it feels like changeability, but this is at least partly challenged by the spenserian pseudo-etymology of mountains, which provides a sense that movement is in some sense permissible to that which is truly great; even mountains move (though so slowly we do not see them – like the movement of the earth round the sun?); the line might therefore be compared to the ‘trepidation of the spheres’ in donne’s ‘a Valediction: Forbidding Mourning’. greville’s poem as a whole turns at this point with a consequential, gathering ‘then’. The remaining six stanzas are perhaps not as striking or complex as the first four, but the appeal here is as touchingly indirect as the line ‘thou mightst him yet recover’ at the end of drayton’s ‘since there’s no help’: Then Caelica lose not heart-eloquence, loue understands not, come againe: Who changes in her owne defence, needs not cry to the deaf in vaine.

The feeling here is nearly as compressed as that of the first stanza (though more straightforward): i understand, even if i didn’t at that moment because of my love – i know you were only pretending not to love me because i didn’t respond well to your declaration of love (i was only silent because of my love, oppressing my powers . . .) i will hear next time. speak again.

The next stanzas obliquely bring up the issue of his own infidelity, masked by the generalization that new lovers are always a bit more exciting than old. Woven in, too, is a sense of how the once-perfect beloved is always going to seem unfairly less when she diminishes, even in comparison to

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the imperfect: ‘Because you’re no longer as beautiful as you once were, i’ve turned to others who are in truth still less beautiful than you even now – but i should have imagined you as you once were’: loue is no true made Looking glasse, Which perfect yeelds the shape we bring, it vgly showes vs all that was, and flatters euery future thing. When Phoebus beames no more appeare, tis darker that the day was here.

There is something rather specious about this appeal to a sense of general human imperfection. The next stanza, though, in returning to the feeling of lost infancy, captures a sense that all lovers are inadequate substitutes for the maternal one; therefore, one will return compulsively to the original love: and though the youth that are estrang’d From Mothers lap to other skyes, doe thinke that nature there is chang’d Because at home their knowledge lyes; yet shall they see who farre haue gone, That Pleasure speaks more tongues than one.

The poem could end here, as multiplicity is set up against uniqueness – but this fall into the symbolic order, as lacan would put it, is not taken as a sufficient conclusion. We have to make an imaginative leap into the last two stanzas, as an unarticulated realization has taken place: while he’s been doing all this elaborate excusing of his heart’s intermittencies, her love, so full in the eternal present of the first stanza, has died. He has missed his chance. yet that is not all that is expressed here: despite his feeling that a phoenix-like rebirth of love can come about through nostalgia, despite the knowledge that feeling has its seasons, some things cannot really be recovered; some things die: The leaues fall off, when sap goes to the root, The warmth doth clothe the bough againe; But to the dead tree what doth boot, The silly mans manuring paine?

There is a strong resemblance to donne’s ‘nocturnal upon s. lucies day’ here, in which the ‘The world’s whole sap is sunk’ (line 5), but it has its own intrinsic character. i think we need to emphasize the gender in that last line to get the full effect (and the pun on manuring helps this): man

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can revive his love, woman cannot, a thought elaborated in the next lines: Vnkindnesse may peece vp againe, But kindnesse either chang’d or dead, selfe-pittie may in fooles complaine;

Man is unkind (unnatural as well as inconstant?) whereas woman is kind, until she changes, but then her changes are final. greville has here neatly articulated the difference between the male and female changeability that has been one of his major themes – man’s inconstancy is trivial, only to be expected, but a woman’s change in feeling, be she mother, queen or lover, is more serious. The gender politics here may just be another way of articulating a double standard, but they are based on a deep consideration of the movement of feeling. after all this, the last lines are sour in a way that recalls Wyatt at his most disagreeable; greville becomes petulant and accusatory in a way that seems to have forgotten what has gone before: Put thou thy Hornes on others head: For constant faith is made a drudge, But when requiting loue is judge.

to blame the woman for cuckolding him, after all that has gone past, seems disingenuous, but greville sees that it’s the only way out of his self-pity; in any case, it is unclear to whom ‘constant faith’ is attributed here – or indeed the cuckold’s horns, which are regarded as belonging to the woman. The need for some sort of objective judge invokes the idea of masculine authority: the primal bliss of maternal or nutritive affection is exposed as a fantasy because it is never sufficiently mutual or simultaneous; in the sequence as a whole, it must be replaced by the more fully reciprocating love of a male deity. There is no hope for balance between the sexes. More fully than elsewhere in the verse of the period, greville here demonstrates the failure to present an integrated selfhood in the face of a complex of feeling – filial, courtly and amorous – that seems to offer fullness but really only offers passivity and disappointment. This can also be seen in Caelica lxxxiv, another farewell to love. in a standard trope, the amorous pursuits of youth are abandoned for more serious matters – in this case, we are to infer from the rest of the sequence, spiritual thoughts. Whilst the feeling here, as in lxii, is directed to the ‘sweet boy’ cupid, in this case greville figures his own love as maternal, saying ‘Thy Mother lou’d thee not with more deuotion’ (line 2). His presentation of cupid as a ‘yong Master’, for whose ‘promotion’ he has striven (line 4) redirects the

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ambition Marotti sees as always a component of sonneteering outward, enabling greville to disclaim ‘Honours’ and ‘Fame’ (lines 5–6).47 so obsessive is the idea of childishness that even fame is presented as ‘the child of paine and anguish’ (line 6, emphasis added). although it is common enough in the literature of the period, greville makes his own special use of the valuation of male endeavours as a superior labour to female parturition: the pervasiveness of childish metaphors extends the notion of love’s childishness into other spheres of endeavour. almost simultaneously, though, greville disarms any notion that love is sought for procreative purposes, saying ‘i bow’d not to thy image for succession’ (line 9); this may be compared to the mournful sense of ‘succession’ we have seen in Caelica lxii. His religion of love, though explicitly idolatrous, was pure, seeking no procreative end beyond itself, living entirely within the circular ‘confession’ of ‘the playes of hope and fear’ (line 11). The poem does not wholly escape from this futile play, however: even as greville turns to less treacherous thoughts, presumably of a religious cast, he presents this as play: ‘Cupid now farewell, i will go play me, / With thoughts that please me lesse, & lesse betray me’ (lines 13–14). as the discourse of amorous childishness infected that of other ambitions, so the discourse of childish play infects even the spiritual sphere. The ‘baby-thoughts’ (lxxviii. 9) he had earlier presented as the consequence of endearing oneself to authority now infect every other way of looking at the world. greville begins Caelica with a belief that delight is ‘the fruit of vertue’ (i. 2), but develops a sense that the true fruits of love are hard to find, ‘down in shadowes hidden’ (xxxviii. 6); there is a growing scepticism in the amorous poems about the value of any human action, considering love – and by extension ambition – as fundamentally fruitless (e.g. cxii, cxxxiii). in xcix he takes this to its fullest extent in saying that man is ‘fruit of his degeneration’ (line 8); far from there being any possible redemption of love through its generative fruit, as there is for spenser, greville’s sterner calvinism denies any redemptive power to any action of man. The childishness of love we have seen in the earlier poems is now explained as a representation of the futility of all endeavour; all action is a kind of pointless play. elaine y. l. Ho argues that ‘the discourses of Petrarchanism and calvinism, while apparently irreconcilable, are engaged in a kind of textual interplay’.48 Writing about Caelica x she argues The poem chips away at the long-established Petrarchan model of inner complexity and exposes its own paradoxical modes of consciousness and rhetoric as its very source of error. greville rewrites the Petrarchan lover as the object lesson of the Fall and its impact on human existence.49

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to have children – who would be born in original sin – would simply perpetuate this play. The crucial insight in lxxxvii, that ‘generation to corruption turnes’ (line 4) points the whole sequence towards spiritual regeneration. The erotic play of the early part of the sequence, which was always presented as futile, is now recognized as deeply painful: in lxxxvi, childish play turns cruel – ‘life is a top which whipping sorrow driueth’ (line 10), a game that man must ‘endure’ (line 9); the image is derived from sidney, whose Plangus in the New Arcadia refers to his grief for erona as ‘like a top which nought but whipping moves’.50 This image is reused in xcvi, where greville also re-imagines the circular amorous imagery of lxi: Flesh but the Top, which onely Whips make goe, The Steele whose rust is by afflictions worne, The Dust which good men from their feet must throw, a liuing-dead thing, till it be new borne, a Phenix-life, that from self-ruine growes, or Viper rather through her parents torne, a boat, to which the world itself is sea, Wherein the minde sayles on her fatall way. (lines 49–56)

The pain and futility of re-emergent desires, of repetitive play, must be recast to a truer regeneration which destroys its parents. The later poems in the sequence see through the ‘Visions and dreames’ of love as ‘faire inticements’ which ‘want delight’ (cii. 2; 21); the ‘large desires’ (ci. 1) which stir ambition are also cut off as illusory, despite their ability to make men live for others and escape pure ‘selfnesse’ (line 5), because ultimately they are the actions of men who depend on royal favour, fundamentally the work of ‘Power’s babie-creatures’ (line 33) – dolls, not even children. all forms of earthly generation are to be rejected – even the church is a ‘sensuall vnsatiable vaste wombe’ (cix. 15) which disgraces the true unseen church it represents. We have moved from a sense of the individual disempowered by maternal authority to a rejection of all matter. The rejection of material existence, and the rejection of the maternal and the mere play involved in eroticism all tie together as he strives for the pure paternity of god, which is to ‘fill vp time’ (line 29). The earlier image of Philocell as ‘great with child with teares’ (lxxv. 139) which echoes sidney’s first sonnet in Astrophel and Stella – ‘great with child to speak’ (line 12) – is an image not of artistic creativity as it was for sidney, but of proleptic self-regeneration, escaping the self-destructive cycles of love, in which ‘self-pitties have reflexion, / Backe into their own infection’ (lxxv. 89–90). love’s childishness finally enables one to see the childishness and sorrow of the whole

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world of human endeavour; rather than harking nostalgically back to a primal mother or asserting one’s masculine rights, it tends towards a rejection of all that is maternal and material. sidney may have been in the process of returning to the paternal/martial/masculine world before his death (if so, he did this more through actions than words); greville, as dissatisfied with a male monarch as a female, sought another Father to destroy the dilatory, repetitious, painful material and maternal world. sidney’s use of such formulations are, finally, an expression of frustration at being kept in what he saw as a childish condition of subjection; they also constitute a way of apologizing for not accomplishing as much as he might have done. no longer so much the bright young prospect he had been on his grand tour, and with plans to marry princesses having come to nothing,51 his childish subjection to stella is a way of accounting for his arrested development without exactly blaming the Queen. in 1578 sidney wrote to languet of his surprise that ‘when i’ve not yet done anything worthy of myself, you want me tied in the chains of matrimony’.52 Marriage, for sidney, was something that ought to come after achievement. in Astrophel and Stella 21 sidney writes, with clear autobiographical implications, since mad March great promise made of me, if now the May of my yeares much decline, What can be hoped my harvest time will be? (lines 9–11)

The harvest, in terms of both achievement and the production of children, can here be thought of only as a decline. greville picks up on sidney’s resentful and ironic formulations of maternal nostalgia – specific as they were to his friend’s condition before his marriage in 1583 and his military appointments in 1585 – and generalizes them into a hostility to the whole material and maternal world. greville, then, writes a kind of anti-poetry, fundamentally suspicious of the grounds of its own creation and inhabited by an extraordinary sense of loss of one’s own maternal origins, and a number of other poets pursue this self-nullification. William drummond of Hawthornden, writing in around 1614, gives a similarly fascinating instance of poetic alienation based on loss both of the beloved and of the maternal origins of the poetic voice: My lute, bee as thou wast when thou didst grow With thy greene Mother in some shadie groue, When immelodious Windes but made thee moue,

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and Birds on thee their ramage did bestow. sith that deare Voyce which did thy sounds approue, Which vs’d in such harmonious straines to flow, is reft from earth to tune those Spheares aboue, What art thou but a Harbenger of Woe? Thy pleasing notes be pleasing notes no more, But orphane Wailings to the fainting eare, each stoppe a sigh, each sound draws forth a teare, Bee therefore silent as in Woods before, or if that any Hand to touch thee daigne, like widow’d turtle, still her losse complaine.53

The pathos of orphancy here is not made an instrument of appeal as it is in daniel; the confusion of this pathos with the pathos of widowhood is a fascinatingly sidneian confusion. From the very beginning of his very sidneian sequence, drummond has wanted to ‘reade my death’ in a ‘living Booke’ (First Part, sonnet [i], line 14); the life of books preys on the life of the poet. The idea of wanting one’s lute (a figure for the poetic voice) to return to its original, maternal state as wood reflects a desire for silence as perfect speech. something similar seems to be behind george chapman’s ‘Hymnus in noctem’ (Hymn to night, from The Shadow of Night (1594)), one of the strangest of elizabethan poems; it is a grand reflection on nothingness which nonetheless sees human nothingness as inadequate compared to the true night-nothingness which is the mother of us all: a stepdame night of minde about vs clings, Who broodes beneath her hell obscuring wings, Worlds of confusion, where the soule defamde, The bodie had bene better neuer framde, Beneath thy soft, and peace-full couert then, (Most sacred mother both of gods and men) treasures vnknowne, and more vnprisde did dwell; But in the blinde borne shadow of this hell, This horrid stepdame, blindnesse of the minde, nought worth the sight, no sight, but worse then blind. (lines 63–72)54

The eerily comforting idea of the true mother is displaced by the stepmother who can be blamed for human inadequacy even though it is hard to see how she really differs from the mother herself. The poem yearns for the creativity of the true mother even as it laments the ruinous state of creation itself (‘a lump reuerst’ – line 101); better there be no form than chaotic form, the poem insists, better to return to a lack of order than to

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live in ‘order, orderlesse’ (line 37). The absence of a truly masculine spirit of order is the real cause of this lament: what makes men without the parts of men, or in their manhoods, lesse then childeren, But manlesse natures? (lines 91–3)

as a result, the poem’s addressees, the initiates who are ‘noblest heires of men’ must accept nullity as better than any human attempt at creativity (line 379) – that is, the best men must welcome darkness at least ‘till vertue flourish in the light of light’ (line 403). only the return of a truly masculine light will enable men to display their virtue. The whole poem, then, may amount to an extravagant version of a common lament about the best men not being promoted (so that, here, they’d be better accepting true nullity unless they can get the true light of favour); yet the mode of expression implies a real yearning for both the primal mother and the truth-bringing father. This may be driven by frustration at actual feminine rule, or by an associated need to return to the very origins of creativity in order to achieve real form and order. only by an engagement with the ultimate original mother can paternal creativity be secured. if uncertainty of paternity can lead to a reliance on other forms of creation, chapman seems to insist that all creation except the original ex nihilo needs to be rejected in order to assert masculine virtue. Manly silence would be the only end to this. More radical than silence, though, is the manly death-impulse of greville’s chamber-drama Mustapha, which revises the Arcadia rather as Caelica revises Astrophil and Stella, removing its forgiving conclusion in which a friendly balance between the sexes is nearly achieved; whereas the ‘old’ Arcadia ends with the promise of Pyrocles having a son and Musidorus a daughter (who presumably will eventually marry one another), greville’s play is one long, highly sententious vacillation about whether a father should kill his son; the King, soliman, fears his heir, the title character, principally at the prompting of his wife, Mustapha’s stepmother. The thin plot is essentially a pretext for mulling over the nature of royal power and its corresponding paranoias, along with the central issue of whether a noble son should be more a source of pride and hope or fear and anxiety. The fact that the son’s reverence for his father is such that he imitates him in almost everything (i. ii. 138–9) seems more like a threat than a compliment to the paranoid soliman, who asks himself shall loue be a chaine, tyed to my crowne, either to help him vp, or pull me downe? no, no: This Father-language fits not Kings. (ii. ii. 36–8)

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The contradiction between paternity and kingship resembles the problems of euarchus in the ‘old’ Arcadia, but is still more acute. love threatens rather than underpins rule; it is a bond that enslaves rather than providing security and order. yet achmat later in the same scene argues that this problem is not unique to fatherhood, but in fact applies to all one’s subjects and begets only self-destructive impulses: selfe-murther is an vgly worke of feare; and little lesse is childrens ouerthrow. Mustapha is yours; more sir! euen he is not, for whom you Mustapha or’ethrow. Suspitions common to Successions be; Honor, and Feare together euer goe. Who must kill all they feare, feare all they see, nor subiects, sonnes, nor neighbourhood can beare: so infinite the limits be of Feare. (lines 148–56)

added to this pragmatic warning, Mustapha’s sister camena is significantly the voice of nature: The tendernesse of life it is so great, as any signe of death we hate too much and vnto Parents sonnes, perchance, are such. yet nature meant her strongest vnity, twixt sonnes, and Fathers; making Parents cause Vnto the sonnes, of their humanity; and children pledge of their eternitie. Fathers should loue this image in their sonnes. (ii. iii. 89–96)

This moves elegantly from natural causes of affection to more theological reasons: as sons are images of eternity and god is eternal, one should love one’s sons. The jealous father, however, is more apt to see the son as an image of his mortality than of eternity; yet to resist mortality is futile: as time points out in the third chorus, the attempt to ‘master Time’ must fail (chorus tertius, line 41). in a further twist, however, the figure of eternity refutes time as being one who, like soliman, builds his plan ‘Vpon the mouing Base of self-conceipt’ (line 110); only a commitment to eternity can save one. soliman becomes ‘distract’ with the plots he ‘will conceiue’ (iv. i. 24–5) because he can only see a choice between his own death and that of his son, being unable to see things under the aegis of eternity. Mustapha’s christ-like death, forgiving his father and those who have plotted against him, is not redemptive: it purges soliman’s rage, but provokes popular rebellion. This is a development of the ‘old’ Arcadia’s murmurings against euarchus’s judgement of his son and nephew, for

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there is to be no happy ending as in sidney’s romance. The murder is significantly carried out by eunuchs, whose sexless position disconnects them from the interests in succession that impel the people. The people rise up on behalf of legitimacy (as they in fact did in 1553 when they resisted the attempt to put Jane grey on the throne in place of Mary tudor), suggesting that they are connected to nature more than a patriarchal king is; but their rage can do no good, for in greville’s view there can be no redemption from within nature. revising his friend’s work to much more pessimistic ends, greville can see no hope in biological generativity. This may seem a characteristically calvinist point of view, but it is clearly inflected with greville’s own personal and poetic preoccupations. Having no offspring of his own, and seeing poetry as an ink-wasting toy that he would not publish (accepting as true what may have been merely a modesty formula for sidney), greville can have no commitment to the future of the world. although he may have shared some aspects of greville’s religious position,55 edmund spenser has much more hope for the political world and for poetry’s ability to affect it; he is therefore a truer heir of sidney, attempting to find the balance between male and female, mother and father, judge and lover that sidney struggled with and that greville saw as impossible. spenser, in dedicating Complaints to sidney’s sister, the countess of Pembroke, registers his sense of sidney being cut off before he could produce true fruit, and suggests that he might in a sense be sidney’s successor: Most Honourable and bountifull Ladie, there bee long sithens deepe sowed in my brest, the seede of most entire loue and humble affection unto that most braue Knight your noble brother deceased; which taking roote began in his life somewhat to bud foorth:56and to shew themselues to him, as then in the weakenes of their first spring: And would in their riper strength (had it pleased high God till then to drawe out his daies) spired forth fruit of more perfection.

in the next chapter, we will examine the nature of that fruit, fathered in a sense by sidney. spenser’s riper strength enables him to avoid the selfdefeating silences invoked by greville, drummond and chapman, and demonstrates that poetry can be more than a childish toy. sidney’s persistent love may keep him from ‘use of day’ (Astrophel and Stella, 108. 11), but spenser finds a way to escape from the darkness of obsessive eroticism and puts love to some use.

ch apter 4

Spenser’s timely fruit: generation in The Faerie Queene

edmund spenser is more preoccupied than any other poet of his time – arguably more than any poet tout court – with the idea of biological generation. This preoccupation informs his attitude to sexuality, shapes the structures of his narrative and other forms, and is the crucial arena of his presentation of the future, both historical and spiritual. He tries to complete sidney’s project of balancing the sexes’ generative capacities for both public and private ends; his aim – never quite completed, but always in hopeful process – is to reconcile himself (and all men) with a positive model of femininity, challenging in the process traditional models of masculinity and misogynist or passive models of femininity. recent studies of eros in spenser have tended to follow a lacanian model of desire, but the problem with lacan’s work (taken up by some of his followers) is its resolute anti-biologism, in which the use of pseudo-mathematical models rules out any procreative basis for sexuality.1 This misrepresents the work of a writer like spenser, to whom the idea of procreation is absolutely central; to dismiss or marginalize this issue in spenser is to focus too much on the poems’ secondary or momentary concerns and to distort the poet’s urgent sense that his work has a direct application to earthly and spiritual praxis. richard Mallette has argued that ‘Book iii is not “about” marriage but rather “about” desire and its discontents. especially as it progresses, the book allegorizes how reformation idealizings about marriage cannot satisfy the dark imperatives of sexual desire’;2 but in this account the procreative imperative is left darkest of all. in Mallette’s chapters on marriage in Books iii and iv he acknowledges that there are three basic purposes for marriage in the discourses of Protestantism – ‘procreation, companionship, and relief of concupiscence’ – but he only discusses the latter two. Procreation is too easily taken as read, or transferred into other fields, suggesting that it is only a metaphor for other concerns. This chapter will examine the question of generation in spenser’s poems (with a particular emphasis on The Faerie Queene), showing how 95

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this crucial aspect of life is used to bridge the divides between discursive spheres – the public and the private, the historical and the eschatological, the contemplative and the active – whilst remaining a focus of interest in its own right. We will also see that generation is an exceedingly difficult matter for spenser; though it is certainly one of his major priorities, a number of large obstacles and difficulties intrude which make for magnificent poetic tension. amongst these difficulties are the Queen’s virginity, the necessary uncertainty of paternity, and the problematic nature of procreation in a world whose end, if not imminent, is at least a matter of pervasive concern. spenser responds to the calvinist concern that the majority of one’s offspring may be damned (see chapter 1, above) not by refusing to invest in procreation like greville, nor by accepting small returns on the investment as richard greenham does, but by making the difficulty of the investment a guarantor of its success. in other words, the harder won the offspring, the fuller expression it is of the parents’ and its own salvation. generation is not an unequivocally positive image in spenser, but through his use of the idea of fruitfulness, he negotiates and dispels some of its ambiguities. Fruit is a key word used by spenser for a variety of metaphorical purposes, many of them generative, though often carrying a simpler sense of result, whose frequent negative implications are put in deliberate contrast with the generative sense. The sense of result can be seen, for example, in the fight between the Brigants where ‘strokes’ are ‘the frute of too much talke’ (vi. xi. 16.1). The vicious Phaedria, patron of idleness, argues that fruit is not the result of work, but something that merely emerges naturally, without the need for man to stir (ii. vi. 15–17); her words are opposed to the poem’s central belief that actions always have an appropriate fruit. Medina, patron of the via media of temperance, criticizes the ‘bitter fruits of warre’ (ii. ii. 30.6), the adjective hammering her point home and uncomfortably anticipating the phrasing of the union between scudamour and amoret. a sense of the fruitlessness of battle can be found in Paridell’s narration of the trojan War and the ‘fruitless liues’ (iii. i. 35.8) spilled for Helen. Battles which do not secure generative continuity are meaningless, however much fame they produce. When Britomart fights radigund they ‘on the ground their liues did strow, / like fruitless seede, of which vntimely death should grow’ (v. iii. 31.8–9); as Mary Villeponteaux argues, these lines reflect Britomart’s defeat of the unmaternal aspects of herself.3 death is untimely by contrast to generation, which is often described as ‘timely fruit’, suggesting its urgency, and its consequential involvement in historical time.

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in Book v vice is seen as having ‘wicked seede’ (v. i. 3.3) whose ‘fruitful rancknes’ (3.9) heroes must destroy, and indeed the whole poem’s first use of the word ‘fruit’ refers to the spawn of error. all these negative images of fruition are, however, only to be put in contrast with happier connotations, which are seen as primary, from the ‘fruitfull lap’ of earth (iv. x. 45.2) at the temple of Venus to the dynastic ‘Most famous fruits of matrimoniall bowre’ (iii. iii. 3.7) which introduces Merlin’s prophecy. Mammon’s poisonous fruits and tempting ‘fruit of gold’ (ii. vii. 63.7) are contrasted with those from earth’s ‘fruitfull woomb’ (ii. vii. 51.6). Fruit is not just an image of generation, but also of spiritual regeneration for the redcrosse Knight: charissa, who has just left childbed, comes to him from ‘her fruitfull nest’ (i. x. 29.8). There are ambivalent uses of the word, such as when Belphoebe’s treatment of the wounded timias (who at this moment represents ralegh) is called ‘foolish physick, and vnfruitfull paine’ (iii. v. 42.1) because her cure has only done him the deeper damage of making him fall hopelessly in love with her; surely there is an implicit critique here of the fruitlessness of her virginity, yet her virginity is a few lines later described as bearing ‘fruit of honour and all chast desyre’ (iii. v. 52.9). Here we must see the contrast between generative biological fruit, and the fruit which is the result of emulative activity, heroic or poetic, in honour of the Queen. The biological meaning, whatever the weight of the other meanings, remains primary, and must be connected to the other meanings. spenser tries to harmonize all the forms of fruitfulness in his verse – including the private, the political, the poetic and the spiritual. However, as he finds that the public realization of masculine virtue has not yet been fully achieved, even by the end of the second instalment of the poem, he has to find other ways of securing the future, turning to the private sphere, the ‘secret societie’ of marriage as Perkins called it, to make his poem and his nation hold together. spenser never quite reconciles his incompatible desires for poetic completion and for endless continuation, corresponding respectively to his concern for the next world and for the improvement of this one; but we perhaps should not expect a poet to square such a circle better than philosophers or theologians can. nature’s judgement at the end of the ‘cantos of Mutabilitie’ (first published 1609) is meant to be something of a mystery: i well consider all that ye haue sayd, and find that all things stedfastnes doe hate and changed be: yet being rightly wayd They are not changed from their first estate; But by their change their being doe dilate:

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giving the last word to this feminine maternal voice is significant; it emphasizes the need for a process of becoming, of working one’s own perfection. if, in calvinist terms, one cannot cause one’s own salvation,4 one can put one’s labour into maintaining a previously ordained state of election. nature further tells her ‘daughter’ Mutabilitie that ‘thy decay thou seekest by thy desire’ (59. 1–3); this is enigmatic – is all aspiring desire self-destructive (as desire destroys itself in its achievement in ‘Four Foster-children of desire’ – see chapter 3, above)? or does this mean that change would cease to change if it got a static status at the top of the universal hierarchy? certainly the next lines seem to support the latter meaning: ‘time shall come that all shall changed bee, / and from thenceforth, none no more change shall see’ (lines 4–5). The paradox of change being required to produce perfection expresses the relation between male and female as much as that between god and nature. indeed, nature has to guarantee Jove’s status and only the rather transparent use of the classical name instead of that of the christian god prevents this idea from being heretical. nature’s mysterious disappearing act (going ‘whither no man wist’ – line 9, emphasis added), and spenser’s turn, in propria persona, to the ‘great sabbaoth god’ in the next canto (viii. 2. 9) may reassert masculine control, but feminine generation is not ruled out – in fact, it is clear that male authority depends on ‘that which nature sayd’ (line 1). one must therefore learn to trust women, however mysterious they may be, as a father must trust his wife in order to be a father; this may be the central lesson of The Faerie Queene as a whole. despite spenser’s primary concern with procreative and redemptive union between the sexes, there is little pregnancy in the direct narrative of The Faerie Queene, but there are plenty of descriptions of it in the backstories of the characters, and the imagery of fruition, generation and birth permeates many sections of the poem, even if they are largely frustrated. oddly, given that spenser is often seen as a poet of matrimony, births in The Faerie Queene tend to take place outside wedlock (and it is an interesting coincidence that illegitimacy rates in england peaked in the years 1590–1610).5 even the poem’s over-arching royal hero is a bastard, the product (as tradition dictates) of Uther Pendragon’s seduction of gorlois’s wife. Bastardy is used principally as a narrative trope which enables the unfolding of identity, in that characters’ uncertainty as to their paternity allows

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them to learn their legal identity as they develop in their virtues; characters who are not bastards have often been stolen from their parents (like the redcrosse Knight). one effect is that the heroes of the poem – even arthur – come to seem like self-made men; whilst they are, according to the canons of romance/epic genre, of noble blood, they also resemble the new Men who played such an important part in tudor culture and society; such men often fictionalized their ancestries, and spenser, in providing a genealogy for the earl of leicester in his lost Stemmata Dudleiana,6 had contributed to such fictions; the romance tropes of lost children could therefore be used, half-jokingly and perhaps with an element of doublethink, to validate dubious claims – of which the tudors’ supposed descent from arthur and spenser’s own claim to be related to the spencers of althorp were merely the most salient. additionally, in a patriarchal society which had done away with Il Papa’s authority and which had an unmarried woman on the throne, the absence of fathers and the proliferation of unsponsored sons had an obvious resonance. Perhaps the most crucial effect is to register The Faerie Queene and the england it celebrates as potentially or provisionally heroic rather than fully realized in its heroism: unlike the imperial rome celebrated by Virgil, england was only about to be worthy of its epic. arthur, presented ‘before he was king’ (‘letter of the authors’, lines 18–19), is set off on a quest not to become king, but to find gloriana and marry her. Marriage therefore becomes the poem’s model for succession to the throne, even though in this case marriage will not produce offspring. The legendary arthur’s wife guinevere, whose infidelity was a major cause of her husband’s tragedy, is replaced by the shadowy elizabeth-figure, who nonetheless may bear some traces not only of guinevere but of Morgan le Fay and her sister Morgause (or anna), with whom (according to Malory) arthur did produce a son – Mordred, the direct cause of arthur’s defeat. spenser cannot quite suppress this tragic material, cannot quite brush it all away in favour of a pure Queen elizabeth. The effect of using arthur in the first place is to cast an element of doubt into the poem’s whole narrative of succession, which is only partially expunged by introducing artegall and Britomart as an alternative line, and by having arthur never meet gloriana. spenser’s ‘darke conceit’ (letter to ralegh, line 4) is, finally, a set of suggestions as to how the conception of a new king might take place. He wants to redeem the biological by adumbrating a new balance between the sexes, but he also wants to escape from the darker aspects of its mystery and to bring a secure masculinity to light, albeit a masculinity that has won its security through a full engagement with the feminine.

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arthur, however, is rarely associated with women in the course of the poem. When he first tells his story to Una (significantly enough as she represents truth), he presents himself in terms that stress his masculinity: all so soone as life did me admitt into this world, and shewed heuens light, From mothers pap i taken was vnfitt: and streight deliuered to a Fary knight, to be vpbrought in gentle thewes and martiall might. (i. ix. 3.5–9)

line 7 has the basic meaning ‘i was taken from my mother’s breast before i was ready’, but also strongly suggests ‘i was not fit for womanly nurture’. The word delivered suggests that he was rescued from his mother, and straight may hint not only at immediacy but at him being unbent by maternal care. lisa celevosky shows that part of male development in sixteenth-century england was the escape ‘from familial, and particularly maternal, jurisdiction – an environment labelled “a cage, a cloister,” by richard Mulcaster’ (headmaster of spenser’s school);7 such an escape may be echoed in a male desire to escape from the influence of the Queen. These suggestions are all the stronger given that most mothers’ attempts at care in the poem (notably cymoent’s and agape’s) go badly wrong. arthur’s one major deviation towards womankind comes when he is pursuing Florimell, ostensibly to rescue her from dangers which have in fact passed: oft did he wish, that lady faire mote bee His faery Queene, for whom he did complaine: or that his Faery Queene were such, as shee. (iii. iv. 54.6–8)

it is easy to see here a lacanian model of desire as substitution, particularly as Florimell is the figure of whom a simulacrum is later made; such substitutional desire is, however, precisely used in circumstances where procreation is not possible: both Florimell and gloriana are fetishes, objects of arbitrary and fruitless desire, because they are not going to produce children. arthur’s fruits will be in action, not in procreation, as his separation from his own mother perhaps intimates. arthur can only be an agent of divine grace if he is ruled out of the economy of generation. He makes remarkably little effort to find the Faerie Queene;8 neither guyon nor artegall (knights of Faerie court) are able to guide him to the Queen, and the total absence of narrative progress for arthur is surely a problem. towards the end of the poem as we have it, arthur’s quest for gloriana is periphrastically described as ‘first enterprize’ (vi. vi. 44.19), which hardly seems a matter of urgent desire, suggests that

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he has barely started, and makes it seem rather like a diplomatic mission to unite himself with Faerieland in a marriage of convenience. Francis Bacon argued in ‘of love’ that ‘nuptial love maketh mankind; friendly love perfecteth it; but wanton love corrupteth and debaseth it’.9 it might be simplistic to say that something like this informs spenser’s allegory of love, and his poetry does, crucially, demonstrate the problematic permeability of these categories, but arthur’s love, which might have a nuptial basis (as Bacon coyly puts it), nonetheless moves towards a friendly, perfectionist conclusion. it is more about his achievement of self than about any biological inheritance; as richard a. Mccabe observes, arthur’s mind . . . ‘did trauell as with chylde, / of his old loue, conceau’d in secret brest’ (iv. 9. 17). like george, he is ‘with child of glorious great intent’ seeking to deliver himself of ‘th’ eternall brood of glorie excellent’ (i. v. 1). This is perhaps the most subtle use of the child imagery in the poem since, as Plato pointed out, children after the spirit are preferable to children after the flesh (Symposium, 209d). arthur is giving birth to his own heroic character.10

This is clearly right in respect of arthur (and the decidedly chaste guyon, for that matter) but spenser does not consistently follow Plato in privileging the memetic over the genetic; the two spheres work in parallel, and are mutually reinforcing. However much spenser values the masculine, heroic or memetic, he never loses faith in the feminine, the sexual and the reproductive; he is as keen to redeem the former as the latter, for only in that way can really constructive human creativity, in all fields, be secured; in fact, it may be more difficult to redeem the masculine than the feminine. Many other male characters in the poem are fatherless. The redcrosse Knight is told that he is the offspring of saxon kings who have fought ‘many bloody battailes’ (i. 65. 3), but he is not at all interested in them; the fairies who took him from his parents have detached him from family quite finally. instead, he calls contemplation (who is telling the story) ‘holy sire’ (67. 1), indicating his greater attachment to the church. guyon’s origin is completely neglected; he is totally dedicated to the Faerie Queene as a Knight of Maidenhead, and it would perhaps be as indecorous for such a man to have parents as for him to have a lover; it is however notable that the other major knight whose origin is Faery court, calidore, is not given a genealogy – devotion to the Queen seems to rule out one’s parentage, as it does in ‘Four Foster-children of desire’. Britomart’s father is only introduced as the owner of the mirror in which she sees artegall, though in order to do so she has to be in the habit of going into her father’s closet, indicating his trust of her, his only child and heir (iii. ii. 22). cambell and

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triamond are both fatherless: the former’s back-story and parentage are to be found in chaucer’s Squire’s Tale, so that spenser does not need to supply them; the latter is more intriguing, his fairy mother having been raped by a passing knight (iv. ii. 45). This ‘Fond’ and ‘carefull’ (51. 5; 53. 1) mother has bound his life up with his brothers’, a precaution that is ultimately useless, but which may express their unusual loyalty to one another (brothers in The Faerie Queene usually being in competition): in the absence of a father, and with no paternal identity to compete over, brothers’ lives are more firmly bound together; they get their souls by ‘traduction’ from one another, rather than from their father. artegall is not a rival to his halfbrother arthur because he has been taken by fairies, like redcrosse, and consequently does not know who he is (iii. iii. 26–7), but he will replace his brother in the poem’s dynastic and generative economy. although he is the main future father in the poem’s narrative structure, artegall is himself rather marginal: his roles as substitute for arthur, avatar of impersonal justice, representative of lord grey, and quest-object for Britomart mean that he is not allowed much subjectivity. The maternal element of the poem’s dynastic narrative is thus given more attention than the paternal, which is made rather passive. Britomart’s quest for artegall is much more the focus of the narrative’s attention than arthur’s barren quest for gloriana. The feminine romance quest for that which will be productive is privileged at least as highly as masculine heroic questing characteristic of true epic.11 Britomart’s desire is validated by Merlin’s prophecy: Most noble Virgin, that by fatall lore Hast learn’d to loue, let no whit thee dismay The hard beginne, that meetes thee in the dore, and with sharpe fits thy tender hart oppresseth sore. For so must all things excellent begin, and eke enrooted deepe must be that tree, Whose big embodied braunches shall not lin, till they to heuens hight forth stretched bee. For from thy wombe a famous Progenee shall spring, out of the auncient troian blood, Which shall reuiue the sleeping memoree of those same antique Peres, the heuens brood, Which Greeke and Asian riuers stayned with their blood. renowmed kings, and sacred emperours, Thy fruitfull ofspring, shall from thee descend; Braue captaines, and most mighty warriours,

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That shall their conquests through all lands extend, and their decayed kingdomes shall amend: The feeble Britons, broken with long warre, They shall vpreare, and mightily defend against their forrein foe, that comes from farre, till vniuersall peace compound all ciuill iarre. (iii. iii. 21–3)

spenser plays splendidly here with the ambiguities involved in retrospective prophecy (also wittily dissected by W. H. auden in ‘secondary epic’).12 The alternation of rising and descending metaphors for succession serve to firm up the family tree, making it both deep-rooted and endless, even though the line will, strictly, end with Queen elizabeth. The idea of the tree stretching out to heaven is on the one hand a straightforward hyperbole, but also suggests that this tree will be in existence until the end of the world, when heaven replaces earth and universal peace (a phrase that is also hyperbolic, but is also literally meant as the end of the world) will come – but would that end come with the death of elizabeth? Britomart’s offspring are called fruitful, but in some respects this is a transferred epithet; it is she, not her ultimate offspring elizabeth who is fruitful. The only alternative to this sense of an ending is to consider that Britomart and her line are so fruitful that one branch (elizabeth’s) can fail, and there can still be descendants; who these would be was very much an open question in the early 1590s (elizabeth in fact had remarkably few cousins, owing to her father’s and grandfather’s tendency to behead them). With the gloriana–Belphoebe–elizabeth line having no prospects, much of the rest of the poem is concerned with generation; ultimately, in Books v and vi, alternative possibilities for succession are suggested, but before those books sexuality is more frustrating than fruitful. Dalliances are an important part of the poem’s sexual ethics – as the word suggests, their primary meaning is delay from one’s proper task; what is actually going on sexually is not quite clear, but they certainly do not produce offspring.13 The first, and perhaps most important instance of a dalliance is redcrosse’s with duessa; redcrosse has come to a fountain cursed by diana because its tutelary nymph had rested idly from the chase: Hereof this gentle knight unweeting was, and lying down vpon the sandie graile, dronke of the streame, as cleare as christall glas; eftsoones his manly forces gan to fayle, and mighty strong was turnd to feeble frayle: His chaunged powres at first them selues not felt,

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This moment of sloth leads to redcrosse’s defeat by orgoglio; it is hard to say how sexual this is, but it is clearly not reproductive sexuality, as his masculine powers have been so dissipated. as sex usually produces offspring in romance, this is surely not meant to be full intercourse. it is clear that non-reproductive sexual practices, though frowned upon, were relatively common in renaissance societies;14 perhaps, like President clinton, people did not consider them sex. The phrase ‘Pourd out in loosnesse’ is suggestive, but it is not absolutely condemned in itself – it is the carelessness of health and fame that is the problem. in being loose, unfocussed in one’s desires, one is not reproductive, as in the Bower of Bliss and other moments of sexual lassitude. in episodes which are more generative than merely sexual, the problems caused are more consequential, and even irreversible. The poem’s most significant baby is ruddymane in Book ii: he was conceived in wedlock, but is orphaned as a result of his father’s seduction by acrasia; and his birth is associated with the death of his ironically named mother amavia (‘one who loves life’). after the mother’s death guyon picks up the baby: Who with sweet pleasaunce and bold blandishment gan smyle on them, that rather ought to weepe, as carelesse of his woe, or innocent of that was doen, that ruth emperced deepe in that knyghtes hart, and wordes with bitter teares did steepe. ah lucklesse babe, borne under cruell starre, and in dead parents balefull ashes bred, Full little weenest thou, what sorrowes are left thee for porcion of thy liuelihed, Poore orphane in the wide world scattered, as budding branch rent from the natiue tree, and throwen forth, till it be withered: such is the state of men: Thus enter we into this life with woe, and end with miseree. (ii. ii. 1–2)

This is undoubtedly a tragic moment, with the (strangely meretricious) smile producing horribly incongruous irony, and the pity of guyon awoken in a way that will later impel his ‘rigor pittilesse’ against the Bower

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of Bliss (ii. xii. 83.2). The mention of the parents’ ashes may suggest the idea of the phoenix and rebirth, but only in an ironic manner. detached from the family, the child is not associated with renewal; like many of the poem’s heroes (especially arthur and guyon, as we have seen), the condition of being thrown into the world seems to preclude ideas of further generation: he will live only until he dies, or withers. His condition is taken as typical of all humanity in guyon’s final sententia, and as the babe’s hands cannot be washed of his parents’ blood, a clear emphasis on original sin is introduced, despite his innocence of the particular event of their death. However, the Palmer goes on to give a lengthy interpretation of the incident, which turns away this original sin interpretation: the waters of this fountain will not cleanse the babe’s bloody hands because the fount is derived from the transformation of a determined virgin who escaped ravishment by praying to diana; its purity will not allow it to be tainted with blood. This is a complex incident, but its most significant element is the fact that a virgin cannot redeem the bloody babe, whose hands stay bloody not because they are unwashable, but because guyon and the Palmer choose to keep them so as a reminder of the need for vengeance, and as a ‘moniment’ of amavia’s innocence (ii. ii. 10.9). The virgin may be perfect, but cannot do anyone else much good – virginity (like the Queen’s) amounts to spiritual selfishness. like the Puritan emphasis on original sin, it is too passive and solipsistic for spenser. an active model of feminine virtue is needed. The poem’s whole narrative had begun with a monstrous image of original sin in the form of error who is, significantly, presented as an image of grotesque maternity. Whilst there is clearly an element of the Fall in the error incident, and Milton obviously based his sin in Paradise Lost on this figure, it is not in fact quite right to make a simple identification between error and original sin. error is inevitable, but it does not make mankind utterly irredeemable; in fact, the great error is to believe that one has defeated error. The redcrosse Knight’s later priggish misjudgement of Una is his true sin – whilst spenser’s primary meaning is that the great mistake is in giving way to illusory opinion (in the person of archimago) rather than trusting truth (in the person of Una), the secondary meaning is that one should trust women, despite the fact that error is feminine. in fact, spenser is careful to suggest that the femininity of error is only figurative: she is first described thus: Halfe like a serpent horribly displaide, But th’ other halfe did womans shape retaine, Most lothsom, filthie, foule, and full of vile disdaine. (i. i. 14.7–9)

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it is clear that error only has woman’s shape, rather than being essentially a female person – and that shape only applies to her top half; her genitals are not a woman’s. The ambiguous syntax here is important: does line 9 qualify ‘woman’s shape’ in general, this woman’s shape, or the figure as a whole? We might in the last case see error as hermaphroditic, given the snake’s phallic associations, but this is clearly the wrong kind of union between the sexes. Whilst error is in some sense a fusion of eve and the serpent of genesis, spenser is not here engaging in the traditional misogynistic practice of blaming original sin on women – after all, it is Una who warns redcrosse against error – but at first sight error does seem to be an attack on maternity. it is perhaps the chief fascination of The Faerie Queene to work out in any given moment how much of the narrative or poetic vehicle is in play along with the allegorical meaning, and this is one of the earliest moments of such intrigue. it is awkward that error has no serpentine mouth, so it is given a sting – it is a bit of a mess of a monster. Then we are told of her there bred a thousand yong ones, which she dayly fed, sucking vpon her poisnous dugs, eachone of sundrie shapes, yet all ill fauored: soone as that vncouth light vpon them shone, into her mouth they crept, and suddain all were gone. (i. i. 15.4–9)

The point about error is that she produces offspring that are unlike herself. she is the negative image of multiplicity, which hates the unity of light and truth, and returns to maternal darkness. error’s offspring therefore look forward to the Blatant Beast, which is defeated by calidore at the end of the poem: like as whylome that strong Tirynthian swaine, Brought forth with him the dreadfull dog of hell, against his will fast bound in yron chaine, and roring horribly, did him compell to see the hatefull sunne, that he might tell to griesly Pluto, what on earth was donne, and to the other damned ghosts, which dwell For aye in darknesse, which day light doth shonne. so led this Knight his captyue with like conquest wonne. (vi. xii. 35)

The light of day can expunge the darkness associated with the maternal mystery, but the very fact of the comparison to Hercules reminds us that this is something that needs doing repeatedly, not a terminal moment. in Frank Kermode’s terms, myth is transformed into fiction – an absolute

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becomes a usable human precedent enabling one to live in a world of uncertainty and change rather than in the darkness of mystification.15 as such, it also resembles a process of coming out of Plato’s cave, which luce irigaray speculatively but suggestively figures as male philosophy’s escape from the maternal womb.16 There is in fact some evidence for linking the womb with imperfect perception in the writing of the period: edward, lord Herbert of cherbury, declares in his Life that certainly since in my Mothers Wombe That Vis Plastica or Formatrix which framed my eyes, eares and other senses, did not intend them for that dark and noysome place, but as being conscious of a better life made them as fitting organes to apprehend and perceiue the things which should occure in this world my soule hath formed or produced certaine Facultyes, which are almost as vselesse for this life as the abouenamed senses were for the Mothers wombe.17

The escape from the womb may be the escape from the cave, but there must be another escape into the light of heaven. The offspring of error are figures of darkness, and, rather than coming further into the light, go back into the cave – which is, however, figured as a mouth rather than a womb, because error has no woman’s nether parts. These erroneous offspring are clearly words. error is not really generative; she is a verbal offender like the Blatant Beast. The offspring have a second birth, when redcrosse strangles their mother: Therewith she spewd out of her filthie maw a floud of poyson horrible and blacke, Full of great lumps of flesh and gobbets raw, Which stunk so vildly, that it forst him slacke, His grasping hold, and from her turne him backe: Her vomit full of bookes and papers was, With loathly frogs and toads, which eyes did lacke, and creeping sought way in the weedy gras: Her filthie parbreake all the place defiled has. ne when old father Nilus gins to swell With timely pride aboue the Aegyptian vale, His fatty waues doe fertile slime outwell, and ouerflow each plaine and lowly dale: But when his later spring gins to auale, Huge heapes of mudd he leaues, wherin there breed ten thousand kindes of creature partly male and partly femall of his fruitfull seed; such vgly monstrous shapes elswher may no man reed. (i. i. 20–1)

