The Columbia History of British Poetry (44 page)

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Authors: Carl Woodring,James Shapiro

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Page 181
repeatedly collide with an apparently heartfelt misogyny reinforced by puritanical guilt. These harsher feelings inspire several poetic "farewells to love," not all of which carry conviction. Shakespeare's sonnets evidently despair of ever making a clean break from the Dark Lady, despite their strong denunciation of "lust in action." Finally, the close connection of the lyric to a court repeatedly denounced as a snake pit of ambition and deceit undercuts a belief in the romantic golden world evoked by its verses. Wyatt's poetry bears the imprint of what he calls ''the prease of courts," even as he proclaims his independence of the court's corrupting pressures.
The current picture of the sixteenth-century lyric is thus more pessimistic and complicated than the one evoked by the
Golden Treasury
the lyric is no longer transcendent but historically situated and susceptible to various contradictory cultural influences. The emotions expressed are still intense but powerfully and even neurotically conflicted. The personality manifest is less attractive and more agonized, and the proclamations of love are often perversely hostile and misogynistic. Finally, the lyric can no longer attain "the higher and healthier ways" of a better, more poetic realm. Instead, it remains mired in the ulterior motives, bad faith, and imperfections of ordinary experience; there is no escape from the ways of the world. It is a view of lyric poetry that fits neatly with the late-twentieth-century view of life, as neatly as Pal-grave's Victorian uplift fit his age. Our own darker view may not allow adequately for what Sir Philip Sidney describes as the power of "the erected wit" in his
Defence of Poesy
, but questions about wit's power to transform a "brazen" world to a "golden" one can be best addressed by reviewing the work of some of the poets of the period.
John Skelton fixed his gaze for the most part on the medieval past. His objections to the purist classicism of early English humanism, his praise for the old aristocracy and scorn for upstarts like Cardinal Wolsey, and his hostility to reformers all made him appear to later literary historians as a benighted, reactionary figure. His lively satires, coarse bawdry, and demotic vulgarity offended many later readers even as they proved immensely popular in his own time. Skelton is disparaged by George Puttenham in
The Art of English Poesy
(1589) for his earthy "rayling and scoffery," while Alexander Pope denounces him as "beastly Skelton."
Skelton's verses incorporate the popular voice, edged out of some of the more courtly collections of lyric poetry but never suppressed alto-
 
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gether. The first of the imitations of
Tottel's Miscellany
, entitled
A Handful of Pleasant Delights
(1566), consists entirely of ballads and "such pretty things / as women much desire." Moreover, Skelton's Philip Sparrow makes a reappearance in sonnet 83 of Sidney's
Astrophil and Stella
and other poemsnestled between the lady's breasts and as lecherously impertinent as everand even Sir Fulke Greville's high-minded
Caelica
echoes Skelton's bawdiness in its verses on Scroggins and his wife. In Skelton we confront a genuinely transitional figure poised between the achievements of Geoffrey Chaucer and the still loftier aspirations of Edmund Spenser.
Sir Thomas Wyatt was a prominent courtier and close associate of King Henry VIII who served him both in battle and in diplomatic missions to France and Italy. He was one of the earliest English translators of Petrarch as well as one of the first of Puttenham's "new company of courtly makers" arising near the end of Henry's reign to supplant the literary scribes, minstrels, and clerics of the late Middle Ages. Life could be dangerous for Henry's minions, especially for one who had been Anne Boleyn's lover, and Wyatt was arrested and imprisoned twicefirst after charges of adultery were brought against Anne in 1536 and again in 1541 on charges of treason following the fall of his patron Thomas Cromwellbut each time he was released and pardoned having regained the king's favor.
Wyatt's poetry is marked by an intense inwardness and a mood of solitary introspection, in which the integrity of the speaker is asserted against the hypocrisy of the court and the fickleness of women. Yet, despite its private and personal quality, the poet's reactions to momentously public events are explicitly recorded. "Who list his wealth and ease retain" is thought to refer to the execution of Anne Boleyn, which Wyatt apparently witnessed from his prison window: "The bell tower showed me such sight / That in my head sticks day and night," and "In Mourning Wise" mourns for the men executed with her, a fate that might have befallen him.
The answer to the riddle in "What word is that changeth not" is the palindrome
Anna
embedded in a pun at the center of the poem; the "Brunet" (Boleyn had dark hair) described in "If Waker Care" was said to "set our country in a rore'' in an earlier version; and "Whoso list to hunt" with its deer who wears Caesar's collar but remains "wild for to hold, though I seem tame" has always been taken as a grimly astute description of the ill-fated queen. These cryptic but provoca-
 
