The Columbia History of British Poetry (41 page)

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Page 171
less expenditure of wit and effort, Philocosmus issurely reflecting doubts that must have assailed Daniel himself over the years he endeavored to earn a living by his pen.
In providing Musophilus with answers to these doubts, Daniel offers two that are personally revelatory. Acknowledging that his age is negligent of learning, Philocosmus asks, How can a writer achieve fame when he inhabits a "scarce discernèd isle" and speaks a language that is unknown elsewhere? "How many thousands," he asks again, "never heard the name / Of
Sidney
or of
Spenser
or their books?'' To this, Musophilus, although intending a thrust at continental arrogance, gives an answer that was to prove prophetic:
And who in time knows whither we may vent
The treasure of our tongue, to what strange shores
This gain of our best glory shall be sent
T' inrich unknowing nations with our stores?
What worlds in th' yet unformèd occident
May come refin'd with th' accents that are ours?
Musophilus's most revealing personal statement comes in responding to the charge of scant public recognition: "For the few that only lend their ear," he says, "that few is all the world . . .
And for my part, if only one allow
The care my laboring spirits take in this,
He is to me a theatre large ynow,
And his applause only sufficient is:
All my respect is bent but to his brow,
That is my all, and all I am is his.
And if some worthy spirits be pleased too,
It shall more comfort breed, but not more will;
But what if none, it cannot undo
The love I bear unto this holy skill:
This is the thing that I was born to do,
This is my scene, this part must I fulfill.
During the 1590s poets thus essayed a variety of narrative genres, with subject matter ranging from the mythological to the historical and philosophic toat least with Danielthe personal manifesto. Of these genres, which varied in response to the individual preference of a patron or the success of some recent publication, some were to have a wider and longer-lasting appeal than others.
 
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One such was the epyllion. Invariably erotic in subject matter, it offered a range of possible treatments up to and including satire. But, on occasion, such elasticity of tone could raise questions about the author's intent. In 1598 John Marston's
Metamorphosis of Pygmalion's Image
seemed sufficiently lewd to some readers that he felt compelled to append verses indicating its satiric purpose. With Chapman the question has remained, Is his epyllion a spiritual epiphany or a sexual debauch? With Marston, Is it titillation, satire, or even parody? This flexibility, in consequence, allowed John Weever in 1600 to turn his epyllion
Faunus and Melliflora
into an account of the origin of satire. Like Shakespeare with the first heir of his invention, young poets could exploit the rhetorical tricks they had so recently learned at school or the university, and like Shakespeare, their choice of love as subject matter required a treatment that was, as Puttenham had pointed out in his
Art of English Poesy
, "variable, inconstant, affected, curious, and most witty."
Salmacis and Hermaphroditus
, the most impressive of the several derivatives of Marlowe's epyllion, was published anonymously in 1602. Following its appearance in later collections (1618+), it was attributed to Francis Beaumont, who would have been about eighteen years of age at the time of initial publication. Based like most of the others on "sweet-lipped Ovid," it is the story of the lovely young offspring of Venus and Mercury and the equally lovely nymph Salmacis, who, having attracted the attention of Jove, is promised that she will become a star in exchange for the "amorous pleasures of her bed." Although content to yield, the nymph insists that Jove first get Astraea, the goddess of justice, to guarantee his worda stipulation which elicits the narrator's comment: "Just times decline, and all good days are dead / When heavenly oaths had need be warranted."
There follows an account of Jove's visit to Astraea's palace, its description clearly modeled on the Elizabethan courtwith its rout of doorkeepers and its aged porter who exacts his own fees. Venus obstructs the agreement by enticing Vulcan to withhold the thunderbolts from the king of the gods should he fulfill his promise to Salmacis. Jove complies, but in order to show his love, he makes Salmacis "twice as beauteous as before."
"Light-headed" Bacchus is the next to become enamored of Salmacis, and it is only by the intervention of Apollo that her maidenhead is preserved. This calls for an account of the hostility between
 