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This birth is presented so negatively that it cannot really be said to taint the idea of maternity: the offspring are coming out of the wrong end; digestive rather than sexual senses are emphasized; the extended simile uses father nile, re-emphasizing error’s hermaphroditic nature; the ambiguity of ‘partly male / and partly femall’ makes it possible that these offspring are also hermaphroditic; nilus’s swelling with pride anticipates redcrosse’s nemesis orgoglio; moments later error’s brood will eat their mother and so kill themselves; altogether this is a special instance of the wrong kind of generation. spenser does, however, use two key words in this passage that he will later use for more positive generation – timely and fruitful. if spenser’s key organizing trope is correction,18 presenting what is wrong and then carefully introducing us by contrast to the right way of seeing, the correction of error, and particularly of errors about fecundity, will need to develop from this moment. This is a key reason that The Faerie Queene seems to work backwards, starting with apocalyptic victories and ending, as we shall see, with more humdrum concerns about human generation. only after defeating erroneous or evil ideas of generation can a virtuous form of conception occur. lauren silberman argues, splendidly, that Book iii shifts perspective from transcending to making sense of the fallen world. it does not deny the truth of revelation but rather addresses that practical concern for the here and now that, at the conclusion of Book i, moves the protective mothers of eden to pull their children away from the dragon slain apocalyptically by saint george.19

This balance of values is a key element of spenser’s work; the here and now is of course at least as complex as the apocalyptic future; its political and poetic achievements as important as care for children. When the dragon, the ultimate enemy, is destroyed, the common people fear lest ‘in his wombe might lurke some hidden nest / of many dragonettes, his fruitfull seede’ (i. xii. 10.5–6); they are wrong, for they misread the monster’s sex: this masculine enemy is unprocreative. yet they are also right – there are dragonettes in the world, minor enemies which need to be defeated in the rest of the poem. Following on from this, many of the poem’s births are shrouded in sin, error, carelessness or misjudgement. The first character whose birth is narrated in a back-story is satyrane; his mother was raped by a satyr who kept her in his cabin until she produced her ‘timely fruit’ (i. vi. 23.3). a similar rape takes place in Book iv, in the back-story of triamond and his brothers, the offspring of a ‘noble youthly knight’ (iv. ii. 45.1), who ‘oppressed’ their Fairy mother; the paternity of their sister cambina, who appears in

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the next canto to still the conflict between them and cambell, is a mystery. The casual presentation of such rapes may owe something to ovid, but it also reflects the generic norms of romance, in which sex always produces offspring and a woman is as culpable for her unguarded moments as the man is for attacking her; the word ‘vnawares’ describing the noble young knight’s rape of agape (iv. ii. 45.6) could apply to both the man and the woman, suggesting an unconscious element to sexuality. The conception of Marinell is a little more ambiguous; it is often assumed that his mother cymoent was raped,20 but the verse itself is not so clear: His mother was the blacke-browed Cymoent, The daughter of great Nereus, which did beare This warlike sonne vnto an earthly peare, The famous Dumarin; who on a day Finding the nymph a sleepe in secret wheare, as he by chance did wander that same way, Was taken with her loue, and by her closely lay. (iii. iv. 19.3–9)

she is a goddess, he a mortal; it is not clear if she wakes up; the phrase ‘Was taken’ rather implies that he was the passive one. certainly sex does not seem very volitional here; dumarin being taken by a woman anticipates and explains Britomart’s defeat of his son Marinell, which has just been narrated. Marinell is very much a new Man, enriched with his monopoly of sea-treasure, but is easily defeated by Britomart, perhaps because his wealth and power are maternally rooted, suggesting that they are not truly masculine endowments. Until a more paternal line can be reasserted, either through establishing one’s identity, or becoming a father oneself, women, at least in the form of Britomart, will have control, and masculine virtue (vir being the latin for ‘man’) will remain incomplete or precarious. yet feminine emotions, of the right kind, are clearly to be valued, at least in anticipation. Britomart’s rejoicing in talk of her future husband artegall is compared to the feelings of a ‘louing mother’ (iii. ii. 11.6); syrithe Pugh observes that this moment is a rehabilitation of the idea of motherhood in the poem, which has previously presented birth as ‘something monstrous and dark’, notably in the error and amavia incidents.21 as i have shown, those incidents are carefully designed not to taint the idea of maternity too radically. There is, however, a long way to go before those feelings of motherhood are fulfilled in genuine fruitfulness. Mothers do seem to do their sons no good in the poem: in addition to the foolish (or ‘fond’) efforts of Marinell’s and triamond’s mothers, we also see tristram’s mother ‘conceiuing . . . great feare’ (vi. 29. 2) of his fate and withdrawing him from the world; the locution suggests that the

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conception of a child is automatically linked to a desire to overprotect and thus to subvert any full realization of masculinity. However, this overprotection may be a function of the absence of fathers – as in ‘Maye’ in The Shepheardes Calender, where the mother’s advice to be cautious is not taken by the kid; her maternal care is largely driven by grief for his lost father, as she sees ‘in the younglings face / The old lineaments of his fathers grace’ (lines 213–14). He may be almost a perfect copy of his father, even retaining his elect status, but he is as doomed to die as his father was. ‘Muiopotmos’ is rare in spenser’s canon in presenting a doting father, but rather than protecting his offspring, this father is fed ‘With fruitfull hope’ (line 25) by his son, which leads the young hero clarion into carelessness that destroys him. although spenser’s presentation of his heroes as having only one parent may reflect a common social reality of the time, its ubiquity hints at larger thematic issues and a concern with a perceived imbalance between the sexes. neither paternal hope nor maternal caution seem sufficient; as with sidney, some balance between the sexes’ parenting styles needs to be found. The generation of daughters is less problematic in some respects than that of sons, for one does not have to become a woman as one does a man.22 chastity, the key feminine virtue, is a state one maintains rather than acquires; yet, as we have seen from nature’s final speech, this may be a better model for spiritual development than the masculine/heroic, as it fits better with calvinist ideas of predestination, in which the great burden on the individual is to maintain (or not to lose) one’s election rather than to gain it; the feminine model of virtue thus becomes central, but spenser tries to give it a more positive, active form. in Book iii, the origin and upbringing of amoret and Belphoebe is given considerable attention, but the girls’ conception was not sexual, being caused by the action of sunbeams on their mother’s body: ‘wondrously they were begot, and bred / Through influence of th’ heuens fruitfull ray’ (iii. vi. 6. 1–2); this takes place, significantly, ‘far from all mens vew’ (line 6), where The sunbeames bright vpon her body playd, Being through former bathing mollifide, and pierst into her wombe, where they embayd With so sweet sence and secret power vnpside, That in her pregnant flesh they shortly fructifide. Miraculous may seeme to him, that reades so straunge ensample of conception, But reason teacheth that the fruitfull seades

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of all things liuing, through impression of the sunbeames in moyst complexion, doe life conceiue and quickned are by kynd: so after Nilus inundation, infinite shapes of creatures men doe find, informed in the mud, on which the sunne hath shynd. (iii. vi. 7–8)

The association of this with the supposed fecundity of the nile is unsettling, given the use of that river in the description of error’s brood. Though chrysogonee (whose name relates her to danaë, suggesting that the sun has in some sense raped her, as Jupiter raped danaë in the form of a golden shower)23 has a ‘guiltlesse conscience’ (10.2), she fears shame and disgrace. Her parthenogenesis is a cause of fear for her, but it all turns out all right; her parturition is painless, and she doesn’t even have to bring up her offspring, as Venus and diana take the babies away: Vnwares she them conceiud, vnwares she bore: she bore withouten paine, that she conceiu’d Withouten pleasure: ne her need implore Lucinaes aide: which when they [the goddesses] both perceiu’d, They were through wonder nigh of sense bereu’d, and gazing on each other, nought bespake: at last they both agreed, her seeming grieu’d out of her heauie swowne not to awake, But from her louing side the tender babes to take. Vp they them tooke, eachone a babe vptooke, and with them carried, to be fostered. (iii. vi. 27–8)

We see again the element of unconsciousness in the word ‘Vnwares’. This rather casual abduction is made all the stranger by the use of the word ‘louing’; maternal love does not require the mother to be conscious of her children. This is a form of non-motherhood, which separates amoret and Belphoebe from the generative process proper – or at least from consciousness of it. This seems appropriate for the virginal Belphoebe, but less so for amoret. Paul alpers sees this conception as showing the naturalness of generation, but not the human experience of it, which needs to be worked out more fully elsewhere,24 but despite the lack of men, this is still a human experience: feminine generativity is being rehabilitated separately before it can be reintegrated with masculinity. spenser’s concern with human generation is clear even when he presents the virgin Belphoebe; his symbol or metaphor for her maidenhead is ‘That daintie rose, the daughter of her Morne’ (iii. v. 51.1; emphasis added), intruding the idea of offspring into

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his picture of the childless Virgin Queen’s private person. The garden of adonis, which is presented straight after this, is an odd narrative bait-andswitch: we are introduced to Belphoebe, and then told of her origins, but it is her younger twin sister who was brought up in the garden. From the virginity of Belphoebe, then, we are cunningly transferred into the place of generation, even though it has nothing to do with Belphoebe herself; the narrative digression pushes the virgin aside in favour of the sexually generative sister; this reflects the fact that, as John n. King has observed, Belphoebe is ‘an anomaly in a Protestant poem celebrating married love’.25 as the tale of chrysogonee’s daughters is also a tale of Venus and diana adopting daughters, we may wonder if spenser is quietly hinting at the possibility of adoption as a means for Queen elizabeth to secure her succession. The narrative turn away from the virgin mimics this adoptive process, guaranteeing narrative and dynastic continuity, but still requiring generation to take place somewhere, in the secret places of feminine nature. The garden of adonis fully associates amoret with a timeless generative principle, but one that seems oddly paradoxical and unnatural, not least because there is some doubt as to the role of time in the garden. spenser seems deliberately to ignore the dangers and damage he has suggested that time causes in the garden: But were it not, that Time their troubler is, all that in this delightfull gardin growes, should happy bee, and haue immortall blis: For here all plenty, and all pleasure flowes, and sweete loue gentle fitts emongst them throwes, Without fell rancor, or fond gealosy; Franckly each Paramor his leman knowes, each bird his mate, ne any does enuy Their goodly meriment, and gay felicity. (iii. vi. 41)

all this, and the ‘continuall spring, and haruest there / continuall’ (42. 1–2), are controlled by the unfulfilled conditional ‘were it not’, and in that respect the garden seems wilfully self-deceptive, a place where, rather than true generation, we encounter the ovidian floral preservation of love in such figures as narcissus and amaranthus, as well as adonis himself. These are figures of death, not generation, and of memorial rather than biological preservation. Thomas P. roche accordingly argues that the Venus of the garden is unmaternal and ‘belongs entirely to the immaterial realm’. 26 richard a. Mccabe sees more hope in the ‘late’ reconcilement of cupid and Psyche, in hints that man can ‘break free from the generative

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cycle, to exchange eternal flux for eternal rest’,27 but that would involve an escape from the real world that spenser is not yet willing to countenance. adonis himself is engaged in an act of perpetual sex which would have pleased John donne: There now he liueth in eternall blis, ioying his goddesse, and of her enioyd. (iii. vi. 48.1–2)

This resembles donne’s desire at the end of ‘The good-Morrow’ for sex in which ‘none can die’, but it is not procreative (see chapter 6, below); nor is adonis’s homoerotic relation to cupid, who ‘playes his wanton partes’ with him (49. 9).28 The boar that killed adonis is still in the garden, imprisoned beneath the Mount of Venus (48. 5–9); death is still a presence here. The only child of cupid and Psyche here is ‘Pleasure’ (50. 7–9), which seems to be the sole purpose of their union. all this tells us something about amoret, whose home the garden is – it accounts perhaps for the only partial happiness of her reunion with scudamour at the end of the 1590 Faerie Queene. she, like the garden, is not truly generative. spenser’s ambivalence about the generative properties of the garden is reflected in the role amoret plays in the rest of the poem. sexuality will be a difficult matter for her, with no guarantee that she will contribute to the poem’s or the nation’s fecundity. The feminine side of generativity is rehabilitated, but the masculine is still too passive here: adonis is still playing at sex like sidney’s astrophel. a pivotal rehabilitation of feminine sexuality comes at the end of Book iii. Britomart’s rescue of amoret from the House of Busirane, which forms the climax of Book iii and of the 1590 edition of the poem, could almost be described as an example of heroic midwifery. only Britomart can deliver amoret from the pain that scudamour’s excessive desire for his wife has caused. The pain may reflect her consciousness of her own sexuality, in contrast to her mother’s unconsciousness. The tapestries in the House (iii. xi. 28–46) present ovidian images of the gods’ rapes of mortal women; even if Britomart’s deliverance of amoret is not quite delivery in a parturitive sense, it is clear that Britomart is rescuing another woman from the consequences of male desire. The physical damage to amoret is clearly meant to suggest the physical damage wrought by loss of virginity (the word ‘dew’ having been associated with Belphoebe’s virginity), and perhaps also by childbirth: Her brest all naked, as nett yvory, Without adorne of gold or siluer bright, Wherewith the craftesman wonts it beautify,

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This is the wrong kind of orifice, perhaps reflecting the fetishization of breasts and the poetic insistence on the erotic value of hearts. Busirane tries to force amoret to love him, but ‘ah who can loue the worker of her smart?’ (iii. xii. 31.5). The problem that Britomart needs to redress here is how a woman can love a man, given that the love of man causes women pain, through loss of virginity and the biblical curse of painful childbirth. spenser notably refuses to blame women in general, or eve in particular as genesis does, for the sin that supposedly made childbirth painful. amoret’s redemption is expressed in the following terms: The cruell steele, which thrild her dying hart, Fell softly forth, as of his owne accord, and the wyde wound, which lately did dispart Her bleeding brest, and riuen bowels gor’d, Was closed vp, as it had not beene sor’d. and euery part to safety full sownd, as she were neuer hurt, was soone restor’d: Tho when she felt her selfe to be vnbownd, and perfect hole, prostrate she fell vnto the grownd. (iii. xii. 38)

The last pun on hole/whole suggests a healing of the wounds caused by sex.29 amoret differs from her mother, who ‘bore withouten paine, that she conceiu’d withouten pleasure’ (iii. vi. 27. 2–3); she has both pain and pleasure, but they are oddly inverted. The pain caused by Busirane is compensated by pleasure with scudamour, as they appear to have sex in front of Britomart (which one might think an odd ending to the legend of chastity): lightly he clipt her twixt his armes twaine, and streightly did embrace her body bright, Her body, late the prison of sad paine, now the sweet lodge of loue and deare delight: But she faire lady ouercommen quight

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of huge affection, did in pleasure melt, and in sweete rauishment pourd out her spright: no word they spake, nor earthly thing they felt, But like two senceles stocks in long embracement dwelt. (iii. xii. 45 (1590))

There is something both extremely sexual and sexless about this, her melting implying orgasm, but the image of them as a statue of a hermaphrodite (46. 2) and the denial of earthly pleasure removes this. The melting here dismisses the penetrative element of sex, displacing it into the House of Busirane. The narrative ends: Thus doe those louers with sweet counteruayle, each other of loues bitter fruit despoile. (47. 1–2)

The fruit is bitter, still containing pain, and therefore, we are told, Britomart looks on only ‘halfe enuying their blesse’ (46. 6). conception, like the poem, is incomplete: only a partial success is allowed in the poem’s 1590 instalment; Britomart herself is still waiting to encounter her other half. even if the ‘fruit’ here does imply conception, that conception is cancelled when spenser removes these final stanzas in 1596, having scudamour impatiently leave the scene before Britomart has accomplished her rescue. lauren silberman argues that ‘spenser cancels the Hermaphrodite stanzas as a signal that the erotic ideal embodied in the Hermaphrodite cannot be readily sustained in a culture antagonistic to that ideal’,30 but it is hard to see this as a fully realized ideal. The poem’s generative function, in any case ambiguously presented, is suspended to a later date. such love, like the love of the garden of adonis, is imperfect and perhaps deceptive in its apparent finality – it cannot triumph over time as a harder-won dynastic or generative conclusion would. The 1590 Faerie Queene, until this, is rather sexless: the redcrosse Knight and Una are only betrothed, despite their ‘full content’ (i. xii. 41.2); the House of alma represents an ungendered body, focussing on the alimentary canal rather than on the genitals;31 and even the Bower of Bliss is a place of erotic lassitude and play rather than of true sexuality. There is no explicit mention of the marriage of scudamour and amoret in the 1590 Faerie Queene, though Jan Karel Kouwenhoven has observed that scudamour may be the one described as a ‘groome’ in the letter to ralegh;32 the highly sexual ending of the legend of chastity is both fruitful and a dead end, reflecting this ambiguity about marital accomplishment without the full realization of paternal masculinity. scudamour and amoret, the central couple of the central books of the poem, are detached from the poem’s public narrative, and scudamour has done nothing to deserve his happiness. Thomas P. roche

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has argued that ‘The main narrative of Books iii and iv is the only one in The Faerie Queene that is neither initiated by gloriana nor has her as its goal’;33 roche is referring mainly to Britomart’s narrative, but that at least has a public side. amoret is the sister of Belphoebe, representative of the Queen’s private person, and her story takes us into the world of private satisfactions which for the moment must substitute for public accomplishment, but which ultimately may help to renew the public sphere, at least when they are rethought in the poem’s second instalment. in the second instalment, concerned with public virtues, there will be an attempt to rehabilitate masculinity as femininity had been rehabilitated through the private virtues of the first instalment. Book iv, although a legend of friendship, is very much centred on marriage. cambell and cambina, triamond and canacee are the first couples who actually marry in the poem, but they produce no offspring; marriage in their case is about the friendly binding together of society – in Bacon’s terms, they are perfecting rather than making mankind. The marriage of Marinell and Florimell may be more concerned with fertility, but it is more as a matter of principle than of actual procreation. as amoret is kept for seven months in the House of Busirane (iii. xi. 10), Florimell is kept for seven months in ‘darknesse dred’ (iv. xi. 4) by Proteus; we might take this as a (rather curtailed) gestatory period, but the poem does not highlight this; it may also be a rather extended winter. she is released and united with Marinell after the river marriage attended by ‘all the sea-gods and their fruitfull seede’ (8. 2 – the phrase ‘fruitfull seede’ is repeated at xii. 1. 3). spenser has the air of letting us into a secret when introducing this fruitful company, telling their ‘hid abodes’ (10. 9). The sea-gods are all associated ‘by lineall descent’ (12. 7), and amongst them are the founders of nations (15) – they ‘all the world haue with their issue fild’ (17. 2). Here is a greater generative centre even than the garden of adonis, it seems. yet among the rivers, Thame, isis and Thamesis are the only nuclear family in The Faerie Queene, the aged couple giving place to their union, their ‘fresh and iolly’ son (27. 1). obviously, this is an allegorical fiction driven primarily by wit: isis is only old, ‘weake and crooked’ (24. 8) because it is a meandering river, and Thame is only aged because of supposed hoariness of colour; the rejuvenation involved in their union around oxford requires some geographical juggling; marriage and the creation of offspring here are not really a serious matter; indeed the whole business of essential identity in rivers can hardly be taken seriously. We don’t actually get to see the marriage of Thames and Medway, perhaps because as mortals like Marinell we ‘might not with immortal food be fed, / ne with th’ eternall gods to

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bancket come’ (xii. 4. 3–4); we have to be content with seeing the procession. The river marriage, then, becomes an image of pure and rather pointless fruitfulness and proliferation,34 whose only value is that it catalyses the union of Florimell and Marinell. even in their case, one suspects that it is natural generativity or harmony rather than a more human kind that is being emphasized. The poem is still marking time. spenser’s playful but slightly exasperated tone as he considers the futility of his lists of immortals drives this point home. all of nature here is fruitful, but human, fully realized fathers have not yet come to the party. spenser suspends the full development of the poem’s generative imagery and narrative because he has tied his poem’s dynastic impulses and hopes for the english nation’s future up with a Queen who obviously was not going to produce an heir. His narrative is forced to play a waiting game as the recalcitrance of real events frustrated his desires for a future england taking the lead in Protestant europe. The succession was genuinely uncertain in the early 1590s, and the Queen could die at any time; events could only unfold and release the continuation of spenser’s allegorical narrative with the death of the Queen, not with her producing an heir. as Mccabe puts it, ‘to become gloriana all elizabeth need to do is to die.’ 35 That is, after her death she will have the eternal glory her waywardness as a temporal person prevents her having. Whereas spenser had begun The Faerie Queene intending to bring it to fruition in marriage for the Queen,36 which might in practice have meant her naming an heir, he later began to be impatient for her death, and even to conceive of her as already dead. This is reflected in spenser’s ambiguous formulation of a desire that ladies should follow Belphoebe’s ‘ensample dead’ (iii. v. 54.9). There is something lifeless about such an example; it will only be a good example when it is dead. The poem’s frustrated dynastic prophecies, such as Merlin’s ‘yet the end is not’ (iii. iii. 50–1) immediately after his prophecy of Queen elizabeth, reinforces this sense of a dangerous and artistically stymying effect that results from the Queen’s refusal to produce offspring, though it is hard to say what she might have been expected, at this late date, to do about this, except perhaps to adopt an heir as Julius caesar and other roman emperors had done, and as Venus and diana do with amoret and Belphoebe in the poem. Whilst the marriage of Britomart and artegall is anticipated as the poem’s fullest contribution to dynastic generative continuity, it only appears in mirrors, prophecies and dreams. Britomart’s dream in the temple of isis is obviously a foreshadowing of her consummation with artegall, in which she will be ‘transfigured’ (v. vii. 13. 4). The dream

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involves another kind of transfiguration, in that the sexes are apparently transferred: the waking crocodile beneath the figure of isis (with whom Britomart seems to identify) is ‘growen great’ and ‘swolne’; although this has some phallic connotations (given that it swells with rather masculine ‘pride of his own peerlesse powre’ (15. 6–7)), there is still an aura of pregnancy. isis in turn beats the crocodile back with her ‘rod’ (line 9). He has to turn ‘all his pride to humblesse meeke’ (16. 1) before she will allow him to draw near; she consequently becomes ‘enwombed’, but without apparent penetration – it is ‘his game’ that has impregnated her (line 5). it seems odd at this pivotal ‘prophetic moment’, as angus Fletcher describes it,37 to call this a game, and this works with spenser’s transsexualizing wordplay almost to deconstruct sex even as it is given its most serious role. We might also consider that there is a privileging of the feminine, maternal perspective over artegall’s masculine, paternal perspective – which is not allowed to be penetrative (Britomart is penetrating artegall’s book or legend in any case). However, it is not enough to accept this deconstruction and inversion of normative gender categories. spenser is suggesting that this act of generation is still not quite right: it is after all a proleptic dream of a goddess having mystical sex with a crocodile and giving birth to a lion. it is not yet true or timely fruition; it is a mere icon of sexuality, and rather a silly one at that. Here i think we get to the nub of the issue: at this very point of the highest hope, spenser signals his emergent distrust of allegory, of ‘darke conceit’. The dark game must stop; conception, in all its senses, must be a clearer matter; the light of truth and reality must be better than dark conceptions, and the whole poem must be dragged into clear day, just as the Blatant Beast must be brought into the light of the (to it) ‘hatefull sunne’. The poem must come out of the woods, and it does so most sharply when calepine rescues a baby from a bear in Book vi. This incident, quite apart from its incongruity and its possible dynastic implications, is one of the most beautiful in the poem. The babe’s innocence, emphasized by its being unharmed by the bear, is a relief and liberation from the burden of original sin: Then tooke he vp betwixt his armes twaine The litle babe, sweet relickes of his pray; Whom pitying to heare so sore complaine, From his soft eyes the teares he wypt away, and from his face the filth that did it ray, and euery litle limbe he searcht around, and euery part, that vnder sweathbands lay,

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least that the beasts sharpe teeth had any wound Made in his tender flesh, but whole them all he found. (vi. iv. 23)

The fourth line clearly echoes revelation 21:4: ‘and god shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, neither crying, neither shall there be anymore pain; for the first things are passed’ (geneva Bible).38 This contrasts strongly with the appalling story of ruddymane stained by his parents’ blood (ii. i–ii; see above). The relief in this story is further emphasized by calepine’s lightness of movement in his pursuit of the bear (he isn’t wearing his accustomed armour): Well then him chaunst his heauy armes to want, Whose burden mote empeach his needfull speed, and hinder him from libertie to pant: For hauing long time, as his daily weed, Them wont to weare, and wend on foot for need, now wanting them he felt himselfe so light, That like an Hauke, which feeling her selfe freed From bels and iesses, which did let her flight, Him seem’d his feet did fly, and in their speed delight. (vi. iv. 19)

This suggests the relief of escaping from the burden of the chivalric and heroic codes, and the hawk simile suggests a liberation from courtly servitude. There is also a delicate comedy in calepine losing his way, giving way to relief as he gets out of the woods onto the plain: at last about the setting of the sunne, Him selfe out of the forest he did wynd, and by good fortune the plain champion wonne. (26. 1–3)

The pun on champion suggests that to get out of woods is a sufficient heroic endeavour. The final element of relieving comedy is calepine’s relief at getting rid of the baby ‘whereof he skilled not’ (38.2) – the child is adopted by the barren Matilda and her husband, in another example of spenser suggesting alternative means of getting heirs. she weeps over the child, which seems to make it her own (37.8–9), and convinces her husband that it is theirs. This child is a symbol of great hope, as he will do ‘right noble deedes’ (38.9). Feminine secrecy here is justified, as spenser introduces considerable flexibility into his ideals. Further liberations of sexuality then emerge. one of the poem’s oddest and most uncomfortable moments is the recovery of serena by calepine: serena has been stripped for sacrifice by the savage nation, and is saved in the nick of time by her beloved, who has come upon them by chance in the dark, drawn by the ululation of the savages, but also by ‘a litle dawning

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sight’ of the woman (vi. v. 48.3). as we move away from the episode, serena is dreading calepine’s recognition of her, owing to her nakedness. Harry Berger argues that ‘The sudden shift from the problems of murder to those of modesty is characteristic of the disequilibrium spenser maintains in this book’,39 and that is surely the point, for feminine sexual shame is shown to be absurd, delaying recognition indefinitely: so inward shame of her vncomely case she did conceiue, through care of womanhood, That though the night did couer her disgrace, yet she in so vnwomanly a mood, Would not bewray the state in which she stood. so all that night to him vnknowen she past. But day, that doth discouer bad and good, ensewing, made her knowen to him at last: The end whereof ile keepe vntill another cast. (51)

The paradoxes of womanliness here are very strong – she is concerned because she is a woman, but her reticence is conceived as ‘vnwomanly’; this taps into a misogynistic notion of women’s supposed talkativeness, but has other layers of irony: her situation is unfit for a woman, and her reaction to it inappropriate, as it is by no means her fault. Her shame at her case (which denotes both her situation and her genitals) prevents a satisfactory recognition. There may be bad here, but there is, finally, to be good. spenser suspends his narrative conclusion here yet again, but with a certain satisfaction, giving the lovers the privacy they need in order reach a procreative end. Both serena and the narrator here can be construed as coy, but we know that the naked truth of sexual knowledge must out in the end, and that is for the good. Throughout Book vi, spenser seems to be suggesting a need to escape sexual shame, to bring truth to light. even the book’s most moralistic character, the experienced knight turned hermit, argues that it is freedom from secrecy, from the covert shades, that liberates one from the wounds of the Blatant Beast – though he lives in the woods himself. The poem as a whole moves into fresh air in these incidents. it is the beginning of an ascent that culminates in the pastoral cantos and the dance of the naked graces. This element of unstifling is by no means final or permanent: some blockages and burdens still cannot be removed;40 but the way forward has been signalled. The deliverance of serena and the delivery of the child are liberations from dark conceit, and this will be still more the case as calidore conceives a child of his own. calidore’s private wooing of Pastorella is fruitful, and the proper result of effort, but it also has some public significance. Her acceptance of him is

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‘the frute of ioy and blisse, though longe time dearely bought’ (vi. ix. 45.9). in the end calidore ‘reapt the timely frute’ of his love (vi. x. 38.5); given the verbal parallel to the conception of satyrane (see i. vi. 23, and above) this surely suggests not only that calidore has sex with Pastorella, but that she conceives. His ‘close felicity’ (38.6) with her reflects Book vi’s general attitude that sex is a private matter, as perhaps does the poem’s coyness about the matter. Michael o’connell argues that ‘calidore is the only character in all The Faerie Queene whom we see fall in love in anything like the way ordinary mortals do.’ 41 calidore’s subsequent deliverance of Pastorella from the Brigants’ cave may, like Britomart’s deliverance of amoret, be a metaphor for the further difficulties of such sexual relations, and the persistent presence of the Blatant Beast is certainly a recognition of the persistence of forces unwilling to allow sexuality to be private, but the poem as a whole begins to hold out hopes for true generation in the private if not the public sphere. generation between married couples such as the redcrosse Knight and Una, and scudamour and amoret may be suspended, their felicity incomplete, as between the as-yet-unmarried Britomart and artegall, but the poem’s last hero, swerving away from his heroic destiny, can beget timely fruit. ‘timely fruit’ has two main meanings – it primarily implies an eagerly awaited result, but it also carries the suggestion that the fruit is subject to time and its depredations; it is therefore only really fruit when considered within time rather than sub specie aeternatis. spenser’s phrase echoes sidney’s version of Psalm 1, where the righteous man shall be lyke a freshly planted tree, to which sweet springs of waters neighbours be, Whose braunches faile not timelie fruite to nourish nor withered leafe shall make yt faile to flourish.

This element of timely fruit is carefully poised between the worldly and the spiritual. as we shall see, spenser suggests in other works that this element of fruitfulness is what points us out of the sphere of time, but this can only be effected from within time:42 ‘only through time time is conquered’, as eliot had it.43 Both of The Faerie Queene’s most important procreative narratives end with the male hero leaving his lady behind. artegall leaves Britomart to go on his ‘first aduenture’ (v. vii. 43.9) and calidore leaves Pastorella in favour of his ‘first quest’ (vi. xii. 12.2). The former couple are betrothed, the latter have consummated, but neither are married – each therefore has accomplished only one of the trio of elements necessary for an elizabethan marriage. The men, it seems, have an extra necessary task to accomplish

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first, but it is unclear whether those tasks are first in order of importance as well as in order of temporal priority. Whichever is the case, the women are troubled by the departures, the narrator’s attention staying with them a little longer than the heroes’ does. Pugh argues that we are to think of Pastorella as having difficult times ahead, as her parents did on her conception;44 certainly, she is described as enduring ‘heauy care’ in calidore’s absence (xii. 14.4), which may hint at worries about pregnancy. Britomart’s condition is given even more emphasis, particularly as this is the last time we see the figure who has been the poem’s central heroine (and perhaps its most important character overall): Full sad and sorrowfull was Britomart For his departure, her new cause of griefe; yet wisely moderated her owne smart, seeing his honor, which she tendred chiefe, consisted much in that aduentures priefe. The care whereof, and hope of his successe gaue vnto her great comfort and reliefe, That womanish complaints she did represse, and tempred for the time her present heauinesse. (v. vii. 44)

Britomart is not pregnant, but the use of the word ‘heavinesse’ along with the mentions of ‘care’ and ‘hope’, remind us of her future motherhood. The poem’s sympathy is with her, however necessary paternal proof may be. she has just rescued him from ridiculous subjection to radigund, and though she has handed power over to him, she is clearly given moral authority by this: she has dressed him ‘anew’ (41.8), rather maternally, and it seems probable that the phrase ‘she there as Princess rained’ (42.3) refers not only to her rule before restoring power to men, but to her authority when ‘There she continu’d for a certain space’ (45.1) and to the real-world authority of Queen elizabeth.45 a legitimate form of female authority, emotional and maternal in character, is negotiated here; it may not trump the masculine, but it does put it in its place. The more private figure of Pastorella also turns out to be a figure of some dynastic significance. after calidore’s departure, we discover that she is the child of sir Bellamore and claribell, the daughter of the ‘lord of Many Ilands’ (vi. xii. 4.2), which is a possible reflection of the atlantic archipelago Queen elizabeth partly ruled. as such, she – and therefore any child by calidore – may constitute an alternative line of succession. she is recognized because of a birthmark, a ‘litle purple rose’ (18.5), which may signify empire, transcending the tudor rose. spenser hints, then, at

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other possibilities of succession, other familial lines, which might compensate for the imminent failure of the tudors. in fact, there were many families around who might have a claim on the throne, and who might be recognized as good candidates on elizabeth’s death with as much fictive surprise as that involved in the recognition of Pastorella; some of these claims would have gone right back to the many children of edward iii.46 such is the value of the ‘fruitfull ofspring’ produced by the likes of Britomart. However tentatively they are expressed, spenser’s final suggestions as to the possibilities for generation in the public world are ultimately rooted in an approbation of private sexuality. in his private poetry, spenser puts his eggs in another basket: sonnet 49 of Amoretti uses a trope of mutual generation in poetry which, whilst it derives from common Petrarchan attitudes, is characteristically spenserian in its insistence on life-giving.47 spenser argues that his mistress and future wife will be more admired if she ceases to be ‘cruell’ to him, as he will then be able to celebrate her, concluding, ‘so shall you liue by giuing life to me’ (line 14). There is some resemblance here to shakespeare’s Sonnets – for example sonnet 18’s insistence that ‘this gives life to thee’ (line 14) – but in spenser it seems more emphatic, because there is the clear subtext, picked up in Epithalamion, that the life-giving is not just a matter of being erotically kind to him, but of giving him children. The commonplace idea of poetic immortality is thus cut across by a more literal idea of biological continuity; this is only possible for spenser, of all his contemporaries, because his poems are addressed to his future wife. in sonnet 23, spenser compares his work to Penelope’s weaving, calling it ‘fruitlesse worke’ (line 14), his ‘labour’ (line 13) being like the excremental spider’s web. This refers both to the unsuccess of his wooing and also clearly to an element of despair at his poetic task in The Faerie Queene. His public poetry seems futile unless it can be revivified by private happiness. it seems here that he is resisting the idea of poetic generation; the only real fruit can come from erotic success. on the other hand, the ‘Mutability cantos’ suggest that poets can survive the depredations of the powerful, and can resist the mutability of a moonlike queen. Unlike actaeon, Faunus is not killed when hunted: he is immortal, and this reflects his status as a poet. notably, cynthia and her maids consider castrating him, but cannot do so, for his ‘breed . . . must for euer liue’ (vii. vi. 50): this clearly reflects the fact that his poetic offspring in particular is immortal, and he can thus see the larger transcendent picture. He becomes an object to be hunted but not destroyed, like the Blatant Beast. cynthia’s powers with regard to him are frustrated.

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Amoretti 75 is a fascinating instance of a dialogic poem about poetic immortalization: one day i wrote her name vpon the strand, but came the waues and washed it away: agayne i wrote it with a second hand, but came the tyde, and made my paynes his pray. Vayne man, sayd she, that doest in vaine assay, a mortall thing so to immortalize, for i my selue shall lyke to this decay, and eek my name be wyped out lykewise. not so, (quod i) let baser things deuize to dy in dust, but you shall liue by fame: my verse your vertues rare shall eternize, and in the heuens wryte your glorious name. Where whenas death shall all the world subdew, our loue shall liue, and later life renew.

The renewal of later life here is still strictly ‘by fame’ rather than by reproduction, yet the poem’s argument is hardly compelling: if it is vain to write a name on the beach, why should writing in books be any more successful? yet the emphasis on ‘name’ here (the poem’s linking keyword)48 points us back to the previous sonnet in the sequence, which reflected on the ‘three elizabeths’ (74, line 14) who made spenser happy – his mother, his Queen and his beloved; the use of ‘glorious’ in sonnet 75 therefore reminds us that this poem may be as much about elizabeth/gloriana as about elizabeth Boyle. He is therefore promising both women that they will be written in the heavens, but we must also remember that the basis of this is the ‘mothers womb’ and the ‘dew descent’ that gave the poet his bodily being. in Epithalamion spenser asks leave of the sun for one day of privacy; his poetry of marriage will ultimately vivify his public poetic. Epithalamion’s ending is saturated with generative imagery. cynthia is asked sith of wemens labours thou hast charge, and generation goodly dost enlarge, encline thy will t’ effect our wishfull vow, and the chast wombe informe with timely seed, That may our comfort breed. (lines 383–7)

The word timely here again suggests spenser’s sense of the urgency of procreation, and perhaps a belief that offspring, being accepted as inevitably subject to time (not theoretically cut off from it as the garden of adonis is) may offer resistance to time’s depredations. The word ‘enlarge’ here may be used as a complex pun, as it is when Marinell frees Florimell (iv. xii. 14.2),

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with anticipations of enlarging her womb;49 expansiveness, freedom and generation are linked in the concept. For spenser, children are to be a comfort, not fruitless mast as they were for donne (see chapter 6, below).50 The private value of sexuality and procreation has its fullest expression here: thou glad genius, in whose gentle hand, The bridale bowre and geniall bed remaine, Without blemish or staine, and the sweete pleasures of theyr loues delight With secret ayde doest succour and supply, till they bring forth the fruitfull progeny, send vs the timely fruit of this same night. (lines 398–404)

He goes on with the hope That we may raise a large posterity, Which from the earth, which they may long possesse, With lasting happinesse, Vp to your haughty pallaces may mount, and for the guerdon of theyr glorious merit May heauenly tabernacles there inherit, of blessed saints for to increase the count. (lines 417–23)

This constitutes a revision of the platonic use of love to reach the deity: it is not so much through contemplation of beauty that one arrives at the heavens, but through procreation, which provides increase of even heaven’s glory, by creating additional saints; it is the offspring that is improving and exemplary, not the love itself. in investing himself in this ultimate act of generation, spenser connects the public, the private and the heavenly spheres as no other poet does, as nearly as possible completing a project that he saw as implicit in sidney’s work. Whatever his public frustrations, spenser sees his own poetry as fruitful, referring to the ‘rich frute’ he is seeking in ploughing his narrative furrows (The Faerie Queene, vi. ix. 1). This harmonizes with his return to the pastoral mode at a point when the turn from the heroic/public to the pastoral/private seems more fruitful. spenser’s final movement to Platonism in the Fowre Hymnes seems to leave behind the idea of generation as central to human value. Following the insistence of the apostles’ creed that the son of god is ‘begotten not created’, spenser presents his creation myth in ‘an Hymne of Heavenly love’ as involving masculine, but ungendered creativity: it [love, or god Himself] lou’d it selfe, because it selfe was faire; (For faire is lou’d;) and of it selfe begot like to it selfe his eldest sonne and heire. (lines 29–31)

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However, when he presents the Holy spirit’s creation of the angels, spenser reverts to the language of human generation, calling the spirit ‘pregnant’ and ‘full of fruitfull loue’ (lines 50–1). even when thinking in Platonic and heavenly terms, spenser cannot resist his habit of invoking the human and fruitful. it is through fruitfulness, ultimately, that human life is connected to heaven; as early as A Theatre for Worldlings, he had concluded in a paraphrase of revelation’s vision of new earth and heaven: a liuely streame, more cleere than christall is, ranne through the mid, sprong from triumphant seat. There growes lifes fruite vnto the churches good. (sonnet 15, lines 12–14)51

The attempt to reconcile poetic, generative and spiritual fruit, despite the difficulties, runs through the whole of spenser’s work like a stream of life. no aspect of it will ultimately be privileged. spenser begins Amoretti with an image of the masculine womb, presenting Vnquiet thought, whom at the first i bred, of th’ inward bale of my loue pined hart: and sithens haue with sighes and sorrowes fed, till greater then my wombe thou woxen art. (2. 1–4)

This is the wrong kind of self-oriented generativity, like a ‘vipers brood’ (line 6); it resembles the futile work of care making his ‘vnquiet thoughts’ ‘to small purpose’ (The Faerie Queene, iv. v. 35. 8–9), and perhaps even the dragon imagined as breeding offspring. The end of spenser’s work must be wholly different from this kind of breeding. it must, as for sidney, involve finding some balance between the sexes; even if that balance is never quite finally achieved in spenser’s works, he goes considerably further than sidney in indicating how it might be. spenser will not allow masculinity to be self-sufficient, and therefore will not privilege the role of paternity in self-realization. The sexes need to be balanced, but hermaphroditism is not a solution: as we have seen, there are many ways in which the joining of the sexes can fail or even be vicious. yet that does not mean that generation is not worth striving for. as a poet who is consciously constructing a public role for his art,52 spenser intends to inspire others, in poetry, politics, private life and the life of the spirit, to generate more good things, more fruit. He therefore refuses finality, refuses to conclude with an overdetermined image of masculine perfection in fatherhood. Frustrated as he may have been with Queen elizabeth, her undeniable presence forced spenser to explore wider varieties of experience than any previous poet. His major successors – donne, Jonson and even the shakespeare of the non-dramatic verse – would react against his

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unmanageable breadth and would attempt to formulate male identity in more limited ways, but the complexity that spenser had introduced into the subject could not be wished away. Whilst spenser attempted the impossible task of unifying himself and the nation, male and female generativity, and the public and private spheres, his successors’ efforts to forge a unified paternal identity would be on a smaller scale, reacting against the increasingly alienating forces of public life. even spenser’s most slavish followers, affected by the cancelled generativity of donne and Jonson and the limitation of it in shakespeare that we will see below, make human procreation less central, revising his work in order to chasten it. in Phineas Fletcher’s The Locusts, or Apollyonists (1627), a mannerist spenserian attack on rome, urging charles i to enter the european wars of religion, sin, the porter to Hell, is presented as ‘a shapeless shape, a foule deformed thing’ (i. 10. 2) and her parentage is described in terms that make her an important bridge between error and Milton’s sin: of that first woman, and th’ old serpent bred, By lust and custome nurst; whom when her mother saw so deform’d, how faine would she have fled Her birth, and selfe? But she her damme would smother, and all her brood, had not He rescued Who was his mothers sire, his childrens brother; eternitie, who yet was borne and dy’de: His owne creatour, earths scorne, heavens pride, Who th’ deitie inflesht, and mans flesh deifi’de. (i. 11)53

like duessa, she is fair up front (resembling her mother), but ‘her backe parts (black as night) / like to her horride sire’ (i. 12. 4–5). it is the masculine part of her, then, that is hellish. The lines about the incarnation are reused in Fletcher’s much more important poem, The Purple Island,54 a lengthy allegorical depiction of the human body derived from spenser’s House of alma, which presents the body as a battle-ground between good and evil. its gendered and generative politics make it an important bridge between The Faerie Queene and Paradise Lost, taking on some of spenser’s ideas about the reconciliation of male and female, but ultimately neglecting the procreative impulses that were so central to spenser’s project. W. Benlowes’s commendatory poem puts Fletcher’s work in a patrilineal context, its title reminding us that Phineas’s father and brother were both ‘judicious poets’ too: Grave Father of this Muse, thou deem’st too light To wear thy name, ’cause of thy youthfull brain

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Poetry and Paternity in Renaissance England It seems a sportfull child; resembling right Thy wittie childhood, not thy graver strain, Which now esteems these works of fancie vain. Let not thy childe, thee living, orphan be; Who when th’ art dead, will give a life to thee.

The formula of modesty and embarrassment on someone else’s behalf is offered because Fletcher was now wearing ‘the reverend gown’ of a priest, but Benlowes asserts that he is ‘Poet born’ and that thy very name’s a Poet. Thy very name will make these Poems take, These very Poems else thy name will make.

Poetry is to be validated familially, and the family name to be validated by verse. such a virtuous – and fundamentally masculine – circle resembles the validations of poetry we will see in Jonson; and, though Fletcher is clearly mainly a spenserian, his desire for generative stasis reflects the fact that he is more of Jonson’s generation than spenser’s. The island of the body is initially created as ‘a little living sunne, sonne of the living light’ (i. 45.7), but it drifts off into the sea of death on the fall of man, so god gave ‘a second being’ in the organs of generation (iii. 23.2): For from the first a fellow isle he fram’d, (For what alone can live, or fruitfull be?) Arren the first, the second Thelu nam’d; Weaker the last, yet fairer much to see: alike in all the rest, here disagreeing, [in the generative ‘towns’] Where Venus and her wanton have their being: For nothing is produc’t of two in all agreeing. But though some few in these hid parts would see Their makers’ glory, and their justest shame; yet for the most would turn to luxurie, and what they should lament, would make their game: Flie then those parts, which best are undescri’d; Forbear, my maiden song, to blazon wide What th’ isle and natures self doth ever strive to hide. (stanzas 24–5)

shame at the genitals derives from shame at their being necessary because of the death introduced by the fall. The poem’s forbearance on the matter of generation then impels a praise of the unique ‘Phoenix-like’ chastity of Queen elizabeth (29. 4); this is not the marital chastity praised by spenser, but the virginal chastity of elizabeth. it is therefore significant that the rest of the poem values such chastity, to the point of making the virgin Parthenia the chief champion of the body against the dragon of

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revelation in its final battle. The poem puts the generative flesh on the side of the dragon (vii. 14), which is presented as giving birth (xii. 6–9); only ‘heav’nly offspring of an heav’nly bed’ (ix. 9) is on the side of good. spenser’s hard-won sense of redemptive generation is nullified: the only generative value is spiritual rather than fleshly. The idea of generation is also, very surprisingly, excluded from Brittain’s Ida (pub. 1628), a poem printed as spenser’s but almost certainly by Fletcher. it concerns the affair of anchises and Venus, but no mention is made of his fathering aeneas. as much an imitation of Venus and Adonis as of The Faerie Queene’s erotic passages (such as the garden of adonis), it rigorously avoids any of its models’ concerns with generation. instead, it ends with anchises being punished for telling of his love, and an obvious moral drawn from that; sexual love is to be valued in itself, not for any fame it might bring. The song that initially draws anchises to Venus has similar overtones, doing away with spenser’s emphasis on love directed to other ends: Fond men, whose wretched care the life soone ending, By striving to increase your joy, do spend it; and spending joy, yet find no joy in spending: you hurt your life by striving to amend it, and seeking to prolong it, soonest end it: Than while fit time affords thee time and leasure, enjoy while yet thou mayst thy lifes sweet pleasure: too foolish is the man that starves to feed his treasure: love is lifes end (an end but never ending) all joyes, all sweetes, all happinesse awarding: love is lifes wealth (nere spent, but ever spending) More rich, by giving, taking by discarding: love’s lifes reward, rewarded in rewarding, Then from thy wretched heart fond care remoove; ah should thou live but once loves sweetes to proove, Thou wilt not love to live, unlesse thou live to love. (2. 7–8)

The language of spending here echoes that of shakespeare in Venus and Adonis and the Sonnets, but thrift is not the point – love here is a zerosum game, and one with no consequences. The central idea of generation, emphasized even in the relatively autotelic world of the garden of adonis, is removed and replaced with a carpe diem motif more appropriate to the Bower of Bliss. The concept of ‘fit time’ loses its sense of the opportune moment to change history, and becomes a mere sexual opportunity. Where spenser created separate private spheres in order to revivify the public, his successors create them for their own sake.

ch apter 5

‘We desire increase’: Shakespeare’s non-dramatic poetry

How much interest does shakespeare really show in the issue (pun intended) of procreation? sidney suspended it; spenser saw it as the only worthwhile end of sexuality; donne, as we shall see, tried to push it off the erotic agenda. shakespeare is harder to pin down: the plays certainly do not give generation real centrality, but on the whole they concede its necessity – as Benedick admits, justifying his emergent love for Beatrice, ‘the world must be peopled’ (Much Ado, ii. iii. 242). The poems, however, seem obsessed with the consequences of sex while seriously worrying about how they compromise selfhood. as we have seen (chapter 3, above), sidney presents the alternative to responsible reproduction as ‘self-conceit’; paternity is a duty which compromises individual autonomy, but which also expands it into something more meaningful. shakespeare elaborates on this, complicating the sidneian dichotomy considerably. Whilst selfconceit is initially put in opposition to generation in the Sonnets, a number of other modes of self-conception are explored. generation is a tremendously ambiguous matter – central but suspect – not only in the Sonnets, but also in Venus and Adonis, ‘let the bird of loudest lay’ (aka ‘The Phoenix and the turtle’) and, to a lesser degree, in Lucrece. shakespeare’s very complex sense of the relationship between generation and masculine selfhood is associated with his peculiar poetic position, straddling the transient theatre, private but prestigious manuscript circulation and permanent but somehow shameful print culture.1 artistic achievement is the truest form of self-preservation, shakespeare suggests; yet at the same time he acknowledges that this attitude is a dubious leap of faith, a supreme fiction. He strains to create a perfect aesthetic realm that will not be tainted by biological and sociopolitical anxieties; this effort is serious, but it is also seriously ironized, as the public and familial purposes of sidney and spenser cannot be wished away. shakespeare begins by trying to imagine a perfectly masculine form of generation, playing down the role of women, but this suppression is 130

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ultimately impossible, if it was ever desirable. like spenser, though with a greater show of reluctance, he must come to an accommodation between the sexes; anxieties caused by women and by the fundamentally limited nature of masculinity must finally be tackled head on. desperate to create something permanent, shakespeare works towards accepting the paradox that permanence can only be imagined as meaningful if it is infected by a feminine, maternal emotionality that initially seemed the very essence of impermanence and uncertainty. The first 17 so-called ‘generation’ sonnets make it a central issue, but these often have the air of a commission and the poet seems more interested in the metaphors he can marshal to his persuasive programme than in the outcome; in any case, the attitude to procreation here is decidedly idealized, continually (if disingenuously) suggesting that any offspring of the young man would be exact copies of himself. sonnet 11, however, gets to the nub of the idea of generation as necessity when the poet writes that in procreation lives wisdom, beauty, and increase; Without this, folly, age, and cold decay. if all were minded so the times would cease, and threescore year would make the world away. let those whom nature hath not made for store, Harsh, featureless, and rude, barrenly perish look whom she best endowed she gave the more, Which bounteous gift thou shouldst in bounty cherish. she carved thee for her seal, and meant thereby Thou shouldst print more, not let that copy die. (lines 5–14)2

The beautiful are ‘made for store’, and therefore prevent the world from ending. one of the central issues of any poetry with generation as its subject was the problem of millenarianism: if the end of the world is imminent, why on earth would you have children? spenser gets round this by suggesting that one needs to stock up heaven with extra saints and that earthly action remains at least typologically significant; the problem is one reason for donne’s dislike of producing children (in theory if not in practice – see chapter 6, below); shakespeare takes a bolder view than either – by having children, we endeavour to postpone the end of the world, which, though it might be spiritually desirable, is something our natures oppose. By contrast to sonnet 11, sonnet 19’s opening quatrain unleashes an extraordinary destructive impulse, wanting to end the world: devouring time, blunt thou the lion’s paws, and make the earth devour her own sweet brood,

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Poetry and Paternity in Renaissance England Pluck the keen teeth from the fierce tiger’s jaws, and burn the long-lived phoenix in her blood.

The figure of earthly power here, whether benign (the lion) or tyrannical (the tiger), is to lose its force; the figure of eternal renewal (associated with Queen elizabeth) is to come to a final end; natural, earthly breeding is to give way to infanticide. a millenarian attitude is struck, but the next three lines weaken this, culminating in the sonnet’s point in lines 8–12: Make glad the sorry seasons as thou fleet’st, and do whate’er thou wilt, swift-footed time, to the wide world and all her fading sweets: But i forbid thee one most heinous crime, o carve not with thy hours my love’s fair brow, nor draw no lines there with thine antique pen. Him in thy course untainted do allow For beauty’s pattern to succeeding men.

The poem then turns on itself in the couplet: yet do thy worst, old time: despite thy wrong, My love shall in my verse ever live young.

overall, the logic of this poem is perhaps the weakest in the sequence: ‘destroy the world, do anything you like, but don’t change my beloved; oh, all right then, do – my verse will preserve him.’ How the ‘succeeding’ men will admire the young man when the world is destroyed is rather problematic; the preservation of shakespeare’s verse seems equally problematic; the implication we must take is that verse is somehow outside nature, safe from time’s influence. This is an extravagant expansion of spenser’s idea that despite the transitory nature of human endeavour, poetry will somehow live to eternity (e.g. ‘The ruines of time’, lines 367–71). like spenser’s garden of adonis, in which the all-destructive power of time is invoked only to be forgotten, shakespeare’s sonnet affects to believe in a poetic realm or realm of memory that is indestructible, as if shakespeare were able to create the timeless platonic idea of his beloved. so superior is this to any kind of breeding, it cancels out the persuasive sentiment of sonnets 1–17. yet, at the same time, the need for ‘succeeding men’ as an audience for the young man and shakespeare’s poems makes us aware of natural succession as a necessary precondition. The ground is laid for a rapprochement with a feminine nature. The ‘generation’ group of sonnets are preoccupied with imagery of the preservation of a house (in both the familial and the architectural sense), with imagery of nature’s abundance, and – perhaps above all – with

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imagery of financial breeding, interest or usury. Underlying all this may be the troubling biblical sentiment ‘For vnto hym that hath, shall it be geuen: and from hym that hath not, shalbe taken away, euen that which he hath’ (Mark 4:25, Bishops’ Bible; see also Matthew 13:12). The passage is christ’s comment on his parable of the sowers, and can clearly be taken to justify increase, particularly the increase in wealth of a wealthy family, as being natural. it doesn’t seem a very ‘christian’ sentiment, but it can easily be used to underpin reverence for ruling-class individuals like shakespeare’s young man, and a belief that there is divine sanction for anything extra they might get; but whether the extra should be wealth, children or poetic reverence is a deep concern of the Sonnets. More human, emotional forms of love are kept out here, but though they may seem problematic, they may ultimately be the solution to the contortions shakespeare creates for himself. sonnet 6 evinces a decidedly odd sentiment; the core idea that the young man should ‘for thyself . . . breed another thee’ seems strangely undermined. The poem argues that as breeding is like financial interest, one does not lose one’s principal in breeding – in other words that breeding is not a zero-sum game, but an arena in which one gets something for nothing (a notion he will complicate elsewhere). stirred by this thought, shakespeare goes on to suggest that as the doubling of oneself in breeding involves the use of nonnegotiable assets, one might as well make as many new selves as one can: or ten times happier be it ten for one: ten times thyself were happier than thou art, if ten of thine ten times refigured thee. (lines 8–10)

The increase in one’s happiness through breeding becomes limitless, but this begins to suggest excess – something also signalled by the idea spilling over the poem’s volta. at other times shakespeare suggests that beauty and money are not the same, as one is preserved, and the other has no continuation either in this world or the next; he writes in sonnet 9: look what an unthrift in the world doth spend shifts but his place, for still the world enjoys it; But beauty’s waste hath in the world an end, and kept unused the user so destroys it. (lines 9–11)

Here the parable of the talents is more applicable than that of the sower. Beauty’s waste (with a common pun on ‘waist’ as the female genitalia) brings women back into play; whilst it may be an image of impermanence, any notion of permanence that does not take natural procreation into account seems likely to wither on the bough.

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later in the sequence, shakespeare plays out a fascinating battle between use and possession, the latter being considered better, if more difficult to claim. in sonnet 20, he concedes that the young man must be used by women for the purposes of reproduction, but claims that the poet really owns him: ‘Mine be thy love, and thy love’s use their treasure’ (line 14). We might wonder in what sense the poet possesses the young man, but shakespeare clings on with a favourite little pun on mine, suggesting not just possession but the kind of limitless wealth that was imagined as coming from new World silver mines. shakespeare uses this pun in ‘let the bird of loudest lay’, whose theme is perfect unity in love, saying ‘each was the other’s mine’ (line 36); in The Two Noble Kinsmen, in one of the most intense scenes of friendship in his oeuvre, arcite says We are an endless mine to one another; We are one another’s wife, ever begetting new births of love; we are father, friends, acquaintance, We are, in one another, families; i am your heir and you are mine. (ii. ii. 79–83)

The endlessness of this mine (which soon goes wrong) appears for the moment to trump breeding, any familial connections, and of course any mere notion of usurious interest. Heather dubrow has argued that ‘Possession is nine-tenths of the law in shakespeare’s sonnets’;3 and the poet’s insistence on his possession of the young man is one key way in which he asserts himself in the sequence, even if it is a fiction. such possession may be temporarily satisfying, but it is miserly and self-thwarting in the long run. We might feel that shakespeare, in emphasizing that the young man must breed, whilst totally ignoring the possibility of himself as a breeder, is extravagantly denying his own biological imperatives, and that the Sonnets are an example of selfless love. to some extent that is true, but another effect, which amounts to a competition between poet and patron/beloved emerges. The young man may get all the praise in the sequence, but shakespeare of course gets all the credit for the sequence.4 despite conjectures as to the young man’s identity, his anonymity is to some degree the point. ‘shakespeare’ appears on every page of the Sonnets (in the running title), but the young man’s name is famously elusive. yet shakespeare’s possession of the poetry involves a radical alienation: one must be prepared to lose oneself in order to gain value for one’s verse. other poets can see the problematic economy of such praise, but none as radically as shakespeare. Poetic works may – considered as children, with a degree of autonomy of voice – get out of their makers’ control, but

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it is by no means clear that they therefore get into anyone else’s control. edward de Vere’s ‘The labouring man’ argues that the reaper does not possess the ‘fruit’ he works for, and extends this idea to poetry, drawing his ideas into one key point: so hee that takes the payne to penne the booke reapes not the giftes of goodlye golden Muse, But those gayne that who on the worke shal looke, and from the soure the sweete by skill doth chuse. (lines 21–4)

Poetry becomes a reluctantly altruistic business, almost as if the writer were as badly exploited as agricultural workers or hunt-beaters. shakespeare wryly turns this idea of exploitation around, exploring the mutual costs as well as the mutual gains of poetic praise. The Sonnets set up an implicit (and sometimes explicit) competition between biological and poetic inheritance or immortality. shakespeare may have no living descendants today (and had no living son to continue his name at the probable time of writing the sequence), but his poetry has obviously lasted. as we have seen (chapter 1, above), the idea of a Platonic preference for memetic over genetic posterity was clearly available in shakespeare’s time; as Bacon said ‘the care of posterity is most in them that have no posterity’.5 looked at from the other direction, an effect of this is that i care a lot more about shakespeare, nearly 400 years after his death, than i do about my own ancestors who were his contemporaries;6 i suspect this is true of many people reading this chapter. Unlike spenser, who wants to harmonize poetic, national and procreative achievement, shakespeare sets up a continual competition not only between the poet and the (very much notional) woman who will provide him with offspring, but also between the poet and the young man himself; it amounts to a competition between poetry and sex, between culture and biology, between men and women, friendship and love, nature and education, necessity and choice. yet shakespeare also tangles up our attitudes about these categories from the very first sonnet, in which he pulls us in with our own biological imperatives before turning these towards the young man. The need to be a father in order to have full masculine identity is radically interrogated, but still used as a support for all other spheres of self-investment.7 let us consider what actually unfolds in the first few lines of the sequence, before the overall persuasive pattern has taken control of the poems’ meanings. at the risk of succumbing to a Fishy surprise at each element that comes along in a poem, i think we can mull over each line one by one, such mulling being one of the major reasons for the lineations of verse; it helps to reconstruct the sequence’s first impression.

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Poetry and Paternity in Renaissance England From fairest creatures we desire increase,

The generalizing we here speaks, we might assume, to a masculine community; taken in isolation the line might mean ‘We men want to breed with the most beautiful women.’ it becomes something of a definition of desire, but this definition is left uncertain in the oddly chosen paired words ‘creatures’ and ‘increase’ (intimating a pseudo-etymological connection), the former reminding us of divine creation, the latter carrying ideas of wealth as well as of the divine obligation to increase and multiply. The next line qualifies all this with a purpose for increase, suggesting that it cannot be an end in itself as the first line alone might have suggested: That thereby beauty’s rose might never die, [Rose capitalized and italicized in Quarto]

The reason for our desire of beauty is to preserve beauty. Whose purpose is this? our own conscious intention, or an unconscious one? or is beauty playing a trick on us, acting as a parasite, using our desires to preserve itself? We are probably still at this stage thinking of ourselves, the desirers as male, the beautiful desired as female. The next two lines have a syntactic flow that discourages the line-by-line pauses we have interjected thus far: But as the riper should by time decease, His tender heir might bear his memory

We are still positioning ourselves, as readers, on the masculine side of a straightforward gender divide: might bear seems to be covered by the purposive that in line 2, the whole unit reading ‘We want the beautiful so that we can preserve it, but also so that our heirs can remember us.’ it all seems to be generalization about the purposes of sex. only looking back do we identify His in line 4 with the fairest creatures rather than the we of line 1. of course, the fact that the lines are both generalization (initially) and a movement to the specifics of advising the young man (retrospectively) allows the two meanings to be mutually reinforcing, but that does not do away with the dislocation of meaning; on the one hand we are dealing with a general sense of our desire to breed, on the other with the much more debatable desire that beautiful aristocrats should breed. The trick is to piggyback our attitude to aristocrats onto our obvious and biologically fundamental desire to breed, as if they were part of the same issue, yet we’re also made aware of the trick, as it is not all that easy at first to identify the young man with beauty’s rose. c. s. lewis commented that no man ever much cared if another man had children;8 whilst i’m really not sure that’s true, i do think few would want a man to breed entirely on account of his beauty,

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which seems more the attitude of a stock-breeder. We may then withhold our assent to the first quatrain’s proposition, but the complications do disappear at the beginning of the next quatrain (where the main meaning becomes clear), because here the poem’s address turns away from a masculine community to the young man himself; the persuasive intent takes over. it is his assent, not ours, that is required. We, the disinterested readers, are pulled away from the biological desires with which we began the poem. This division is characteristic: one of the main burdens of the Sonnets is that there are two selves in everyone; although the distinctions between them are often very hard to see, we can simplify things by calling one self the individual and the other the familial.9 This first comes across in sonnet 1, where shakespeare calls the young man ‘Thy self thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel’ (line 8). it is the essential problem of such difficult sonnets as 13, beginning, ‘o that you were yourself’. shakespeare makes division of the young man, in order partly to detach him from his family, which is often conceived as an aspect of natural necessity. yet it is also conceived as the reason for the young man’s beauty, raising the question of how far shakespeare sees beauty, goodness and high status as a package. His romantic plots do tend to suggest that this might be so, or that it at least ought to be. as Margreta de grazia puts it, ‘Fair is the distinguishing attribute of the dominant class, not unlike Bourdieu’s taste that serves both to distinguish the dominant class and, by distinguishing it, to keep it dominant.’ 10 as with the debate about nature and nurture in The Winter’s Tale (iv. iv), however, matters are not that simple. The constructedness of natural ideas of family and social status cannot be avoided. sonnet 13 ends with the telling sententia, which might be taken as a summation of the ‘generation’ sonnets, ‘you had a father, let your son say so’, but this is the only mention of the young man’s father, from whom he has his status. elsewhere, the emphasis is on his mother. There may be a number of reasons for this: the young man’s mother may have commissioned the sequence; the past tense in the above line implies that his father is dead; if the young man is to be identified as William Herbert, earl of Pembroke, mention of his mother invokes the sidney family.11 The emphasis on the mother, and the implicit erasure of the father, however, also create a paternal vacancy that the poet may fill. sonnet 3 says ‘Thou art thy mother’s glass’ (line 9), a concept that rather feminizes the young man even as he is being urged to engage in ‘husbandry’ (line 6). shakespeare seems here to be playing on one of the most powerful of evolved masculine anxieties, the uncertainty of paternity.12 everyone knows who their mother is, but no one can ever be entirely certain of their father’s identity.

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as shakespeare insists that a son will be a copy of the young man, then, there may be the underlying anxiety that he’ll never know. Better, perhaps, to trust one’s friend and poet. The poet may have no biological connection, but he might be better than a mother; he promises to keep the young man’s heart as well ‘as tender nurse her babe from faring ill’ (sonnet 22, line 12); there may be more affection in non-familial bonds – affection in this case, though, being conceived as essentially feminine. in sonnet 37 shakespeare goes further and likens himself to ‘a decrepit father’ who takes delight in his son’s deeds (line 1), and goes on to insist that ‘i make my love engrafted to this store’ (line 8), intruding himself on the family’s resources (which are ‘worth and truth’, ‘beauty, birth, or wealth, or wit’ – lines 4–5); affection for the young man makes him part of the family, rather than familial bonds creating affection; in his engrafting, he resembles the dangerous parasite Falstaff, to whom Hal is supposedly ‘engraff’d’ (Henry IV Part 2, ii. ii. 63). More generally in sonnet 21, shakespeare says ‘my love is as fair / as any mother’s child’ (lines 10–11), and in 41 calls him a ‘woman’s son’; the latter context suggests contempt for women – ‘When a woman woos what woman’s son / Will sourly leave her till he have prevailed?’ (lines 7–8). insofar as one is a woman’s son, one is subject to lust; the idea of woman’s responsibility for the Fall of Man here ties up with the blaming of shakespeare’s mistress for sleeping with the young man. generativity and sexuality are gendered female, and condemned as untrustworthy, but they cannot be wished away, as they are the basis for feeling, and therefore for any real meaning. The sequence as a whole increasingly compromises the value of biological generativity, but even in the ‘generation’ sonnets themselves we can see some reservations. sonnet 7 is mostly a description of the inevitable declines in life, even whilst making the young man into a sun-god and a king: lo in the orient when the gracious light lifts up his burning head, each under-eye doth homage to his new-appearing sight, serving with looks his sacred majesty; and having climbed the steep-up heavenly hill, resembling strong youth in his middle age, yet mortal looks adore his beauty still, attending on his pilgrimage: But when from highmost pitch, with weary car, like feeble age he reeleth from the day, The eyes (fore duteous) now converted are From his low tract and look another way: (lines 1–12)

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The last lines, however, seem logically disconnected from all this: so thou, thyself outgoing in thy noon, Unlooked on diest unless thou get a son. (lines 13–14)

The only reason a son seems a solution to the decline of a sun is the pun. in fact, the sun-god apollo did have a son, Phaethon, whose handling of his chariot was not exactly successful; his story, familiar from ovid’s Metamorphoses Book ii, was frequently taken by writers of shakespeare’s period (including shakespeare himself) as an example of over-reaching (e.g. Henry VI Part 3, i. iv. 33, Romeo and Juliet, iii. ii. 3). The mention here of the sun’s ‘car’ and falling from the day both surely nod at that story, and suggest the fallings off involved in fatherhood. The presumption throughout is that the young man, if and when he breeds, will have a son, but sonnet 17, at the very end of the ‘generation’ sonnets, genders any potential child neutrally as ‘it’ (line 14), in order perhaps to balance the equivalence made in that line with the poet’s ‘rhyme’. Whilst this does not exactly undermine the persuasive intention, it consolidates the abstraction that has pulled the sequence along. The financial and farming metaphors have also had this effect, depersonalizing any son. sonnet 12, perhaps the most forceful of the generation sonnets, certainly construes breeding as necessary, but hardly as entirely or personally desirable. He tells the young man: thou among the wastes of time must go, since sweets and beauties do themselves forsake, and die as fast as they see others grow. (lines 10–12)

This sentiment actually runs rather counter to the overall persuasive programme, making generation into a zero-sum game, or a competition, as it was for Bacon and others (see chapter 1, above), since it implies, ‘the faster your son grows, the quicker you will die’. The final couplet rescues the poem somewhat from this uncomfortable thought, but is more defiant than genuinely triumphant: and nothing ’gainst time’s scythe can make defence save breed to brave him when he takes thee hence. (lines 13–14)

‘Breed’ here, despite the tough alliterative effect, is basically abstract. The figurative language of sonnet 10 also has the effect of pulling the mind away from the actual business of having children; shakespeare accuses the young man of conspiring against himself seeking that beauteous roof to ruinate, Which to repair should be thy chief desire. (lines 7–8)

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We might wonder if many young men see home repairs as chief desires, however sensible a priority they may be. sonnet 15, the closest thing the sequence has to a carpe diem poem,13 also seems to redefine the key concept of increase, saying that ‘men as plants increase’ (line 5); growth and generation can both be covered by this word, but they are not quite the same thing, and the young man might – selfishly, but understandably – be more interested in the former. This poem ends with shakespeare saying ‘i engraft you new’, compellingly introducing the idea of poetic immortality as more reliable than biological. Having abstracted the language of breeding, shakespeare can now use it for poetry as well as the original persuasive intention. like many poets of the time, shakespeare uses metaphors of childbirth as images of poetic creation, but he characteristically makes more complex use of the idea than his contemporaries do. Poetry is called ‘birth’ in sonnet 32 (line 11), a comparison which is elaborated in the opening quatrain of sonnet 59: if there be nothing new, but that which is Hath been before, how are our brains beguiled, Which, labouring for invention, bear amiss The second burden of a former child?

ostensibly a poem about the difficulties of writing anything new, its first lines infect the field of childbirth with this ecclesiastican absence of novelty. The idea of bearing children amiss resembles donne’s sense of ‘an ominous precipitation’ in birth (An Anatomy of the World: The First Anniversary, lines 95–8 – see chapter 6 below).14 This amounts to a challenge to the idea of perfect reproduction held up in the ‘generation’ sonnets. a similar sense of doomed generation can be found in the next sonnet: nativity, once in the main of light, crawls to maturity, wherewith being crowned crookèd eclipses ’gainst his glory fight, and time that gave doth now his gift confound. (sonnet 60, lines 5–8)

This poem holds out ‘verse’ as the only thing that can stand against time (line 13). it preserves not only the young man, but shakespeare too, who asserts in sonnet 74 that when he is dead ‘My life hath in this line some interest’ (line 3); this line neatly compresses a range of ideas, coalescing poetic and familial lines and commandeering the usurious imagery from generation into the poetic sphere, appropriating interest in its broadest senses to the poet-friend. Here, shakespeare’s personal investment gives

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unity to the sequence, despite the fragmentation of selfhood that always seems implicit in ideas of generation. sonnet 77 makes a book (perhaps, as steevens suggested, a blank notebook accompanying the poem) the ground of sharing between the poet and the young man: Thy glass will show thee how thy beauties wear, Thy dial how thy precious minutes waste, The vacant leaves thy mind’s imprint will bear, and of this book this learning mayst thou taste: The wrinkles which thy glass will truly show of mouthèd graves will give thee memory; Thou by thy dial’s shady stealth mayst know time’s thievish progress to eternity. look what thy memory cannot contain, commit to these waste blanks, and thou shalt find Those children nursed, delivered from thy brain, to take a new acquaintance of thy mind. These offices, so oft as thou wilt look, shall profit thee, and much enrich thy book.

The generative imagery here seems largely incidental, but the poem’s overall meaning is not quite clear – is the young man to write his own ideas in the book, or to copy shakespeare’s poems into it? if the latter meaning is present, patronizing as it may be (and i think the poem just sustains it), the young man is imagined as the bearing mother of shakespeare’s verse, the book as nurse. shakespeare is asserting himself as masculine, the young man as essentially feminine, an idea that has been present from the first. He is giving the young man his duties (‘offices’) as a mother to his verse. The idea of accommodation between the sexes therefore finds its way into the purely masculine homosocial bond. later, in sonnet 86, shakespeare turns the idea around, and imagines his own mind as a ‘womb’ (line 4), but there he is thinking about the so-called ‘rival Poet’, and presenting himself as an abandoned wife. in sonnet 97, he similarly constructs himself as widowed in the young man’s absence: How like a winter hath my absence been From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year? What freezings have i felt, what dark days seen? What old december’s bareness everywhere? and yet this time removed was summer’s time, The teeming autumn big with rich increase, Bearing the wanton burden of their prime, like widowed wombs after their lords’ decease: yet this abundant issue seemed to me

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The simple meaning of this is ‘it was summer while we were apart, but felt like winter’, but the emphasis on generation gives this a different spin. The meaning comes to be something like ‘i felt very bad whilst i was absent from you; i felt barren [bareness and barrenness were not wholly distinguished words], yet i was in fact productive, even if the fruits of my labours seemed like orphans; i failed really to sing – oh, all right, i sang, but i did so sadly, because i feared the approach of a really barren season, in which my papers (leaves) might look really blank.’ Making this meaning implicit allows the purpose of the relationship to be the poetic fruit it produced – a fruit that is alienated from its producer. This looks forward to the enigmatic final couplet of sonnet 112: you are so strongly in my purpose bred That all the world besides me thinks y’are dead.

This is one of the Sonnets’ most difficult cruces; Burrow rightly calls the Q reading of the last line (which he adopts) ‘almost solipsistic’. For our purposes, though, the key word is bred – ‘you have so strongly fertilized my verse’ is one possible meaning of line 13; this would carry a further implication into line 14: ‘having bred so much in me, producing my verse, you seem almost to have expended all your life-force in me’. any other kind of breeding, whether with women or other poets, would seem impossible; it is a triumph for poetic over biological heritage. Having begotten these sonnets, we might think, the only begetter can beget nothing else, but the poet’s purpose has a triumphant if alienated unity. Poetic growth, then, becomes associated with the poet’s growing love, and trumps generativity. in sonnet 115 (a poem strongly resembling donne’s ‘love’s growth’), the image of their love as a child finds its fullest expression: love is a babe, then might i not say so, to give full growth to that which still doth grow. (lines 13–14)

This is simply a way of squaring the circle (as spenser does – see chapter 4, above), and saying that love can be perfect and still growing, but this meaning of increase seems to have driven out the usurious breeding metaphors of the early sonnets. if the young man makes shakespeare a parent

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of a perfect but growing baby, the woman of the last 28 sonnets infantilizes him, as he is presented, in a poem strongly resembling greville’s Caelica 61 (see chapter 3, above) and sidney’s ‘sleep, baby mine’, as an infant wailing for his mother. sonnet 143 is one of shakespeare’s most sustained presentations of motherhood, and it is done with a delicate and poignantly observed sentimental comedy: lo, as a careful housewife runs to catch one of her feathered creatures broke away, sets down her babe and makes all swift despatch in pursuit of the thing she would have stay, Whilst her neglected child holds her in chase, cries to catch her whose busy care is bent to follow that which flies before her face, not prizing her poor infant’s discontent; so runn’st thou after that which flies from thee, Whilst i, thy babe, chase thee afar behind. But if thou catch thy hope, turn back to me and play the mother’s part: kiss me, be kind. so will i pray that thou mayst have thy Will, if thou turn back and my loud crying still.

all of the characters in shakespeare’s famous love triangle are made rather absurd here: the ‘dark lady’ is a flustered housewife, shakespeare a baby, and the young man a chicken (though, as Helen Vendler points out, the poet is careful to circumlocute so that the word chicken isn’t actually used). The chicken, not the son, is the ‘hope’ here, intimating something wrong-headed about feminine and maternal thinking. The futility of the infant’s perspective is splendidly conveyed: it ‘holds her in chase’, and it is not clear whether it is really chasing her, or is too young to do so and is merely frustratedly mimicking the chase by grasping at nothing. all of the poem’s actions are rather like this: chasing, playing roles and praying are all secondary forms of action, involving will rather than achievement. in all the poems to the ‘dark lady’, there is something unmanly and illusory about the pursuit of a woman; yet it is necessary. in the poems to the young man, there is a persistent sense of preservation to the ‘age unbred’ of both poet and patron (sonnet 104, line 13). it is not, however, his familial self or name that will survive, but the self itself, held up to ‘posterity’ in sonnet 55, where verse’s preservative capacities are held up against a subtly feminized ‘unswept stone besmeared with sluttish time’ (line 4), time being presented as an inadequate (and perhaps therefore unfaithful) housewife. This poem brings back millenarian accents we

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heard in earlier sonnets, again with a sense that the last Judgement is a long way off: ’gainst death, and all oblivious enmity shall you pace forth, your praise shall still find room, even in the eyes of all posterity That wear this world out to the ending doom. so, till the judgement that yourself arise, you live in this, and dwell in lovers’ eyes. (lines 9–14)

The young man is presented in very manly terms here, but only because of the poet’s preservation; obviously this deserves the more credit the more the last Judgement is delayed. Posterity, and perhaps even the young man’s children, only wear the world away. a similar idea comes across in sonnet 81: your monument shall be my gentle verse, Which eyes not yet created shall o’er-read, and tongues-to-be your being shall rehearse, When all the breathers of the world are dead. you still shall live (such virtue hath my pen) Where breath most breathes, even in the mouths of men. (lines 9–14)

line 12 momentarily suggests that he will live when all people are dead – i.e. after the end of the world – ‘tongues-to-be’ being such a grand phrase that it suggests future beings, even the saints of the latter days as the young man’s praisers (drayton, by contrast, speaks of ‘nephewes’ – i.e. grandsons – as the future praisers of his love object (Idea, 17, 11)). shakespeare’s final couplet pulls back from this meaning, but there is an implication, both here and in sonnet 55, that shakespeare’s verse will actually enable the young man to reach the end of days. shakespeare turns this implication around in sonnet 122 where he quite frankly says that the young man’s compositions will be preserved in his (shakespeare’s) memory ‘Beyond all date even to eternity’ (line 4). Poetic memory seems, for the moment at least, a much better way to ensure one’s immortality, even to the crack of doom, than biological preservation with all its uncertainties. yet for this verse to survive, it needs to be ‘gentle verse’, relying on its social status – a very temporal, and fictive concept (particularly in the case of shakespeare, who had bought himself such status). if the young man is Beauty’s rose from the very start of the sequence the ‘woman coloured ill’ (sonnet 144, line 4) represents everything contrary to beauty. yet such is her appeal that in sonnet 127 her blackness can be called ‘beauty’s successive heir’ (line 3). This is a slander to beauty, ‘a

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bastard shame’ (line 4). although there are many other things going on in this poem, one implication, pointing back to the idea of generation, is that sex with women only produces uncertain offspring, or at best heirs that won’t live up to the original model. such black pseudo-beauty is guilty of ‘sland’ring creation with a false esteem’ (line 12); true creativity, poetic rather than biological, is blackened by the comparison with what female sexuality can do to preserve the individual and his beauty. imagery of bastardy also crops up in the opening of sonnet 124, where its meaning is clearly figurative: if my dear love were but the child of state it might for Fortune’s bastard be unfathered.

The lines’ difficulty is based on the unnecessary child images, and the meaning is glossed to some extent in the next line – ‘as subject to time’s love, or to time’s hate’ – i.e. ‘if my love were merely a product of success, it might, when fortune turned against it, be denied by me as by fortune.’ But why bring in the children as well as the imagery of stately success? Whilst the word child is sometimes used quite casually in the verse of this period simply to mean product or result, it is here developed suggestively with the idea of Fortune’s bastard in the next line; it may be a way of slipping in the idea of bastardy without saying anything really explicit about it. Having analogized poetic and biological preservation, anxieties about the unreliability of biology infect the supposedly purer realm of poetry. Perhaps no form of generativity can be reliable; all may bring shame. The necessity of this shame means that some accommodation with women must be found. as we have seen, anxiety about the reliability of women is one reason for putting all your seed in the basket of poetry rather than in a woman’s womb. By comparison to the work of most dramatic contemporaries, shakespeare’s plays present women as remarkably chaste, but the poetry shows continual anxiety about cuckoldry. in The Rape of Lucrece, the heroine’s virtuous suicide is partly motivated by fear of her husband’s shame at having tarquin’s bastard (crudely described as a ‘load of lust’ she bears, line 734) foisted on him; in a sense her suicide is a drastic mode of abortion: she says, mentally addressing her husband, that tarquin ‘shall not boast who did thy stock pollute, / That thou art doting father of his fruit’ (lines 1063–4). as it was commonly thought that orgasm was necessary to conception, pregnancy was taken as evidence of consent in cases of rape;15 her suicide therefore becomes the only way to deny such consent. in ‘a lover’s complaint’, appended to the Sonnets,16 the lady says she has ‘Heard

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where his [her seducer’s] plants in others’ orchards grew’ (line 171) and that his words were considered ‘bastards of his foul adulterate heart’ (line 175). The effect of verbalizing the idea of bastardy is to suggest that sex corrupts male integrity more even than female. as we shall see, Venus and Adonis is preoccupied with male chastity; and its fable may be partly motivated by anxieties about this extended kind of bastardy. opting out of sexuality seems a way of preserving one’s integrity. sonnet 53, with its reference to that poem’s hero, leads us nicely to Venus and Adonis; it is also a central poem in the sequence’s dealings with the young man’s uniqueness: What is your substance, whereof are you made, That millions of strange shadows on you tend? since every one hath, every one, one shade, and you, but one, can every shadow lend. describe adonis, and the counterfeit is poorly imitated after you. on Helen’s cheek all art of beauty set, and you in grecian tires are painted new. speak of the spring and foison of the year, The one doth shadow of your beauty show, The other as your bounty doth appear, and you in every blessèd shape we know. in all external grace you have some part, But you like none, none you, for constant heart.

spenser’s adonis is invoked here in order to be partly inverted; that figure is ‘eterne in mutabilitie’ (iii. vi. 47.5), whereas shakespeare’s young man is (however ironically) constant, but both are presented as the centres of generativity, almost the platonic idea of the world. By identifying the foison (harvest) with the young man’s bounty, shakespeare moves us away from spenser’s fanciful realms into the materialist world of patronage, but he also cuts off the idea of the spring–harvest trajectory as having to do with biological generativity. such a young man’s harvest will not be grown in the inconstant world of woman and natural conception, but in the masculine realm of patronage and poetic conception. The young man’s constancy (perhaps a surprising choice of unique attribute) can only be guaranteed if no copies of him are made. This is one crucial reason why shakespeare’s adonis, in his narrative poem, will reject Venus – unlike spenser’s, who is engaged in an act of perpetual sex. such a rejection is a rejection not just of women, but of the temporal world, with its external graces. yet such a rejection, the longer poem recognizes, is as futile as it is admirable. as well as being influenced by spenser, shakespeare’s Venus

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and Adonis may well have been partly inspired by titian’s painting of that name, which had some significance to english public life: it was sent to the future Philip ii of spain in england in 1554, and copies were made which shakespeare may have seen.17 The image of adonis resembles the young Philip (as painted by titian), albeit in an idealized manner;18 the Venus of the painting might then refer to Philip’s wife Queen Mary of england (though it would be a highly flattering portrait, titian made a point of figuring Venus from the rear, and had of course not seen the decidedly plain Mary), and the portrayal of the man’s departure for the hunt acts as a reminder of royal duties (such as Philip’s in the low countries), also flattering its patron by depicting the english Queen as enthralled by her husband.19 This might have been suggestive for shakespeare, whose generation portrayed their Queen more as diana than Venus – a Queen who had, moreover, rejected proffers of marriage from Philip, and was now at war with him. The point of this is that titian is the first major interpreter of the story to have adonis reject Venus, as shakespeare would also tell it, though titian’s adonis is much more tender and regretful.20 cupid here is asleep, his arms hung up; love has no power over this man. Venus is a figure of unchastity (signalled by her precarious pose, her loose hair, and above all her knocking over of the jug, bottom left). Jove (or apollo) is an indistinct voyeur of the scene, blazing, or thundering from a cloud, on a diagonal above the line between the main figures’ eyes;21 we shall see that shakespeare also makes marginal use of other male gods to sharpen our sense of adonis’s masculine rectitude, but without titian’s possible sense of providing a moral centre for adonis. Venus and Adonis, in addition to its dialogues with spenser and titian, is also engaged with contemporary issues: it certainly has something to do with the earl of southampton, to whom it is dedicated, and who had resisted marriage to his guardian’s granddaughter; and it certainly has something to do with resentment of Queen elizabeth, the woman on top whom readers could fantasize about rejecting. it can also be said that a vague aetiological allegory about the relationship between love and beauty can be found here, though the current critical consensus runs against the older moralizing tradition that saw the poem as involving the rejection of lust. i think that tradition had some validity, but the older critics’ acceptance of the word lust (which is used by adonis himself) does betray a Victorian attitude to sexuality. adonis’s rejection of Venus, in my view, is a rejection of female sexuality and biological generativity such as we have seen at work in the Sonnets. His resulting death reflects the fact that, however much the poet may distrust generativity, it is nonetheless

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necessary. as Katherine duncan-Jones puts it, ‘as we close each book of shakespeare’s nondramatic poetry, what we most remember about adonis, about lucrece, and about the “lovely Boy” of the Sonnets’ speaker is that they have died or will die.’ 22 adonis’s stance is both unbearably priggish and strangely admirable. He is a man going off into a manly world, rejecting a too-maternal, overpowering woman; he is a priggish guyon put in a world where calidore’s sexualized, discreet courtesies would be more appropriate; he is kicking against the pricks (including his own). like the young man in sonnet 94, he is capable of ‘moving others’, but he is not ‘as stone’, as the boar proves. in the dedication, shakespeare describes southampton as the ‘godfather’ to the poem; this invokes another mode of non-biological connection, one that involves giving one’s name to someone. Venus and Adonis does not, however, offer poetic memorial connection with other men as an alternative to sexual reproduction as the Sonnets do. Masculine independence is rather lonely here; the only other males in the poem are animals and gods. The best mode of preservation/immortality offered to adonis is his floral preservation by a sentimental, maternal woman at the end. interestingly, spenser parallels poetic and ovidian floral preservation in the garden of adonis (iii. vi. 45), but does not present adonis himself in this way; he is only ‘lapped in flowres’ (46.5). The preservation of adonis is at the cost of masculinity in both poems. shakespeare’s initial picture of adonis, admittedly from Venus’s mouth, is not exactly masculine: she calls him ‘more lovely than a man’ (line 9); this may relate to sonnet 20’s sense of the young man as androgynous, but it also calls the idea of masculinity as the primary value into question. Venus’s very existence challenges masculinity, as elizabeth i’s royal power did. at the point when Venus gets closest to making adonis yield to her, the moment is described in terms of melting, rather than masculine stiffening: What wax so frozen but dissolves with temp’ring, and yields at last to every light impression? (lines 565–6)

Women are traditionally presented as more wax-like and impressionable than men (see Lucrece, line 1240 – ‘men have marble, women waxen minds’). adonis’s death is presented more as a homoerotic penetration than a masculine heroic end; the moment is filtered through Venus’s consciousness, rather than being directly narrated: ’tis true, ’tis true, thus was adonis slain: He ran upon the boar with his sharp spear,

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Who would not whet his teeth at him again, But by a kiss thought to persuade him there, and, nuzzling in his flank, the loving swine sheathed unaware the tusk in his soft groin. (lines 1111–16)

clearly this is projection, but it also demonstrates how Venus appropriates the narrative and reverses gender-roles. Whether we are meant to take a delight in the queering of gender categories, or are meant to be unsettled, it is clear that there is an element of identification between the boar and Venus. This is also partly the case in spenser, where the boar is not dead, but ‘emprisoned’ in a cave underneath the Mount of Venus in the centre of the garden (iii. vi. 48.6) – there is something boarish in the goddess of love. The moment Venus grabs him in shakespeare’s poem, adonis is driven to ‘Pure shame’ (line 69) in his failed resistance; such shame is introduced into the Sonnets by the ‘dark lady’, whose ‘waste of shame’ is so troubling in sonnet 129 (line 1), and who introduces ‘bastard shame’ in sonnet 127 (line 4). Venus accuses adonis of being a ‘lifeless picture, cold, and senseless stone, / Well-painted idol, image dull, and dead’ (lines 211–12), with some proleptic irony; the lines also may anticipate the young man being ‘as stone’ in sonnet 94 (line 3); the difference is that the male poet admires (or affects to admire) stoniness. Venus has, immediately before this, insisted that any ‘woman’s son’ (line 201) would sleep with her, anticipating shakespeare’s emphasis on the young man’s mother in most of the ‘generation’ sonnets. a feminine frame of reference does away with all masculine values. There are, however, appeals to other masculine figures in the poem; the most notable is the ‘breeding jennet’ (line 260) who has none of adonis’s sexual reluctance. Venus tries to persuade adonis not only by comparison with this animal, but also to other gods; the fact that she has been loved by Mars – the ultimate macho-god – ought, she thinks, to appeal to adonis’s masculine emulation. yet in this, of course, she is doing down masculinity, expressing her pride that Mars was ‘servile’ to her (line 112). The narrator also points out titan’s envy of adonis (line 177, perhaps mistaking the figure in the sky in titian’s painting). These amount to homosocial appeals, in which the valuation of a woman is referred to a masculine court of appeal – and the imagined audience are also part of this court. even the boar can be co-opted into such a frame of reference, but again through Venus’s perspective, as she tells adonis alas, he naught esteems that face of thine, to which love’s eyes pays tributary gazes,

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The effect of what Venus says here may be counter-productive; the boar is the exception to the world’s assent as to adonis’s perfection, and as such may provide an external achilles’ heel – to try to kill it becomes necessary to one who needs to make himself absolutely perfect. What is absent from this poem is the higher judge we may see in titian’s painting; fighting the boar becomes a way of submitting oneself to the only power that can challenge Venus’s view of the world, given her feminine appropriation of the courts of homosocial masculinity. Venus’s feminine priorities come across in her insistence on generative sexuality, in passages that have long been recognized as analogues with the ‘generation’ sonnets.23 The difference here is that there is no masculine voice to ironize the priorities of generativity. Her crucial argument runs as follows: ‘torches are made to light, jewels to wear, dainties to taste, fresh beauty for the use, Herbs for their smell, and sappy plants to bear. Things growing to themselves are growth’s abuse; seeds spring from seeds, and beauty breedeth beauty: Thou wast begot: to get it is thy duty. ‘Upon the earth’s increase why shouldst thou feed, Unless the earth with thy increase be fed? By law of nature thou art bound to breed, That thine may live, when thou thyself art dead: and so in spite of death thou dost survive, in that thy likeness still is left alive.’ (lines 163–74)

conventional as these arguments are, they lack the sense of non-negotiability we saw in the ‘generation’ sonnets; we (and presumably adonis) are keenly aware that such breeding involves expenditure of self, particularly in the first few lines: the torch will burn out, the pun in wear is clear, the idea of tasting suggesting devouring, and the idea of use here has no sense of interest. The idea of the earth feeding on adonis’s putative offspring emphasizes that death cannot really be defeated. The assertion of the law of nature imposes on adonis’s freedom – whereas the Sonnets emphasize nature’s affection for the young man. There is also a pun on still in the last line – there is something lifeless in the likeness. later, after emphasizing a few tempus fugit motifs, Venus resumes the argument:

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despite of fruitless chastity, love-lacking vestals, and self-loving nuns That on the earth would breed a scarcity, and barren dearth of daughters and of sons, Be prodigal. The lamp that burns by night dries up his oil to lend the world his light. ‘What is thy body but a swallowing grave, seeming to bury that posterity Which by the rights of time thou needs must have, if thou destroy them not in dark obscurity? if so the world will hold thee in disdain, sith in thy pride so fair a hope is slain. (lines 751–62)

The paradox of breeding a scarcity suggests a wicked force – perhaps, through the nuns, the catholic church – which wants to destroy prosperity, at the time associated with both good harvests and population increase.24 The idea here is that you can only shine in the world if you have children, a notion we have seen the Sonnets go some way to dispelling. There is a distinct ambiguity, however, in the phrase ‘the rights of time’ – does it mean ‘the rights (or even rites) that time demands from individuals’, or ‘the rights that individuals are given by time’? is adonis being urged to accept necessity, or to claim his rights? He takes the latter course, asserting his masculine right to self-realization rather than accepting the necessity of the rites of love. in Harold Bloom’s terms, he strongly misreads Venus.25 His actions could also be described as metaphysical rebellion, in albert camus’s terms,26 in this case a doomed defiance of biological necessity. adonis dismisses the argument for ‘increase’, calling it ‘strange excuse’ (line 791), without much exercise of his reason. love is eloquent, chastity blunt – or we might say that he, representing Beauty, has his eloquence rather in his face than in his voice. The principal argument he has used earlier is that he is not ready for love: ‘Who wears a garment shapeless and unfinished? Who plucks a bud before one leaf put forth? if springing things be any jot diminished They wither in their prime, prove nothing worth. The colt that’s backed and burdened being young loseth his pride, and never waxeth strong. (lines 415–20)

He is conscious here of sex as diminution of self, taking away resources that might be used in other fields. The word ‘leaf’, whilst it clearly fits in with the natural metaphor, may also imply achievements in print; the

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concept of worth and the emphasis on strength both suggest that martial achievement may be at least as valuable a contribution to one’s immortality as reproduction. Just before this, adonis has, with comic bluntness, asserted his single-mindedness: ‘i know not love’, quoth he, ‘nor will not know it, Unless it be a boar, and then i chase it.’ (lines 409–10)

This is a boy, we are reminded. That’s the simple meaning anyway; but is he also chasing possession of the phallus? The spear in titian’s painting, which he seems almost to be sticking into Venus, might imply this, but it seems reductive. given that Venus is love – as the poem continually makes plain, to great comic effect – the deeper point here may be that Venus and the boar are to be identified. love and death are really two aspects of the same thing; both are figures of time and necessity: sexual generation is needed because of time and death. going back to the initial picture of adonis from Venus’s mouth, we can see that there is something unnatural about adonis from the first; she reports that nature that made thee with herself at strife, saith that the world hath ending with thy life. (lines 11–12)

it may be his perfection that is unnatural – a perfection that can only be compromised and brought into the natural order by either the diminutions of sex or the dissolution of death. adonis may therefore choose the boar in order to get his de-perfection out of the way in one fell swoop. The sense that adonis is somehow the guarantor of the world’s persistence is more troubling, however. it follows from spenser’s use of adonis to some extent, but this keystone of the world seems to have a death-wish. Venus confirms the spenserian sense of adonis later on, calling him ‘fairest mover of this mortal round’ (line 368), making him something of an unmoved mover, like the young man of sonnet 94. We have seen in the Sonnets a sense that natural generation somehow forestalls apocalypse (though poetry can, it seems, do a more reliable job). adonis here is someone rushing rather keenly to the end of days. When he dies, however, the world recalcitrantly refuses to end; Venus’s extravagant language on his death (echoed by othello)27 tries to accommodate her emotional sense of the end of the world with the evidence that it has not yet come: ‘o Jove’, quoth she, ‘How much a fool was i to be of such a weak and silly mind to wail his death who lives, and must not die