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Apollo and the thievish Mercury and the sun god's promised reward to Salmacis that if she recovers his stolen chariot wheels, she shall have sight of the "most beauteous boy / That ever was." These several narratives move with great rapidity, but they are interlaced with gnomic couplets and witty conceitsthe inventive element that the poet has picked up from Marlowe.
Since the beauteous Hermaphroditus, like Narcissus, becomes entranced by his own reflection in her eyes, Salmacis is forced to do the wooing, and she provides him with a recital of the proper technique:
Fairer than love's queen, thus I would begin,
Might not my over-boldness be a sin,
I would intreat this favour, if I could,
Thy roseate cheek a little to behold;
Then would I beg a touch, and then a kiss,
And then a lower, yet a higher bliss;
Then would I ask what Jove and Leda did,
When like a swan the crafty god was hid:
What came he for? Why did he there abide?
Surely I think he did not come to chide;
He came to see her face, to talk, and chat,
To touch, to kiss: came he nought for that?
Yes, something else: what was it he would have?
That which all men of maidens ought to crave.
Later, on seeing him naked on a river bank"clapping his white sides with his hollow hands"Salmacis is unable to resist. She follows him into the water, praying that they should never be separated; this the gods grant so that "neither and either might they well be deemed."
Another seventeenth-century publication, by Phineas Fletcher and recounting the love of Venus and Anchises, appeared in 1628 with the title
Britain's Ida
. Presumed to have been written much earlier, probably around 16051607, it was attributed by its publisher to Edmund Spenser, perhaps in an attempt to capitalize on the latter's acclaim, but with some reason, since Fletcher has subsequently been classified with the neo-Spenseriansin part because of his fondness for a long rhyming stanza and feminine rhymes. The discovery in this century of a manuscript containing the poem identifies its author and gives as its title the name of the two protagonists. A more likely form for it would be
Venus and Anchises: Britain's Ida
, paralleling Drayton's linking of his characters and locale in
Endymion and Phoebe: Idea's Latmus
. One pos-
 
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sibility for the publisher's misattribution is that by the time of its publication Fletcher had long since become an ordained minister (1611), as had John Marston two years earlier. Poets who responded to current literary fashions in their youth may well have wished to discount their early efforts on assuming a soberer vocation.
Fletcher sets his epyllion, like the earliest exemplar, in a personal framework. Sitting on the banks of the Cam, Thirsill reports the story behind the scene in accord with his fair Eliza's wishes. It then begins, "In Ida Vale (who knows not Ida Vale?")a distinctive echo of Spenser's "Who knows not Colin Clout?" There follows the account of the youthful Anchises, who, like Adonis, finds his contentment in hunting (including the tusked boar) until one day he has a glimpse of Venus in a shaded wood. He next hears a voice singing of the delights of love and Echo repeating the words: "Should thou live but once love's sweets to prove / Thou wilt not love to live, unless thou live to love."
The sight of the goddess covered only with the "thinnest silken veil"she is elaborately describedcauses him to swoon. Once recovered, he is instructed in the arts of love by Cupid himself. Having profited from this tutelage, Anchises in due course acts upon it; this Fletcher describes in a passage analogous to that in
Romeus and Juliet
written more than forty years earlier:
At length into the haven he arrives
Where safe from storm the love-beat vessel rides,
And as a ship that now the port achieves
With sundry shot the angry Neptune chides
And with a thousand joys, past fear derides.
So th' happy boy in this fair haven blest
Means here sometime his joyful bark to rest
And mock those dangerous waves that late his boat opprest.
Some of the older critics of the twentieth century have caviled at (or ignored) the sexual frankness of the Elizabethans; some have questioned the "low" diction they employed, objecting, for example, to Shakespeare's description of Venus "smothering" Adonis with her kisses or to a poet's calling Helen of Troy the "foreign heifer of the Greeks." One explanation for this is the debasing of specific terms over the centuries; another is the change in literaryand especially, pictorialtastes in successive periods. Fletcher provides a good instance of the latter in the description of his Rubenesque Venus (although to a twentieth-century reader it may suggest parody rather than the intended wit):

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