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till mutual overthrow of mortal kind? For he being dead, with him is beauty slain, and beauty dead, black chaos comes again.’ (lines 1015–20)

Perhaps, then, his death was necessary for the persistence of the world, like christ’s? This kind of religious double-think, where the evidence is manipulated to fit the theory, may be partly ironized here, or it may be accepted as a transition from erotic paganism to self-denying christianity. i’m not sure which, though it matters tremendously: adonis is either purely selfish or purely self-denying; it would be a remarkable instance of shakespeare’s ‘negative capability’ if he could be both. in one reading, then, adonis has (perhaps not consciously) sacrificed his own generative prospects so that others may procreate; but this fable has to go alongside the more explicit aetion, that love will be full of pains and troubles, as Venus’s revenge for her sufferings here. catherine Belsey argues that Venus and Adonis ‘is a poetic record of the originating moment of desire’ in lacanian terms, that is of the origin of desire as necessarily impossible to satisfy.28 There is much in this account of the poem’s aetion, but it perhaps goes too far in arguing that the unsatisfying reasons adonis gives for his refusal are part of the poem’s deliberate tactics of frustration. Venus’s invocation of Jove in the passage above may be significant; Jove can be identified with the christian god, and with male authority in general. such authority has been absent in the poem, as it had been absent in england for two generations. There were not many people around who remembered what it was like, so it could be increasingly idealized in the 1590s. James schiffer points out the ‘unusual circumstance, unique in the shakespeare canon, of the absence of a psychosexually mature, heterosexual male, human or divine, though the entire work’.29 as in Belsey’s account of the poem, this argument is put in the context of a lacanian narrative of desire; but i think the historical situation more important. The absence of masculine authority is strikingly signalled in the poem through Venus’s frustration: ‘Being judge in love, she cannot right her cause’ (line 220). The articulation of the syntax here is ambiguous: does it mean, as with lines like ‘she’s love, she loves, and yet she is not loved’ (line 610) that it’s ironic she, the judge of love, cannot right her cause; or does it mean ‘Because she’s judge of love, she cannot right her cause’? in either case, the limitations of her authority as a woman are exposed, and there is perhaps a reflection on Queen elizabeth, who presented herself as an analogue to the biblical judge deborah (see chapter 3, above); we may be reminded of stella’s cheeks as ‘scarlet judges’ (Astrophel and Stella, 73). as dubrow puts it, ‘Venus’ assertions of power may well reflect

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resentment of elizabeth herself’,30 but that resentment is tinged, as in sidney, with fascination. Venus can only govern in strength, not lust (line 42); her affection has the tendency to destroy its objects, as her promise to ‘smother’ adonis with kisses suggests (line 18); these aspects may also reflect on the ageing Queen, who could no longer inspire equal affection from her favourites, and who tended to do them more harm than good (as in the cases of Walter ralegh and robert devereux, earl of essex). once adonis is dead, her relation to him becomes maternal, as it perhaps should have been all along – as perhaps the favourites (and certainly the unfavoured sidney) thought it might be better to play the roles of elizabeth’s sons than of her lovers. The sense of Venus as a potential mother to adonis is subtly emphasized by the unusual absence of cupid from the poem.31 even before she knows adonis is dead, Venus feels an instinctive, sympathetic pity for him that is clearly maternal rather than erotic: she rushes to him like a milch-doe, whose swelling dugs do ache, Hasting to feed her fawn, hid in some brake. (lines 875–6)

There is a strong parallel to this in Walter ralegh’s The Ocean to Scinthia (probably written in the same year), where the poet describes himself, in his alienation from the Queen as mich like the gentell lamm, though lately waynde playes with the dug though finds no cumfort ther. (lines 71–2)

Venus is able to redeem her adonis in a way that scinthia cannot rescue ocean, but only by turning him into a flower; ralegh, as we saw in chapter 1, could see some redemption for his ‘tender stalkes’ if not for himself. it is debatable whether this amounts to the same kind of immortality the poet offers the young man in the Sonnets; i don’t think it does. she says at the end of the poem, clasping the flower, ‘Here was thy father’s bed, here in my breast. Thou art the next of blood and ’tis thy right. lo, in this hollow cradle take thy rest: My throbbing heart shall rock thee day and night. There shall not be one minute in an hour Where i will not kiss my sweet love’s flower.’ (lines 1183–8)

This feels less like the sort of preservation we saw in sonnet 55, with its defiant pacing forth, and more like a man being stunted by a mother who does not want him to grow up. The faintly incestuous suggestion that she has been trying all along to seduce the son of a man with whom she has

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previously been in love only dissipates when we realize that the flower is being conceived as the son, adonis as the father. This child/flower really only allows Venus to persist and not adonis. Venus is described as ‘weary of the world’ (line 1189), and goes to Paphos; the poem ends with a withdrawal from the world, rather than the promise of continual presence in the world that we get in the Sonnets. The poem, which is in shakespeare’s terms ‘the first heir of my invention’ (dedication, line 12), ironically suggests that such inventions or conceits may have no future, or at least may get out of the inventor’s control.32 coppélia Kahn’s psychoanalytic reading of Venus and Adonis has been very influential; its core argument is that The adonis of shakespeare’s poem is caught between the poles of intimacy and isolation: intimacy with Venus, which constitutes entry into manhood, and the emotional isolation of narcissism, which constitutes a denial of growth, change, and the natural fact of mortality, which underlies them. But adonis’ selfabsorption and claims of autonomy actually mask an intense need for dependency, a wish to escape the risk and conflict involved in having a separate identity, a wish symbolically fulfilled in his metamorphosis into the flower which Venus treats as her child.33

This makes me wonder if i’ve been reading the same poem as Kahn; it seems like a Freudian account of what the poem does not say, but what it ‘really’ means. as my reading has suggested, Kahn’s first sentence can be inverted: Venus’s smothering prevents adonis’s entry into manhood; his isolated pursuit of the boar is an acceptance of death. as for the masking of dependency, all i can say is that it is well done. even the flower is not so much a metamorphosis of adonis himself, but his offspring or memorial, which can only exist when he no longer does. one can assent to Kahn’s later conclusion that adonis prefers the boar to Venus because he prefers destruction to annihilation in love, but it is the grounds for that preference that are more important, as we have seen. in the poetry, where shakespeare is explicitly concerned with immortality, he is also concerned about women’s fidelity and the problem of bastardy as he is not in the plays. Women come to be associated with forces of natural necessity, but poetic immortality provides a means of escaping from them, however illusory that means may be. Whether or not shakespeare wanted to preserve his plays for posterity – and i am at least partly convinced by lukas erne’s argument that he did34 – it is poetry that he conceives as able to confer immortality, whereas playing is frequently conceived as an image of transience (most famously in Macbeth’s final soliloquy). yet the promised immortality is by no means straightforward,

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or even desirable: is being preserved as a flower enough? and who is preserved in the Sonnets? Poetry has a life of its own, which escapes its creator’s control, and which is therefore just as subject to (feminized) natural necessity. For this reason, shakespeare’s works accept that neither poetry nor paternity can bring one to a position of real authority. He is, however, fascinated by the sense of loss involved in this acceptance. His last singleauthored play, The Tempest, contains one of the great laments for a father, but it is strangely displaced, not least because Ferdinand’s father is not really dead, and the song is not his; Ferdinand says sitting on a bank, Weeping again the king my father’s wrack, This music crept by me upon the waters, allaying both their fury and my passion With its sweet air; thence i have follow’d it, or it hath drawn me rather. But ’tis gone. no, it begins again. Ariel’s song Full fadom five thy father lies, of his bones are coral made: Those are pearls that were his eyes: nothing of him that doth fade, But doth suffer a sea-change into something rich and strange. sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell. (i. ii. 390–403)

The father is idealized and transformed, taken beyond natural feeling into some other realm where the paternal is displaced into a more abstract model. The aesthetic realm conjured here is not without connections to the real world, though: its richness gently reminds us of the ambivalence a son might feel on his father’s death given the wealth he will inherit. The persistent knell here may remind us of the lost services for the dead, but again only mildly; that religious change (which shakespeare could not be personally nostalgic for) may be one of the changes that one has to accept as rich and strange. The son, who now has to become his father (or so he thinks) becomes strange to himself. The patriarchal line which ought to found identity becomes a mode of self-estrangement. yet this is also a mode of beauty – only in this risking of oneself to the larger commitment of the world, symbolized by the sea, can one attain a world worth having. such estrangements are particularly acute in ‘let the bird of loudest lay’, shakespeare’s strangest poem. This poem is a self-generating artefact: it

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seems constantly to be invoking new avian voices, songs within songs, until it turns at the end to pure utterance of a sigh; it also seems to create the posterity that the Phoenix and the turtle have failed to produce. it is possible that the poem comments, in some maddeningly oblique way, on the death of the earl of essex, and likely that it touches on the anticipated death of Queen elizabeth: it is therefore concerned with the national succession and the succession of poetic patronage as well as with the idea of poetic immortality.35 The ‘defunctive music’ of these lines seems to be constantly commencing even as it seems to speak of the end of poetic speech. There is also the possibility that the poem contains elements of an elegy for spenser, a notion that cheney seems ready to entertain.36 spenser, after all, presents himself as a turtle dove, interceding between Belphoebe and timias (the Queen and ralegh); this (female) bird ‘made a lamentable lay’ (The Faerie Queene, iv. viii. 4. 3), and spenser himself may be a component of the ‘bird of loudest lay’, being called upon to sing (or at least herald) his own threnody. as a lament for spenser, and an anticipatory lament for the Queen that poet celebrated (however ambivalently), the poem revises that troubled poetic relationship, moving its failed efforts to breed a new Britain into a purer aesthetic realm. This process may, however, be only a part of the poem’s compounded song. There is at least a small sense in which the Phoenix itself is being asked to sing its own obsequy, as the song is to be sung in the Phoenix’s home, ‘the sole arabian tree’ (line 2). is this Queen elizabeth, associated as she is with the Phoenix? is it her successor? is it spenser’s successor as bird of loudest lay, perhaps shakespeare himself? The compounding and perhaps competition of all these voices is of course the poem’s central trick. as shakespeare calls on other birds, he certainly brings in other resonances. The ‘eagle, feathered king’ (line 12) hints at elizabeth’s successor; the swan may be shakespeare himself. The (upstart?) crow, which supposedly makes its own ‘gender’ ‘With the breath thou giv’st and tak’st’ (lines 18–19) is a model of non-biological generation, of verbal and poetic succession, an idea the poem enacts in its ambiguity of voice – at what point does the bird of loudest lay start to sing? When we are told ‘Here the anthem dothe commence’ (line 21), whose anthem is it? reason certainly sings lines 45–8, but does it also sing the ‘Threnos’? or is it love that sings these final lines? given the core sense that ‘number there in love was slain’ (line 28), we are surely wrong to want answers to these questions, but we are just as surely right to ask them. The difficulties only increase. When the ‘Threnos’ refers to ‘this urn’ (line 65), does it refer to the poem itself, thus turning active song into silent object? if so, we are nonetheless invited to resume song of a sort by

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the final line ‘For these dead birds sigh a prayer’ (line 67). The strained rhythm of this line makes it hard for us to decide the intended emphasis, forcing us to hesitate over the word ‘dead’ in particular. How can we mourn the Phoenix, we might ask, given that it is supposed to be reborn (and would not be anything special if it were not). This makes us wonder if only the turtle has died; yet we are also told that there is ‘no posterity’ (line 59). shakespeare’s equivocation here is remarkable: he does not directly say that the Phoenix has no offspring, just that it had no offspring with the turtle; whilst the Phoenix is dead, it may also be reborn – unless its love of the turtle was such that it has chosen not to be reborn, like the suicidal Phoenix of Petrarch’s Rime Sparse no. 323.37 There is a clear distinction between the modes of the birds’ deaths, even as the poem has insisted that they are both joined and distinct (‘Hearts remote, yet not asunder; / distance and no space was seen / ’twixt this turtle and his queen’: lines 29–31): death is now the Phoenix’ nest, and the turtle’s loyal breast to eternity doth rest. (lines 56–8)

even if it is dead, the Phoenix has a nest from which it can be reborn – hence it can be involved in singing its own lay; the turtle on the other hand is resting until eternity (the resurrection) and in eternity (the eternizing power of this song). Three kinds of afterlife, then, are in play: the rebirth of a monarch in national succession, poetic immortality, and the christian afterlife. none are certain; all are a matter of will or faith. The poem’s final prayer is that all these modes of succession will work – it is a notion very similar to the balance between Hamlet’s ambiguous ‘the rest is silence’ (v. ii. 358), and his desire for his story to be told, ideas themselves complicated by Hamlet’s own ‘dying voice’ (line 356) handing the kingdom to Fortinbras, and Horatio’s optative ‘flights of angels sing thee to thy rest’ (line 360).38 Finality is achieved, but thoughts of the future cannot be removed. ideas of paternity, invoked by sidney and spenser to give greater seriousness to the writing of poetry, have now been abstracted, but not without a sense of real loss. Human concerns with natural generation and with the public world will never quite go away. John donne, in the Anniversaries and ‘a nocturnall upon s. lucies day’, would attempt a similar enacting of poetic finality to that we have found in ‘let the bird of loudest lay’,39 but without scaling shakespeare’s heights of perfection in balancing death and the fruitfulness of a nest. donne may surpass even shakespeare in

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some things, but his intellect is too restless to come to such a balanced conclusion, his faith in poetry and the persistence of other forms of reproduction being so much less than shakespeare’s. shakespeare’s conjuring of an aesthetic realm which somehow bridges this world and the next cannot wholly or permanently (or even for more than a moment) do away with the necessities of human, mortal life and its changes (represented by women, particularly powerful women), but it can put them in their proper place. in the dialogue between private concerns and the otherworldly, the public sphere is to some extent elided or abstracted, but it is nonetheless an important referent, shaping one’s private concerns, even if it is not as central as it is for spenser. donne sees the dialogues between self and world, heaven and earth, as much more a matter of dangerous competition.

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John Donne’s rhetorical contraception

Unlike the other poets we have considered thus far, John donne’s poetry makes continual efforts to repress the whole idea of procreation, making sex an end in itself. donne tries to persuade himself, his audience and his female addressees that sex can be free of consequences. We may see this as rooted in the generic conventions of the ovidian love elegy with which he began his poetic career,1 but it also reflects a habit of mind that persisted throughout his poetry and that even leaves traces in his sermons. significantly, it is only when he writes for publication – in the Anniversaries – that he uses the common trope of poems as children. surprisingly, for a poet whose work might be thought almost definitively ‘conceited’, donne does not use the words ‘conceit’ or ‘conceive’ for his verse; the reason for this is not far to seek: other poets consider conceit or conception as a way to connect with the wider world, but for donne ‘Wee are all conceived in close Prison’, and can never get out.2 generally, he is a private poet, choosing genres and tropes that emphasize the self-sufficiency of the poet and his love. Whereas sidney, spenser and shakespeare used ideas of paternity to impose unity on their works, donne sees reproduction as compromising the integrity of the self; the love-connections he makes must develop the self without removing anything from its substance; love, for donne, is a zero-sum game which cannot create anything new. in taking this attitude he is resisting the central mode of public poetry fashioned by spenser, the dominant poetic presence of his youth. in his various poetic forms and personae, donne quite consistently denies and ironizes generativity: love elegies, songs and sonnets, memorial verse and ovidian anti-epic all question the value of reproduction; even in epithalamium, the genre where spenser most demonstrably influences him, and in which generativity is traditionally at the highest premium, donne challenges the idea of marital sex as the best way of connecting the private and the public spheres. Where spenser had made the radical step of admitting generativity even into his private erotic verse, donne is conservative in pushing it 160

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out again – but, owing to spenser’s powerful influence, donne has to do so more vigorously and consciously than earlier erotic poets. some similarities between donne’s ‘The Flea’ and spenser’s Amoretti 48 provide a useful starting-point for an understanding of the key differences between the two writers’ attitudes to biological and poetic generativity. spenser regrets his beloved’s destruction of a poem of his: innocent paper whom too cruell hand did make the matter to auenge her yre: and ere she could thy cause wel vnderstand, did sacrifize vnto the greedy fyre. Well worthy thou to have found better hyre, then so bad end for hereticks ordayned: yet heresy nor treason didst conspire, but plead thy maisters cause vniustly payned. Whom she all carelesse of his griefe constrayned to vtter forth th’ anguish of his hart: and would not heare, when he to her complayned, the piteous passion of his dying smart. yet liue for euer, though against her will, and speake her good, though she requite it ill.

consciously or not, ‘The Flea’ echoes the phrasing here (and perhaps also picks up on the beloved’s ‘bloody hands’ in spenser’s previous sonnet) in the opening lines of its final stanza – ‘cruell and sodaine, hast thou since / Purpled thy naile, in blood of innocence?’ (lines 19–20) – as the woman addressee kills the flea, the site where donne declares they are unified. in both cases the woman is being rebuked for the destruction of the poet’s brainchild: for spenser this is the physical reality of the poem, which will nonetheless live forever because there are more copies, which will be printed; for donne it is the insect which has become his anticipatory metaphor for their sexual union – the poem itself being as expendable as the flea. in both cases the brainchild is innocent and the woman cruel in her use of her hands; in both cases that cruelty is futile: the woman’s manual action only serves to emphasize her inability to impose her will on the male poet. donne wittily insists that the flea has joined them, ‘Though parents grudge, and you’, (line 14, emphasis added), and concludes by saying that her action has merely proved ‘how false, feares be’ (line 25); spenser’s final lines celebrate the permanence of his verse ‘against her will’. Both poets, then, assert the power of their inventiveness to override the woman’s will. given these similarities, we can see how far the poets diverge in other respects. spenser, the professional and epic poet, believes wholeheartedly in the immortality of his verse; the gentleman amateur donne’s conceit

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is adventitious and disposable, a means to an end. donne seems unconcerned with fame, and shows no interest in immortalizing his beloved – differing in this from shakespeare and sidney as well as from spenser. (He frequently wishes to immortalize his exemplary love, but that is a rather different matter.) spenser’s metaphor at the end insists that his verse will live; for him an assertion of life and generative power is always the ultimate validation of love. donne’s poems, such as ‘The relique’, connect the permanence of his exemplary love with images of death, and the death of the flea fits in with this tendency. other than persuading the woman to sex, no result is expected in ‘The Flea’. donne’s poem is a self-consuming artefact, whose product is destroyed inside its frame. it is typical of donne’s poetry in refusing to leave any generative residue. in fact, ‘The Flea’ can be seen as an act of rhetorical contraception, or a conceit that tries to obviate conception; the flea itself, in which ‘our two bloods mingled bee’ (line 4), can be destroyed by the woman; a half-stated, half-implicit aspect of the poem is a proof that the woman has power over any product of their union. although she may be amused by the rhetorical virtuosity of the poem’s case, the woman is obviously not expected to be really convinced or seduced by the explicit argument as to how little honour she will lose in the sexual act. The more implicit granting of power over reproduction may, however, be more subtly persuasive; we cannot be as sure as we may think that the poem doesn’t seriously expect to win the woman over; the idea that the poem is not successful in its seductive tactics is often protested too much.3 The woman is allowed to triumph (line 23) in her killing of the flea; she can destroy the ‘pamper’d’ product of donne’s sexual imagination, procuring an abortion of the ‘one blood made of two’ (line 8).4 in this, she becomes similar to the woman in ovid’s Amores 2. 14, who controls her own reproductivity to the poet’s despair and rage – and in Marlowe’s translation the poet rails at her ‘cruel hand’ (line 24);5 but donne is not angry like ovid (only feigning anger in the opening lines of the third stanza). The poet’s stance is one of abjection which masks his own rhetorical control: he says that the flea is only ‘guilty’ ‘in that drop which it suckt from thee’ (lines 21–2), with a sly double meaning – the flea is on the surface guilty because it has harmed the woman, but the further sense is that it is only guilty because it has drawn the taint of original sin from woman. This mercy-killing therefore restores the innocence of sexuality; perhaps, donne suggests, it is only reproductive sexuality that is sinful; as long as no ‘life’ is taken (line 27), as long as the union is free of result, it can be a perfect one. spenser, as we have seen (chapter 4, above), is consistently interested in continuation, in results, and in generating fruit outside

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his poetry. donne is interested only in the creation of union between the sexes, without any procreative result. donne’s distrust of biological generation can be seen most acutely in his use of spenser’s key term for the subject, ‘fruit’: the word appears relatively rarely in his verse, and generally in rather negative terms. in his sermons, he sees the ‘fruition’ of love, human and divine, as being ‘to enjoy’ rather than to reproduce.6 in ‘love’s Usury’ he promises ‘the fruit of love’ to the god of love (line 22); this amounts to a promise to sacrifice his children to cupid if he can be free of love now. in ‘a Valediction: of Weeping’ he presents his tears as artefacts, ‘Fruits of much griefe’ (line 7), but they are only ‘Pregnant of thee [the beloved]’ (line 6) not of any children; perhaps developing from this, he wishes in the Holy sonnet ‘o might those sighes and teares’ that he could ‘Mourne with some fruit’ (line 4), that there could be a spiritual effect in the tears which he has wasted in amorous matters.7 His most significant use of the word appears in one of his letters, in negative reference to his children: he tells sir robert Ker, ‘i stand like a tree, which once a year beares, though no fruit, yet this Mast of children’ (‘mast’ meaning acorns and other tree-nuts, considered as fodder for swine).8 obviously, we should not take this entirely at face value; donne is clearly appealing pitifully to a patron (whom he is asking to act as godfather to his daughter), but even this rhetorical device reveals an intellectual preoccupation as well as a personal problem: in some sense, donne sees his children as having prevented him from achieving fruition – economic, artistic or careerist. This idea fits with the common notion that people had only a certain quantum of creative energy which needed to be carefully distributed between the spheres of a man’s life (see chapter 1, above). donne is perhaps more anxious about this than any of the other poets considered here, partly due to his urgent sense that the world might end soon, and partly reflecting his desire to create a relationship with women in which men are completely in control. donne begins his Problem ‘Why hath the common opinion afforded Women soules’ by saying ‘it is agreed that wee have not so much from them [women] as any part of either our mortall soules of sense, or growth’;9 he takes the aristotelian line that women are merely seed-beds, and that it is men who are the source of the animal souls of their offspring. He also has considerable doubt as to whether the immortal soul is directly infused by god or is passed on by traduction;10 if it is the latter, then reproduction must surely diminish the self, if the former then god is responsible for tainting pure souls by putting them in corrupt bodies. yet, even if children’s immortal souls do not come from

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the father, men can create something: donne’s central joke in the Problem is that ‘we have given women soules’, as if men’s opinions were somehow enough to fashion a soul;11 male control here may be ironized, but the very irony suggests that uncertainty about relative contributions to offspring creates a male desire to control language; donne is sympathetic to this desire even as he sees how silly it is. The uncertainties of reproduction – involving the unreliability of women and a lack of knowledge as to how it works – are the cause of considerable anxiety, putting the integrity of the self at risk. donne therefore prefers to explore different models of loving union between the sexes; yet he also leaves clear traces of his repression of biological reproduction. Throughout this study, we have often seen poems presented as offspring, perhaps as a way of stilling male concerns about paternity. Working the other way, Jonson saw his son (in death at least) as ‘Ben. Jonson his best piece of poetrie’ (see chapter 7, below), but donne is less concerned than the professional writer Jonson to celebrate either his poetic or his genetic posterity. Unlike sidney or spenser, donne does not see either his poetry or his offspring as fruitful contributions to the public sphere, and his works from the very first resist this idea. The elegies, written early in donne’s poetic career, display, in their youthful libertinism, a dislike and contempt for generation or reproduction as the consequence of sex. The ironic postures of these poems should make us cautious about taking this too seriously, but it does suggest an early and persistent desire to detach sexual pleasure from the possibility of generation, or at least a refusal to take reproduction seriously. in the elegy ‘The autumnal’, donne says that he prefers tombs to cradles (though disliking both as ‘extreames’, lines 45–6), and this prefigures his later preoccupation with death rather than birth.12 He prefers the completed and final to the open and potential. in the same poem he flatters the older woman to whom the poem is putatively addressed by referring to ‘ages glory, Barrennesse’ (line 32); it is, to say the least, a backhanded compliment, but surely reflects a common male desire not to get one’s mistress pregnant – ‘we’re all agreed that age has at least this much to be said for it’ is the tone. The attitude in the elegies is, however, mercurial; given to persuasion and the trying out of varied ideas, donne’s poetic speakers cannot be said to embody a coherent position. in the elegy ‘The Perfume’, donne blithely refers to his mistress’s mother fearing ‘lest thou’art swolne’ (line 20): pregnancy here is a concern of the woman’s family, not of the paramour – for whom, we can infer, it would merely be evidence of his own virility.

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When donne wants to justify sex’s superiority to warfare in the elegy ‘loves Warre’, the possibility of procreation becomes a rhetorical resource: There men kill men, we’will make one by and by. Thou nothing; i not halfe so much shall do in these warres, as they may which from us two shall spring. Thousands we see which travaile not to warres, but stay swords, arms, and shot to make at home: and shall not i do then More glorious service, staying to make men? (lines 40–6)

donne’s idea about reproduction being better than military service here emerges from the whole poem’s analogy between love and war, and serves as a witty conclusion to the argument without reflecting any deep-seated beliefs; reproduction is a joke, and the woman’s role in it is virtually ignored; children are merely imagined as cannon-fodder. in the elegy ‘The comparison’, donne demonstrates his distaste for procreation, with her sweat ‘like spermatique issue of ripe menstruous boiles’ (line 8), and ‘her best lov’d part’ being ‘like the dread mouth of a fired gunne’ (lines 38–9); the latter insult perhaps suggesting that her foulness consists in having, as it were, discharged children. in the elegy ‘The anagram’, giving mockcompliments to another man’s beloved, he says that Flavia is worth marrying because her ugliness guarantees fertility: Beauty is barren oft; best husbands say, There is best land, where there is foulest way. of what a soveraigne Plaister will shee bee, if thy past sinnes have taught thee jealousie! (lines 35–8)

Fertility is foul, and only barrenness really beautiful; the attitude reflects a grotesque version of the ideal of unproductive (and hence complete) beauty that had been associated with elizabeth i since it had become clear that she would not marry and produce an heir, an ideal that spenser ambivalently praises in his glorification of the virgin Belphoebe, who is presented as an ‘ensample dead’ (The Faerie Queene, iii. v. 54. 9). donne’s valuation of barrenness may be an ironic development of spenser’s ambivalent idealization of the Queen’s virginity. in ‘The storme’ he presents england (which may metonymically refer to elizabeth) as sighing a wind from ‘her pregnant intrailes’ (line 13);13 the only offspring the Queen can produce is a stormy wind to stir up her fleet. such pregnancy only produces chaos. Though much of this may seem like frivolous posturing, it does rest on some serious foundations. For donne, there are two key reasons for valuing

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barrenness: on the one hand, he values the non-reproductive because it allows sex to be perpetual and valuable for itself rather than its products (endless in two senses); on the other, barrenness proves that the relationship with the woman is more than sexual, and is rarefied to the point of being angelic. These attitudes can be found in embryo in the elegies. in the elegy ‘love’s Progress’, donne insists that angels are barren, and though this is a libertine trope which scorns sexual virtue and insists on the human need for sex, it anticipates the valuation of angelic non-sexual love in such later poems as ‘The relique’. in the elegy ‘to His Mistris going to Bed’, the reproductive element of sex is firmly pushed aside even as the language of reproduction is used. donne begins the poem: come, Madame, come, all rest my powers defie Until i labour, i in labour lye. (lines 1–2)

Here he displaces her potential generative labour with his own sexual workmanship; at the poem’s end, he displaces the midwife: Then since i may knowe, as liberally as to a midwife showe Thy selfe; cast all, yea, this white linnen hence. (lines 43–5)

our first thought here is that she is being asked to show herself, proleptically, as a mother in childbirth does, and so the lines seem the very opposite of rhetorical contraception, reminding her that he could get her pregnant; but donne could also be saying, ‘show yourself as you first did, naked as when you were born’. The lines’ meaning depends on the notorious crux in line 46 – ‘Ther [or Heere] is no penance, much less innocence’, or ‘Ther is no penance due to innocence’.14 in the former reading donne would be saying ‘you’re not innocent, you’ve had children – as i can see, now i’m in the midwife’s position’ (a reading emphasized by reading ‘Heere’); empson rightly calls this an ‘orthodox but ugly sneer’, and rejects the (textually preferable) reading accordingly.15 in the latter reading, donne would be reminding the woman of the consequences of sex and then denying that they would cause penance: nakedness – like that of the newborn – is innocent.16 Ultimately, our reading depends on whether we take the woman as innocent (a virgin) or not (perhaps a prostitute, or a married woman): is she a ‘newfound land’ (line 27) to donne or to all men? Whichever sense we take, male desire trumps any female concern with generation: procreation is brought up in order to be dismissed: either sex is innocent and therefore unprocreative, or the lack of innocence means that one shouldn’t worry about procreation. This is an inversion of the spenserian way of seeing such matters: for the older poet, sex almost

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always brings generation to mind. When it does not, it is a vicious, melting looseness, as in redcrosse’s tryst with duessa (The Faerie Queene, i. vii. 7). examples of donne’s belief in sex as an end in itself can be found throughout the Songs and Sonnets. sex is imagined as paradisal, an escape from time and death. donne’s desire at the end of ‘The good-Morrow’ for sex in which ‘none can die’, resembles the ‘eternall blis’ of spenser’s adonis,17 but it is not procreative. The poem uses sex as a way of staving off mortality, but not through reproduction. Far from children being the consequence of sex, the emphasis here is on childhood as a state that comes before true love: i wonder by my troth, what thou, and i did, till we lov’d? were we not wean’d till then? But suck’d on countrey pleasures, childishly? (lines 1–3)

The element of sucking here is an infantile fantasy that nonetheless has a certain continuity with fucking (especially in renaissance script, where s resembles f ); it may also suggest (non-procreative) oral sex as a prologue to intercourse which is, in the poet’s mind, equally non-procreative. The infantile element of love – as expressed in ‘loves exchange’ in the admission that ‘love childish is’ (line 18) – is that it seeks permanence without consequence, freed from ‘houres, dayes, months, which are the rags of time’ (‘The sunne rising’, line 10); this childishness is, paradoxically, a refusal to admit that love is childish in the secondary sense that it makes children. Unlike sidney, however, donne refuses to consider this childishness as innocent play – it is deadly serious. christopher ricks argues that donne’s poetry displays ‘a dislike of having come’,18 and this i think reflects a dislike of the return into time and time’s consequences. Unlike spenser, with his belief in ‘timely fruit’, donne wants neither fruit nor time; it is as if he has gone to the garden of adonis and ignored spenser’s initial caveat, ‘were it not, that Time their troubler is’ (The Faerie Queene, (iii. vi. 41. 1). as we shall see, one consequence of sex for donne is death; a more obvious consequence would be birth, yet the ending of ‘The good-Morrow’ makes sex endless precisely in order to make it fruitless: What ever dies, was not mixt equally; if our two loves be one, or, thou and i love so alike, that none doe slacken, none can die. (lines 19–21)

donne seems to be arguing that a perfect love should result in a perpetual erection. it is a commonplace that to die meant to have an orgasm, but the oddity of the locution (of which donne seems fonder than any of his

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contemporaries) is that it focuses solely on the (male) individual spending himself and not at all on the potential birth. of course childbirth was frequently lethal at this time, and we can see considerable anxiety about his wife’s health in pregnancy in some of donne’s letters,19 but his poems do not make the connection explicit, and it is not a connection that we find in spenser’s work. There is an underlying sense in donne that sexual union exists for its own sake, and that all thoughts of childbirth must therefore be actively banished – even the introduction of death is preferable. in ‘Farewell to love’, donne introduces the idea that each orgasm shortens one’s life (an idea we will consider further below), but he seems to console himself with the thought that it also creates posterity: as shee [nature] would man should despise The sport, Because that other curse of being short, and onely for a minute, made to be eager, desires to raise posterity. (lines 26–30)

if anything desires posterity here, it seems to be the curse of short life – which is itself exacerbated by procreation. However, these difficult lines may not really refer to posterity in the sense of offspring, but rather, as John carey observes in his note to these lines, to ‘successive acts of love’.20 instead of children, we simply get more sex. Just as spenser uses the language of chastity to underpin procreation, donne uses the language of procreation to underpin non-procreative sex. associated with, and developing from, the notion that sex ought to be perpetual and consequence-free is the Platonic idea of love raising one to a higher sphere;21 in this higher sphere there is of course no need to worry about generation. donne’s cradle catholicism may have inoculated him against the Protestant enthusiasm for marriage and reproduction as the highest ideals. He is therefore constantly seeking some purer form of sexual relation. ‘The exstasie’ is full of images of generation, but these are cauterized, turned into non-generative images of union. Here, the bank on which the lovers lie is ‘Pregnant’ and ‘swel’d up’ (line 2); although the word pregnant did not necessarily have its modern meaning in donne’s time, it could certainly suggest it (the OED has the earliest use of the modern sense in 1545), and the chain of ideas in the poem, as well as the swelling image, strongly suggest that we are to take it in this sense. donne goes on to say that ‘pictures on our eyes to get / Was all our propagation’ (lines 11–12). They are creating images of each other, in a mutual act of procreation which is, donne insists, sexless and superior to sex. as in ‘a Valediction: of Weeping’, where tears are ‘Pregnant of thee’ (line 6) but of

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nothing else, it is a fantasy of sexual equality in which each can perfectly reproduce him- or herself in the other. This is reinforced by the image of the self-reproducing violet: a single violet transplant, The strength, the colour, and the size, (all which before was poore, and scant,) redoubles still, and multiplies. (lines 37–40)

This is a generative image, certainly, but one that deliberately contrasts with human sexual reproduction – it is an image of self-replication. Having repressed ideas of sexual propagation, the poem can end with a turn to the sexual body, without fear of making new bodies. so spiritual is their love that, it is suggested, it can only produce further spirits, not bodies: ‘our blood labours to beget / spirits, as like soules as it can’ (lines 61–2). John carey argues that these lines ‘are not just about fruitful and liberating union’;22 in fact, they are not about fruitful union at all, at least in the spenserian sense. The poem uses images of generation but, like ‘The Flea’, it turns these to a form of rhetorical contraception. donne seems to be persuading the woman to sex by transferring all generativity into the spiritual realm, making their bodies pleasantly barren. if the expression of spiritual love here is partly a pretext for sex, in other poems it is taken more seriously. donne really does want to insist, at times, that his love is ‘not sexe’ (‘The exstasie’, line 31), even if it obviously is; sexual intercourse, sexual difference, sexual reproduction – all of these may be in play, but they are not the point. donne is fascinated by the barrenness of angelic love, and in ‘aire and angels’ he proposes a model of unity in which he will be an angel, the woman his sphere of movement; this preserves ‘disparitie’ (line 26) between the sexes, whilst removing the sexual element. The beloved must take physical form as if begotten by the poet, the logic here being premised on some rather complicated causality: since my soule, whose child love is, takes limmes of flesh, and else could nothing doe, More subtile than the parent is, love must not be, but take a body too. (lines 7–10)

donne’s sinuous syntax here is typical of the poem in refusing to create a violent hierarchy. The general sense seems to be, ‘since my soul is embodied despite being more airy than the love it creates, love must also be embodied’, but donne says that the soul is more subtle/airier than the parent, not its offspring. if this is a mistake, as it seems to be, it may nonetheless reflect donne’s doubts as to whether the creator (soul/male lover)

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or created (love/female object of love) is better; after all, is it better to be airier? is air airier than the angels that inhabit it? The confusion may also arise from the fact that two different models of parenting are in play: the soul creates love, and each of them creates its material manifestation. next to this, more commonplace procreation seems secondary, even if donne roots his metaphysical ideas in physical phenomena. The processes underlying the body–soul connection and the connections between lovers seem more important to donne than any new bodies and souls they might create. in ‘The Undertaking’ donne sees the ability to ‘forget the Hee and shee’ (line 20) as an ideal, and this reaches its height in ‘The relique’, where he claims that ‘difference of sex no more wee knew, / Then our guardian angells doe’ (lines 25–6). in removing sexual difference, donne allows for a perfect love that is asexual and therefore non-reproductive: he perhaps even taps into the very unorthodox idea that people will lose their sex – women becoming men – at the last Judgement.23 nonetheless, donne’s refigurations of sexual difference tend, as in ‘aire and angels’, to create new kinds of redemptive difference (in ‘The relique’ the difference is that between Mary Magdalen and christ). such ideas of perfect union have some similarities to spenser’s idea of the hermaphroditic union between scudamour and amoret at the end of the 1590 Faerie Queene, though those similarities can be exaggerated;24 spenser, after all, removed that image in the revised 1596 ending to Book iii. For spenser, such perfect union can only be half-satisfying; even if The Faerie Queene never gets there, it is offspring that his poetic method requires: the public world must be peopled. donne’s essential orientation to the private world means that he prefers the perfect, even if it is dead, to the live and potential; this is a fundamental inversion of spenserian priorities. spenser had a conscious plan to produce a Virgilian poetic oeuvre, culminating with a nationalistic epic poem;25 donne’s poetry is lyric and panegyric, with only a brief excursion into something like ovidian mock-epic, Metempsychosis. Kenneth gross has argued, focussing on this last-mentioned poem, that donne was ‘an author who did as much as anyone to un-write the spenserian mode in english poetry’, and that donne was ‘in awe’ of The Faerie Queene, and felt a need to do violence against it.26 it is spenser’s celebration of fecundity that caused a particular ‘anxiety of influence’. Metempsychosis radically challenges spenser’s notions of continuity in the public sphere; yet at the same time it is the most obviously spenserian of donne’s works. as gross argues, its ten-line stanza constitutes a deliberate ruination of spenser’s

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subtle harmonies; he associates this with the ‘more ferocious myth of donne’s poem’, and argues that ‘The scenes of insemination, of passage from body to body, are especially bizarre and abrupt, and the soul seems hardly begotten or born than it is killed.’ 27 The exception to this is when the soul first becomes human, as adam and eve’s daughter Themech; here the formation of the body is strongly emphasized, as eve’s ‘temperate wombe’ forms liver, heart, brain and limbs (lines 493–506). all this is prefaced by the notion that the soul ‘comes out next, where th’ ape would have gone in’ (line 492). There may be some confusion here, as the ape (the soul’s previous incarnation) desired eve’s daughter siphatecia rather than eve herself, but this suggests the interchangeability of women and their vaginas. By getting mixed up in the whole issue of how the world was first populated (incest? bestiality even?), Metempsychosis also subverts comforting notions of dynastic continuity. The very origin of familial generation is tainted here. Patricia Parker has argued that death is out of place in romances like The Faerie Queene,28 and the poem’s heroic characters simply do not die; moral improvement is the crucial change for spenser’s heroes. Metempsychosis is generically the inverse of this, in that all the creatures die, but morally get only worse; its concentration of deaths, along with the soul’s persistence, make death seem meaningless, and sex bestial. sex and death become parts of an entropic economy of self-preservation, in which the soul is consistently imperilled. ramie targoff has argued that donne left Metempsychosis incomplete owing to ‘his ultimate distaste for its conceit. The idea that each soul belongs to an individual body was of the utmost importance to donne – there is perhaps no single idea more important to his metaphysics.’ 29 yet this raises the question of why he started such a poem in the first place: it seems that donne felt the need to explore models of propagation that do not involve biological reproduction, something he could not imagine taking place without diminishing the individual self. This may help to account for donne’s preoccupation with the idea that orgasm cuts off life, but it is unclear how seriously he takes it.30 in ‘Farewell to love’, he parenthetically notes that ‘each such act [of sex], they say, / diminisheth the length of life a day’ (lines 24–5); the casual statement makes this seem a commonplace assumption. in Metempsychosis he develops the idea with an almost puritanical twist, as he writes about the sparrow as an ‘ill steward of himself’, a sexual unthrift who ‘himselfe in three yeares ends’ (lines 209–10): else might he long have liv’d; man did not know of gummie blood, which doth in holly grow,

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Poetry and Paternity in Renaissance England How to make bird-lime, nor how to deceive With faind calls, hid nets, or enwrapping snare, The free inhabitants of the Plyant aire. Man to beget, and woman to conceive askt not of roots, nor of cock-sparrowes, leave: yet chuseth he, though none of these he feares, Pleasantly three, then streightened twenty yeares to live, and to encrease his race, himselfe outweares. (lines 211–20)

This is a rare instance of donne seeming to endorse the need to increase one’s race, given added resonance by the mention of human fertility drugs. The adverb ‘pleasantly’ suggests that it is pleasant from the sparrow’s perspective, but that we should know better. shakespeare calls the young man of his sonnets an ‘unthrift’ (sonnet 13, line 13) for not investing his seed in a son, but here donne regards unthriftiness as involving refusal to preserve one’s individual self; what sidney condemned as ‘self-conceit’ is admirable for donne. donne uses the odd form of Metempyschosis to insist on the permanence of the individual transmigrating soul, however vicious, a permanence which transcends the imperfect copying of sexual reproduction. The sparrow’s sexually hastened death simply sends the soul into a swan; this soul persists to the present elizabethan age, and has (we are told) a position of considerable power. such an ironic attempt to create a principle of continuity which bypasses biological generation may seem a deliberate attempt to subvert spenser’s preoccupation with dynastic succession in The Faerie Queene. if spenser feels an urgent need for generation to provide orderly succession of power, donne suggests that this non-successive but persistent soul holds the real power: For this great soule which here amongst us now doth dwell, and moves that hand, and tongue, and brow, Which, as the Moone the sea, moves us; to heare Whose story, with long patience you will long; (For ’tis the crowne, and last straine of my song) This soule to whom Luther and Mahomet were Prisons of flesh; this soule which oft did teare, and mend the wracks of th’ empire, and late rome, and liv’d when every great change did come, Had first in paradise, a low, but fatal roome. (lines 61–70)

M. van Wyck smith’s argument that this refers to robert cecil, the real power behind the throne, seems more than plausible.31 The royal advisor, even though donne seems to be opposed to him, guarantees continuity in times of change; indeed it was cecil who secured James i’s orderly

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succession to the throne. donne therefore seems to be suggesting that spenser’s preoccupation with generation, even in the political sphere, is unwarranted. despite death, the world goes on, without the sustaining moral effort that spenser insists upon. donne wants to celebrate finality rather than a continuation that, for him, can only be vicious. The contrast between donne’s most public poetry (i.e. that which he actually had printed) and his most private poetry (that which may reflect on the death of his wife) is particularly acute, but what the two poles have in common is a preoccupation with death. There is a general feeling in poems such as ‘The relique’ that a dead love will be more perfect than a living one. in part, we could attribute this to a feeling like that of Herodotus’s solon, ‘until [a man] is dead, you had better refrain from calling him happy, and just call him fortunate’ 32 – no love can be called happy or permanent until death has taken away the possibility of change. Francis Bacon takes solon’s idea rather further in his memorial for Queen elizabeth, arguing that perfect happiness, the escape from Fortune’s power, can only be attributed to the childless, for those who die with offspring can still be made unhappy by children’s misfortunes (see chapter 2, above). This attitude would make the death of cordelia the perfection of King lear’s happiness, but there are elements of it in donne. His fears for his daughters’ fortunes were such that he wrote to sir Henry goodyer in 1622: as those my daughters (who are capable of such considerations) cannot but see my desire to accommodate them in this world, so i think they will not murmure if heaven must be their nunnery, and they associated to the B[lessed] virgins there.33

He would rather his children be dead than that he should have to worry about placing them in the world. it is perhaps revealing that he thinks this only of his daughters and not of his sons, but thoughts of his children seemed always to give donne a sense of doom rather than the sense of hope that is more typical of his contemporaries. death in fact is frequently a more positive idea than birth for donne. ‘The dissolution’ presents the death of the beloved as a means by which the poet may move quickly to heaven. its theme is similar to the Holy sonnet ‘since she whome i lovd, hath payd her last debt’, and may also refer to the death of his wife.34 death here adds fuel to an upward movement, with a grand release of energy: This death, hath with my store My use encreas’d. and so my soule more earnestly releas’d,

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The variety of frontal consonants in the final line gives this a conclusive force which belies the poem’s title; the line explodes rather than dissolves (with a curious, but characteristic, pun on his wife’s surname). The dissolution of their marriage fires donne off to heaven: that is the truest product of their union. death preserves integrity, whereas birth risks it. This optimistic private attitude to death can be contrasted with the gloomy outlook on birth in the first poem donne deliberately had printed, An Anatomy of the World: The First Anniversary: We are borne ruinous: poore mothers crie, That children come not right, nor orderly, except they headlong come, and fall upon an ominous precipitation. (lines 95–8)35

Whilst death shoots fierily upwards, life is all tumbling downhill; donne takes a certain delighted relish in the ironic inversions involved, and in implying that downhill birth is somehow a matter of female choice. He goes on, How witty’s ruine! how importunate Upon mankinde! it labour’d to frustrate even gods purpose; and made woman, sent For mans reliefe, cause of his languishment. They were to good ends, and they are so still, But accessory, and principall in ill. For that first mariage was our funerall: one woman at a blow, then kill’d us all, and singly, one by one, they kill us now. We do delightfully our selves allow to that consumption; and profusely blinde, We kill our selves, to propagate our kinde. (lines 99–110)

Man is trapped with evil women and with death-dealing sexual urges, for which women are blamed (the ‘we’ here being emphatically masculine, opposed as ‘they’ (women) and ‘us’ (men) are in line 108). it is notable that donne here, as elsewhere, emphatically inverts the obvious truth in claiming that men not women die from sex: it is a way of denying the importance of childbirth in either a positive or negative sense, and thereby gives greater drama to male than female sexual experience. However, in this poem donne cancels what he has just said: ‘and yet we doe not that; we are not men’ (line 111). of course, this is largely a way of sustaining the poem’s hyperbolic claims as to the effects of its subject elizabeth drury’s

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death, but it also suggests a fantasy of a world in which there shall be no more propagation (and thereby no more corruption or decay). donne wants to destroy the public sphere, into which he is venturing for the first time in having the poem printed. significantly, it is only in the Anniversaries that donne expresses the common belief that poetry can provide a securer mode of immortality than family. His way of expressing this involves images of maternity, in which he appropriates the role of the mother. in Of the Progress of the Soul: The Second Anniversary he regards elizabeth drury as mother to his true progeny, his poems: Thou seest mee strive for life; my life shalbe, to bee hereafter prais’d, for praysing thee, immortal Mayd, who though thou wouldst refuse The name of Mother, be unto my Muse a Father, since her chast ambition is, yearely to bring forth such a child as this. These Hymnes may worke on future wits, and so May great grand-children of thy praises grow. and so, though not revive, embalm and spice The world, which else would putrify with vice. For thus, Man may extend thy progeny, Untill man doe but vanish, and not die. (lines 31–42)

This statement of ambition for poetic immortality comes significantly in one of the very few poems that donne published. one might wonder if there is irony here in his use of the professional writer’s immortality trope in a work his patron had essentially forced him to publish, expressing a certain resentment at having to put himself into print, which he makes the best of. There is a striking parallel here between the promise to produce such a poem yearly (though there were to be no further anniversaries) and the near-yearly child with which donne burdened his wife; as empson rather harshly put it, donne spent his time in poverty and exile from the court ‘gradually killing his wife by giving her a child every year’.36 to be fair, donne’s wife did not have a child every year, but she was pregnant in 12 of the 15 years of their marriage, and died giving birth to a stillborn child at the age of 33. to find himself in the role of a professional poet may sit ill with donne, but his labour was in truth less dangerous than his wife’s. His denial of generativity and its dangers for a woman may be a bitter displacement of the dangers he knew he was causing for her. it is significant, then, that donne uses imagery associated with pregnancy and childbirth in his greatest assault on death, the Holy sonnet ‘death be not proud’. Here death is equated at the climax of the sonnet’s

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octave with ‘soules deliverie’ (line 8), as if life were merely a period of pregnancy awaiting the parturition of the soul. in a sense, for donne, the only meaningful birth is death; marriage merely prepares one for this. Hence it is that donne’s epithalamia contrast so strongly with spenser’s. despite his resistance to the ideas of generation in it, spenser’s great celebration of his own second marriage, Epithalamion, has a strong influence not only on donne’s various epithalamia, but also on the lyric poems which we can (with reasonable confidence) regard as being about his wife. donne’s ‘a nocturnall Upon s. lucies day’, as rodney stenning edgecomb has convincingly argued, contrasts its setting on the shortest day with Epithalamion’s emphasis on its midsummer setting; edgecomb sees the poem as ‘an anti-epithalamium, a poem about solitary survival rather than procreative communion’; the images of ‘uncreation’ in the ‘nocturnall’ are in a deliberate contrast to the procreative emphases in Epithalamion;37 this adds some weight to the idea that the ‘nocturnall’ is about donne’s wife. in this reading, spenser’s optimistic belief in ‘endlesse matrimony’ (line 217) is compromised for donne by the death of a wife (even if the word death wrongs her); the future promised by the poem is not to any offspring, but to future lovers, the endless cycle of the seasons as each generation become lovers: you lovers, for whose sake, the lesser sunne at this time to the goat is runne to fetch new lust, and give it you, enjoy your summer all. (lines 37–40)

Future lovers will only engage in goatish lust. The ‘next spring’ may be a new ‘world’ (line 11), but the regeneration is merely part of a futile cycle – ‘dying generations’, as yeats would have it.38 donne himself is ‘re-begot / of absence, darknesse, death; things which are not’ (lines 17–18); his negative regeneration gets him out of the cycle, has refined him to the point where he is more than ‘an ordinary nothing’ (line 35). Whilst marriage may make two people one, the next step is not to make people, but to make donne ‘none’ (line 37); as in Meister eckhart’s approach to god, Who is not-being, one must become nothing oneself in order to get near to god.39 For donne, this comes through marriage and loss, and is its ultimate fruit. donne’s decision not to remarry after the death of his wife, as might have been expected,40 indicates his belief in the finality of the one transformative marriage. The biological fruit of such marriage was never the point. in the spirit of his own puns, one might say that he was done and didn’t need more, having become

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one and ultimately none. He leaves not even the shadow of succession behind. ernest W. sullivan ii has called donne’s supposed epigram on his marriage, – ‘John Donne, Ann Donne, Un-done’,41 – despite r. c. Bald’s rather compelling doubts as to its authenticity – donne’s ‘epithalamium’ for his wife.42 it is certainly true that marriage for donne was an undoing, causing his forced withdrawal from public life (as secretary to the lord Keeper sir Thomas egerton) to the privacy celebrated in such poems like ‘The sunne rising’. Walton famously calls donne’s marriage ‘the remarkable error of his life; and error which, though he had a wit able and very apt to maintain Paradoxes, yet he was very far from justifying it’,43 but in that poem he comes very close to a justification. ‘The sunne rising’ can easily be seen as the poet’s insistence that the marriage bed is superior to courtly success, that a truer and larger world can be found in the bedroom than in the chambers of the great. Having lost his secretarial career (which brought him a seat in the House of commons) through his ill-judged marriage to his patron’s ward, donne needs to believe that ‘nothing else is’, that ‘Princes doe but play us’ (lines 22–3), that the bed rather than the king’s hunt is the truest centre round which the sun should rotate. This reading may be augmented by the recognition that the poem owes something to spenser’s Epithalamion. spenser, like donne after him, sees an intruder in the bedroom, but this is a feminine figure rather than the masculine sun: Who is the same, which at my window peepes? or whose is that faire face, that shines so bright? is it not cinthia, she that neuer sleepes, But walkes about high heauen al the night? o fayrest goddesse, do not thou enuy My loue with me to spy? For thou likewise didst loue, though now vnthought, and for a fleece of woll, which priuily, The latmian shephard once vnto thee brought, His pleasures with thee wrought. Therefore to vs be fauorable now; and sith of wemens labours thou hast charge, and generation goodly dost enlarge, encline thy will t’effect our wishfull vow, and the chast wombe informe with timely seed, That may our comfort breed: till which we cease our hopefull hap to sing, ne let the woods vs answere, nor our eccho ring. (lines 372–89)

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Whereas donne inverted Epithalamion’s attitude to generativity in ‘a nocturnall’, in ‘The sunne rising’ the contrast is more to do with the couple’s relation to the intruding outside world. The starting-point for any comparison is that both celestial bodies are looking through windows; the fact that spenser’s moon ‘neuer sleepes’ may be the origin of donne’s epithet ‘Busie’. spenser is able to make his virginal Queen the paradoxical guarantor of generation, whilst hinting at the sort of envy to which Britomart is subject at the end of the 1590 Faerie Queene – where the public destiny of the heroine’s love does not prevent her from ‘halfe enuying’ the ‘blesse’ of the private couple scudamour and amoret (iii. xii. 46.6, 1590). donne, by contrast, only wants the sun to warm him and his lady (line 28). a male monarch having replaced cynthia/elizabeth, there is still a sense of privacy being invaded by the pervasive power of royalty: donne’s sense of an intrusive king may well be informed by James’s habit of asking prurient questions of newly wed courtiers. The sun may not exactly be identified with James i; but although calling him ‘Busie’ and ‘unruly’ would hardly be tactful (line 1), the sense that court huntsmen need to be told in the morning that ‘the King will ride’ (line 7) does suggest an irregularity to his movements, and a kind of idle business on his part. yet donne’s aubades do suggest some desire to return to the world of business, as david cunnington argues.44 The ‘warming’ that donne demands, then, might be an oblique – if farouche – request for royal favour. like spenser’s, donne’s poem points to the monarch’s responsibilities to supply his or her poets for their private lives, but for donne the public sphere is merely a source of bounty for the private – the two worlds are not engaged in any give and take as in spenser. donne’s hopes for the sanctifying effects of his marriage are finally focussed on his relationship to his wife rather than on the products of their marriage. in the Holy sonnet ‘since she whome i lovd, hath payd her last debt’, Theresa M. diPasquale finds a pun on whom/womb which indicates that ‘donne’s ongoing desire for ann is ridden with guilt; there is too direct a relation between his conjugal activities and their lethally fruitful consequences’,45 but the main drift of the poem’s argument, at least in the octave, is that ann has moved donne closer to heaven, a line of argument we have seen in ‘The dissolution’. Marriage only does good to those who are married (chiefly to the man). Both offspring and a sense of the wider public implications of marriage are driven out of donne’s poetic. targoff argues that despite his desire for near-perfect erotic intimacy, donne ‘seems to find the notion of exchanging spiritual parts unsettling’;46 he has a similar problem with the kind of mingling involved in sexual reproduction to

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that he has with the promiscuity of body parts that happens after death. His poetry remodels the union between the sexes so that difference is preserved – air and angels, hair and bone, powder and bullet. in those models the self is developed without the compromise involved in making something new – apart from the newly founded relation to the woman. donne’s fullest expression of his attitude to marital fecundity can be found in his sermon on ephesians 5: 25–7, preached at a christening. He argues that at first the heates and lusts of youth overflow all, as the waters overflowed all at the beginning; and when they did so, the Earth was not onely barren, (there were no creatures, no herbs produced in that) but even the waters themselves, that did overflow all, were barren too; there were no fishes, no fowls produced out of that; as long as a Mans affections are scattered, there is nothing but accursed barrennesse; but when god says, and is heard, and obeyed in it, Let the Waters be gathering into one place, let all thy affection be setled upon one wife, then the earth and the waters become fruitfull, then god gives us a type, and figure of the eternity of the joyes of heaven, in the succession, and propagation of children here upon the earth.47

The final idea is highly spenserian, and might be compared to the end of Epithalamion, where spenser promises ‘a large posterity’ (line 417) from his marriage, but the central idea, based on a highly strained analogy, that youthful wild oats are necessarily barren, reflects the thinking of the younger donne, with his refusal to connect sex and procreation. dr donne may be looking back on Jack donne and seeing his sexuality and the poems that emerged from it as accursedly barren, but he is also continuing an earlier strain of thought that gave a certain innocence to that sexuality. The strange notion that only focussed sexual desire (necessarily marital) can produce offspring also fits in with donne’s larger analogy in this sermon between marriage and the church, and with his mythologizing of his own life, followed and deepened by izaak Walton. Walton, in regarding donne as an english augustine, was perhaps following hints of donne’s own, not least from this sermon: now the English Church had gain’d a second st. Austine, for, i think, none was so like him before his conversion: none so like st. Ambrose after it: and if his youth had the infirmities of the one, his age had the excellencies of the other; the learning and holiness of both. and now all his studies which had been occasionally diffused, were all concentred in divinity.48

The point here is that donne’s youthful sexuality does not condemn him, but rather fits him for an augustinian role in the reformed church of

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england; that church, with its promotion of clerical marriage, was keen to make christ’s marriage to the church a prefiguration of and licence for marriage in general, as donne does in his ephesians sermon. The analogy with regard to donne’s own life is made explicit in his poem on the death of his wife, whom he describes as the one who ‘my mind did whett / to seek thee god’ (Holy sonnet ‘since she whome i lovd, hath payd her last debt’, lines 5–6); donne’s marriage, it seems from this poem, focussed not only his procreative but his spiritual energies. nonetheless, the sermon presents youthful diffuseness of desire as a precondition of such focus, a stage on donne’s not-quite Platonic ladder to divinity. We might expect donne to allow more public emphases on generation in his epithalamia for public figures, and his wrestling with spenserian attitudes here is particularly instructive. When dealing with the marriage of others, as in Prothalamion, spenser emphasizes the public element; he presents his stay at court as ‘fruitlesse’ (line 6), but he is compensated by the sight of the swans (representing the somerset daughters) who he hopes will produce ‘fruitful issue’ (line 104) after their imminent marriage. The implication is that their offspring will not only be fruit, but also be fruitful, of good works for the nation as well as of offspring themselves. The poem as a whole takes us along the river from court to the earl of essex’s house, where the wedding is to be celebrated. The implication may be that in essex’s Protestant militarism and generosity to the arts, spenser has a more fruitful model for the kingdom as a whole than in the court, where, in the words of Colin Clouts Come Home Againe, talent is ‘out of door quite shit’; the last word is an archaizing past tense of shut, but it does suggest the excretory rather than generative nature of the court. spenser wishes essex, not strictly the subject of the poem, ‘endlesse happinesse of thine owne name’ (Prothalamion, line 153), suggesting that national continuity might best be secured through the earl’s family. if spenser is not suggesting that essex become king, he is suggesting that the continuance of essex’s family will secure the nation’s glory in a more positive sense than the vicious but persistent force invoked by donne in Metempsychosis. The move from public to private finds in the private a solution to the problems of discontinuity in the public realm. By contrast, donne’s formal epithalamia for other people show some very odd attitudes to generation in matrimony. donne’s ‘epithalamium made at lincolnes inn’ seems unlikely to be celebrating a real wedding, as david novarr suggests.49 Heather dubrow, by contrast, thinks it an extreme case of some preoccupations commonly found in the epithalamium of the time.50 Virginia tufte similarly argues that it involves

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‘traditional fescennine teasing’,51 but it seems to go further than this. novarr’s idea that it might celebrate a mock-wedding between two male inns of court students would help to explain some of its oddities, and it is a very odd poem indeed, but one that reflects some of donne’s ambiguities about marriage and its purpose. H. l. Meakin argues that the poem’s language ‘suggests deeper fears of castration or impotence, and of male identity being swallowed in an engulfing mother’.52 The poem’s refrain insists that marriage will make the bride assume ‘perfection, and a womans name’. if this refers to a young male student, its archness is clear, but the notion that a virgin is perfected by being made womanly is also present, suggesting that there is no more for a woman to do in life than to lose her virginity. Helen cooper argues that this is a development of spenser’s attitude: Belphoebe’s virginity can be ‘perfect’ in so far as it is complete in itself, requiring nothing beyond itself; amoret is destined – somewhere beyond the poem as spenser left it – to find her fulfilment in a husband. it would take the ex-catholic John donne to insist that on her wedding night a maiden ‘puts on perfection’, that perfection lies in what is added to virginity.53

cooper perhaps misses the ironies of donne’s poem; it does have some references to the woman coming into ‘a mothers rich stile’ (line 87), but the overall thrust is that marriage is ‘a better state, a cradle’ (line 80), to which one comes by a kind of death, it being a grave to virginity. The idea of marriage as death and rebirth is a relatively common one, but donne’s use of it here is particularly emphatic; even as he denies the importance of death in the circumstances of marriage, he continually reminds us of it, and connects graves and cradles, tombs and wombs. donne addresses the temple (inn of court as well as ‘Flea’-like marriage-temple) thus: Thy two-leav’d gates fair temple, ’unfold, and these two in thy sacred bosome hold, till, mystically joyn’d, but one they bee; Then may thy leane and hunger-starved wombe long time expect their bodies and their tombe, long after their owne parents fatten thee. (lines 37–42)

The hungry womb here is a male belly, eager for fattening wealth. The poem undermines its more serious sections and sentiments with jocose satire, presenting women as ‘golden Mines’ (line 14) desirable only for their dowries, with a simple pun on them as angels (spiritual or financial), and courtiers as ‘barrels of others wits’ (line 27). Wealth is nearly as important a theme as sexuality: it is hoped that the couple will long outlive their

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parents, a sentiment which focuses all good wishes on the young coming into their inheritance, with an implicit hope that their parents will die soon. in stanza 5, the poem takes on a spenserian tone, considering the relative lengths of the marriage day and the wedding night, clearly reflecting the influences of spenser’s Epithalamion; there is at this moment an erotic seriousness that resembles spenser’s usual tone. This seriousness continues for most of the rest of the poem, but then slips back into absurdity by excessive gravity. The final stanza’s grotesque presentation of the girl’s loss of virginity takes the idea of the bride as sacrifice to vivid and absurd lengths, which Meakin likens to spenser’s serena amongst the savages;54 donne presents her as ‘like an appointed lambe, when tenderly / The priest comes on his knees t’ embowell her’ (lines 89–90). The embowelling may suggest the woman’s future pregnancy (the OED 3 and 4 meanings of the word are, roughly, to feed or fill the stomach) but it nonetheless suggests an element of violence and mortality in sexuality, given that the primary meaning is to disembowel for the purposes of embalming or punishment. The priest’s apparent violence resembles spenser’s Busirane torturing the newly wed amoret (Faerie Queene, iii. xii), reflecting a sense that marriage and sex are acts of violence against women; the difference between the poets is that spenser condemns and attempts to ameliorate this violence, whereas the young donne celebrates its finality. The much later ‘an epithalamion, or Mariage song on the lady elizabeth, and count Palatine being married on st Valentines day’ presents the princess’s marriage as almost a kind of death, though it is a death that constitutes an apotheosis: a great Princess falls, but doth not die; Bee thou a new starre, that to us portends ends of much wonder; and be Thou those ends. (lines 38–40)

rather than presenting us with images of endless continuity from this royal couple, donne gives this marriage a sense of finality. (ironically, it is the descendants of this marriage that still sit on the British throne today.) The bridal couple are, paradoxically, ‘two Phoenixes’ (line 18), whose double uniqueness is resolved into restorative unity in the poem’s final stanza: and by this act of these two Phenixes nature againe restored is, For since these two, are two no more, Ther’s but one Phenix, as was before. (lines 99–102)

The poem may intend to restore something that had recently been lost, either in the death of Queen elizabeth or in the more recent death of

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Prince Henry;55 but the main point of the lines is that rather than seeking generative multiplicity, donne wants a return to former unity. He seeks an end, not a new beginning. celebrating the scandalous marriage of the divorced countess of essex Frances Howard to sir robert carr (newly created earl of somerset) in 1613, donne echoes spenser’s Prothalamion (ironically given that the names of somerset and essex had been involved in that poem as brides and host, though the families were not quite the same), in calling the couple ‘swans’ (line 171). donne uses generative imagery in his ‘Benediction’ on the couple, exhorting them to ‘raise heires, and may here to the world’s end, live / Heires from this King, to take thankes, you, to give’ (lines 177–8). The awkward syntax here cannot conceal the fact that this is really just a wish for permanence of royal favour to the couple (which signally failed within three years, as the couple were imprisoned for murder). continuity here is really a matter of the continuous circulation of favour – from which donne wanted to get scraps – rather than true, public-spirited continuity. donne’s primary persona idios ends the poem saying that he will burn the poem (line 227), making it as self-consuming as ‘The Flea’, but allophanes (more public-spirited than the self-oriented idios, lines 228–35) insists he will lay it as a sacrifice on public altars so that it may be properly prized, and the poet presumably rewarded; donne here brilliantly ironizes his own tendency to the self-consuming, balanced with the need to earn one’s bread from court altars. The use of the double voice here indicates a separate self that speaks to the outside world, keeping a private self which is untainted by that relation. Heather dubrow argues that ‘one explanation for the vogue the epithalamium enjoyed in seventeenth-century england is that Queen elizabeth had discouraged weddings whereas her successor actively promoted them’;56 in that case spenser was going against the grain of his monarch’s wishes by celebrating marriage, and donne was going with the flow, though with a characteristically rebarbative edge. one of spenser’s most striking achievements in The Faerie Queene and in his other poems concerning marriage is to rewrite the idea of chastity, centring it on fertile marital sexuality; donne, perhaps betraying his catholic heritage, continues to insist that ‘the chastity of virginity, is the proper, and principal chastity’.57 donne’s conservatism, in many senses of that word, resists spenser’s radical orientation to the future; in Freud’s terms, he is driven by the death instinct, spenser by creative desire. We may alternatively view this as a matter of donne wanting the world, which is in inevitable decline, to end before further corruption and loss of selfhood can take place,

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whereas spenser believes in the renewing effects of generative fruitfulness. John carey, comparing spenser with donne (specifically the donne of Metempsychosis) accuses the former of ‘dreamy conservatism’, and argues that donne’s counter-spenserian epic is more ‘wedded to immediacy and the real world’;58 although it may be true that the experience of donne’s poetry is more direct, it is perhaps donne who is more fundamentally conservative, in a number of senses. donne can accept the idea of poetry as procreative, but only in poems addressed to male friends and centring on friendship; those poems will be handled in the next chapter, alongside Jonson’s similar poetry of procreative male friendship. in donne’s case, even such friendship is ultimately private rather than being oriented to the public sphere, whereas Jonson can use it to create a friendly harmony in the public sphere, subordinating women. For spenser, whatever his late disillusionment with public life, generation in private life is crucial to any human value, and ultimately contributes to the public and indeed the spiritual good. Epithalamion insistently demands an ‘echo’ in its refrain, making his wedding celebration reverberate through the world. donne searches for a private space for love, but to be fully private it must be cut off almost entirely from the public sphere to the extent of ignoring the duty to multiply the species; the public sphere only provides fuel for the private space of love. celebrating the spring’s ‘additions’ to love in ‘loves growth’ (line 22), donne (punning again on his wife’s maiden name, here with relentlessly appropriate zeal) uses terms like ‘encrease’ which should surely invoke the idea of having children (line 28), but his imagery uses the idea of expanding circles in water to suggest growth without the involvement of any new element; his ‘love deeds’ are ‘as blossomes on a bough’ (line 19) – beautiful, but not fruitful, existing only in and for themselves. donne’s attitude had a powerful influence on the generation of poets who followed him. edward, lord Herbert of cherbury, takes donne’s idea of true amorous fruition being progress to Heaven even more seriously than donne himself, and therefore like donne rules out any meaning in biological generation. in ‘an ode upon a Question Moved, Whether love should continue for ever’, Melander assures his beloved let then no doubt, Celinda, touch, Much less your fairest mind invade, Were not our souls immortal made, our equal loves can make them such.

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so when one wing can make no way, two joyned can themselves dilate, so can two persons propagate, When singly either would decay. (lines 121–8)59

The language of biology (‘propagate’) is appropriated precisely in order to rule out biology; it seems likely that donne’s ‘ecstasie’ is a development of this.60 similarly, in Thomas carew’s very sexy development of donne’s mode of love elegy, ‘a rapture’, procreation is invoked as an essentially non-procreative idea: no curtaine there, though of transparant lawne, shall be before thy virgin-treasure drawne; But the rich Mine, to the enquiring eye expos’d, shall ready for my mintage lye, and we will coyne young Cupids. (lines 31–5)61

This seems procreative, but the movement through metaphors denies any privileged position to children as the result of sex: mines and money replace children who then seem to return in the images of cupid; but those cupids are abstract children, prompters to desire rather than the physical results of it, conventional poetic representations of love rather than biological copies of their parents. as in donne’s ‘Farewell to love’, sex makes more sex, and here perhaps more poems of sexual desire, but it doesn’t make babies. george Herbert’s ‘giddinesse’ is typical of an attitude that focuses attention on the individual rather than his products: lamenting man’s inconsistency, he argues that ‘now he scorns increase; / now all day spares’, going on to say ‘He builds a house, which quickly down must go’ (lines 11–13).62 The sentiment is similar to greville’s in Caelica lxii (see chapter 3, above), but there is no reference to procreation; ‘increase’ seems to have an exclusively economic meaning here, and the house is purely bricks and mortar. Herbert here attributes creativity only to god, concluding with the entreaty lord, mend us or rather make us: one creation Will not suffice our turn: except thou make us dayly, we shall spurn our own salvation. (lines 25–8)

as Wilcox points out (in her notes to the poem), this chimes with his famous comment in A Priest to the Temple: ‘Preservation is a creation; and more, it is a continued creation, and a creation every moment.’ With such

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creation going on, human creativity must seem rather feeble. in ‘affliction’ (i), however, Herbert seems to wrestle against god’s monopoly on creation in the extraordinary lines i reade, and sigh, and wish i were a tree; For sure then i should grow to fruit or shade: at least some bird would trust Her houshold to me, and i should be just. (lines 57–60)63

The desire for purpose is partly equated with the desire for fruit in the manner of the elizabethans, but the poem ultimately thwarts that. Wishing one could ‘mourne with some fruit’ (donne, Holy sonnet, ‘oh might those sighes and teares’) is ultimately only the wish for salvific agency in a calvinist universe, not a desire for procreation on its own terms. For donne and his followers, a unified self can only be found by denying paternity, both biological and poetic. His kind of investment in his poems is fundamentally negative: he wants to deny it, to deny that his poems are part of a coherent self, because he sees what investing in them and in the public world would cost; but paradoxically the desperate anxiety of his denials demonstrates his awareness that one cannot cut oneself off from the world. in order to ensure one’s own coherence, one has to centre the world on oneself, but then to refuse any real connection with it, as the individual can only properly relate himself to one other. Though donne finds ways of relating the sexes – which are arguably superior to spenser’s – it is at the price of any spenserian connection to the public world. it is through death not birth that the community is connected, as in such famous passages as ‘ask not for whom the bell tolls’ (Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, 7). However, a career in the church offered donne an alternative mode of paternity. in one of his latest poems, written when he was already in orders himself, and celebrating the ordination of edward tilman (possibly a kinsman), he reflects on the priestly office thus: These are thy titles and preheminences, in whom must meet gods graces, mens offences, and so the heavens which beget all things here, and th’ earth our mother, which these things doth beare, Both these in thee are, in thy calling knit, and make thee now a blest Hermaphrodite. (‘to Mr tilman after he Had taken orders’, lines 49–54)

redeeming the relation between the sexes more radically than sidney or spenser ever could, donne can find a final role for himself as hermaphrodite, but that involves rejecting fatherhood.

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donne’s sense of finality and introversion – or at least self-orientation – may account for the fact that he did not become a central canonical figure until the twentieth century. in the end he is making claims that apply only in his own world (and the next, crucially), denying the value of the public and generative, even as he expects them to support him; these claims are powerful, however, which is why donne was able to be a powerful influence on the next generation of poets (less a poetic father, and more a disreputable uncle perhaps?). Unlike his friend Ben Jonson, donne does not claim to be a guarantor of the public sphere, but he does make claims on it, if only to subordinate it to the individual and his salvation.

ch apter 7

‘To propagate their names’: Ben Jonson as poetic godfather

What we know of Ben Jonson’s sex-life is summed up in two paragraphs of Conversations with Drummond: ‘he maried a wife who was a shrew yet honest, 5 yeers he had not bedded with her, but remained with my lord aulbanie’, and in his youth given to Venerie. He thought the use of a maid nothing in comparison to the wantonness of a wyfe & would never have ane other Mistress. He said two accidents strange befell him, one that a man made his own wife to court him, whom he enjoyed two yeares erre he knew of it, & one day finding them by chance Was passingly delighted with it, one other lay diverse tymes with a woman, who shew him all that he wished, except the last act, which she would never agree unto.1

such biographical snippets may not seem to fit with the attitude to sexuality displayed in his verse, but they do provide some interesting clues: in talking to drummond about these matters, he is making sex into amusing homosocial discourse; the emphasis that his wife is ‘honest’ suggests an element of defensive paranoia about female infidelity; the preference for a patron over a wife relates clearly to his poetic persona’s subordination of sexuality to communal relations; the other man’s connivance in making him almost a cavalier servente to his wife reflects his general sense of male generosity and female untrustworthiness; the rather unamusing last story shows a recognition of a woman’s desire not to get pregnant by him – and a certain indignation at that fact. above all, women are to be used. such ideas can be found throughout his poetry, which focuses on some aspects of sex, but which ultimately makes it a relatively trivial part of life. What matters for Jonson is a stable system of interpersonal relations, which may be threatened by the dynamic intensity of sexuality. sex must therefore be put in its place, as firmly as donne marginalizes reproduction. recognizing the risk of chaos and self-diminution invoked by his predecessors’ centralizing of desire, Jonson initiates a poetic tradition in which arm’s-length connections will suffice – something we can see in the 188

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unsentimental connections of paternity in his plays, and most fully developed in his poetic fashioning of stable communities. central to the process of correction in Jonson’s dramatic work is a sense that paternal feeling is apt to be excessive and needs to be moderated to a more just balance. identification with sons is to be carefully ruled out, and even investment in them severely attenuated. in the third addition to Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (possibly by Jonson),2 which constitutes one of the great speeches of paternal grief, Hieronimo complains: My son! and what’s a son? a thing begot Within a pair of minutes, thereabout: a lump bred up in darkness, and doth serve to ballace these light creatures we call women: and at nine months’ end, creeps forth to light. What is there yet in a son to make a father dote, rave or run mad? Being born, it pouts, cries and breeds teeth. What is there yet in a son? He must be fed, Be taught to go, and speak. ay, or yet? Why might not a man love a calf as well? or melt in passion o’er a frisking kid as for a son? Methinks a young bacon or a fine little smooth horse-colt should move a man as much as doth a son: For one of these in very little time Will grow to some good use, whereas a son, The more he grows in stature as in years, The more unsquar’d, unbevell’d, he appears, reckons his parents among the rank of fools, strikes care upon their heads with his mad riots, Makes them look old before they meet with age: This is a son: and what a loss were this, consider’d truly? oh, but my Horatio grew out of reach of these insatiate humours: He lov’d his loving parents, He was my comfort, and his mother’s joy, The very arm that did hold up our house: our hopes were stored up in him. (Third addition, lines 4–33)

as it takes little effort (or pleasure) to conceive a son, he cannot be of much worth; the later educational investment is so much wasted effort unless something is recovered – and it is clear that parents in england at this time did not expect, as in peasant societies, to recover their investment in children.3 against the odds, Hieronimo’s son has turned out to advance

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the whole family; his loss is therefore a special case, not just a knee-jerk natural reaction of grief. For Hieronimo, the son must have merit to be worthy of love and hope. Fatherhood here is surprisingly associated with Humanist ideas of meritocracy – thus putting it alongside friendship and romantic love as a virtue-based, disinterested feeling, and in opposition to the partial familial feelings of the play’s royal family. Every Man in His Humour, being a thoroughly classical comedy, has the clash of the generations at its heart, but it does not allow a traditional triumph for youth. The conflict between old Knowell and his son edward is, it is mildly suggested, based on fundamental similarities between them. The play’s plot is set in motion when Knowell opens a letter to his son, an action he justifies as the messenger has mistaken him for edward and because they have the same name: This letter is directed to my sonne: yet, i am edWard Kno’Well too, and may With the safe conscience of good manners, vse The fellowes error to my satisfaction. Well, i will breake it ope (old men are curious) Be it but for the stiles sake, and the phrase. (i. ii. 61–6)

Knowing his invasion of his son’s privacy to be wrong, he blurs conscience and conventional manners as much as he tries to blur identities with his son. The idea that old men are curious could be an authorial commentary as much as a self-description by Knowell, but also operates as a further self-justification: the fact that old men are conventionally curious in comedy licenses him to be so too. The word ‘curious’, however, has not only its modern meaning and his own suggestion that his curiosity is essentially a concern for literary style, but also the latinate connotation implying that fathers take (possibly excessive) care for their sons. The process of the play’s plot will try to shake him out of this essentially jealous worry, just as it will shake the jealous husband Kitely from his excessive concerns. Having read the letter, in which Wellbred invites edward to city amusements, and jokes rather mildly about ‘thy vigilant father’ and his concern for his apricots (lines 75–6), Knowell believes he has learned a lesson that ‘affection makes a foole / of any man, too much the father’ (lines 110–11); this sentiment chimes with Jonson’s ‘on My First son’, where the poet has had ‘too much hope’ and wishes to ‘lo[o]se all father’ (lines 2, 5); fatherly affection is associated with excess, but the play goes on to suggest that Knowell’s way of correcting his excesses and those of his son is itself excessive. at first, we might see his plan as reasonable: rather than restraining his son, he is going to allow him enough rope to get into trouble, and plans

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to find out about it. This resembles Polonius’s indulgent spying on his son in Hamlet, but Knowell’s servant Brainworm is less reliable than Polonius’s agent reynaldo. Brainworm’s betrayal of the father to the son indicates the problems inherent in a situation where both men can be regarded as the master of the household; the servant’s greater sympathy for the younger man simply reflects loyalties which have an eye on the future, a greater care for the rising sun/son. Brainworm’s betrayal, and the failure of mastery that this involves, prevents Knowell being the moral centre of the play as he would wish. His soliloquy in act ii seems at first to offer authorial condemnation of modern youth, but really says more about paternal blindness: i cannot loose the thought, yet, of this letter, sent to my sonne: nor leaue t’ admire the change of manners, and the breeding of our youth, Within the kingdome, since my selfe was one. When i was yong, he liu’d not in the stewes, durst have conceiu’d a scorn, and vtter’d it, on a grey head; age was authoritie against a buffon: and a man had, then, a certaine reuerence pai’d vnto his yeeres, That had none due vnto his life. so much The sanctitie of some prevailed for others. (ii. v. 1–11)

Here, his surprise (the primary connotation of ‘admire’) at Wellborn’s irreverence seems tinged with a certain amount of envy and even of admiration. The self-pity here undermines his authority to speak, as does a developing sense that he is deluding himself about the virtues of his own youth; the above suggests that he had some acquaintance with the manners of the brothel district (‘stews’); the generalizations to which he then turns may make us feel that he is more involved in the city’s moral decline than he would like to admit: But, now, we all are fall’n: youth, from their feare: and age, from that, which bred it, good example. nay, would our selues were not the first, euen parents, That did destroy the hopes, in our owne children: or they not learn’d our vices in their cradles, and suck’d in our ill customes, with their milke. ere all their teeth be borne, or they can speake, We make their palats cunning! The first wordes, We forme their tongues with, are licentious iests! can it call, whore? crie, bastard? ô, then, kisse it, a wittie child! can ’t sweare? The fathers dearling!

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despite this final mention of the mother, it is fathers who are surely criticized most firmly in Knowell’s use of ‘we’; paternal interest has corrupted youth by trying to make children too much like men. Knowell implies in all this that he has done similarly himself, and now regrets that the consequences of his amusement at youthful obscenity (and there is much evidence that parents of the time really enjoyed this) cannot be corrected as the child grows older: But, this is in the infancie; the dayes of the long coate: when it puts on the breeches, it will put off all this. i, it is like: When it is gone into the bone alreadie. no, no: This die goes deeper than the coate, or shirt, or skin. it staines, vnto the liuer, and heart, in some. and, rather, then it should not, note, what we fathers doe! looke, how we liue! What mistresses we keepe! at what expense, in our sonnes eyes! where they may handle our gifts, Hear our lasciuious courtships, see our dalliance, taste of the same prouoking meats, with vs, to ruine of our states! nay, when our owne Portion is fled, to prey on their remainder, We call them into fellowship of vice! Baite ’hem with the yong chamber-maid, to seale! and teach ’hem all bad ways, to buy affection!4 This is one path! But there are millions more, in which we spoil our owne, with leading them. Well, i thanke heauen, i never yet was he, That trauail’d with my sonne, before sixteene, to shew him, the Venetian cortezans. (lines 25–46)

He goes on to deny teaching his son to cheat or gourmandize, but we may wonder if this really constitutes a full denial of the various examples of paternal vice he has listed and which he has described in the first-person plural. He concludes, in an attempt to deny any bad example, My sonne, i hope, hath met within my threshold none of these houshold precedents; which are strong, and swift, to rape youth, to their precipice. But, let the house at home be nere so cleaneswept, or kept sweet from filth; nay, dust, and cobwebs: if he will liue, abroad, with his companions, in dung, and leystalls; it is worth a feare.

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nor is the danger of conuersing lesse, Than all that i have mentioned of example. (lines 58–66)

The characteristically paternal ‘hope’ here seems to suggest some doubt about his denials of vice, and it is a forlorn hope anyway, as friends can corrupt as easily as fathers. all this amounts to the recognition that fathers can only be either bad examples or too weak to deter them from vice. The full recognition of paternal weakness will, however, have to wait until the play’s denouement, which seems ultimately to endorse clement’s position that ‘your sonne is old inough, to gouerne him selfe: let him runne his course, it’s the onely way to make him a stay’d man’ (iii. vii. 85–8). edward, as clement points out, is guilty of no real vice other than amusing himself; and he is certainly not scheming against his father, to whom he is not even directly disrespectful: it is Wellbred who is rude about him in the letter, and Brainworm who entangles him with dame Kitely. in the end Knowell recognizes that he has been engaged in an ‘impertinent search’ and ‘half forgiue[s]’ his son for Brainworm’s trick (iv. x. 63–4); impertinence may seem a more characteristically filial offence, but transferring it onto the father is the effect of the deliberate confusion of identity that began with the misprision of the letter; the half-forgiveness reflects Jonson’s refusal to end his play with a sentimental recognition between father and son. The absence of such recognition is reflected in edward’s surprise at the messenger’s confusion: ‘doest thou think that any reasonable creature, especially in the morning (the sober time of the day too), could haue mis-tane my father for me?’ (iii. i. 41–4). despite the fact that this confusion has occurred, and despite their closeness of identity, the play insists that they are separate, and should stay that way. Jonson’s later The Staple of News (1626) centres around a much more radical version of paternal surveillance: old Pennyboy pretends to be dead, and in the disguise of a beggar or ‘canter’ observes the behaviour of his son as he enjoys his inheritance. Pennyboy Junior keeps the canter as his lucky companion, saying ‘He brought me the first newes of my fathers death, / i thanke him, and euer since, i call him Founder’ (i. iii. 19–20). The pleasure that a father’s death brings is undisguised, but the lines are larded with dramatic irony: he thanks his father as his founder with unwittingly proper gratitude. The son may be an unfilial fool, but perhaps such backhanded and accidental compliments are the most a father can expect. The canter’s asides commenting on Pennyboy Junior’s idiocy are a comic version of the father’s ghost in Hamlet: whereas old Hamlet might be taken as a representation of the pressures of a paternal superego, this representation of the voice of the father is unheard by the son but can be taken

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by the audience as an uncomfortably intrusive authority acting as a drag on the fantasy of radical freedom. His ironic encouragement of his son’s foolish schemes hints at the way in which paternal expectations can be misunderstood; and we may wonder if the father is not as guilty as the son. Whilst the father’s disguise offers a foreshadowing of the beggary to which a prodigal son may be heading, his presence is ultimately reassuring, as it gives the reader the sense that the son will be protected in extremis – this is a different matter for the theatrical audience, however, who are not at first aware of the canter’s identity, which is signalled only by the dramatis personae and speech headings in the printed text. The canter is as much the disguised deity as the disguised father: his aim is to expose the corruption of the whole society and particularly his usurious brother; those who ill-treat him for his poverty may be as worthy of punishment as those who turn away Zeus in ovid’s tale of Baucis and Philemon, or the citizens of sodom who abuse the angels.5 When almanac and Madrigal call him ‘a supercilious rogue’ and the ‘Patrico’ or ‘Arch-priest o’ Canters’ (iv. i. 44–5) they speak truer than they know, for he does have something like sacred authority. His son, whatever his faults, is at least generous to him: as he says, ‘i loue all men of vertue, from my Princesse, / Vnto my begger’ (iv. iv. 34–5). despite this, Pennyboy Junior is found wanting; his father reveals himself and gives a long diatribe about his son’s inability to distinguish the true professors of the civilized arts from the false, saying that he will himself take the allegorized woman Pecunia (money) whom he had proposed as his son’s bride. stupefied, or perhaps just stupid, the son speaks not a word in response, so that we cannot assess his attitude to losing his wealth and regaining his father. The onstage audience of gossips react unfavourably to this, hoping for a conventional plot in which youth outwits age (iv. int. 50–64); yet they also recognize rightly that the canter ‘had the chiefest part in his play’ (line 6), a fact that is rather unusual for a father figure. Their desire is nearly satisfied in the fifth act, where a second plot emerges as the lawyer Picklock proposes to help the son betray the father (though really acting for his own ends). Brazening out his attempted fraud, Picklock argues that old Pennyboy ought to prefer letting his money go to his friend than to his prodigal son, but the father has never really intended to disinherit him. When Pennyboy Junior manages to bring a witness against the lawyer’s dishonesty, he partially redeems himself and earns paternal trust. The play may not end with the slaughter of a fatted calf, for old Pennyboy is not the christian god, and his son is not a fully repentant sinner, but it does insist that one cannot ultimately ‘thrust out of the blood’ in the ‘ciuill

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slaughter of a sonne’ (v. ii. 74–6). The father is only ‘partly reconcil’d’ to his son because of his ‘piety, and good affection’ (v. iii. 23–4), but such limited paternal blessing is the most that can be properly expected, and is enough. The son is to take off the beggar’s rags his father has imposed, and bidden to ‘be your selfe againe’ (line 22); only a father can confer identity thus. it is such a role, as only partially interested father, that Jonson takes in his poems, where this mode of attachment rules out all the grander but more dangerous passions involved in making oneself a father. in fact, he becomes more like a godfather (who often conferred their names on their godchildren, or chose the name given); he acts as a guarantor of the bases of community rather than one who has a passionate stake in them. For this reason, he has to fashion a radically new attitude to women and sex. The Forest, his most formal collection, is deeply preoccupied with women’s marital chastity amongst the upper class, which could even be said to be the collection’s main subject. (given the use of arboreal metaphors to describe families, it may be that the title reflects this, as well as marking the collection as a separate space.)6 Jonson begins the collection declaring that he writes not of love, and richard Helgerson observes that the 1616 Works contains no serious dramatic love scene and is full of poems against love;7 however, as ian donaldson points out, Jonson may not write of conventional Petrarchan love, but does write convincingly of the chaste and generative love he celebrates in aristocratic families.8 true love, as he writes in ‘epode’ is an essence, farre more gentle, fine, Pure, perfect, nay divine; it is a golden chaine let downe from heaven, Whose linkes are bright, and even, That falls like sleepe on lovers, and combines The soft, and sweetest mindes in equall knots: This beares no brands, nor darts, to murther different hearts, But in a calme, and god-like unitie, Preserves communitie. (lines 45–54)9

Unlike the individualistic Petrarchan binding he despises in ‘Why i Write not of love’, associated with cupid and frustrated endeavour, this calm love is communal, mutual, hierarchical, founded on a rejection of the differences inherent to Petrarchan desire. Whereas sidney, spenser, shakespeare and donne had in different ways tried to negotiate new balances between the sexes, Jonson simply tries to do away with gender difference as an issue, pushing the problem off the agenda (pardon the pun).

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This rejection seems to be a rejection of all the frustrations present in the poetry of Jonson’s predecessors; Jonson may repudiate all that we have found most interesting in sidney, spenser and shakespeare, but his poetry as a whole constitutes an attempt to heal the gender divisions, ironic selfabjection and relentless erotic wandering we have seen as central to the elizabethan poetics of love. Whereas donne tries to create a sealed private sphere of marital love, Jonson, inspired by Jacobean notions of patriarchal harmony, strives to make generativity a matter of public rather than private concern, with poetry a celebratory adjunct; he allies the generativity and the deeds of his aristocratic patrons in a new model of harmonious society; he develops new models of healthy eroticism; and he presents a new kind of selfhood which does not rely on the individualistic mess and uncertainty of eros, but which, despite its communality, retains an element of spiky personality. in ‘to Penshurst’, Jonson makes his grandest attempt to inveigle himself into a patron’s family; in fact, as robert c. evans notes, many of the poems in The Forest are designed to present a varied ‘mosaic’ of connections between the poet and the larger sidney family;10 in doing so, he makes subtle claims on the poetic inheritance of sir Philip sidney, even as he insists on the family’s more literal heritage from that poetic hero.11 ‘Penshurst’ is a microcosm of unified community, and that unity depends not only on the lord himself (robert sidney), but also on the poet. evans argues that Jonson’s poem embodies (and trumps) the ‘competitive mentality’ embodied in the other houses it is compared to,12 and the poem constitutes an alternative decoration for a house that disdains the ‘envious show’ of other aristocrats’ homes (line 1). as poetry becomes a part of the household, it loses some of its anxieties, which is reflected in privileging hospitality over desire. as is so often the case with Jonson, food and reproductive sexuality are put on an equal footing; unlike sidney, who makes desire for food a model for an insatiable sexuality (Astrophel and Stella 71), Jonson makes both into a mutually sustaining model of repletion and contentment.13 Just as the Penshurst estate is filled with animals who are notoriously ‘willing to be kill’d’ (line 30), removing the frictions from appetite for food, the women of the estate are frank and free in a way that removes all frictions from sexuality. The peasants are part of a harmonious economy of food and, rather incidentally, sex: some bring a capon, some a rurall cake, some nuts, some apples; some that thinke they make The better cheeses, bring ’hem; or else send

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By their ripe daughters, whom they would commend This way to husbands; and whose baskets beare an emblem of themselves, in plum, or peare. (lines 51–6)

These offerings, it may be noted, are made despite the professed absence of a ‘sute’ (line 50), and are therefore to be taken as in some way equivalent to the poem itself, which is thereby naturalized as a part of the harmonious, fruitful economy. With this pattern in place, Jonson can easily move on to discussion of the house’s hospitality, drawing even the King into the circle he has created, allowing further mutual validation. Jonson writes, at the end of the passage commending the food he is offered, ‘There’s nothing i can wish, for which i stay’ (line 75); he then rhymes this with the introduction of the King, characteristically connecting poet and monarch – ‘That found King James, when hunting late, this way’ (line 76). Jonathan goldberg argues that Jonson internalized his dependency on James i and that his ‘rebellions were royally countenanced’; in ‘Penshurst’ ‘together, poet and king present a picture of the mutually constitutive nature of society’.14 They are the poles that enable the existence of a harmonious social world. The generative sexuality of the family is then introduced, once this powerful set of mutually validating concepts is established: These, Penshurst, are thy praise, and yet not all. Thy lady’s noble, fruitfull, chaste withall. His children thy great lord may call his owne: a fortune, in this age, but rarely knowne. (lines 89–92)

The gathering force of withall, richly rhyming with all, has considerable force – only on such a solid basis can generativity be secure. rather than the darting riskiness of Petrarchan desire, or the strenuous narrative accomplishment of spenser’s model of generative sexuality, Jonson situates sexuality within confirmed structures, rejecting both the lyric and the epic mode of individualistic desire. (This is not so much the withdrawn artist paring his nails, as in Joyce’s picture of the dramatic mode,15 but rather sitting and having a pleasant meal while the life he represents goes on around – and through – him.) Though ‘Penshurst’ is the fullest development of this mode of Jonson’s writing, we can see similar effects in other poems in The Forest, which also point to some of the anxieties and tensions Jonson can never quite dispel. even in ‘Penshurst’ the notion that it is rare for a lord to be able to call his children his own is radically unsettling for a patriarchal society. There is something ludicrous about a society founding itself on a paternalistic order when paternity is so fundamentally uncertain. indeed, one may wonder if

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the almost hysterical insistence on fathers’ power is an attempt to deny the real limitations of their role in generation (see chapter 2, above). ‘epistle to elizabeth, countess of rutland’ is a fascinating attempt to shore up paternalistic order with poetry, but it also starkly shows the limitations of poetry’s power in this regard. Jonson can emphasize poetry so much here because the countess was sir Philip sidney’s daughter;16 he insists: Beautie, i know, is good, and bloud is more; riches thought most: But, Madame, thinke what store The world hath seene, which all these had in trust, and now lye lost in their forgotten dust. (lines 37–40)

The sentiment here is not far from that of shakespeare in the Sonnets, though the difference of writing to a woman is not to be disregarded. like shakespeare, Jonson insists not only on the capacity of poetry to immortalize fame, but even on its salvific power: it is the Muse, alone, can raise to heaven, and, at her strong armes end, hold up, and even, The soules, shee loves. (lines 41–3)

The odd verb even insists on poetic egalitarianism more explicitly than shakespeare does; the countess may be sidney’s daughter, but Jonson is the poet and therefore at least equal to the woman he praises (the only getout clause being Jonson’s disingenuous suggestion that she is a poet too, who can have ‘skill’, when she ‘will’ – lines 33–4). Maternity is disparaged along with the other accoutrements of aristocratic families: Those other glorious notes, inscrib’d in touch or marble, or the cotes Painted, or carv’d upon our great-mens tombs, or in their windowes; doe but prove the wombs, That bred them, graves: where they were borne, they di’d, That had no Muse to make their fame abide. (lines 43–8)

as with donne, the equation of wombs and tombs compromises any value generativity can have, but Jonson sees poetry as a much more powerful solution than donne does. claude summers and ted-larry Pebworth, whilst admiring this poem, argue that The faith in good verses is an important aspect of his personal philosophy . . . But in this poem it so overpowers the subject, who is defined only in terms of her devotion to a muse that may make her shine in conjunction with ‘that other starre’ (line 65), lucy, countess of Bedford, as to destroy any feeling of intimate communication between poet and subject.17

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There is some truth in this view, but we need to see the poem in the context of Jonson’s oeuvre, and in relation to other poems of patronage, to understand the force of Jonson’s position. in the 1616 Works the poem ends with an insistence on high, and noble matter, such as flies From brains entranc’d, and fill’d with ecstasies; Moodes, which the god-like sydney oft did prove, and your brave friend, and mine so well did love. Who wheresoere he be . . . The rest is lost. (lines 89–93)

sidney’s paternal relation to the countess is everything here, and she is bound to Jonson through that and through sidney’s friendship with the earl her husband, who is also Jonson’s friend; the woman is merely the crossing-point of a number of male homosocial relationships which exist more powerfully than any biological/feminine relationships; this is a fiction for, as gavin alexander points out, in reality rutland seems to have been jealous of or at least annoyed by Jonson’s presence in the family.18 The relation of men through poetry, it is emphasized, is more important and secure than any relationship through women, whose wombs offer only death – male writers have a way of proving themselves (making themselves safe, bringing themselves to full realization) which is more solid than the biological. Most modern editions of the poem then print the lines which ended the poem as originally presented to the countess, but which were cancelled in print as they had become obviously inappropriate: on what dear coast, now thincking on you, though to england lost, For that firme grace he holdes in your regard, i, that am gratefull for him, have prepar’d This hasty sacrifice, wherein i reare a vow as new, and ominous as the yeare, Before his swift and circled race be run, My best of wishes, may you beare a sonne. (lines 93–100)

The reason for the lines’ cancellation is that the countess had had no children, and the earl was widely rumoured to be impotent.19 We may wonder if modern editors are right to print the lines, given that Jonson made the conscious decision to publish the poem without them; their absence is in itself significant (at least to those who had seen the poem in manuscript), demonstrating the powerlessness of such poetic wishes over biology: the generative and feminine ending is removed, leaving only the homosocial.

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in the cancelled lines, Jonson presents himself as a kind of proxy for the husband, grateful for him suggesting at least in part being grateful on his behalf. The insistence that she bear a son within a year does almost suggest, given the earl’s current and indefinite absence from home, that the poet might act as a sexual proxy too. i think we are meant to entertain and reject this latter possibility, so that it might provide under-propping for the notion that the poet in some way enables her generativity through his verse sacrifice. We are left with a greater sense of the value of poetic connections than of biological ones. also printed in the 1616 Works is another poem to the same countess, also harping on her father’s poetry, this time comparing it explicitly to her: That Poets are far rarer births than kings, your noblest father prov’d: like whom, before, or then, or since, about our Muses springs, came not that soule exhausted so their store. Hence was it, that the destinies decreed (save that most masculine issue of his braine) no male unto him: who could so exceed Nature, they thought, in all, that he would faine. at which, shee happily displeas’d, made you: on whom, if he were living now, to looke, He should those rare, and absolute numbers view, as he would burne, or better farre his booke. (Epigrams lxxix)

again the idea of sidney’s ability to prove himself is stressed; he also proves and extends Jonson’s favourite maxim – that only kings and poets are not born every year (the latter of course being more remarkably rare). The compliment to the countess is decidedly backhanded: as with the absolute and emphatic need for a son at the end of the first version of the ‘epistle’, it is automatically assumed that ‘masculine issue’ is to be preferred; sons and poems are best, even if daughters turn out to be happy accidents. The countess is the product of a nature who is incensed at sidney’s surpassing her, as he says poets do in A Defence of Poetry.20 Jonson, though he compliments her by saying that she is better than the poetry, also explicitly considers that sidney, were he alive, could do better – and thus implies that masculine poetry can still surpass feminine nature. We might also pick up the implication of the poem as follows: ‘even sidney, great man that he was, only had daughters; if you want to be immortalized, rely on poetry rather than fatherhood, which may only produce girls, however pretty they may be.’

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one problem with daughters is that they do not bear their fathers’ names – they are not only uncertain vessels, but fail to carry forward the fame which Jonson sees so importantly borne in a name (see below). The subject of ‘epistle. to Katherine, lady aubigny’ is chaste, avoiding the perverse sins attributed to most of womankind: you, Madame, yong have learn’d to shunne these shelves, Whereon the most of mankinde wracke themselves, and, keeping a just course, have earely put into your harbor, and all passage shut ’gainst stormes, or pyrats, that might charge your peace. (lines 89–93)

The insistence here on her safety, though, is a little compromised in the next lines: For which you worthy are the glad encrease of your blest wombe, made fruitfull from above, to pay your lord the pledges of chast love: and raise a noble stem, to give the fame to clifton’s bloud, that is deny’d their name. (lines 94–8)

Her father clifton can only see his blood rather than his name propagated through a daughter; the stem here suggests that the familial tree has to start again. Jonson’s act of naming goes some way to restoring that name and re-allying it with the fame he promises. This woman’s husband, one might note, has a much better chance of giving new life, even to the poet, as Jonson observes in ‘to esmé, lord aubigny’ (Epigrams cxxvii): How full of want, how swallow’d up, how dead i, and this Muse had been, if thou hadst not lent timely succours, and new life begot. (lines 6–8)

The patron may be a begetter, but true life is in poems.21 so much, then, even for chaste women, who are, as we have seen, regarded as exceptions to the general rule of unreliable inchastity. away from The Forest, which seems to be a specially corralled collection of poems which validate familial virtues, Jonson is even more sceptical about the virtuous generativity of women. ‘to Fine lady Would-Be’ (Epigrams lxii) is typical of Jonson’s attitude to the way women behave at court: Fine Madame Would-Bee, wherefore should you feare, That love to make so well, a child to beare? The world reputes you barren: but i know your ’pothecarie, and his drug sayes no. is it the paine affrights? that’s soone forgot.

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Poetry and Paternity in Renaissance England or your complexions losse? you have a pot, That can restore that. Will it hurt your feature? to make amends, yo’are thought a wholesome creature. What should the cause be? oh, you live at court: and there’s both losse of time, and losse of sport in a great belly. Write, then on thy wombe, of the not borne, yet buried, here’s the tombe.

The connection of womb and tomb is clearer than in ‘epistle to elizabeth, countess of rutland’, as the woman plans to procure an abortion, but we can’t help feeling that the connection is becoming habitual for Jonson, and that the odds between a virtuous mother and her apparent opposite are not that great. Jonson’s pun on making in the poem’s second line is packed with disdain; her making is really mating, not even making babies – put that next to poetic making, and it looks a very feeble claim on the same word.22 The same disdainful comparison rears itself again in the word write in the poem’s penultimate line. What is most disconcerting is that this comparison is not all that dissimilar to that we saw in the ‘epistle’. lady Would-Be’s name is obviously typical for an aspirant courtier (as in Volpone), but it has a particular application here: she wants to be something at court, but in compassing this she has denied herself the best and only way, to his mind, a woman can really be – shutting herself up and having children like Katherine, lady aubigny. even when a woman at court dedicates herself to the role of mistress, this is futile, for as Jonson bitterly observes in ‘an epistle to a Friend, to perswade him to the Warres’ (Underwood xv), ‘lesse must not be thought on then Mistresse: or / if it be thought, kild like her embrions’ (lines 95–6); the mistress thinks she can get attention through childlessness, but ironically gets as little thought as she has fecundity. ‘an epigram on the court Pucell’ (Underwood xlix), on the other hand, shows that ‘fits o’ th’ Mother’ (line 40) will get a woman no more attention, ‘For there the wicked in the chaire of scorne, / Will cal ’t a Bastard, when a Prophet’s borne’ (lines 45–6). Whatever the personal attacks which drive these poems, it is clear that Jonson saw being a sexually active woman at court as a singularly futile way of life. For men, by contrast, courtly endeavour is underpinned by and augmented through familial success. ‘an epigram on William, lord Burleigh, lord High treasurer of england’ (Underwood xxx, a poem presented to Burleigh’s son, robert cecil, the earl of salisbury) presents the highest example of such public-service success: he still was good for goodnesse sake, nor thought Upon reward, till the reward him sought.

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Whose offices, and honours did surprize, rather than meet him: and, before his eyes clos’d to their peace, he saw his branches shoot, and in the noblest families tooke root of all the land. Who now at such a rate, of divine blessing, would not serve a state? (lines 13–20)

The satirical intent here is hard to read. The reason William cecil was able to insert the branches of his family into the upper nobility was his (ab)use of the court of Wards, which gave him the right to marry off orphaned underage noblemen. Jonson seems to see this as the height of felicity, and may indeed have thought so given his own more modest desires to inveigle himself into aristocratic families; but the presentation of this felicity as passively accepted reward rather than keenly promoted power-grab seems a bit much for straightforward praise. The irony of the final couplet probably cuts both ways – ‘[a little sneeringly] who wouldn’t take such a reward? [eyebrows raised in genuine query] well, who wouldn’t?’ The word where Jonson leaves us a genuine query is serve – it has some of the force it has at the end of Wyatt’s ‘They flee from me’ – ‘this is service? and whose state are you serving, by the way?’ such tonal matters, though, are finally undecidable; what we are left with is the ability of some sort of merit to advance one’s family – an aim to which anyone may fairly aspire, even if they can expect to be sneered at a certain amount for doing so. ‘eupheme; or The fair fame left to posteritie of that truly noble lady, the lady Venetia digby, late wife of sir Kenelme digby, Knight’ (Underwood lxxxiv) presents a fascinating nexus of ideas about familial virtues and their sources, made the more telling by the fact that the collection in which it appears was first published by digby, Jonson’s literary executor, after the poet’s death – exemplifying the virtuous circle of patronage in a way that would surely have pleased Jonson. despite being ostensibly in praise of the family’s matriarch, it is clear that the men of the family are its major actors. The section (part 8) of this sequence addressed to lady Venetia’s sons piously insists on virtue as the only cause of praise, but shores this up with the family name: Boast not these titles of your ancestors; (Brave youths) they’ are their possessions, none of yours: When your owne Vertues, equall’d have their names, ’twill be but faire, to leane upon their Fames; For they are strong supporters: But, till then, The greatest are but growing gentlemen. (lines 1–6)

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Jonson, of course, is confident they will live up to their names, and that family is a proper support for such individual virtue; he squares the circle here, ending this section ’tis Vertue alone, is true nobilitie. Which Vertue from your Father, ripe, will fall; study illustrious Him, and you have all. (lines 21–3)

again there is the confidence that virtue will, almost necessarily, come to the sons, falling down the generations naturally; the suggestion that it will come when the time is ripe naturalizes this process as part of the generative economy even as Jonson insists that he is a model to be studied. in all this, there is no room for the mother. succession of virtue may be crucial in such aristocratic families, but it is obviously less important than the securing of the royal succession; as charles i had no surviving brothers, his production of a son was of obvious importance to the nation as a whole. Jonson’s pious ‘to King charles and Queen Mary. For the losse of their first-borne. an epigram consolatorie. 1629’ (Underwood lxiii) is therefore one of his most important public performances: Who dares denie, that all first-fruits are due to god, denies the god-head to be true: Who doubts, those fruits god can with gaine restore, doth by his doubt, distrust his promise more. He can, he will, and with large int’rest pay, What (at his liking) he will take away. Then, royal charles, and Mary, do not grutch That the almighties will to you is such: But thanke his greatness, and his goodnesse too; and thinke all still the best, that he will doe. That thought shall make, he will this losse supply With a long, large, and blest posteritie! For god, whose essence is so infinite, cannot but heape that grace, he will requite.

The use of wit here is rather surprising, but it takes on an added resonance when we relate the poem to Jonson’s earlier lament ‘on My First son’ (see fuller discussion below); both poems deploy the idea of usury, of returning the child to a lender; and the idea that the first child is somehow owed to god resonates with that earlier poem, making us relate the public performance to the poet’s personal experience. Jonson here is sermonizing, taking the opportunity to use imperatives to the royal couple. The idea that the King and Queen will get a fuller, more fortunate posterity for having lost

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their first child is ludicrous, of course, as consolation often has to be, but it fits with the stoicism displayed at the end of ‘on My First son’ – to get a better posterity, one has to sacrifice or attenuate one’s personal feelings. in ‘an epigram to the Queene, then lying in’ (Underwood lxvi), Jonson takes on the role of the angel gabriel in addressing her ‘(without profanenesse) yet, a Poët’, ‘Haile Mary, full of honours’ (lines 4–5); he concludes the poem by calling her ‘spring / of so much safetie to the realme, and King’ (lines 13–14); she is to do an important public duty, becoming a genuine secular equivalent of the Virgin Mary. The significance of the word safety should not be lost: until the birth of Prince charles in 1630, the heir presumptive was charles i’s sister elizabeth, married to the elector Palatine, who was at the centre of european wars of religion from which england had kept largely aloof. should anything happen to the King, england would surely find itself in crisis. ‘on the Kings Birth-day’ (Underwood lxxxi) is therefore not simply uttering pieties in its praise of the ‘kingdom’s hopes so timely sowne’ (line 24).23 The royal couple’s private love, in which they ‘Joy in idæas of their owne’ (line 23), is a very public duty. such erotic deeds, then, are equivalent to heroic acts; whereas spenser had seen heroic virtue and chaste generativity as mutually reinforcing, Jonson puts them on an equal footing – each is an instance of the other, rather than an analogue or guarantor of the other. something similar can be seen in ‘to sir Henry nevil’ (Epigrams cix): Who now calls on thee, nevil, is a Muse, That serves nor fame, nor titles; but doth chuse Where vertue makes them both, and that’s in thee: Where all is faire, beside thy pedigree. (lines 1–4)

The pieties here resemble those in ‘eupheme’, with an added sense of the fair, beauteous praiseworthiness of such coincidence of qualities; this resembles shakespeare’s Sonnets, but without the element of desire. in his deeds, however, nevil is able to become strangely androgynous, as if good masculine deeds and the presence of a poet did away with the need for a woman to bear one’s posterity: goe on, and doubt not, what posteritie, now i have sung thee thus, shall judge of thee. Thy deedes, unto thy name, will prove new wombes, Whil’st others toyle for titles to their tombes. (lines 15–18)

as Jonson is here celebrating an indefatigable parliamentarian who never got the court appointments he might have deserved (after his complicity in the essex rebellion),24 the force of his ‘go on’ is considerable. nevil’s

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efforts (such as his attempt to negotiate between James i and Parliament in 1610) may be fruitless at the moment, but Jonson offers him the patronage and encouragement the King has denied him. Writing to a more successful courtier, lord Weston (son of the lord treasurer and earl of Portland),25 Jonson uses a set of generative imagery to bind king, nation and patron together (with the poet not an incidental part of the circle): in ‘to the right honourable Hierome, l. Weston. an ode gratulatorie, for his returne from His embassie’ (Underwood lxxiv), Jonson begins by expressing such pleasure as the teeming Earth doth take in easie Natures birth, When shee puts forth the life of ev’ry thing: and in a dew of sweetest raine, shee lies deliver’d, without paine, of the prime beautie of the yeare, the Spring. (lines 1–6)

Jonson naturalizes political success as easy childbirth (as compared, one might say, to the mess and difficulty of the real thing); this is possible ‘because the order of the whole is faire!’ (line 12). it is due – making use of a spenserian pun on ‘dew’, which the earlier poet used to indicate chaste generativity – and both aesthetically and ethically pleasing. Political deeds are the truest kind of fruit, and, as with cecil, they enable familial success. Here, however, there is none of the suspicion there was in the poem on Burghley; Weston is to marry the King’s cousin lady Frances stuart, as his due reward for endeavour (the such here picking up the much earlier such with which the poem began): such joyes, such sweet’s doth your Return Bring all your friends, (faire lord) that burne With love, to hear your modestie relate The bus’nesse of your blooming wit, With all the fruit shall follow it, Both to the honour of the King and State. o how will then our court be pleas’d, to see great Charles of travaile eas’d, When he beholds a graft of his owne hand, shoot up an Olive, fruitfull, faire, to be a shadow to his Heire, and both a strength, and Beautie to his land! (lines 19–30)

Preceding the ‘epithalamion’ on this marriage (Underwood lxxv), this poem is already a mini-epithalamion; Weston’s modesty parallels that of a bridegroom; fruit is anticipated; the combination of beauty and strength

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the traditional one of the union of the sexes. yet in all this imagery, the actual marriage and the actual woman are strictly incidental – generativity is here construed as a function of male homosocial relations: the King himself has got over his labour (‘travails’), and the future relationships that matter are between Weston, his (male) offspring and Prince charles. in the ‘epithalamion’ itself, there is a celebration of Marriage, the end of life, That holy strife, and the allowed warre: Through which not only we, but all our Species are. (lines 29–32)

But the King is very much at the poem’s centre, and the newly married couple hasten off for consummation not so much full of desire, but in order to propagate their names, and keepe their Fames alive, which else would die, For Fame keeps Vertue up, and it Posteritie. (lines 149–52)

if relations between the sexes are a war, there is a sense in which the virtue displayed and preserved there is the equivalent of martial virtue. Unlike in the poetry of Jonson’s predecessors, sexual love is not a privileged and private activity. Whatever relation sidney, spenser, shakespeare and donne made between love and the public world, there was always at least some aspect of love that was not public. it is in this sense that Jonson writes not of love. no more than love is poetry a private business for Jonson. Poetry that is apparently about love is frequently used to carve out a careful presentation of the poetic self. ‘against Jealousy’ (Underwood x) is an attack on feeling of the kind Jonson wants to do away with: Wretched and foolish Jealousie, How cam’st thou thus to enter me? i ne’re was of thy kind; nor have i yet the narrow mind to vent that poore desire, That others should not warme them at my fire; i wish the sun should shine on all men’s Fruit, and flowers, as well as mine. But under the disguise of love Thou sai’st, thou only cam’st to prove What my affections were.

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The first stanza seems mainly a denial of poetic jealousy/envy, and an insistence on benevolence, however limited by the curiously possessive apparent identification of ‘my fire’ with ‘the sun’. Jonson refuses to have his poetic talents proved by love (proof, as we have seen, being an important concept in Jonson’s sense of poetic strength). The apparent benevolence to other men’s ‘Fruit, and flowers’ – what, we may wonder, is the distinction? – is undercut by our implicit sense that they get these poetic products from love, whereas Jonson does not. The penultimate poem in Underwood, possibly placed there authorially, ‘[a Fragment of Petronius arbiter]’ (Underwood lxxxviii), once again directs us away from conventional attitudes to love; the poem presents a similar condition to that in shakespeare’s sonnet 129,26 but from more of a distance: doing, a filthy pleasure is, and short; and done, we straight repent us of the sport: let us not then rush blindly on unto it, like lustfull beasts, that onely know to doe it: For lust will languish, and that heat decay. But thus, thus, keeping endlesse Holy-day, let us together closely lie, and kisse, There is no labour, nor no shame in this; This hath pleas’d, doth please, and long will please; never can this decay, but is beginning ever.

This seems like sonnet 129 redeemed by the attitude of perpetual sex presented in donne’s ‘The good-Morrow’, the combination pointing towards Keats’s aesthetic conservation of unconsummated eroticism. The concept of ‘beginning ever’ seems particularly important to Jonson’s sense of what a healthy mode of eros might be. There is no reproductivity, in the conventional sense – no labour – here; the fact that the poem is a translation, and points to itself as something that ‘long will please’ suggests the greater permanence of poetry than reproductive sexuality, avoiding the ‘waste of shame’ to which shakespeare is so compulsively drawn, and sharing in some of the redemptive feeling found in ‘let the bird of loudest lay’ (see chapter 5, above). given his general attitudes, Jonson’s elegies (which are often taken to be so uncharacteristic that doubt has been thrown on their authorship)27 seem

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much more given to extravagant emotion than is usual, but in Underwood xxxviii, Jonson seems in the opening to be imitating donne’s extravagant manner as a kind of prologue for his own sentiments; by the end of 38 lines he seems to have dissipated this mood, along with its attendant eroticism, as a way of apologizing to a female patron. at this point he can present his new condition, in his own voice: i am regenerate now, become the child of your compassion; Parents should be mild: There is no Father that for one demerit, or two, or three, a sonne will dis-inherit. (lines 39–42)

The patron is reconfigured as a mother rather than a lover; then, startlingly, as a father. although this is done to imply that only a man could punish the poet, it does indicate that all eros has gone from the poem. Jonson returns to the feminine as a more nurturing concept, though still with androgynous pronouns, insisting that his reformation is dependent on continued favour, for which past favours act, almost compulsorily, as a precedent: could you demand the gifts you gave, againe? Why was’t? did e’re the cloudes aske back their raine? The sunne his heat, and light, the ayre his dew? or winds the spirit, by which the flower so grew? That were to wither all, and make a grave of that wise nature would a cradle have. Her order is to cherish, and preserve, consumptions nature to destroy, and sterve. But to exact againe what once is given, is natures meere obliquitie! as Heaven should aske the blood, and spirits he hath infus’d in man, because man hath the flesh abus’d. (lines 55–66)

The woman is turned into a divinity, and the patronage relation, including the sinfulness of the client, becomes part of the natural order. The poet’s childishness here recalls that of sidney and greville, but without the yearning they evince. The positive belief in the power of cradles differs from donne’s distrust of all the accoutrements of reproduction. The confidence in the patronage relation as a means to remove sinfulness contrasts strongly with shakespeare’s fear that it introduces other levels of sin. in the refusal of all the complications of eroticism, Jonson escapes from the traps which were so irresistible to the other poets discussed in this study. in ‘an elegy’ (Underwood xlii), Jonson frankly admits that he must feign love: ‘no Poets verses yet did ever move, / Whose readers did not

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thinke he was in love’ (lines 3–4). in fact, however, this complicated poem may be engaged in a number of double and treble bluffs. summers and Pebworth suggest that the love elegies (Underwood xxxviii, xl, and xli) all refer to (or hint at) secret love with a higher-status married lady,28 but it is xlii that most firmly suggests such a situation. Jonson here teases noblemen about their jealousy of wives and daughters, facing the problematic allegations that intimacy might provide; the poem partly denies these, whilst keeping some possibilities open. He insists on the poet’s rights to address beauty: Fathers, and Husbands, i doe claime a right in all that is call’d lovely: take my sight sooner then my affection from the faire. no face, no hand, proportion, line, or ayre of beautie; but the Muse hath interest in: There is not worne that lace, purle, knot or pin, But is the Poëts matter: and he must When he is furious, love, although not lust. But then content, your daughters and your Wives, (if they be faire and worth it) have their lives Made longer by our praises. (lines 11–21)

Thus far he makes a conventional enough defence of his position; it is quietly defiant, negotiating a truce in the manner of a poet’s shop steward. it is also not without the winking suggestion that the poet has a kind of droit de seigneur (but only perhaps over the naming of loveliness). The claim to increase the lives of the women has a knowing element alongside its quasi-medical claim. What comes next, though, seems more peculiar: or, if not, Wish, you had fowle ones, and deformed got; curst in their cradles, or there chang’d by elves, so to be sure you do injoy your selves. (lines 21–4)

The implication is that the husbands and fathers of beautiful women must share them – only ugly women can be kept for men’s solitary enjoyment. it is, to say the least, a peculiar thought, hardly tending to reassurance. if we relate the poem to ‘against Jealousy’ (see above), it makes more sense: men must be generous, must share – perhaps not even precluding erotic sharing; these are only women, after all. Jonson may disdain a poet who, at the sight of a lace ‘straight-way spent a sonnet’ (line 67), but that brings in the idea of poetry as a kind of erotic spending. as in ‘against Jealousy’, Jonson disclaims any sense of envy, specifically here for those who fetishize women’s clothes:

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i envy none of their pleasures! nor will aske thee, why Thou art jealous of thy Wifes, or daughters case: More then of eithers manners, wit, or face! (lines 85–8)

This paralepsis suggests a considerable disdain for the husband/father, who is identified with the fetishist overvaluing of the woman’s case – the pun here on genitals/situation/clothing – which makes sexuality equivalent with material objects of no value. in insisting that he himself values ‘manners, wit, or face’, Jonson makes himself superior to any sexual jealousy, without entirely denying the causes of it. The overall implication is that men, and the poetic/patronage relation, should be above all of that. Male friendship is of course central to Jonson’s poetics, persistently prioritized over romantic love. like donne, he sees the exchange of letters between men as the truest way to join individuals to each other: donne’s verse epistle ‘to sir Henry Wotton’ begins ‘sir, more then kisses, letters mingle soules; / For, thus friends absent speak’ (lines 1–2); in ‘an epistle to a Friend’ (Underwood xxxvii) Jonson similarly refers to ‘letters, that mix spirits’ (line 12). Partly these sentiments reflect the Humanist doctrine of friendship as one soul in bodies twain;29 but in both cases there is also an implication of friendship as a surer form of joining than love. in an early poem ‘to Mr B. B.’ donne makes rare mention of the idea of marriage to the Muse, willing his friend (possibly Beaupré Bell) to be fruitful in his works, whilst claiming that he himself lacks such generative powers: if thou unto thy Muse be marryed, embrace her ever, ever multiply, Be far from me that strange adulterie to tempt thee and procure her widowhed. My Muse, (for i had one,) because i’ am cold, divorc’d herself: the cause being in me, That i can take no new in Bigamye, not my will only but power doth withhold. Hence comes it, that these rymes which never had Mother, want matter, and they only have a little forme, the which their Father gave; They are prophane, imperfect, oh, too bad to be counted children of Poetry except confirm’d and Bishoped by thee. (lines 15–28)

lacking a feminine matter/mother for his poems, he needs masculine friendship to make up the defect. This tends towards the principle of motherless poetic generation between men that is adumbrated in shakespeare’s Sonnets, and in ‘a letter Written by sir H. g. and J. d. alternibus vicibus’;

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in that poem donne and sir Henry goodyer write alternate triplets which unite the friends and the women to whom the poem is written. Meakin observes that donne’s generation took seriously an idea derived from Plato that masculine creativity required the absence of women,30 and it is certainly clear from donne’s friendship poems that he could welcome generativity into the sphere of male friendship as he could not in his poetry of heterosexual love. in ‘to Mr rowland Woodward’ (‘like one’), donne presents his Muse as experiencing ‘a chaste fallownesse’ (line 3); in ‘to Mr Thomas Woodward’, he is ‘Pregnant again’ with hope and fear of receiving a letter (line 1); in ‘to Mr rowland Woodward’ (‘Zealously’), his Muse is ‘barren’ in his friend’s absence. in Thomas Woodward’s poem to donne (printed in robbins’s edition), the idea of poetic generation between friends is taken a considerable erotic distance: Have mercy on me and my sinfull Muse, Which, rubbed and tickled with thine, could not choose But spend some of her pith, and yield to be one in that chaste and mystic tribadry. Bassa’s adultery no fruit did leave; nor theirs which their swoll’n thighs did nimbly weave, and with new arms and mouths embrace and kiss, Though they had issue, was not like to this. Thy Muse (oh strange and holy lechery!), Being a maid still, got this song on me. (lines 11–20)31

The idea of the song itself as the issue of a chaste sexuality is undermined by the lesbian eroticism, adultery and lechery to which it is compared. once women are relegated to the role of Muse, they can serve to amuse men’s sense of their own poetic generativity without provoking any anxiety. donne, less daringly than Woodward admittedly, uses similar ideas in a poem to lord derby: see, sir, how as the suns hot Masculine flame Begets strange creatures on niles durty slime, in me, your fatherly yet lusty ryme (For, these songs are their fruits) have wrought the same. (lines 1–4)32

donne is only happy to combine the fatherly yet lusty once he has abstracted femininity into a disgusting or contemptible natural object – the nile basin (compare spenser’s use of the nile in presenting error’s malign fruitfulness; see chapter 4, above). Perhaps donne’s fullest and maturest portrait of poems as children comes in a poem to Jonson, however. His latin commendatory verses

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to Volpone insist on the maturity of Jonson’s production, thus ruling out childish passions even as he invokes the idea of poetic generation: Nam cartis pueritia est neganda, Nascantúrque senes, oportet, illi Libri, queis dare vis perennitatem. Priscis, ingenium facit, labórque Te parem; hos superes, ut et futuros, Ex nostrâ vitiositate sumas, Quâ priscos superamus, et futuros. (lines 10–16) For writings can’t be childish: they are born old, fittingly enough, in that their strength gives you eternal life. your labour and your wit equal you to the ancients. go on to outdo them, and drive out our vices, in which we outdo the ancients and the people of the future. (My translation)

donne’s sense of friendly poetic generation then, so enthusiastically welcomed in the amicable verse letters of his youth, turns in his maturity to a force for preservation rather than the creation of new things. Where Jonson advances from donne’s use of friendly intermasculine generation is in his figuration of friends as sons, explicitly confounding the paternal relation with the friendly and thus allowing an element of authority in friendship whilst binding friends most firmly together. as we have seen, there are elements of the paternalistic in shakespeare’s friendship in the Sonnets, but never as explicitly as in Jonson. This idea comes across most strongly in ‘epigram. to a Friend, and sonne’ (Underwood lxix): sonne, and my friend, i had not call’d you so to mee; or beene the same to you; if show, Profit, or chance had made us: But i know What, by that name, wee each to other owe, Freedome, and truth; with love from those begot: Wise-crafts, on which the flatterer ventures not. His is more safe commoditie, or none: nor dares he come in the comparison. But as the wretched Painter, who so ill Painted a dog, that now his subtler skill Was, t’have a Boy stand with a club, and fright all live dogs from the lane, and his shops sight, till he had sold his Piece, drawne so unlike: so doth the flatt’rer, with faire cunning strike at a Friends freedom, proves all circling meanes to keepe him off; and how-so-e’re he gleanes some of his formes, he lets him not come neere

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Poetry and Paternity in Renaissance England Where he would fixe, for the distinctions feare. For as at distance, few have facultie to judge; so all men coming neere can spie, Though now of flattery, as of picture, are More subtle workes, and finer pieces farre, Then knew the former ages: yet to life, all is but web, and painting; be the strife never so great to get them: and the ends, rather to boast rich hangings, then rare friends.

The tone of this great poem is hard to judge; even for Jonson’s conception of the epigram form it is very long; but it does seem the essential characteristic of Jonsonian epigram that only one thought be expressed: genuine friendship is not showy, is the whole burden. Where, though, does the element of paternity come in? it does seem rather to be forgotten after the poem’s title and first lines, yet closer inspection shows us that the concept is woven throughout the poem:33 the initial insistence that profit, chance and show are not relevant to this friendship implies that the relationship between them is natural; the miniature allegory of line 5, in which the marriage of freedom and truth begets love, gives friendship a naturalized origin and pedigree; the idea that flattery merely takes up the forms of friendship suggests that friendship is substantial; flattery is painting, but friendship is nature and life. The overall effect is to make what we might normally regard as a socially negotiated relationship the most natural one – perhaps more certain than paternity. it is founded on the will, in that Jonson calls the friend/son to him; whereas, we might infer, more natural relations of paternity, due to the supposed unreliability of women, tend to thwart the masculine will. in this, it anticipates Freud’s idea about the masculine ‘renunciation of instinct’ (see chapter 1, above). The poem’s tonal restraint reflects a rational, masculine will, which Jonson suggests ought to be the tone of the most natural relationships; the poem’s emotional reticence also makes more sense when we compare it to that of ‘on My First son’ (see discussion below); care must be taken not to express too much liking in paternal relations; not only does such restraint avoid flattery, but it is the highest compliment to such relationships’ freedom and trust not to allow the jealousies and abjection of romantic love into their moods. Jonson’s greatest poem of male friendship, ‘to the immortal memorie and friendship of that noble paire, sir lucius cary, and sir H. Morison’ (Underwood lxx), follows immediately after the ‘Friend and sonne’ epigram, and develops its themes in a more enthusiastic manner. The lament for Morison’s untimely death is accompanied by an insistence on his

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perfection and on that of the friendship: ‘though his age imperfect might appeare, / His life was of Humanitie the spheare’ (lines 51–2). Being perfect, in Bacon’s sense (see chapter 6, above), suggests not having any children; friendship is the only relation that does not compromise the perfectly spherical self. life does not depend, as it does for shakespeare, on transmitting that life to another generation: it is not growing like a tree in bulke, doth make man better be; or standing long an oake, three hundred yeare, to fall a logge, at last, dry, bald, and seare: a lillie of a day, is fairer farre, in May, although it fall, and die that night; it was the Plant, and flowre of light. in small proportions, we just beautie see; and in short measures, life may perfect bee. (lines 65–74)

These magnificent, Wordsworthian lines contain the straightforward sentiment that a short life is as perfect as a long one,34 or more so, but the simile of the tree brings up the idea of generation (in family trees); the purity of the lily is both androgynous and sexless; living for day and dying at night, it is most fully congruent with the processes of nature; it has no urgent need to be more than that. such autotelic perfection can only exist in friendly relations. The poem ends with generative imagery, but in terms which suggest completion rather than a need to continue: Friendship, in deed, was written, not in words: and with the heart, not pen, of two so early men, Whose lines her rowles were, and records, Who, e’re the first downe bloomed on the chin, Had sow’d these fruits, and got the harvest in. (lines 123–8)

The fruits here are deeds rather than children (Morison never married), but may also point to other fruits of the friendship, given that cary was to marry Morison’s sister lettice (against his own father’s wishes) the year after his friend’s death. Jonson’s poem may in some ways be a justification of this marriage, but it is not mentioned. There may be an allusion to Astrophel and Stella 21, where sidney writes, since mad March great promise made of me, if now the May of my yeares much decline, What can be hoped my harvest time will be? (lines 9–11)

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Jonson’s mentions of May and of harvests are turned to different purposes. evans argues that ‘Jonson speaks of cary and Morison’s friendship in the past tense, subtly reminding his audience (especially cary) that with Morison’s death, the presence of their friendship’s example can manifest itself only in Jonson’s ode’;35 but it can also be manifested in children and in further deeds. The three senses of fruit – poetic, generative and active – are fully allied in this conclusion, even though the woman is erased from the poem. lorna Hutson connects Jonson’s development of the ‘plain style’ to a change in the nature of homosocial relations, repressing any homoerotic components to the realm of the unsaid; Jonson is thus a ‘transitional figure’ in the history of the intrusion of homophobia into male friendship (her particular discussion is of Every Man in his Humour).36 on this reading, Jonson refuses lyricism in friendship because he is paranoid about homoerotic components of classical friendship. it is notable, however, that he is just as unlyrical about the women he praises as he is about the men; as Huebert points out, ‘Jonson’s resistance to characterizing the feminine ideal by alluding to beauties of body or face borders on the spectacular’.37 All sexual desire is removed, not just the unlicensed. Friendship with women is more problematic and divided, as the diptych of poems ‘an elegie’ and ‘a satyricall shrub’ (Underwood xix and xx) indicate; the former raises and tries to quench the potential embarrassment of such a relation: ‘you blush, but doe not: friends are either none, / (Though they may number bodyes) or but one’ (lines 13–14). The problem is that, if a woman is unified with her husband, how can she also be at one with a friend? as with the poems discussed above, adulterous suggestions are not far away, but here they are still franker: slip no occasion; as time stands not still, i know no beautie, nor no youth that will. to use the present, then, is not abuse, you have a Husband is the just excuse of all that can be done him; such a one as would make shift, to make himselfe alone, That which we can, who both in you, his Wife, His issue, and all circumstance of life, as in his place, because he would not varie, is constant to be extraordinarie. (lines 19–28)

The husband is to be left to masturbate – to remake himself as best he can alone; this is a very different kind of self-sufficiency from that more normally advocated by Jonson. The husband’s constancy is taken as a kind of

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perverse desire to avoid societal norms and as such a justification of the wife’s adultery. so far the poem’s apparent meaning goes, but of course the whole idea is ironic, to the effect that: ‘Why won’t you sleep with me? Because your husband is faithful, loyal, and even has children he can call his own? Well, that’s just perverse – in any case, such a constant man is self-sufficient and doesn’t need a wife for reproduction.’ such irony may be the most effective way of defusing husbandly jealousy. in doing so, however, it is the husband rather than the wife who is really complimented, her virtue being dependent on his self-sufficiency. The next poem clearly indicates the sense that a woman’s friendship ‘ne’re was knowne to last above a fit!’ (line 6); it is male constancy that is ultimately valued. a harmonious relation between the sexes is arrived at, but in a manner very different from that sought by sidney and spenser – it comes through a complete subordination of the female. This relates to the critical Jonsonian notion of the ‘gathered self’, which Helgerson sees as a mark of Jonson’s deliberate, laureate seriousness.38 The notion relates also to the idea of a centred self.39 it is also wholly masculine. such a self, in the end, must be against reproduction – or must at least subordinate it. The phrase is to be found in ‘to sir Thomas roe’ (Epigrams xcviii), and the poem as a whole is worth examining: Thou hast begun well, roe, which stand well too, and i know nothing more thou hast to doo. He that is round within himselfe, and streight, need seeke no other strength, no other height; Fortune upon him breakes her selfe, if ill, and what would hurt his vertue makes it still. That thou at once, then, nobly maist defend With thine own course the judgement of thy friend, Be alwayes to thy gather’d self the same: and studie conscience, more than thou would’st fame. Though both be good, the latter yet is worst, and ever is ill got without the first.

We might relate the first line to the idea of always beginning in ‘a Fragment of Petronius arbiter’ (see above). This leads into the paradox of circularity and straightness, which may hint at the impossibility of really achieving such perfection, until the mutuality of friendship is introduced as a guarantee. Where shakespeare makes friendship and the issue of selfidentity mutually complicating, Jonson makes them mutually reinforcing. The word got in the final line has the primary meaning of obtaining, but also suggests begetting: fame is what one begets, conscience what is

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inherent. Begetting of any kind, then – poetic, generative or active – must be guaranteed by self-sufficiency, which is mutually supportive of virtuous friendship. in ‘an epistle answering to one that asked to be sealed of the tribe of Ben’ (Underwood xlvii) Jonson concludes that, despite the dangers of the world, with mine owne fraile Pitcher, what to doe i have decreed; keepe it from waves, and presse; lest it be justled, crack’d, made nought, or lesse: live to that point i will, for which i am man, and dwell as in my center, as i can, still looking to, and ever loving heaven; With reverence using all the gifts thence given. (lines 56–62)

There is a barely buried sexual discourse here: a broken pitcher was a traditional symbol of inchastity; for him to lose this is to become naught – slang for the female genitalia; he insists on living up to his manly point – the term refers to the supposed mathematical unity of maleness, but also has obvious phallic suggestions. to live in that masculine centre is to avoid all giving oneself away, and it is notable that Jonson does not use the Humanist rhetoric of soul-exchange in friendship, perhaps having seen how shakespeare’s Sonnets complicated the notion. Jonson’s image of friendship is more rational and trust-based: First give me faith, who know My selfe a little. i will take you so, as you have writ your selfe. now stand, and then, sir, you are sealed of the tribe of Ben. (lines 75–8)

This is frank, open, and avoids all mystification. The performative language here insists upon the possibility of trust-based bonds, as being superior to biological or spiritual connections – if we will it to be so. This act of the will is less of a leap of faith than in The Faerie Queene or ‘let the bird of loudest lay’; the elizabethan poets’ ability to risk themselves by giving themselves to others – beloved women, friends as other selves, or potential offspring – is severely compromised by Jonson’s insistence on the necessity for such a ‘gathered self’. restraining the feminine side of himself was as important to Jonson as it is to lear when he urges o how this mother swells up toward my heart! Hysterica passio, down, thou climbing sorrow, Thy element’s below. (King Lear, ii. iv. 56–8)

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in ‘My answer’ to ‘a Poême sent me by sir William Burlase’ (Underwood lii), he admits his own corpulence in terms which suggest that such physical spreading is feminine: ’tis true, as my wombe swells, so my backe stoupes, and the whole lumpe growes round, deform’d, and droupes, But yet the tun of Heidelberg had houpes. (lines 4–6)

Womb certainly could just mean stomach, but the idea of his drooping, when added to this, does strongly imply an emasculation that needs to be resisted with the restraining hoops; this is a very different kind of hermaphroditism from that ultimately welcomed by donne (see chapter 6, above). Jonson goes on: you were not tied, by any Painters law to square my circle, i confesse; but draw My superficies: that was all you saw. (lines 7–9)

The poem’s wit, directed at the painter’s unflattering image of the poet, seems to imply that poetry can square circles, by the exercise of good-will, a truer faith than can be found in painting. This is ultimately effected by one of Jonson’s favourite ideas – that by the act of mere naming, verse can produce self-sufficient praise. This differs radically from shakespeare’s much more problematic articulations of self-identity, and his failure to name his patron/friend (see chapter 5, above): you are he can paint; i can but write: a Poet hath no more but black and white, ne knowes he flatt’ring colours, or false light. yet when of friendship i would draw the face, a letter’d mind, and a large heart would place to all posteritie; i will write Burlase. (lines 19–24)

of course, such mere namings seem to be straining at meaning, producing as much of a sense of verse’s limitations as of its strengths; but the point is not in the namings themselves, but in the way they are arrived at. ‘to William, earl of Pembroke’ (Epigrams cii), a poem written for the man who was possibly the young man of shakespeare’s Sonnets, begins with naming: i do but name thee Pembroke, and i find it is an Epigramme, on all man-kind; against the bad, but of, and to the good: Both which are ask’d, to have thee understood. (lines 1–4)

it is possible that Jonson, aware that Pembroke was shakespeare’s subject, is deliberately naming where his friend and rival had not. Where

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shakespeare’s tortured love had undermined any notion of self-sufficiency, Jonson builds it up, insisting that Pembroke’s ‘noblêsse keeps one stature still’ (line 13). What Jonson insists upon is the strenuous intellectual work required for individuals (patrons, friends, poets) to be just (in all senses) themselves. in some ways, this parallels the hard-won process by which characters in The Faerie Queene acquire their identities (though one thinks of guyon more than of Britomart or calidore). Jonson’s verse, then, claims to be a recorder of self-sufficiency much more powerful than the frail and feminine flesh. in ‘an epitaph’ (Underwood xxxv – on elizabeth chute), he fully takes on this role: What Beautie would have lovely stilde, What manners prettie, nature milde, What wonder perfect, all were fil’d Vpon record, in this blest child. and, till the comming of the soule to fetch the flesh, we keepe the rowle.

Feminine beauty may have wanted to manifest loveliness, but instead it has to be contained in verse. The we here is suggestive: it chiefly refers to the whole of humanity, who must remember the lost child; but it may also be a reflexive reference to the lines of the verse themselves, which are so much more reliable than the flesh. These lines are to be engraved (as they are in a plate on the girl’s grave in sonning Parish church, Berkshire), their brass preservation (with all those Ws and Vs pointing downward) contrasting poignantly with flesh’s soft frailty. ‘on My First daughter’ (Epigrams xxii) articulates these ideas more personally: Here lyes to each her parents ruth, Mary, the daughter of their youth: yet, all heavens gifts, being heavens due, it makes the father, lesse, to rue. at sixe moneths end, shee parted hence With safetie of her innocence; Whose soule heavens Queen, (whose name shee beares) in comfort of her mothers teares, Hath plac’d amongst her virgin-traine: Where, while that sever’d doth remaine, This grave partakes the fleshly birth. Which cover lightly, gentle earth.

The poem’s key ambiguity is in its fourth line, where we might read ‘it makes the father rue less’ or, more subtly, ‘it diminishes the father if he

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rues’. grief for children is, one can infer, a diminution; correspondingly, the pity here is entirely feminine.40 This reflects a logic of association between the feminine, the flesh and the earth (with the male being linked to heaven and spirit): the pity is for flesh that is ‘parted’ from its spirit and which the earth ‘partakes’ (taking its part, taking only a part of her); whilst one should be happy at one’s daughter’s preserved innocence taking her to heaven, the severance of flesh from spirit, child from parent, is hard to bear. christian tradition may dictate a disparagement of the body, but Jonson intimates that such partiality should only be relative: like the earth which ends the poem, the body is ‘gentle’ in every sense of the word. similar issues, but with more of an insistently masculine turn, can be seen in Jonson’s most enduringly popular poem, ‘on My First sonne’ (Epigrams xlv), a fascinating exercise in self-erasure even as it seems to be the most personal of his works: Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy; My sinne was too much hope of thee, lov’d boy, seven yeeres tho’ wert lent to me, and i thee pay, exacted by thy fate, on the just day. o, could i loose all father, now. For why Will man lament the state he should envie? to have so soone scap’d worlds, and fleshes rage, and, if no other miserie, yet age? rest in soft peace, and, ask’d, say here doth lye Ben. Jonson his best piece of poetrie. For whose sake, hence-forth, all his vowes be such, as what he loves may never like too much.

The poem’s first five lines are emphatically self-oriented, harping on my, me and I, but as soon as the wish to lose all father is expressed, the poem turns impersonal, moving to man, Ben Jonson and he; this is a fine example of Jonson’s most characteristic poetic device – making his language reflexive and performative, instantiating the sentiment he is expressing. The poem does this in a number of other ways: the escape from flesh is enacted by the movement from direct consideration of the mortal son to the presentation of the son as a poem; line 9 may pun on lie to give the lie to the consolation the poet is straining for; the boy is to rest in soft peace, and in this poetic piece; line 11’s vows are not exactly made – the verb be suggests an optative desire or strain to make such vows; and besides anything else, the poem may well be regarded as Jonson’s best (as of course it seems to say it is). to lose oneself as a father and become pure poet – father only to poems – is to give up love, or at least the ends of love.

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Jonson signals here that from henceforward his self will be attenuated, but this may enable him to be a more objective poet, one outside the generative economy of life. There is considerable irony in the idea that hope is a sin – it is after all one of st Paul’s three spiritual virtues. H. W. Matalene argues that the ‘hope’ which Ben Jonson calls a ‘sinne’ in line two is in large part the hope that he will father a line of gentlefolk and confirm the new status to which his poetry has raised the Jonson name . . . [a confession that] the poet has probably called down the boy’s death as god’s punishment for his own familial ambition.41

Publishing the poem in 1616, Jonson surely makes it reflect not only on his first son Ben, who died in 1603, but also on another son, also called Ben, who died in 1611; it is even possible that he had another son, yet another Ben, though possibly illegitimate, who was born in 1610 and whose fate is not known. This failure of his hopes to make copies of himself orients him to the relative security of poetry, though we do not know what happened to his son Joseph (b. 1599), or whether he had other children.42 david riggs connects the death of Ben (2), ‘the last of his legitimate offspring’, in 1611 with Jonson’s tutorship of ralegh’s son Wat, and argues that ‘The death of Ben gave Jonson an additional motive for entering into the lives of his patrons’ families and making their children his children: this had now become the outlet for his strong paternal instincts.’ 43 in naming his sons Benjamin and Joseph, Jonson was also imitating the biblical Jacob, but only using the names of the favourites; might it also imply an affection for his wife comparable to Jacob’s for rachel? certainly, real emotional investment is suggested. The spelling of line 5, wishing that he could ‘loose’ all father, gives a rich ambiguity to the poem: he may wish to lose his fatherly feelings, or to let them loose in a number of ways – it is not enough to suggest that this latter meaning involves the desire to abandon his restraint, as many critics suggest;44 it also involves a desire to loose himself from particular bonds. as Pigman observes, Jonson’s wife is totally ignored here;45 the poet must detach himself – perhaps by moving in with a patron. erotic feeling, mediated through women, must be repressed if the poet’s true self, still loving but not actively so, is to be asserted. a rather similar attitude to sons can be seen in Fletcher and Massinger’s Sir John van Olden Barnavelt (1619), when leidenberch, steeling himself to suicide, has to send away the beloved son whose presence compromises his courage: How nature rises now, and turnes me woman? When most i should be man? sweet hart farwell,

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Farwell for ever: when we get us children We then doe give our freedoms up to Fortune, and loose that native courage we are borne to; to dye were nothing: simply to leave the light, no more then going to our beds, and sleeping: But to leave all these dearnesses behind us, These figures of our selves, that we call blessings is that which troubles: can man beget a thing That shalbe deerer then himself unto him? (iii. vi. 24–34)

This fine, shakespearean passage distils many of the contradictions we have seen involved in paternity, but perhaps the most powerful notion is that affection for a child unmans one: the position that ought most to assure one’s identity as a man makes one less manly because of the feminine emotions it creates. a poem with some similarities to Jonson’s is that of sir John Beaumont (1583–1627, elder brother of the dramatist Francis), ‘of My deare sonne, gervase Beamont’: can i, who have for others oft compil’d The songs of death, forget my sweetest child, Which like a flow’r crush’d with a blast, is dead, and ere full time hangs downe his smiling head, expecting with cleare hope to liue anew, among the angels fed with heau’nly dew? We have this signe of ioy, that many dayes, While on the earth his struggling spirit stayes, The name of Iesus in his mouth containes, His onely food, his sleepe, his ease from paines. o may that sound be rooted in my mind, of which in him such strong effect i find. dear lord, receiue my son, whose winning loue to me was like a friendship, farre aboue The course of nature, or his tender age, Whose looks could all my bitter griefes asswage; let his pure soule ordain’d seu’n yeeres to be in that fraile body, which was part of me, remaine my pledge in heau’n, as sent to shew, How to this Port at eu’ry step i goe.46

The poem appears in a posthumous volume, containing a heroic account of the Battle of Bosworth, and many other elegies, a fact which explains the first line’s reference to writing songs of death for others; this service done to others seems to license the expression of a private grief which is nonetheless turned to religious account through the contortions of awkward syntax,

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shifts of tense and strained turns of thought. The son’s pure expression of christ’s name was a consolation to the son himself and therefore to the poet, but the poem uses the present tense to strain this into present consolation even though its source is lost; the son’s spirit is in heaven, having left the body which was ‘part of’ the poet (the boy’s soul, it is implied, was not), and that flimsy connection is (or ought to be) enough to act as a pledge and even proof of the poet’s movement to heaven. such a connection must be above ‘the course of nature’; it must be a soul-connection like that of friendship if it is to work; only in this way can it give force to the optative/ performative wish/pledge to head straight for heaven. as with Jonson, feeling must be converted in order to make the final promise effective. even more than in Jonson’s poems, we can see the strain involved in this work. Here, too, the poem itself seems little consolation. The untitled lyric Underwood lxxx is a powerful statement of Jonsonian erotic beliefs, even though it is probably by sidney godolphin, who is in some ways a ‘son of Ben’:47 Fair Friend, ’tis true, your beauties move My heart to a respect: too little to bee paid with love, too great for your neglect. i neither love, nor yet am free, For though the flame i find Be not intense in the degree, ’tis of the purest kind. it little wants of love, but paine, your beautie takes my sense, and lest you should that price disdaine, My thoughts, too, feele the influence. ’tis not a passions first accesse readie to multiply, But like loves calmest state it is Possest with victorie. it is like love to truth reduc’d, all the false values gone, Which were created, and induc’d By fond imagination. ’tis either Fancie, or ’tis Fate, to love you more then i; i love you at your beauties rate, lesse were an injurie.

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like unstamp’d gold, i weigh each grace, so that you may collect Th’ intrinsique value of your face, safely from my respect. and this respect would merit love, Were not so faire a sight Payment enough; for, who dare move reward for his delight?

This perfectly static love, like that in the pseudo-Petronius translation, is simple and autotelic. it will not multiply in lust or procreation. it denies the arbitrary and shifting values added by imagination. such values were most powerfully articulated in sir Walter ralegh’s Ocean to Scinthia, whose anguished and abject movements of feeling were prompted by the overdetermined figure of Queen elizabeth. if donne had made one crucial step away from elizabethan erotic complexity by affirming the selfsufficiency of married love, making one little room an everywhere, Jonson makes the next step, creating a self-sufficient loving self which does not need the mediating figure of a woman to relate the public and private spheres. Jonson’s static love does not desire its object; it is surely significant that he translates pseudo-Petronius’s coitu as ‘doing’ – it is not just sex, but all doing that is a short and filthy pleasure. Jonson’s restrained but highly personal mode is based on moving from eroticism and the anxieties of literary and literal fatherhood to a stance that is something like godfatherhood, entitling him to name his social world. The poet takes on a new role, which is less fundamentally or passionately invested, but whose position is secure. Jonson’s own canonical position reflects this: his importance is undeniable, but for centuries of readers and for most later poets he has never quite been received with the affection reserved for his predecessors. refusing to be a father, except in the purely verbal sense, makes him too disinterested; in thoroughly professionalizing authorship, he removed a crucial element of risk-taking investment from poetry. He also moved women from the central position they had occupied in elizabethan verse. treating the relations between the sexes as a matter of secondary importance offered a solution of sorts to the problems sidney, spenser and others had wrestled with, but it also leads to the loss of emotion that shakespeare feared.

Coda: Sons

Jonson’s less involved mode of poetic fatherhood solved the immense difficulties encountered by his predecessors. The poets who wrote wholly under Queen elizabeth – sidney and spenser – were working towards an ideal of masculine maturation that could come to an accommodation with women, but never quite dispelled the anxieties and uncertainties inherent in the idea of biological generation. shakespeare and donne, bridging the elizabethan and Jacobean eras, adopted new models of poetic self-development which still bear traces of sidney’s and spenser’s sense of paternal uncertainty. only Jonson, as James i’s semi-official laureate, could find a relatively secure position for poetry, adopting the authority of fatherhood without its anxieties. He was therefore able to become a poetic father to a tribe of ‘sons’, who bore his ‘seal’ without worrying too much about the biological aspects of father–son relations. Though the earlier poets remained powerfully influential in the seventeenth century, they were not conceived of as fathers because the idea of fatherhood in their works was so troubling. despite the proliferation of poetic sons that Jonson had (including Brome, carew, suckling and Herrick), a preoccupation with generativity is not particularly prominent in the next generation of poets. Poets like suckling and cowley may seem to stress an opposition to generation by writing poems ‘against Fruition’, but what they are really claiming to avoid here is sexual enjoyment, using ‘fruition’ in donne’s sense of the word. even the ‘spenserians’ drayton and Phineas Fletcher (as we have seen) do not emphasize the generative aspect of their ‘poetic father’s’ work. Jonson’s efforts to still paternal anxieties had their effect. later seventeenth-century poets also take a cooler, less involved view, even when they are as much influenced by spenser, shakespeare and donne as by Jonson himself. The victory of Jonson’s mode of resolved and self-contained patriarchal masculinity removed one of the most fascinating elements of poetry that had preoccupied his predecessors: the exploratory, provisional, risk-taking 226

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idea of the poet as almost biologically invested in his work. yet some aspects of the these anxieties persisted in the poets of the mid-century, particularly as the national crisis of 1640–60 radically challenged patriarchy. The most shakespearean poet of the period, Marvell, is fascinated by images of selfsufficiency rather than by generation – his ‘Unfortunate lover’, for example, being born by ‘caesarean section’ (line 16).1 However, two of the other most important poets of the mid-century, Herrick and Milton, though from very different political and religious perspectives, revive some of the elizabethan preoccupation with the risks of paternity. it is with them we will conclude, rather than with dryden’s later doomed nostalgia for secure paternalism;2 as they offer solutions rather different from Jonson’s to the earlier poets’ desires to make paternity a model for poetic wholeness. Milton’s relatively early ‘ad Patrem’ is a slightly tongue-in-cheek apology for poetry which nonetheless is loaded with dutifully filial feeling: he offers his father the poem (‘utunque tibi gratum’ – ‘whether you approve or not’, line 6),3 because he has nothing else to offer, it is the only way to pay debts to a father who has educated him; he also insists that he and his father are fundamentally similar: nunc tibi quid mirum, si me genuisse poetam contigerit, charo si tam prope sanguine iuncti cognatas artes, studiumque affine sequamur: ipse volens Phoebus se dispertire duobus, altera dona mihi, dedit altera dona parenti, dividuumque deum genitorque puerque tenemus. (lines 61–6) no wonder, then, that you should have the good luck to beget me, a poet, or that we who are so closely related by ties of affection and blood should cultivate sister arts and have kindred interests. Phoebus, wishing to share himself between the two of us, gave one lot of gifts to me and the other to my father, with the result that father and son have each one half of a god.

The self-congratulatory tone is accentuated by the insistent homosocial binding of father and son (all those joining ques), and the sense of them as halves does away with the need for women (the femininity of the ‘sister arts’ is not as strong in the original latin). Milton promises both to memorialize (in the verse) and to remember (in his mind – line 114) his father. The poem operates simultaneously as payment, apology and promise, giving a clear and settled sense of secure paternity. Herrick’s similar payment of verse to his father is more insecure: what Hamlet’s claudius calls the ‘common theme’ is not all that common, and Herrick’s ‘to the reverend shade of his religious Father’ may be the earliest example of a poem written in english reflecting on the death of a

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father.4 it appears to have been written in 1627, and its circumstances are unusual, in that Herrick’s father probably committed suicide when the poet was less than two years old: That for seven Lusters i did never come to doe the Rites to thy religious tombe: That neither haire was cut, or true teares shed By me, o’r thee, (as justments to the dead) Forgive, forgive me; since i did not know Whether thy bones had here their rest, or no. But now ’tis known; behold, i bring Unto thy ghost, th’ effused offering: and look, what smallage, night-shade, cypresse, yew, Unto the shades have been, or now are due, Here i devote; and something more then so; i come to pay a debt of Birth i owe. Thou gav’st me life, (but Mortall;) For that one Favour, ile make full satisfaction; For my life mortall, rise from out thy Herse, and take a life immortall from my Verse.5

This enigmatic lyric captures an extraordinary range of feeling. to some extent it imitates catullus ci, a poem written on the death of the roman poet’s brother. its performative force is remarkable, relying on the peculiarities of Herrick’s relation to the father he never knew. The elder Herrick was buried in an unmarked grave, giving no opportunity for true grief; but the poet now claims the knowledge of his grave’s position – this is surely not strictly true: ‘now ’tis known’ must mean ‘now, in my verse i can give you a grave, declaring it to the world’. calling his father ‘religious’ acts as a denial of his father’s sin of self-murder. The poem’s dark charm relies on what it denies. Much of the poem’s emotional complexity is based on its sense that poetry can be redemptive: it transforms the unknown grave into poetic knowledge; it pays debts; it gives life where that life has been, for the poet, entirely lacking. The debt of birth is qualified by the arresting phrase ‘but Mortall’, whose syntactic disconnection allows it to be as much attributed to the dead father as to the poet-son: all too obviously mortal himself, the father can only give mortal life to the poet. in gouge’s terms, this qualification is needed so that the father may not be allocated responsibility for the immortal soul of the son, but it also suggests, given Herrick’s belief in the immortality of poetry, that the father cannot be responsible for the poetry itself. The debt is overpaid with poetry; the son can claim more than the father.6 The uncertain location of the father’s grave may reflect a sense of the uncertainty of paternity, but despite his uncertain sense of his own origins,

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Herrick’s erotic attitudes are generally blither than Milton’s. Herrick’s verse is full of healthy, cheerful sexuality, but as he insists at the end of Hesperides, ‘his Life was chast’; he never married, and his celebrations of sex are kept carefully at arm’s length. This may be taken as an aspect of his role as a parish priest, licensing sexuality to the point of ventriloquizing it, but without involving himself in its anxieties as his poetic predecessors did. in ‘The tythe. to the Bride’ he takes a slightly risqué position of hinting at and refusing parsonical droit de seigneur: if nine times you your Bride-groome kisse; The tenth you know the Parsons is. Pay then your tythe; and doing thus, Prove in your Bride-bed numerous. if children you have ten, sir John [this is just a typical name for a parson] Won’t for his tenth part ask you one.

even as he denies a claim on the bride’s children, he moots such a claim as possible; in some sense he is the guarantor of the parish’s fertility, a role that Jonson saw as fitting for the poet. in ‘to his tomb-maker’ Herrick reflects on his own infertility, but only as a modesty formula which allows his verse to be a higher form of procreation: chaste i liv’d, without a wife, That’s the story of my life. strewings need none, every flower is in this word, Batchelour. (lines 3–6)

Floral preservation, like that of shakespeare’s adonis, is acceptable; the poet-parson has a radical self-sufficiency. yet regret for childlessness can be seen in delicately ironic form in the unpublished ‘Mr Hericke his daughter’s dowrye’, where he leaves his poetic virtues to an imaginary ‘female child’ (line 3) who will, with their help, be ‘a tree of life’ to her husband (line 108). Herrick’s longing for continuity, guaranteed by poetry but underpinned by biology, is perhaps as strong as spenser’s. in his lyric verse, Herrick is a frank fetishist, famously more interested in women’s clothes than bodies; in ‘art above nature, to Julia’, he confesses that ‘mine eye and heart / dotes less on nature then on art’ (lines 17–18). The visual is enough for him: in ‘Upon her eyes’ finds a model of pure contemplation, rather akin to donne’s, in which generation is brought up only to be ruled out: cleere are her eyes, like purest skies. discovering from thence a Babie there

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rather than being a model of continuity, the image of the child is a centre, rarefied away from the biological to the intellectual. His poetry is his progeny, most clearly presented in ‘Upon his Verses’: What off-spring other men have got, The how, where, when, i question not. These are the children i have left; adopted some; none got by theft. But all are toucht (like lawfull plate) and no verse illegitimate.

Playing with the idea of plagiarism, Herrick’s blithe tone about that matter fails to conceal a small regret about childlessness (less protestingly, however, than Philip larkin’s ‘dockery and son’). a poet, at least, does not have to worry about other men’s children being imposed on him – if he borrows them, he can make them his own. Herrick’s own childlessness seems to give him the licence to speak of others’ generativity. in his epigrams, this comes across as one of the main jokes of rustic life: Jolly and Jillie, bite and scratch all day, But yet get chilren (as the neighbours say.) The reason is, though all the day they fight, They cling and close, some minutes of the night. (‘Upon Jolly and Jilly, epig.’) Dundridge his issue hath; but is not styl’d For all his issue, Father of one child. (‘Upon Dundridge’)

no grand anxieties can be imagined here – the atmosphere resembles the cheerful attitudes to paternity found in city comedy such as Webster and rowley’s Cure for a Cuckold. in aristocratic families, however, a sense of urgency and importance is brought in: ‘to the right gratious Prince, Lodwick, duke of Richmond and Lenox’ insists on the need for the one surviving brother to continue the family line: of all those three-brave-brothers, faln i’ th’ Warre, (not without glory) noble sir, you are, despite of all concussions left the stem to shoot forth generations like to them. (lines 1–4)

The duke has responsibilities to family, nation and the idea of glory that transcend individuality, particularly in the time of national crisis, in which preserving the nation through paternity can be as heroic as

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fighting. Herrick’s ambivalent celebrations of the royalist cause, woven together with more rustic and amatory poems, create a sense of a nation in dire need of preservation; if it cannot be saved politically, perhaps it can be saved poetically. in ‘to the lady Crew, upon the death of her child’, Herrick offers the small consolation of poetic/floral preservation, which might refer to the nation as a whole as much as to the child: your child lyes still, yet is not dead: But rather like a flower hid here to spring againe another yeare. (lines 6–8)

This delicate sentiment seems aware of its own insufficiency, but is necessary. Herrick’s fragmentary flowers sum up the range of human needs, but without making grand claims for redemption. By contrast, Milton connects the whole human species in writing of our first forefather; this aspect of adam is particularly emphasized when Michael presents him with visions of future history, making him proleptically mourn his offspring (Paradise Lost, xi. 761–2);7 at the same time he is ‘fatherly displeased’ at viewing all of humanity’s failings (xii. 63) – although it is nimrod who is particularly disapproved, we are all splendidly made to feel the paternal rebuke; as david norbrook points out, it is particularly witty to invoke fatherly feelings here given the conventional connection between paternalism and absolutism.8 Milton’s subject is the ‘fruit’ of all human action (i. 1), and this fruit has both its positive and negative senses: on the one hand the result of eating the fruit is the whole tragic pattern of human history; on the other, it is man’s ultimate salvation. Both sides are conceived in terms of familial dynamics: satan’s incestuous relations with sin produces death; god’s perfect relation to his son produces redemption. The sexual relation involving the female is destructive, the verbal, purely masculine relation is salvific, but they are both to be redeemed in the end. Milton may celebrate prelapsarian sexuality, ‘the rites / Mysterious of connubial love’ (iv. 742–3) as the ‘true source / of human offspring’ (lines 751–2), but eve does not seem to conceive before the Fall – the sex is as ungenerative as anything donne could hope for. instead, the conception that night comes from satan’s infection of eve’s fancy, making her ‘Blown up with high conceits engendering pride’ (line 809). This is a development of satan’s original sin; satan is the poetic tradition’s most extreme example of what sidney called ‘self-conceit’: he rebels against the proclamation of god’s son, which afflicts his pride, ‘deep malice thence conceiving’ (v. 666) in raphael’s account. given that raphael’s version, turned to assist human understanding, tells us nothing of the birth of sin

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as described in Book ii, this moment seems a likely equivalent for that conception. in his argument with abdiel, satan goes on to insist that We know no time when we were not as now; Know none before us, self-begot, self-raised By our own quickening power, when fatal course Had circled his full orb, the birth mature of this our native heaven, ethereal sons. (v. 859–63)

This denial of god’s paternal creation is the most radical confirmation of satan’s irredeemability: his specious claim of self-conception is based on the logical fallacy that he was unable to know of his own creation by god, yet his own paternal creativity is decidedly uncertain. When he encounters sin and death, he asks What thing thou art, thus double-formed, and why in this infernal vale first met thou call’st Me father, and that phantasm call’st my son? i know thee not, nor ever saw till now sight more detestable than him and thee. (ii. 741–5)

echoing Henry V’s denial of the false father Falstaff (‘i know thee not, old man’ – Henry IV, v. v. 47), satan’s hostility and inability to identify his daughter and incestuously produced son demonstrate that all secondary or double paternity is uncertain compared to the unified and harmonious paternal relation between god and his son. sin’s femininity suggests that satan is more mother than father to her: he gave birth to her, and became ‘enamoured’ with her because she was his ‘perfect image’ (lines 764–5). like error in The Faerie Queene she is the poem’s first image of negative, distorting motherhood that needs to be redeemed, yet Milton’s image of the Holy spirit at the poem’s opening has anticipated sin, and has already redeemed maternal creativity: chiefly thou o spirit, that dost prefer Before all temples the upright heart and pure, instruct me, for thou know’st; thou from the first Wast present, and with mighty wings outspread dove-like sat’st brooding on the vast abyss and mad’st it pregnant: what in me is dark illumine, what is low raise and support. (i. 17–23)

This hermaphroditic figure of primal generativity enables Milton to insist that his poetic voice is not self-raised like satan. Though the deception of ‘The mother of mankind’ is emphasized (line 36), both maternity and paternity are to be finally harmonized in Milton’s epics. at the very end

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of his poetic career Milton’s redemptive narrative takes a final turn to the human, acknowledging the need for biological parenthood: having defeated satan, christ at the end of Paradise Regained ‘Home to his mother’s house private returned’ (iv. 639). Women, so distrusted in earlier verse, so difficult to rehabilitate, have finally been given a worthy role; ironically, it is the Virgin Mary, partly replaced in the popular imagination by Queen elizabeth, who is allowed this role. Milton’s otiose use of ‘home’ as well as ‘house’ reminds us of the womb through which christ became human. The mother cannot ultimately be denied.

Notes

1 pr e s u m p t i v e fat h e r s 1. references to Ben Jonson, Works, ed. c. H. Herford and Percy simpson, 11 vols. (oxford: clarendon Press, 1925–52). 2. see Matt ridley, The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature (london: Viking, 1993). 3. For a fine recent discussion of the application of evolutionary ideas to renaissance literature, see Marcus nordlund, Shakespeare and the Nature of Love: Literature, Culture, Evolution (evanston, il: northwestern University Press, 2007). 4. Moses and Monotheism, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols. (london: Hogarth Press and the institute of Psycho-analysis, 1953–74), xxiii: 117–18. 5. For the classic account of this, see Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. i: The Will to Knowledge, trans. robert Hurley (london: Penguin, 1998), pp. 135–59. 6. see alan Macfarlane, The Origins of English Individualism: The Family, Property and Social Transition (oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978); stephen greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (chicago: University of chicago Press, 1980). 7. anthony Fletcher, Gender, Sex and Subordination in England 1500–1800 (new Haven, ct: yale University Press, 1995), p. 59. i use the term ‘renaissance’ rather than the more fashionable ‘early modern’ as i am sceptical about the latter term’s whiggish implications; the former term would not only be more comprehensible to the people of the time, but is more commonly understood by the student and general reader of the present. 8. Sir Walter Raleighs Instructions to his Sonne, and to Posterity (london, 1632), p. 27. 9. Broadly speaking, the major poets discussed here take the following attitudes to women: sidney likes them in theory, but feels oppressed by their power over him; spenser has a clear idea of the value of good womanhood, and needs to excise negative versions – he is the closest thing to a feminist among these poets, as Virginia Woolf recognized (Brenda silver, Virginia Woolf ’s Reading Notebooks (Princeton, nJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), pp. 213–14); shakespeare dislikes them in theory, but is compelled by them in 234

Notes to Pages 3–9

10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25. 26.

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practice, recognizing that they are necessary, and that their emotional style is valuable; donne likes them very much in practice, but wants to subordinate them; Jonson comes closest to outright dismissal of them. This pretty much runs the gamut of renaissance – and perhaps modern – sexism. a really visceral hatred of women – which the term ‘misogyny’ implies – is missing, as is a real and passionate interest in women on their own terms. some (but by no means all) of Middleton’s plays exhibit the former attitude; some of shakespeare’s the latter. references to The Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon, gen. ed. Fredson Bowers, 10 vols. (cambridge: cambridge University Press, 1966–96). For a fine survey of this imagery, see elizabeth sacks, Shakespeare’s Images of Pregnancy (new york: st Martin’s Press, 1980). Katharine eisaman Maus, Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance (chicago: University of chicago Press, 1995), pp. 185–6. Ibid., p. 190. elizabeth d. Harvey, Ventriloquized Voices: Feminist Theory and English Renaissance Texts (london: routledge, 1992), chapter 3. tom MacFaul, Male Friendship in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (cambridge: cambridge University Press, 2007). see eve Kosofsky sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (new york: columbia University Press, 1985). For a detailed discussion, see louis a. Montrose, The Subject of Elizabeth: Authority, Gender, and Representation (chicago: University of chicago Press, 2006). see susan dwyer amussen, An Ordered Society: Gender and Class in Early Modern England (oxford: Blackwell, 1988), p. 2. see lawrence stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800, abridged edition (london: Pelican, 1979), chapter 4. Foucault, The Will to Knowledge, p. 101. Mary Beth rose, The Expense of Spirit: Love and Sexuality in English Renaissance Drama (ithaca, ny: cornell University Press, 1988), p. 4. Ibid., p. 10; see arthur Marotti, ‘“love is not love”: elizabethan sonnet sequences and the social order’, ELH 49 (1982): 396–428. references to The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. William a. ringler (oxford: clarendon Press, 1962). see Thomas laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (cambridge, Ma: Harvard University Press, 1990), and linda Pollock, ‘“teach Her to live under obedience”: The Making of Women in the Upper ranks of early Modern england’, Continuity and Change 4 (1989): 231–58. references to Francis Beaumont, The Knight of the Burning Pestle, ed. sheldon P. Zimmer (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984). references to edward sharpham, Cupid’s Whirligig, ed. allardyce nicoll (Waltham saint lawrence, Berkshire: golden cockerel Press, 1926).

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27. sir Philip sidney, The Old Arcadia, ed. Katherine duncan-Jones (oxford: oxford University Press, 1985), p. 3. 28. references to edmund spenser, The Shorter Poems, ed. richard a. Mccabe (london: Penguin, 1999). 29. i am grateful to richard Mccabe for this point. 30. see J. W. saunders, The Profession of English Letters (london: routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964). 31. as Harry Berger observes, ‘Print completes the textualizing process already entrained by the bookishness of manuscript culture. The typographic revolution is at once the consequence, the catalyst, and the symbol of the general rift between the order of the body and the order of texts that characterizes early modern culture’, thus adding to the ‘structural irony available in highlighting the gap between representational intention and technique’: Situated Utterances: Texts, Bodies, and Cultural Representations (new york: Fordham University Press, 2005), pp. 127–8. 32. Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (london: Macmillan, 1995), p. 16. 33. http:///dictionary.oed.com; conceive, vb. it is awkward that the first definition has to include the word itself; yet this perhaps reflects the mystery of the word, which seems able to float back and forth between transitive and intransitive usages more freely than most verbs, as it clearly also does in the second sense. 34. The Miscellaneous Prose of Philip Sidney, ed. Katherine duncan-Jones and Jan van dorsten (oxford: clarendon Press, 1973), p. 79. 35. references to edmund spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. a. c. Hamilton, text ed. Hiroshi yamashita and toshiyuki suzuki (Harlow: longman, 2001). 36. references to The Riverside Shakespeare, gen. ed. g. Blakemore evans assisted by J. J. M. tobin (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997). 37. ‘eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which god hath prepared for them that love him’. 38. references to Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedie with The First Part of Jeronimo, ed. emma smith (london: Penguin, 1998). 39. John day, Law Tricks (oxford: Malone society reprints, 1949). 40. references to lady Mary Wroth, The First Part of the Countess of Montgomery’s Urania, ed. Josephine a. roberts (Binghamton, ny: Medieval and renaissance texts and studies, 1995), pp. 288–9. 41. see laura gowing, ‘ordering the Body: illegitimacy and Female authority in seventeenth-century england’, in Michael J. Braddick and John Walter (eds.), Negotiating Power in Early Modern Society: Order, Hierarchy and Subordination in Britain and Ireland (cambridge: cambridge University Press, 2001): 43–62. 42. references to The Poems of Sir John Davies, ed. robert Krueger (oxford: clarendon Press, 1975). 43. references to ‘The Poems of edward deVere, seventeenth earl of oxford and of robert devereux, second earl of essex’, ed. steven W. May, SP 77 (1980): 5–132.

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44. references to William shakespeare, The Complete Sonnets and Poems, ed. colin Burrow (oxford: oxford University Press, 2002). 45. see ian Maclean, The Renaissance Notion of Woman: A Study in the Fortunes of Scholasticism and Medical Science in European Intellectual Life (cambridge: cambridge University Press, 1980). 46. david cressy, Birth, Marriage and Death: Ritual, Religion and the LifeCycle in Tudor and Stuart England (oxford: oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 30–1. 47. Fletcher, Gender, Sex and Subordination, p. 402. 48. see eve Keller, Generating Bodies and Gendered Selves: The Rhetoric of Reproduction in Early Modern England (seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007), pp. 9–10. 49. Ibid., pp. 67–70. 50. Ibid., p. 48. 51. as elizabeth Foyster has argued, ‘Men were all too aware that their honour depended on the actions and words of their wives’: Manhood in Early Modern England: Honour, Sex and Marriage (london: longman, 1999), p. 2. 52. richard dawkins, The Selfish Gene (oxford: oxford University Press, 1976); see also susan Blackmore, The Meme Machine (oxford: oxford University Press, 1999). 53. references to John Marston, The Malcontent and Other Plays, ed. Keith sturgess (oxford: oxford University Press, 1997). 54. This is a fascinating example of sexual behaviour having to be public for it to be acknowledged: diogenes laertius, along with the biblical onan (probably in any case a practiser of coitus interruptus), are the only famous textual examples of masturbation; they are therefore (to our minds rather hypocritically) treated as freakishly isolated individual cases. For the emergence of masturbation into discourse, see Thomas laqueur, Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation (new york: Zone Books, 2003). 55. The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. J. spedding, r. l. ellis and d. d. Heath, 7 vols. (london: longman, 1857–74), vi, ii: 390. 56. Ben Jonson, Conversations with Drummond in Works, i: 132. 57. Montaigne’s Essays: John Florio’s Translation, ed. J. i. M. stewart, 2 vols. (london: nonesuch Press, 1931), i: 456. 58. see Keith Thomas, The Ends of Life: Roads to Fulfilment in Early Modern England (oxford: oxford University Press, 2009), p. 88. 59. alexandra shepard, Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England (oxford: oxford University Press, 2003), p. 1. 60. Ibid., p. 250. 61. reference to george gascoigne, A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres, ed. george W. Pigman iii (oxford: clarendon Press, 2000). 62. see Martin goodman, Rome and Jerusalem: The Clash of Ancient Civilizations (london: allen lane, 2007), pp. 216–17. 63. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (new york: oxford University Press, 1973).

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Notes to Pages 26–39

64. Heather dubrow, Shakespeare and Domestic Loss: Forms of Deprivation, Mourning and Recuperation (cambridge: cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 172. 65. Michael Witmore, Pretty Creatures: Children and Fiction in the English Renaissance (ithaca, ny: cornell University Press, 2007), pp. 5–7. 66. The Complete Works in Verse and Prose of Samuel Daniel, ed. alexander B. grosart, 4 vols. (london: privately printed, 1885–96). 67. Milton even expresses surprise that adam, not being born of woman, can weep (Paradise Lost, x. 495–6). 68. The Life and Complete Works in Prose and Verse of Robert Greene, ed. alexander B. grosart, 15 vols. (london: privately printed, 1881–6). 69. The Poems of Sir Walter Ralegh, ed. agnes M. c. latham (london: routledge & Kegan Paul, 1951). 70. ODNB under sir Walter ralegh; see also stephen coote, A Play of Passion: The Life of Sir Walter Ralegh (london: Macmillan, 1993), and anna Beer, Bess: The Life of Lady Ralegh, Wife to Sir Walter (london: constable, 2004). 71. catherine Bates, Masculinity, Gender and Identity in the English Renaissance Lyric (cambridge: cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 147. 72. see ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton, nJ: Princeton University Press, 1957), and Marie axton, The Queen’s Two Bodies: Drama and the Elizabethan Succession (london: royal Historical society, 1977). 73. Marotti, ‘“love is not love”’, who does recognize that genuine feelings can be stirred in courtly amorous discourse. 74. latham thinks the poem may well be 1603, though drummond identified it as 1618 (the year of ralegh’s execution); we cannot be sure, but i’m inclined to put it relatively early in the Jacobean period, at least before Henry’s death in 1612. see latham’s notes to the poem. 2 u nc e r t a i n pat e r n i t y: t h e i n di f f e r e n t i de ol o g y of pat r i a rc h y 1. see amussen, An Ordered Society, p. 66. 2. see Jonathan goldberg, Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities (stanford, ca: stanford University Press, 1992). 3. see laura gowing, Domestic Dangers: Women, Words, and Sex in Early Modern London (oxford: clarendon Press, 1996), p. 194. 4. see Foyster, Manhood, p. 67. 5. cressy, Birth, Marriage and Death, p. 46. 6. For fuller details, see Joseph needham, A History of Embryology, 2nd edn (cambridge: cambridge University Press, 1959). 7. on ‘quickening’, see angus Mclaren, Reproductive Rituals: The Perception of Fertility in England from the Sixteenth Century to the Nineteenth Century (london: Methuen, 1984). 8. sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia and The Garden of Cyrus, ed. r. H. a. robbins (oxford: clarendon Press, 1972), p. 39. The fact that

Notes to Pages 39–46

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

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Browne needed to produce such absurd ‘evidence’ for his position demonstrates the kind of mental contortion that was involved here. King James Vi and i, Political Writings, ed. Johann P. sommerville (cambridge: cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 35. stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage, p. 111. see amussen, An Ordered Society, pp. 104, 109–11, and cressy, Birth, Marriage and Death. see Patrick collinson, The Reformation (london: Weidenfeld & nicolson, 2003). For example, stephen greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton, nJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). Michael neill, Issues of Death: Mortality and Identity in English Renaissance Tragedy (oxford: clarendon Press, 1997), pp. 243–61. see the excellent analysis in Katharine r. Firth, The Apocalyptic Tradition in Reformation Britain: 1530–1645 (oxford: oxford University Press, 1979). For medieval views and their impact, see norman cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages (london: secker & Warburg, 1957); for later millenarianism, see christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (london: temple smith, 1972). richard a. Mccabe, The Pillars of Eternity: Time and Providence in The Faerie Queene (dublin: irish academic Press, 1989), p. 28. Firth, The Apocalyptic Tradition, p. 195. see catherine Belsey, Shakespeare and the Loss of Eden (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), pp. 23, 75–7. The phrase is also used by William gouge, and it originates in st Paul (1 corinthians 7:3), being interpreted as sexual activity in marriage by both these Puritan authors. (st Paul is commenting on the idea that ‘it is good for a man not to touch a woman’; he responds: ‘nevertheless, to avoid fornication, let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband. / let the husband render unto the wife due benevolence: and likewise also the wife unto her husband’.) stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage; Keith Wrightson, English Society 1580–1680 (london: routledge, 1982); Macfarlane, Origins of English Individualism. alan Macfarlane, Marriage and Love in England, 1300–1840 (oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), pp. 40–1. Helen Berry and elizabeth Foyster, ‘childless Men in early Modern england’, in Helen Berry and elizabeth Foyster (eds.), The Family in Early Modern England (cambridge: cambridge University Press, 2007): 158–83. Francis Bacon, ‘in Felicem Memoriam elizabethae angliae reginae’, in Works, vi: 296. For example, Heywood, 2 If You Know Not Me (i. 278), Middleton, The Puritan Widow (i. i. 48–9, 136–8), and Your Five Gallants (iv. vii. 246–7); see The Dramatic Works of Thomas Heywood, 6 vols. (london: Pearson, 1874)

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26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

Notes to Pages 46–55 and Thomas Middleton, The Collected Works, ed. gary taylor and John lavagnino (oxford: oxford University Press, 2007). references to richard corbett, Poems, ed. J. a. W. Bennett and H. r. trevor-roper (oxford: clarendon Press, 1955). references to The Collected Works of Robert Armin (new york: Johnson reprint corporation, 1972). Wrightson, English Society, pp. 114–15. stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage, p. 122. Ibid., p. 112. see amussen, An Ordered Society, pp. 77, 90. For a particularly good discussion of this issue, see Katherine duncan-Jones, Ungentle Shakespeare: Scenes from his Life (london: arden shakespeare, 2001), chapter 4; it is worth noting that shakespeare had to pursue the grant of arms on his father’s behalf because his father had previously set such a suit in motion. Macfarlane, Marriage and Love, passim, and particularly p. 227: ‘sex was necessary to constitute a marriage, but children were not.’ shepard, Meanings of Manhood, pp. 72–4, 209–10. see david glimp, Increase and Multiply: Governing Cultural Reproduction in Early Modern England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). richard a. Mccabe, Incest, Drama and Nature’s Law 1550–1700 (cambridge: cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 210. see Foyster, Manhood, pp. 122–4. stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage, p. 84. see Macfarlane, Marriage and Love, p. 268. on the other hand, James i was happy to sign off letters to his lover-favourite the duke of Buckingham by calling himself ‘your dear dad and husband’: see stephen orgel, Impersonations: The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare’s England (cambridge: cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 41. Thomas, The Ends of Life, p. 152. stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage, pp. 95–6. Thomas nashe, Pierce Pennilesse, in Works, ed. ronald B. McKerrow, corr. F. P. Wilson, 5 vols. (oxford, 1958), ii: 176. i plan to discuss these issues further in my work on fathers in the drama. see J. W. Williamson, The Myth of the Conqueror: Prince Henry Stuart, A Study of Seventeenth Century Personation (new york: aMs Press, 1978). see curtis Perry, Literature and Favoritism in Early Modern England (cambridge, cambridge University Press, 2006). Hugh cunningham, Children and Childhood in Western Society since 1500 (london: longman, 1995), p. 44. see david cunnington, ‘letters and counsel’, d.Phil. thesis, University of oxford, 1999. see alan stewart, The Cradle King: A Life of James VI and I (london: chatto & Windus, 2003). James Vi and i, Political Writings, pp. 2–3.

Notes to Pages 55–66

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51. Ibid., p. 23. 52. For example, leah s. Marcus, The Politics of Mirth: Jonson, Herrick, Milton, Marvell, and the Defense of Old Holiday Pastimes (chicago: University of chicago Press, 1986), p. 10. 53. James Vi and i, Political Writings, p. 39. 54. Ibid., p. 42. 55. Ibid., p. 43. 56. see caroline Bicks, ‘Midwiving Virility in early Modern england’, in naomi J. Miller and naomi yavneh (eds.), Maternal Measures: Figuring Caregiving in the Early Modern Period (aldershot: ashgate, 2000): 49–64. 57. see Foyster, Manhood, pp. 91–2. 58. as laurie Maguire comments: ‘it is perhaps no coincidence that this play uses so many metaphors taken from printing. is the new technology of printing the only form of reproduction in which Jacobean males can have confidence?’: Where There’s a Will There’s a Way: Or, All I Really Need to Know I Learned from Shakespeare (london: nicholas Brealey, 2007), p. 127. 59. references to Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy, ed. Philip edwards (london: Methuen, 1959). 60. references to christopher Marlowe, Edward the Second, ed. charles r. Forker (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994). 61. The Works of Michael Drayton, ed. J. William Hebel, 5 vols. (oxford: shakespeare Head, 1931–41). 3 t h e c h i l di s h l o v e of p h i l i p s i dn e y and fulk e gr ev ille 1. see gavin alexander, Writing After Sidney: The Literary Response to Sir Philip Sidney 1586–1640 (oxford: oxford University Press, 2006). 2. see alan stewart, Philip Sidney: A Double Life (london: chatto & Windus, 2000). 3. see Katherine duncan-Jones, Sir Philip Sidney: Courtier Poet (london: Hamish Hamilton, 1991); John Buxton, Sir Philip Sidney and the English Renaissance (london: Macmillan, 1954). 4. Blair Worden, The Sound of Virtue: Philip Sidney’s arcadia and Elizabethan Politics (new Haven, ct: yale University Press, 1996). 5. sidney, Old Arcadia, p. 356. 6. For a fuller account of this, see david norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance, rev. edn (oxford: oxford University Press, 2002), p. 90, and tom MacFaul, ‘Friendship in sidney’s Arcadias’, SEL 49 (2009): 17–33. 7. Helen Hackett, Virgin Mother, Maiden Queen: Elizabeth I and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (london: Macmillan, 1995), pp. 240–1 and passim. 8. Annals, excerpted in elizabeth i, Collected Works ed. leah s. Marcus, Janel Mueller and Mary Beth rose (chicago: University of chicago Press, 2000), p. 59. 9. The Old Arcadia, p. 292.

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Notes to Pages 67–76

10. sigmund Freud, Three Essays on Sexuality, in Standard Edition, vii: 222; Civilization and Its Discontents, in Standard Edition, xxi: 66–7. 11. Theresa M. Krier, Birth Passages: Maternity and Nostalgia, Antiquity to Shakespeare (ithaca, ny: cornell University Press, 2001), pp. 4, 13. 12. Freud, Standard Edition, xviii: 21. 13. Jacques lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, trans. alan sheridan (london: routledge, 1989), pp. 174, 220. 14. catherine Bates, ‘astrophil and the Manic Wit of the abject Male’, SEL 41 (2001): 1–24 at p. 7. 15. derek B. alwes, Sons and Authors in Elizabethan England (newark: University of delaware Press, 2004), pp. 150–4. 16. louis a. Montrose, ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the shaping Fantasies of elizabethan culture: gender, Power, Form’, in Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan and nancy J. Vickers (eds.), Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe (chicago: University of chicago Press, 1986): 65–87 at p. 66. 17. references to Henry goldwel, A Briefe Declaration of the Shews, Deuices, Speeches, and Inventions, Done & Performed before the Queens Maiestie, & the French Ambassadours, at the Most Valiaunt and Worthye Triumph, Attempted and Executed on the Munday and Tuesday in Whitsen Weeke Last (london, 1581). 18. Witmore, Pretty Creatures, chapter 2. 19. see P. J. croft, Autograph Poetry in the English Language: Facsimiles of Original Manuscripts from the Fourteenth to the Twentieth Century, 2 vols. (london: cassell, 1973) i: 14–15. 20. references to The Poems of Lady Mary Wroth, ed. Josephine a. roberts (Baton rouge: louisiana state University Press, 1983). 21. grosart’s text is slightly wrong here, so i have adjusted it accordingly. 22. see elizabeth Mazzola, Favorite Sons: The Politics and Poetics of the Sidney Family (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), p. 15. 23. Queen elizabeth i, Collected Works, p. 72. The word i have quoted in square brackets is used in an alternative Ms, a reading the editors note but reject. 24. Old Arcadia, pp. 227–8. 25. glimp, Increase and Multiply, pp. 57–8. 26. Mazzola, Favorite Sons, p. 8. 27. Old Arcadia, p. 149. 28. Because, in part, he is ‘not certain that ewes do in fact single out particular lambs for especial affection’ – Thomas roche Jr, ‘Astrophil and Stella: a radical reading’, in dennis Kay (ed.), Sir Philip Sidney: An Anthology of Modern Criticism (oxford: clarendon Press, 1987): 185–226 at p. 217. 29. sidney, Miscellaneous Prose, p. 121. 30. Old Arcadia, p. 3. 31. Katherine duncan-Jones, ‘Philip sidney’s toys’, in Kay (ed.), Sir Philip Sidney: 61–80 at p. 61. 32. references to John donne, The Elegies and Songs and Sonnets, ed. Helen gardner (oxford: clarendon Press, 1965).

Notes to Pages 78–94

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33. references to Poems and Dramas of Fulke Greville, First Lord Brooke, ed. geoffrey Bullough, 2 vols. (edinburgh: oliver and Boyd, 1939). 34. Wallace Mccaffrey, Elizabeth I (london: edward arnold, 1993), p. 282. 35. For elizabeth’s milkmaid image, see elizabeth i, Collected Works, p. 170; for the forward Protestants’ views on the Queen, see Worden, The Sound of Virtue, pp. 77–8 and passim. 36. Old Arcadia, p. 100; he is also compared to a ‘poor child’ beaten by supposedly loving parents, p. 98. 37. Marotti, ‘“love is not love”’, pp. 402, 405. 38. alwes, Sons and Authors, p. 81; Marotti, ‘“love is not love”’. 39. elizabeth spiller argues that greville re-emphasizes this element in sidney, as a response to the self-presentation of James i; see elizabeth a. spiller, ‘The counsel of Fulke greville: transforming the Jacobean “nourish Father” through sidney’s “nursing Father”’, SP 97 (2000): 433–53. 40. see ronald a. rebholz, The Life of Fulke Greville, First Lord Brooke (oxford: clarendon Press, 1971). 41. Birth Passages, passim; see d. W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (Hove: Brunner-routledge, 1991). 42. Helen Vincent, ‘“syon lies Waste”: secularity, scepticism and religion in Caelica’, Sidney Journal 19 (2001): 63–84 at p. 76. 43. norbrook, Poetry and Politics, p. 147. 44. Raleighs Instructions to his Sonne, pp. 16–18. 45. Harvey, Ventriloquized Voices, p. 81; however, the prophylactic effect of prolonged breast-feeding was, as angus Mclaren points out, not always recognized – it may have been promoted principally in the interests of infantile health: Mclaren, Reproductive Rituals, p. 67. 46. as, for example, in the Phoenix Jewel now in the British Museum, or nicholas Hilliard’s Phoenix Portrait (c. 1575); for the significance of the phoenix, see Hackett, Virgin Mother, Maiden Queen, p. 81. 47. Marotti, ‘“love is not love”’. 48. elaine y. l. Ho, ‘Fulke greville’s Caelica and the calvinist self’, SEL 32 (1992): 35–57. 49. Ibid., p. 42. 50. The ‘new’ Arcadia, p. 297. references are to Philip sidney, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, ed. Maurice evans (london: Penguin, 1977). 51. For sidney’s negotiations to marry perhaps two different princesses, see stewart, Philip Sidney, pp. 185–7. 52. Quoted in stewart, Philip Sidney, p. 192. 53. William drummond of Hawthornden, The Poetical Works, ed. l. e. Kastner, 2 vols. (edinburgh: Blackwell, 1913), second Part, sonnet viii. 54. references to The Poems of George Chapman, ed. Phyllis Brooks Bartlett (new york: Modern language association of america, 1941). 55. For spenser’s religious position, calvinist if not ‘godly’ or proto-Puritan, see John n. King, Spenser’s Poetry and the Reformation Tradition (Princeton, nJ: Princeton University Press, 1990).

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Notes to Pages 94–108

56. spenser here is referring to The Shepheardes Calender, which he dedicated to sidney. 4 s pe ns e r’s t i m e ly f ru i t : g e n e r at ion i n t h e fa e r i e Qu e e n e 1. For the all-encompassing nature of lacan’s mathematical models of desire, see Malcom Bowie, Lacan (london: Fontana, 1991). 2. richard Mallette, Spenser and the Discourses of Reformation England (lincoln: University of nebraska Press, 1997), p. 86. 3. Mary Villeponteaux, ‘“not as Women Wonted Be”: spenser’s amazon Queen’, in Julia M. Walker (ed.), Dissing Elizabeth: Negative Representations of Gloriana (durham, nc: duke University Press, 1998): 209–25 at p. 221. 4. as spenser puts it, ‘grace’ wins us victories, for ‘if any strength we haue, it is to ill, / But all the good is gods, both power and eke will’ (i. x. 1. 7–9). 5. see amussen, An Ordered Society, p. 111. 6. Mentioned in Three Proper, Wittie and Familiar Letters, in The Works of Edmund Spenser: A Variorum Edition, ed. edwin greenlaw et al. 11 vols. (Baltimore, Md: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1932–57), x: 18. 7. lisa celovsky, ‘early Modern Masculinities and The Faerie Queene’, ELR 35 (2005): 210–47. 8. see ty Buckman, ‘“Just time expired”: succession anxieties and the Wandering suitor in spenser’s Faerie Queene’, Spenser Studies 18 (2003): 107–32. 9. Bacon, Works, vi: 398. 10. Mccabe, The Pillars of Eternity, p. 90. 11. see gillian Beer, The Romance (london: Methuen, 1970). 12. ‘no, Virgil, no: / not even the first of the romans can learn / His roman history in the future tense, / not even to serve your political turn; / Hindsight as foresight makes no sense.’ W. H. auden, Collected Poems, ed. edward Mendelson (london: Faber and Faber, 1976), p. 598. 13. The word ‘dally’ seems to mean ‘flirt’ or perhaps ‘sexually tease’: in george Whetstone’s Promos and Cassandra (london, 1578), the courtesan lamia is advised to ‘dally, but do not’ (div v) – that is, ‘toy with him, but don’t commit to sex’. 14. see John M. riddle, Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World to the Renaissance (cambridge, Ma: Harvard University Press, 1992). 15. see Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction, new edn (oxford: oxford University Press, 2000), p. 39. 16. luce irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. carolyn Burke and gillian gill (ithaca, ny: cornell University Press, 1993), p. 10. 17. The Life of Edward, First Lord Herbert of Cherbury: Written by Himself, ed. J. M. shuttleworth (london: oxford University Press, 1976), p. 13. 18. Correctio, or epanorthosis; Milton uses this more formally – in spenser it is a structural principle, rather than necessarily being used as a rhetorical device; i therefore use an english translation of the term. see Harry Berger,

Notes to Pages 108–117

19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

29.

30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

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Revisionary Play: Studies in the Spenserian Dynamics (Berkeley: University of california Press, 1988). lauren silberman, Transforming Desire: Erotic Knowledge in Books iii and iv of The Faerie Queene (Berkeley: University of california Press, 1995), p. 4. shohachi Fukuda, for example, in the valuable list of characters and incidents appended to The Faerie Queene, ed. Hamilton et al., asserts that cymoent is raped. syrithe Pugh, Spenser and Ovid (aldershot: ashgate, 2005), p. 132. see laqueur, Making Sex. Theresa M. Krier, Gazing on Secret Sights: Spenser, Classical Imitation and the Decorums of Vision (ithaca, ny: cornell University Press, 1990), p. 139 argues that spenser here suppresses ‘an ovidian appearance of the god in anthropomorphic form’. Paul J. alpers, The Poetry of The Faerie Queene (Princeton, nJ: Princeton University Press, 1967), p. 391. King, Spenser’s Poetry and the Reformation Tradition, p. 148. Thomas P. roche, Jr, The Kindly Flame: A Study of The Faerie Queene iii and iv (Princeton, nJ: Princeton University Press, 1964), p. 123. Mccabe, The Pillars of Eternity, p. 149. Uncharacteristically, a. c. Hamilton’s notes are silent at this point. The sodomitical implications of the garden of adonis are drawn out in Barnabe Barnes’s The Devil’s Charter (1606), where the Pope’s villainous seduction of the young Prince astor is couched in language strongly reminiscent of the garden, even down to the prince’s fear that he will become ‘a conceited amoret’ (line 1355). spenser may intend this as a more virtuous homoeroticism, but the danger of crossing the invisible line is clearly spelled out – time, perhaps, turns good eroticism bad. a. Kent Hieatt argues that spenser cannot intend a pun, pointing out that writers of the time do not refer to the vagina as a hole, but it is surely not unreasonable to suggest that spenser invents such a pun; cited in Hamilton’s note to this line. silberman, Transforming Desire, p. 5. see david lee Miller, The Poem’s Two Bodies: The Poetics of the 1590 Faerie Queene (Princeton, nJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), pp. 176–7. Jan Karel Kouwenhoven, Apparent Narrative as Thematic Metaphor: The Organization of The Faerie Queene (oxford: clarendon Press, 1983), p. 82. roche, The Kindly Flame, p. 47. see Jonathan goldberg, Endlesse Worke: Spenser and the Structures of Discourse (Baltimore, Md: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981). Mccabe, The Pillars of Eternity, p. 133. obviously i don’t mean to imply that even in around 1580 (when spenser began the poem) he expected her to marry; but the idea of her marrying the duc d’anjou – which spenser had opposed – was fresh at that time and a marriage for gloriana might have been as metaphorical as the courting of the Queen by younger courtiers. i think it possible that spenser started off

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37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

Notes to Pages 117–127 with the vague idea that the Queen might marry leicester and make his heir sidney her heir; a lot of things got in the way of such a romantic plan – leicester was married, and had a son in 1581, sidney then died in 1586, as did leicester in 1588. angus Fletcher, The Prophetic Moment: An Essay on Spenser (chicago: University of chicago Press, 1971), p. 268. spenser – probably – translated a poetic version of this passage in the final ‘sonet’ of A Theatre for Worldlings. Berger, Revisionary Play, p. 218n. The book also contains remarkable images of blockage – Maleffort being killed in the doorway of Briana’s house (vi. i. 23), the bear’s mouth being blocked with a stone (vi. iv. 21), and the Brigants’ corpses blocking their cave (vi. xi. 46). Michael o’connell, Mirror and Veil: The Historical Dimension of Spenser’s Faerie Queene (chapel Hill: University of north carolina Press, 1977), p. 173. see Mccabe, The Pillars of Eternity, p. 149 and passim. ‘Burnt norton’, in t. s. eliot, Collected Poems 1909–1962 (london: Faber and Faber, 1974), p. 180. Pugh, Spenser and Ovid, pp. 239–40. see M. r. Bowman, ‘“she There as Princess rained”: spenser’s Figure of elizabeth’, RQ 43 (1990): 509–28. see Joel Hurstfield, ‘The succession struggle in late elizabethan england’, in s. t. Bindoff et al. (eds.), Elizabethan Government and Society: Essays presented to Sir John Neale (london: athlone Press, 1961), pp. 369–96. The volume Amoretti and Epithalamion is the only one of spenser’s with no authorial dedication, which may signal its detachment from the public sphere. to borrow Helen Vendler’s term from The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (cambridge, Ma: Harvard University Press, 1997): it is, strictly, a ‘defective keyword’ as it does not appear in the couplet. silberman notes this pun in The Faerie Queene but does not link it to the usage in Epithalamion (Transforming Desire, p. 140). as he described them in a letter of 17 april 1615. edmund gosse, The Life and Letters of John Donne, 2 vols. (london: Heinemann, 1899), ii: 75. The ultimate source is revelation 21:2, via a French poem by Jean van der noot, who has made st John’s fruits, designed for the healing of nations, into a fruit profiting the church. see Patrick cheney, Spenser’s Famous Flight: A Renaissance Idea of a Literary Career (toronto: University of toronto Press, 1993); richard rambuss, Spenser’s Secret Career (cambridge: cambridge University Press, 1993). references to The Poetical Works of Giles and Phineas Fletcher, ed. F. s. Boas, 2 vols. (cambridge: cambridge University Press, 1908–9). The Purple Island, vi. 72: a perfect Virgin breeds and bears a sonne, Th’immortall father of his mortall mother; earth, heav’n, flesh, spirit, man, god, are met in one:

Notes to Pages 127–137

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His younger brothers childe, his childrens brother, eternitie, who yet was born and di’d; His owne creatour, earths scorn, heavens pride; Who th’ deitie inflesht, and mans flesh deifi’d.

5 ‘ W e de s i r e i nc r e a s e’: s h a k e s pe a r e’s non-dr a m at ic p oe t r y 1. see Patrick cheney, Shakespeare, National Poet-Playwright (cambridge: cambridge University Press, 2004). 2. references throughout to William shakespeare, The Complete Sonnets and Poems, ed. colin Burrow (oxford: oxford University Press, 2002); it would be cumbersome to catalogue in footnotes all of my many and various debts to the superb commentaries and notes by Burrow and the Sonnets’ other editors; i should therefore like to acknowledge here my use of the enormously valuable elucidations and arguments to be found in the following: William shakespeare, The Sonnets, ed. Hyder e. rollins, 2 vols. (Philadelphia, Pa: lippincott, 1944); Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. with analytic commentary by stephen Booth (new Haven, ct: yale University Press, 1977); William shakespeare, The Sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint, ed. John Kerrigan (london: Penguin, 1986); Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. Katherine duncan-Jones (london: arden shakespeare, 1997); Vendler, The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. 3. Heather dubrow, Captive Victors: Shakespeare’s Narrative Poems and Sonnets (ithaca, ny: cornell University Press, 1987), p. 246. 4. For subtle readings of such problems of identity and praise, see Joel Fineman, Shakespeare’s Perjured Eye: The Invention of Poetic Subjectivity in the Sonnets (Berkeley: University of california Press, 1986). 5. Bacon, Works, vi: 390. 6. The fact that these might, in theory, be around 65,000 in number makes it hard to care about them – but of course, there are bound to be duplications in any family tree. 7. The death of shakespeare’s own son Hamnet is surely relevant to this, but if so it is handled so obliquely as to be invisible to any who do not know about shakespeare’s personal life. 8. c. s. lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama (oxford: clarendon Press, 1954), p. 503. 9. see my discussion of the Sonnets in Male Friendship in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, chapter 2. 10. Margreta de grazia, ‘The scandal of shakespeare’s sonnets’, in James schiffer (ed.), Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Critical Essays (new york: routledge, 1999): 89–112 at p. 101. 11. i really don’t want to get into this debate, but i incline to some version of the Pembrokian hypothesis. Herbert’s father died in 1601; Penry Williams in the ODNB (see under William Herbert) describes him as ‘disastrously lacking in tact’; that may be another reason for forgetting him.

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Notes to Pages 137–147

12. Whatever one thinks of evolutionary psychology, the basic insight that at the genetic level men’s most universal and compelling fear is wasting their resources on a cuckoo is surely reasonable; see Jerome H. Barkow, leda cosmides and John tooby (eds.), The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture (new york: oxford University Press, 1992); for some important qualifications, see christopher Badcock, Evolutionary Psychology: A Critical Introduction (cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), Patrick colm Hogan, Cognitive Science, Literature and the Arts: A Guide for Humanists (london: routledge, 2003), chapter 8, and richard c. Francis, Why Men Won’t Ask for Directions: The Seductions of Sociobiology (Princeton, nJ: Princeton University Press, 2004). 13. see J. B. leishman, Themes and Variations in Shakespeare’s Sonnets (london: Hutchinson, 1961), pp. 95–101, for the relative and surprising absence of carpe diem motifs in the Sonnets. 14. John donne, The Epithalamions, Anniversaries and Epicedes, ed. W. Milgate (oxford: clarendon Press, 1978). 15. see Mclaren, Reproductive Rituals, p. 21. in Fletcher and Field’s Four Plays in One (‘The triumph of love’ section), gerrard tries to prevent his mistress Violanta being punished for fornication by claiming that he ravished her; yet the fact that she is pregnant is taken as evidence against this, the spokesman for the states saying ‘Who ever knew a rape produce a childe?’ (vi. 39); The Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon, vol. viii. 16. Brian Vickers, Shakespeare, A Lover’s Complaint, and John Davies of Hereford (cambridge: cambridge University Press, 2007) has presented a strong case that shakespeare did not write the poem; Katherine duncan-Jones (letter in the Times Literary Supplement, 20 July 2007), however, objects, partly on the basis of her equally convincing view that the Sonnets volume’s publisher Thomas Thorpe was too reliable to foist the poem on shakespeare. The poem has, ironically enough, become tainted with accusations of bastardy. 17. see erwin Panofsky, Problems in Titian, Mostly Iconographic (london: Phaidon, 1969), pp. 150–3, and georgianna Ziegler, ‘Picturing Venus and adonis: shakespeare and the artists’, in Philip c. Kolin (ed.), Venus and Adonis: Critical Essays (new york: garland, 1997): 389–404 at pp. 389–90. Panofsky (p. 153) argues that ‘shakespeare’s words, down to such details as the nocturnal setting and “love upon her backe deeply distrest”, sound like a poetic paraphrase of titian’s composition’. Panofsky may be getting carried away here: the painting is hardly nocturnal (though it may be crepuscular), and Venus is not on her back, at least not yet – we do have a back view of her though, and she is tumbling, hopelessly, backwards. 18. The resemblance to the miniature of Philip, a copy of a lost titian original, in the national Portrait gallery, london, is particularly striking, though admittedly the hair-colour is different (and Philip is rather uglier). 19. Fernando checa, Tiziano y la monarquia hispania: usos y funciones de la pictura veneciana en España (siglos XVI y XVII) (Madrid: nerea, 1994), p. 101 sees the painting’s moral as adonis resisting the ‘tentación venusina’ (the

Notes to Pages 147–157

20.

21.

22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

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amorous temptation of Venus) and turning to his ‘deber’ (duty), but does not apply this to Philip. Julius s. Held, ‘rubens and titian’, in david rosand (ed.), Titian: His World and Legacy (new york: columbia University Press, 1982): 283–339 at p. 321, reads titian’s adonis differently: ‘Venus tries desperately to restrain the determined youth, who almost smilingly looks down at what he may well consider an unreasonable woman.’ Panofsky, Problems in Titian, p. 151n insists that this is an image of Venus’s chariot rather than of Jove’s or apollo’s, and this reading of the painting informs Thomas Puttfarken, Titian and Tragic Painting: Aristotle’s Poetics and the Rise of the Modern Artist (new Haven, ct: yale University Press, 2005), p. 164, who argues attractively that the ray of light from the chariot tragically anticipates Venus’s discovery of adonis’s corpse in the woods. shakespeare might, however, have reasonably read the chariot as that of the sun-god; it does look very much as if it is an emanation of the sun. That particular element of the painting is decidedly vague – it is an anticipation of titian’s late style, in which the paint is used in an almost impressionist manner. Both these readings fit better with an early copy of the painting (now on loan to the ashmolean Museum, oxford) than with the original in the Prado, Madrid. The copy not only makes the chariot more clearly feminine and gives the scene of adonis’s death, but also makes the main portrayal of adonis more boyishly beautiful – less like Philip ii, in other words. Katherine duncan-Jones, ‘Playing Fields or Killing Fields: shakespeare’s Sonnets and Poems’, Shakespeare Quarterly 54 (2003): 127–41 at p. 141. e.g. coppélia Kahn, ‘self and eros in Venus and adonis’, Centennial Review 20 (1976): 351–71 at p. 352. see glimp, Increase and Multiply. Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, passim. see albert camus, L’ homme révolté (Paris: gallimard, 1958). ‘when i love thee not, / chaos is come again’ (Othello iii. iii. 91–2). catherine Belsey, ‘love as Trompe l’oeil: taxonomies of desire in Venus and Adonis’, in Kolin (ed.), Venus and Adonis: Critical Essays: 261–86 at p. 263. James schiffer, ‘shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis: a lacanian tragicomedy of desire’, in Kolin (ed.), Venus and Adonis: Critical Essays: 359–76 at pp. 362–3. dubrow, Captive Victors, p. 26. see Shakespeare’s Poems, ed. Katherine duncan-Jones and H. r. Woudhuysen (london: The arden shakespeare, 2007), p. 57. see lukas erne, ‘Print and Manuscript’, in Patrick cheney (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s Poetry (cambridge: cambridge University Press, 2007): 54–71 at pp. 56–7. Kahn, ‘self and eros in Venus and adonis’, p. 352. lukas erne, Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist (cambridge: cambridge University Press, 2003); see also cheney, Shakespeare, National Poet-Playwright. see axton, The Queen’s Two Bodies, pp. 116–30; cheney, Shakespeare, National Poet-Playwright, pp. 173–97, and Burrow’s introduction to the poem. other

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36. 37. 38. 39.

Notes to Pages 157–164 readings of the poem, which put it in the context of Love’s Martyr, are well summarized in William shakespeare, The Poems, ed. John roe (cambridge: cambridge University Press, 1992), and developed in duncan-Jones’s and Woudhuysen’s edition. These arguments are convincing, but do not exhaust the poem’s meaning: shakespeare could be inspired by the volume to which he was asked to contribute, but still touch on larger political issues. cheney, Shakespeare, National Poet-Playwright, pp. 185–7. translated by spenser (following clement Marot’s French version) in A Theatre for Worldlings. For connections between ‘let the bird of loudest lay’ and Hamlet, see Frank Kermode, Shakespeare’s Language (london: allen lane, 2000). see the introduction to shakespeare, The Poems, ed. roe, p. 52. 6 joh n d on n e’s r h e t or ic a l c on t r ac e p t ion

1. Marlowe, his greatest predecessor in this mode, is unconcerned with generativity. 2. The Sermons of John Donne, ed. evelyn M. simpson and george r. Potter, 10 vols. (Berkeley: University of california Press, 1953–62), ii: 197. 3. see, for example, Ben saunders, Desiring Donne: Poetry, Sexuality, Interpretation (cambridge, Ma: Harvard University Press, 2006), p. 150, who has to restate yet again in his reading of the poem as ‘seductive bullshit’ that the woman would have to be ‘astonishingly gullible’ to be seduced if she weren’t half-seduced already. 4. as people did not believe that the soul entered the foetus until the fifth month, termination of pregnancy by the use of herbal abortifacients seems to have been widely accepted; see amussen, An Ordered Society, p. 114, and cressy, Birth, Marriage and Death, pp. 47–50. 5. The Collected Poems of Christopher Marlowe, ed. Patrick cheney and Brian J. striar (new york: oxford University Press, 2006). 6. donne, Sermons, i: 238. 7. John donne, The Divine Poems, ed. Helen gardner, 2nd edn (oxford: clarendon Press, 1978). 8. 17 april 1615; John donne, Letters to Severall Persons of Honour (1651), p. 272; empson argues that donne found his children a ‘nuisance’, and therefore did not write about them as Ben Jonson did – Essays on Renaissance Literature, vol. i: Donne and the New Philosophy, ed. John Haffenden (cambridge: cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 151. 9. John donne, Selected Prose, chosen by evelyn simpson, ed. Helen gardner and timothy Healy (oxford: clarendon Press, 1967), p. 20. 10. as donne argues in a letter to sir Henry goodyer, 9 october 1607, Letters to Severall Persons of Honour, pp. 17–18; for a fuller discussion of donne’s attitude to soul-transmission, see ramie targoff, John Donne, Body and Soul (chicago: University of chicago Press, 2008), pp. 11–12, 97. 11. The philosophical discussion of love in Sir Giles Goosecap (pub. 1606, probably by chapman) gives an interesting sidelight on donnean love and

Notes to Pages 164–166

251

women’s souls; clarence, in love with Momford’s niece, worries that if she becomes his wife she [as] my other selfe Brings me another bodie to dispose That haue alreadie much too much of one, and must not looke for any soule of her to helpe two rule to bodies. Momford: Fie for shame. i neuer heard of such an antedame. doe women bring no helpe of soule to men? Why friend they either are mens soules themselues or the most wittie imitatrixes of them or prettiest sweet apes of humaine soules, That euer nature fram’d; as i will proue. For first they be Substantiae lucidae and purer then mens bodies, like their soules, Which mens harsh haires both of their brest and chinne occasiond by their grose and ruder heate Plainely demonstrates: Then like soules they doe, Mouere corpora, for no power on earth Moues mans bodie, as a woman does! They doe they Dare formas corpori or adde faire formes to men, as their soules doe: For but for women, who wood care for formes? i vowe i neuer wood washe face, nor hands nor care how ragg’d, or slouenlie i went Wer’t not for women, who of all mens pompes are the true finall causes: Then they make Men in their seedes imortall like their soules That els wood perish in a spanne of time. oh they be soulelike-creatures, and my neece The soule of twentie rare soules stild in one. (iii. ii. 58–86)

12.

13. 14. 15.

references to The Plays of George Chapman: The Tragedies, with Sir Gyles Goosecappe, ed. allan Holaday et al. (cambridge: d. s. Brewer, 1987). given the editors’ disagreements about the numbering of the elegies, i omit numbers so as to avoid confusion. The general critical consensus that ‘The autumnal’ is a later poem addressed to Magdalen Herbert seems to me to rest on rather thin evidence: see The Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne, gen. ed. gary a. stringer, 8 vols. (Bloomington: indiana University Press, 1995–), ii: 836–7. John donne, The Satires, Epigrams and Verse Letters, ed. W. Milgate (oxford: clarendon Press, 1967). For full commentary see Variorum, ii: 731–5, and textual apparatus. empson, Essays in Renaissance Literature, p. 161.

252

Notes to Pages 166–171

16. if we read ‘Heere’ in this interpretation (admittedly, there’s no textual warrant for this, but that word is more subject to transmission error), the meaning of the lines would still be a sneer, though of a rather different kind. 17. see r. e. Pritchard, ‘dying in donne’s “The good Morrow”’, Essays in Criticism 35 (1985): 213–22. 18. christopher ricks, ‘John donne: “Farewell to love”’, in Essays in Appreciation (oxford: oxford University Press, 1998), p. 19. 19. For example, to Henry goodyer in January 1607 he writes ‘it is (i cannot say the waightyest, but truly) the saddest lucubration and nights passage that ever i had. For it exercised those hours, which, with extreme danger of her, whom i should hardly have abstained from recompensing for her company in this world, with accompanying her out of it, encreased my poor family with a son’, Letters to Severall Persons of Honour, p. 147; writing again to goodyer in april 1612, he says ‘i have received no syllable, neither from her self, nor by any other, how my wife hath passed her danger, nor do i know whether i be increased by a childe, or diminished by the losse of a wife’, Letters to Severall Persons of Honour, p. 74. 20. John Donne, ed. John carey (oxford: oxford University Press, 1990). 21. The idea is expressed in the Symposium, in socrates’ account of diotima’s view of love; it is then developed in the renaissance in Marsilio Ficino’s De Amore, and popularized in Bembo’s speech in castiglione’s The Courtier: see Marsilio Ficino, Commentary on Plato’s symposium on Love, trans. sears Jayne (Woodstock, ct: spring Publications, 1985); Baldessare castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, trans. Thomas Hoby (london: dent, 1928). 22. John carey, John Donne: Life, Mind and Art, new edn (london: Faber and Faber, 1990), p. 253. 23. see Thomas, The Ends of Life, p. 228, the source being from the apocryphal gospel of Thomas. 24. see a. r. cirillo, ‘The Fair Hermaphrodite: love-Union in the Poetry of donne and spenser’, SEL 9 (1969): 81–95. 25. although, as richard rambuss has pointed out, spenser’s ‘poetic aims were never exclusively Virgilian’; ‘spenser’s life and career’, in andrew Hadfield (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Spenser (cambridge: cambridge University Press, 2001): 13–36 at p. 24; see also cheney, Spenser’s Famous Flight. 26. Kenneth gross, ‘shapes of time: on the spenserian stanza’, Spenser Studies 19 (2004): 27–35 at pp. 32, 33–4. 27. Ibid., pp. 32–3. 28. Patricia Parker, Inescapable Romance: Studies in the Poetics of a Mode (Princeton, nJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), p. 37. 29. targoff, John Donne, Body and Soul, p. 8. 30. arthur Marotti, John Donne: Coterie Poet (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), p. 237, thinks this idea unserious; ricks, ‘John donne: “Farewell to love”’, disagrees.

Notes to Pages 172–184

253

31. M. van Wyck smith, ‘John donne’s Metempsychosis’, RES 24 (1973): 17–25, 141–52. 32. Herodotus, The Histories, trans. robin Waterfield (oxford: oxford University Press, 1998), p. 16 (1. 32). 33. Letters to Severall Persons of Honour, p. 137. 34. carey, John Donne, p. 278. 35. donne, The Epithalamions, Anniversaries and Epicedes. 36. empson, Essays on Renaissance Literature, p. 85. 37. rodney stenning edgecomb, ‘a nocturnal Upon s. lucy’s day, Being the shortest day’, Explicator 52 (1994): 142–5. 38. ‘sailing to Byzantium’, in W. B. yeats, The Poems, ed. daniel albright (london: J. M. dent, 1990), p.239. 39. see Meister eckhart, Selected Writings, trans. oliver davis (london: Penguin, 1994). 40. see John stubbs, Donne: The Reformed Soul (london: Viking, 2006), p. 327. 41. izaak Walton, The Compleat Walton, ed. geoffrey Keynes (london: nonesuch Press, 1929), p. 223. 42. ernest W. sullivan ii, ‘donne’s epithalamium for ann’, in Thomas Hester (ed.), John Donne’s ‘Desire of More’: The Subject of Ann More Donne (newark: University of delaware Press, 1996): 35–8. 43. The Compleat Walton, p. 248. 44. david cunnington, ‘donne’s new days’, Essays in Criticism 54 (2004): 18–37. 45. Theresa M. diPasquale, ‘ambivalent Mourning in “since she whome i lovd”’, in Hester (ed.), John Donne’s ‘Desire of More’: 183–95 at p. 186. 46. targoff, John Donne, Body and Soul, p. 64. 47. donne, Sermons, v: 116. 48. The Compleat Walton, p. 238. 49. david novarr, ‘donne’s “epithalamion made at lincoln’s inn”: context and date’, RES 7 (1956): 250–63 at p. 254. 50. Heather dubrow, A Happier Eden: The Politics of Marriage in the Stuart Epithalamium (ithaca, ny: cornell University Press, 1990), pp. 151–2. 51. Virginia tufte, The Poetry of Marriage: The Epithalamium in Europe and its Development in England (los angeles: tinnon-Brown, 1970), p. 221. 52. H. l. Meakin, John Donne’s Articulations of the Feminine (oxford: clarendon Press, 1998), p. 181. 53. Helen cooper, The English Romance in History: Transforming Motifs from Geoffrey of Monmouth to Shakespeare (oxford: oxford University Press), p. 257. 54. Meakin, John Donne’s Articulations of the Feminine, pp. 196–7. 55. dubrow argues that the reference to the Phoenix invokes Queen elizabeth (A Happier Eden, pp. 166–7) and fits with an increasing stuart nostalgia for the ‘once and future queen’ (p. 66), but also sees the poem’s generically normal preoccupation with death as being particularly driven by Prince Henry’s death. 56. dubrow, A Happier Eden, p. 40. 57. donne, Sermons, iii: 68. 58. carey, John Donne, p. 143.

254

Notes to Pages 185–196

59. The Poems, English and Latin, of Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, ed. g. c. Moore smith (oxford: clarendon Press, 1923). 60. see Marotti, John Donne: Coterie Poet, p. 197. 61. references to The Poems of Thomas Carew, ed. rhodes dunlap (oxford: clarendon Press, 1949). 62. references to The English Poems of George Herbert, ed. Helen Wilcox (cambridge: cambridge University Press, 2007). 63. cf. donne, Holy sonnet 5, ‘if pois’nous minerals’: if pois’nous minerals, and if that tree Whose fruit threw death on else immortal us, if lecherous goats, if serpents envious cannot be damned, alas, why should i be?

7 ‘t o pr opag at e t h e i r n a m e s’: be n jons on a s p oe t ic g odfat h e r 1. Jonson, Works, i: 139–40. 2. edwards (ed.), The Spanish Tragedy, pp. lxi–lxvi, has some doubts about the common attribution to Jonson; david riggs, Ben Jonson: A Life (cambridge, Ma: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 87 observes that the theme of ‘parental bereavement’ was ‘close to Jonson’s heart’. no final decision on this matter seems possible – see lukas erne, Beyond The spanish tragedy: A Study of the Works of Thomas Kyd (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), pp. 125–6, who does not, to my mind, sufficiently attend to the literary and dramatic merits of these particular lines, keen as he rightly is to emphasize Kyd’s own merits. 3. see Macfarlane, Marriage and Love, pp. 85–6, and chapter 1, above. 4. i follow here the reading of F2 – F1 has ‘affiction’; gifford’s edition of 1816 has ‘affliction’. 5. ovid, Metamorphoses, viii. 611–724; genesis 19. 6. see norbrook, Poetry and Politics, p. 168. 7. richard Helgerson, Self-Crowned Laureates: Spenser, Jonson, Milton and the Literary System (Berkeley: University of california Press, 1983), p. 110. 8. ian donaldson, ‘Jonson’s Poetry’, in richard Harp and stanley stewart (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Ben Jonson (cambridge: cambridge University Press, 2000): 119–39 at p. 132. 9. references to Works, vol. viii. 10. robert c. evans, Ben Jonson and the Poetics of Patronage (lewisburg, Pa: Bucknell University Press, 1989), p. 129; see also norbrook, Poetry and Politics, p. 163. 11. dubrow, Shakespeare and Domestic Loss, p. 173, suggestively points out that many writers of country-house poems, including Jonson, had suffered the early deaths of their own fathers. 12. evans, Jonson and the Poetics of Patronage, p. 122. 13. Joseph loewenstein, Ben Jonson and Possessive Authorship (cambridge: cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 117–20 shows how the language of digestion is also crucial to Jonson’s sense of proper poetic imitation.

Notes to Pages 197–212

255

14. Jonathan goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature: Jonson, Shakespeare, Donne and their Contemporaries (Baltimore, Md: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), pp. 221, 223. 15. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ed. Jeri Johnson (oxford: oxford University Press, 2000), p. 181. 16. see evans’s valuable discussion, Jonson and the Poetics of Patronage, pp. 40–8. 17. claude summers and ted-larry Pebworth, Ben Jonson Revised (new york: twayne Publishers, 1999), p. 183. 18. alexander, Writing After Sidney, p. 144. 19. such rumours need to be taken with a pinch of salt, given the case of the earl of essex, who insisted that allegations of his impotence were merely an excuse for his wife to annul their marriage. 20. ‘nature never set forth the earth in so rich tapestry as divers poets have done; neither with so pleasant rivers, fruitful trees, sweet-smelling flowers, nor whatsoever else may make the too much loved earth more lovely. Her world is brazen, the poets only deliver a golden’; sidney, Miscellaneous Prose, p. 78, emphasis added. 21. as we saw at the beginning of the chapter, Jonson lodged for five years with lord aubigny, probably before the lord’s marriage in 1611. 22. J. g. nichols, The Poetry of Ben Jonson (london: routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), p. 78, points out that Jonson balances make against bear, ‘and consequently one set of values against another’. 23. it is worth noting that this poem is also often attributed to sir Henry Wotton; even if it is Wotton’s (as seems distinctly possible), its presumable inclusion amongst Jonson’s poetic papers (assembled into Underwood by digby) must mean that it had some importance for him. 24. see ODNB under sir Henry neville. 25. For further details on Weston and Jonson’s dealings with him see robert c. evans, Jonson and the Contexts of his Time (lewisburg, Pa: Bucknell University Press, 1994), pp. 158–68. 26. see summers and Pebworth, Ben Jonson Revised, p. 198. 27. see evelyn simpson, ‘Jonson and donne’, RES 15 (1939): 274–82. given that Underwood xxxix is probably donne’s, the doubt is understandable, but i am persuaded, as most editors are, that xxxviii, xl and xli are all Jonson’s; xlii is undoubtedly his. 28. summers and Pebworth, Ben Jonson Revised, p. 203. 29. see laurens J. Mills, One Soul in Bodies Twain: Friendship in Tudor Literature and Stuart Drama (Bloomington, in: Principia Press, 1937), MacFaul, Male Friendship in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries. 30. Meakin, John Donne’s Articulations of the Feminine, pp. 78–9. 31. The Poems of John Donne, ed. robin robbins, 2 vols. (Harlow: longman, 2008), i: 38–9. 32. ‘to e. of d. with six Holy sonnets’; recent views (see robbins) date this poem earlier than previously thought, and would title it ‘to My lord of derby’. The Poems of John Donne, i: 44.

256

Notes to Pages 214–227

33. evans, Jonson and the Poetics of Patronage, p. 201, argues that the poem is written to lucius cary, and that the turn from son to friend is a movement from subordination to moral equivalence; whilst this is true to some extent, the paternal feeling retains its resonance throughout. 34. cf. Wordsworth’s ‘ode: intimations of immortality’. 35. evans, Jonson and the Poetics of Patronage, p. 214. 36. lorna Hutson, ‘liking Men: Ben Jonson’s closet opened’, ELH 71 (2004): 1065–96. 37. ronald Huebert, ‘a shrew yet Honest: Manliness in Jonson’, Renaissance Drama 15 (1984): 31–68 at p. 38. 38. Helgerson, Self-Crowned Laureates, p. 40. 39. Most influentially discussed in Thomas M. greene, ‘Ben Jonson and the centered self’, SEL 10 (1970): 325–48. ‘in the case of an artist like Jonson, the imagery of circularity is one means of intuiting, beneath the turbulent richness and vehement variety of his work, its underlying coherence. But it is also a token of his massive artistic independence’ (p. 326). 40. see g. W. Pigman iii, Grief and Renaissance Elegy (cambridge: cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 87. 41. H. W. Matalene, ‘Patriarchal Fatherhood in Ben Jonson’s epigram 45’, in david g. allen and robert a. White (eds.), Traditions and Innovations: Essays on British Literature of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (newark: University of delaware Press, 1990): 102–12 at p. 105. 42. see ODNB, under Ben Jonson. 43. riggs, Ben Jonson: A Life, p. 180; he also argues that Joseph may have died unrecorded; Herford and simpson in the original printing of ‘The Man and his Work’ (Jonson, Works, vols. i–ii), asserted that Jonson’s second son lived until 1635 (i: 9); however, Mark eccles, ‘Jonson’s Marriage’, RES 12 (1936): 257–72 showed that this was unfounded; it is also certainly possible, as eccles points out, that Jonson had other sons, or daughters. 44. For example, Pigman, Grief and Renaissance Elegy, pp. 89–90; Matalene, ‘Patriarchal Fatherhood’. 45. Pigman, Grief and Renaissance Elegy, p. 88. 46. references to sir John Beaumont, Bosworth-Field (london, 1629). 47. see douglas Bush, English Literature in the Earlier Seventeenth Century: 1600–1660 (oxford: clarendon Press, 1945), p. 120; tiree Macgregor and c. Q. drummond, ‘The authorship of “Fair Friend, ’tis true, your Beauties Move”’, John Donne Journal 12 (1993): 153–68, make a convincing case on stylistic grounds for godolphin’s authorship, and suggest that Jonson may have retouched the poem (p. 164). 8 c oda : s ons 1. references to The Poems of Andrew Marvell, ed. nigel smith (london: longman, 2003). 2. although dryden is one of the great poets of paternity, his attitudes are very different to those we have seen in this study, and derive largely from Virgil,

Notes to Pages 227–231

3. 4.

5. 6. 7. 8.

257

in an attempt to recover the supposed patriarchal certainties of the past: his Flecknoe is ‘blessed with issue of a large increase’, and has one son who his ‘perfect image bears’ (Mac Flecknoe, lines 8, 15) – the proliferation and yet perfect copying of bad writing ironically undermines all that should be continuous and virtuous about true paternity. in such circumstances, dryden cannot allow himself to exercise spenserian moral discrimination, or Jonsonian anger; an urbane distance is what is needed. despite dryden’s firm belief in paternalism as the model for a good society, most sons are disappointments – notably absalom, and of course achitophel’s ‘unfeathered, two legged thing, a son, / got while his soul did huddled notions try, / and born a shapeless lump, like anarchy’ (Absalom and Achitophel, lines 171–2). generation, in a poem whose king ‘scattered his maker’s image through the land’ (line 10), can produce ‘no true succession’ (line 15), either poetic, economic, biological or political. references to The Poems of John Dryden, ed. Paul Hammond and david Hopkins, 5 vols. (london: longman, 1995–2005). references to John Milton, Complete Shorter Poems, ed. John carey, 2nd edn (london: longman, 1997); i use carey’s translations of the latin verse. in the first edition of Tottel’s Miscellany, nicholas grimald published ‘a funerall song’ for his mother agnes, expressing the fear that such a lament might seem ‘womans work’, and feels the need to justify his poem with classical examples of heroic figures mourning their mothers – Tottel’s Miscellany, ed. Hyder e. rollins, 2 vols., rev. edn (cambridge, Ma: Harvard University Press, 1966), i: 111, line 20. The Poems of Robert Herrick (london: oxford University Press, 1933). see the excellent discussion in dubrow, Shakespeare and Domestic Loss, pp. 143–4, 191. references to John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. alastair Fowler, 2nd edn (london: longman, 1998). david norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics 1627–1660 (cambridge: cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 463.

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Wroth, lady Mary, The First Part of the Countess of Montgomery’s Urania, ed. Josephine a. roberts (Binghamton, ny: Medieval and renaissance texts and studies, 1995) The Poems of Lady Mary Wroth, ed. Josephine a. roberts (Baton rouge: louisiana state University Press, 1983) Wyatt, sir Thomas, The Complete Poems, ed. r. a. rebholz (london: Penguin, 1978) yeats, W. B., The Poems, ed. daniel albright (london: J. M. dent, 1990) Ziegler, georgianna, ‘Picturing Venus and adonis: shakespeare and the artists’, in Kolin (ed.), Venus and Adonis: Critical Essays: 389–404

Index

adoption, 112, 119, 230 alexander, gavin, 199 alpers, Paul, 111 alwes, derek B., 68 anne, Queen of england, 34 aristotle, 3, 37, 163 armin, robert The Two Maids of More-Clacke, 46 auden, W. H., 103 authorship, 2, 10, 155, 217

clinton, Bill, 104 cogan, Thomas The Haven of Health, 22 coleridge, samuel taylor, 12 ‘conceit’/conception, 12–19, 34 contraception, 162, 166 cowley, abraham, 226 cressy, david, 20

Bacon, sir Francis, 23, 46, 50, 135, 139, 173 Barnfield, richard, 18 Barry, lording Ram-Alley, 38 bastardy, 17, 98, 145 Bates, catherine, 29, 68 Beaumont, Francis The Knight of the Burning Pestle, 7–8 Beaumont, sir John, 223 Belsey, catherine, 153 Bible, 1, 40, 47, 73, 114, 119, 133 Bloom, Harold, 11, 25, 151 breast-feeding, 37 Browne, sir Thomas, 39 Bullinger, Heinrich, 41 Burrow, colin, 142 calvin, Jean, 40, 98, 110 camden, William, 65 camus, albert, 151 canonicity, 25, 225 carew, Thomas, 185, 226 carey, John, 168, 169 cecil, robert, 172, 202 celovsky, lisa, 100 chapman, george, 91–2 charles i, King of england and scotland, 54, 204 chaucer, geoffrey, 102 childlessness, 45 cicero, 26

daniel, samuel, 23 Delia, 27, 72 daughters opposed to sons, 57, 110 davies, sir John Epigrams, 24 Gulling Sonnets, 18 dawkins, richard, 22 day, John Law Tricks, 16 de grazia, Margreta, 137 donne, John, 34, 43, 50, 113, 125, 131, 140, 158, 160–87, 188, 226 ‘a nocturnall Upon s. lucies day’, 176–7 ‘a Valediction Forbidding Mourning’, 85 ‘a Valediction: of Weeping’, 163, 169 ‘air and angels’, 7, 169 Anniversaries, 174–5 epithalamia, 180–4 ‘Farewell to love’, 168 Holy sonnet ‘death Be not Proud’, 176 Holy sonnet ‘since she Whom i loved’, 178 ‘love’s exchange’, 82 ‘love’s growth’, 142, 184 ‘love’s Progress’, 166 ‘love’s Usury’, 163 ‘love’s Warre’, 165 Metempsychosis, 170–3 Paradoxes and Problems, 163 sermons, 179 ‘The anagram’, 165 ‘The autumnal’, 164 ‘The comparison’, 165

272

Index ‘The dissolution’, 173 ‘The ecstasie’, 76, 168, 169 ‘The Flea’, 163 ‘The good Morrow’, 167, 208 ‘The Perfume’, 164 ‘The relique’, 162, 170 ‘The storme’, 165 ‘The sunne rising’, 167, 177–8 ‘The Undertaking’, 170 ‘to His Mistress going to Bed’, 166 verse epistles, 211–13 drayton, Michael, 85, 226 Idea, 61, 144 drummond, William, 91, 188 dryden, John, 227 dubrow, Heather, 26 duncan-Jones, Katherine, 75, 148 education, 26 edward Vi, King of england, 59 elizabeth i, Queen of england, 1, 5, 7, 28, 46, 51, 53, 63, 72, 78, 84, 96, 103, 112, 132, 153, 157, 165, 173 and Phoenix, 85 as maternal figure, 66 emasculation, 9 empson, William, 175 ensoulment, 38–9, 163 erne, lukas, 155 eschatology, 42–3, 108, 144 essex, robert devereux, 2nd earl of, 154, 157 evolutionary biology, 2

273

genealogy, 99 genre, 7, 10, 99 glimp, david, 73 godolphin, sidney, 224–5 goodyer, sir Henry, 212 gouge, William, 41, 45, 48 greene, robert Menaphon, 28 greenham, richard, 41–2, 96 greville, sir Fulke, 35, 43, 65, 68, 96, 143 Caelica, 78, 80–90 Mustapha, 92–4 harmonization of the sexes, 68, 99, 131, 164, 217 Harvey, elizabeth d., 4 Hatton, sir christopher, 52 Henry, Prince of Wales, 34, 53 Henry Viii, King of england, 52 Herbert, george, 185–6 Herbert of cherbury, edward lord, 107, 185 hermaphroditism, 7, 106, 115, 170, 186, 219, 232 Herrick, robert, 227–31 homosexuality, 5, 216 homosociality, 5, 188, 211 infant mortality, 26, 47, 220–1 irigaray, luce, 107 James Vi and i, King of scotland and england, 1, 39, 53, 173 Basilikon Doron, 53–6 Jeronimo (anon.), 16 Jonson, Ben, 1, 10, 23, 35, 43, 164, 184, 188–225, 226 Every Man in His Humour, 190–3 The Staple of News, 193–5 ‘to Penshurst’, 196–7

family, extended, 5 family, nuclear, 5 female orgasm, 38 femininity, 20, 212 and creativity, 4, 17 and emotions, 131 and nature, 7 and pathos, 28 Fletcher, angus, 118 Fletcher, anthony, 3, 20 Fletcher, John Sir John van Olden Barnavelt (with Philip Massinger), 222–3 The Honest Man’s Fortune (with nathan Field), 4 Fletcher, Phineas, 127–9, 226 fostering out, 51 Foucault, Michel, 5 Freud, sigmund, 2, 66–7, 71, 83, 214

lacan, Jacques, 67, 84, 95 larkin, Philip, 230 leicester, robert dudley, earl of, 72, 99 lewis, c. s., 136 luther, Martin, 40, 43

galen, 7, 37 gascoigne, george, 24

Macfarlane, alan, 45, 49 Mallette, richard, 95

Keats, John, 208 Keller, eve, 21 Kermode, Frank, 106 Krier, Theresa M., 67 Kyd, Thomas The Spanish Tragedy, 59, 61, 189–90

274 Marlowe, christopher, 160, 162 Edward II, 60 Marotti, arthur, 5, 79, 88 marriage, Protestant theories of, 5, 40, 45, 50, 121 Marston, John Sophonisba, 22 Marvell, andrew, 227 Mary i, Queen of england, 147 masculinity, 3, 7, 54, 59, 63, 65, 68, 75, 78, 92, 97, 99, 131 masturbation, 22, 216 Matalene, H. W., 222 maternal mortality, 104, 175 Maus, Katharine eisaman, 4 Mccabe, richard a., 43, 50, 101, 113, 117 Middleton, Thomas A Trick to Catch the Old One, 17 Milton, John, 105, 127, 227, 231–3 misogyny, 3 spenser’s challenge to, 95 Montaigne, Michel de, 23 Montrose, louis a., 68 More, anne, 175, 177 mourning for children, 220–1 mourning for fathers, 46, 227–8 nashe, Thomas, 52 neill, Michael, 42 niccholes, alexander, 49 nixon, anthony, 44 norbrook, david, 82 ovid, 26, 139, 160, 162 oxford, edward de Vere, 17th earl of, 18, 71, 135 paternity, uncertain, 2, 16, 38, 67, 92, 99, 137, 145, 197 patronage, 51, 63, 146, 199, 206, 209, 211 Pembroke, William Herbert, 2nd earl of, 137 Perkins, William, 44, 97 Petrarch, Francesco, 158 Phaer, Thomas The Boke of Chyldren, 37 Philip ii, King of spain, 147 Phoenix, 57, 85, 105, 128, 132, 157, 182 Pigman, g. W., 222 Plato, 4, 26, 101, 135 Protestant work ethic, 23 public versus private life, 2, 5, 22, 26, 51, 125, 170, 196, 207 publication, 9, 10, 11, 130, 160 Pugh, syrithe, 109, 122 Purgatory, Protestant abolition of, 42

Index ralegh, sir Walter, 3, 28–34, 52, 78, 83, 97, 154 ralegh, Walter Junior (‘Wat’), 31, 222 rape, 108, 145 reproduction, theories of, 3, 13, 21, 37–40 ricks, christopher, 167 roche, Thomas P., 112, 116 rose, Mary Beth, 5 schiffer, James, 153 shakespeare, William, 13–16, 34, 43, 49, 129, 130–59, 226 ‘a lover’s complaint’, 146 A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 14, 79 As You Like It, 17 Hamlet, 15, 158, 191 Henry IV Part Two, 49, 138 Henry VI Part Three, 53, 60, 139 Henry VIII, 56 King Lear, 7, 13, 15, 48, 218 ‘let the bird of loudest lay’ (aka ‘The Phoenix and the turtle’), 134, 156–8 Macbeth, 14 Much Ado about Nothing, 130 Othello, 14 Richard II, 15 Romeo and Juliet, 15, 139 Sonnets, 18–20, 23, 40, 123, 131–45, 146, 149, 152, 208, 219 The Merchant of Venice, 13 The Passionate Pilgrim, 18 The Rape of Lucrece, 145, 148 The Taming of the Shrew, 13 The Tempest, 156 The Two Noble Kinsmen, 81, 134 The Winter’s Tale, 15–16, 56, 58, 137 Titus Andronicus, 57 Venus and Adonis, 42, 146–56 sharpham, edward Cupid’s Whirligig, 8 shepard, alexandra, 24 sidney, sir Henry, 63 sidney, sir Philip, 6, 12, 34, 62, 63–94, 113, 130, 143, 226 Arcadia, 9, 64, 66, 72, 73, 79 Astrophel and Stella, 71–80, 153, 215 Certain Sonnets, 70 Defence of Poetry, 75, 200 ‘Four Foster-children of desire’, 70, 101 Letter to Queen Elizabeth, 75 silberman, lauren, 108, 115 spenser, edmund, 12, 18, 34, 43, 95–129, 131, 132, 135, 157, 160, 226 A Theatre for Worldlings, 126

Index Amoretti, 67, 80, 123, 124, 126, 161–2 Colin Clouts Come Home Againe, 180 Complaints, 52, 94, 110 Epithalamion, 124–5, 176–9 Fowre Hymnes, 125 Prothalamion, 180 The Faerie Queene, 10, 64, 96–123, 146, 148, 149, 165, 167, 170, 220 The Shepheardes Calender, 9, 110 statius, 25 stone, lawrence, 45, 51 suckling, sir John, 226 Swetnam the Woman-Hater (anon.), 4

tilney, edward, 50 titian, 146–7, 149, 152

targoff, ramie, 178

yeats, W. B., 176

Vendler, Helen, 143 Villeponteaux, Mary, 96 Virgil, 26, 99 Walton, izaak, 179 Winnicot, d. W., 80 Witmore, Michael, 27, 69 Wrightson, Keith, 45 Wroth, lady Mary Urania, 17, 71

275