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tive lyrics were performed at court and circulated in manuscript as part of an elaborately coded and dangerous game, in which intimate details of the poet's lifeat once personal and state secretsare elliptically publicized. It was a game Wyatt played, as Stephen Greenblatt has shown, with calculated recklessness and still somehow managed to survive.
The moral stance and tone of Wyatt's unnerving performances are accordingly inscrutable. He has traditionally been regarded as a paragon of the honest and straightforward plain style. Yvor Winters championed this style over what he calls the ornamental or Petrarchan style practiced by more imitative poets in his essay on "The 16th Century Lyric in England." Wyatt's simple, monosyllabic native diction, moralistic sententiousness, and insistent proclamation of his own "truth" or honesty and ''troth" or steadfast fidelity certainly demonstrate his commitment to the plain style. Yet truth is of little avail against craftiness in many of these lyrics, and craftin the sense of both art and deceptionis inescapable in poetry, no matter how plain the style.
In Wyatt's verse there is ultimately a profoundly contradictory sense of the ineffability of truth combined with a doomed determination to put it into words. As Wyatt declares in his epigram 70, "But well to say and so to mean / That sweet accord is seldom seen." The final impression of Wyatt's poetic persona is fundamentally ambiguous, for he is caught, as Greenblatt explains, in a perpetual conflict between factitious self-presentation and inscrutable inwardness. It is a conflict brilliantly captured in a poem attributed to Wyatt: "I am as I am and so will I be / But how that I am none knoweth truly."
Henry Howard, earl of Surrey, was a great admirer of Sir Thomas Wyatt and eulogized the older poet in his verse, but his own style is smoother and more polished with a more fluent and regular metrical scheme. The contrast can be seen by comparing their translations of Petrarch. Wyatt's "rougher" style is favored by most modern readers, but Surrey's was greatly admired in his own time. Certainly Surrey's was more influential, since he established the standard pattern for the sonnet in Englishthe so-called Shakespearean sonnet, with three qua-trains and a final rhyming coupletwhich required fewer repeated rhymes than the Italian or Petrarchan sonnet, with its octave and ses-tet. He also introduced unrhymed iambic pentameter or blank verse, the standard metrical form of English verse, in his translation of Virgil's
Aeneid
.
 
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In translating Books II and IV of the
Aeneid
, Surrey combines a humanist commitment to the recovery of the great works of antiquity with a personal enthusiasm for epic heroism. In "An excellent epitaph of Sir Thomas Wyatt," Surrey praises the older man as the embodiment of classical
virtu
and national service, inspiring English youth to aspire to comparable fame. However, Wyatt's own assessment of service to king and country is more equivocal, as the profoundly ambiguous advice given to Sir Francis Brian in "A Spending Hand" indicates. Moreover, Wyatt chose to translate works of a more consolatory and Stoic castthe Psalms and Plutarch's
Quiet Mind
implying a turn away from worldly ambition.
As the oldest son of the duke of Norfolk and scion of a venerable aristocratic family, Surrey was consumed by a passion for worldly honor. He was raised as the companion of the king's illegitimate son, Henry Fitzroy, at Windsor. Shortly after his friend's death, Surrey was imprisoned at Windsor for striking a courtierin the elegy "So cruel prison" he recalls their close bond as a kind of chivalric parity, "where each of us did plead the other's right." He is no more repentant in ''London, has thou accused me" written after he was arrested for throwing rocks at the citizens and windows of London in 1543. An older counselor called him "the most foolish, proud boy that is in England," and his pride led inevitably to a fall.
As a cousin to Catherine Howard, Henry VIII's fifth queen, Surrey was also entangled in the dangerous sexual politics of Henry's final years. Unfortunately, he was much less adroit at surviving these entanglements than Wyatt, and after Catherine's execution for adultery he was accused of including the royal insignia on his own coat of arms and sent to the block not long before the king himself died.
The lyrics of Wyatt and Surrey were first published and prominently featured in
Tottel's Miscellany
(1557), the first in a series of poetical "miscellanies" or collections including verses by more than one author. This immensely popular and influential work contained forty poems by Surrey, ninety-seven by Wyatt, forty by the less-renowned Nicholas Grimald, and samplings of verse by other early Tudor authors including Lord Vaux, John Heywood, John Harington, Thomas Churchyard, and Thomas Norton. The collection presents an immense variety of metrical and poetic formspoulter's measure, ottava rima, terza rima, heroic couplets, rime royal, and blank verse along with epigrams, satires, elegies, and an abundance of amorous lyrics. The aristocratic
 
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distinction of the contributors and the stateliness of their style were emphasized as selling points in the preface; most of the poems by Grimald, an obscure commoner, were dropped from subsequent editions.
By contrast,
A Handful of Pleasant Delights
(1566) lacked the prestigious pedigree and noble names of its more illustrious predecessor, consisting entirely of anonymous broadside ballads. Ballads were scorned as vulgar by many contemporaries, Ben Jonson insisting that a true "poet should detest a balladmaker," yet the courtly lyric never completely lost its connections to popular song, and the enthusiasm for both crossed class lines. In Shakespeare's
Hamlet
the well-born Ophelia sings snatches of ballads from a
Handful of Pleasant Delights
and elsewhere, while the grave digger sings verses by Lord Vaux from
Tottel's Miscellany
.
The effort to consolidate the authority of the "courtly makers" continued and intensified in later miscellanies such as
The Paradise of Dainty Devices
(1576), whose title page advertised the distinction of its poets, "sundry learned Gentlemen, both of honor, and woorshippe." The contents are marked by a didactic sobriety resembling the tone of
The Mirror for Magistrates
(1559). Similarly,
The Phoenix Nest
(1593), an elegiac tribute to the memory of Sir Philip Sidney, boasts that it contains the "rare and refined" work of "Noble men, worthy Knights, gallant gentlemen, Masters of Arts and brave Schollers." Nevertheless, snobbish claims for the lofty social status of lyric verse were not the sole concern of poetic miscellanies.
England's Helicon
(1600) unashamedly mingles the work of celebrated worthies with those previously unknown, insisting on a kind of equality in the republic of letters in which "the names of Poets . . . have been placed with the names of the greatest Princes of the world.''
George Gascoigne is another genuinely transitional figure, writing in the early 1570s just before the real flowering of the Elizabethan lyric. A very talented and ambitious poet, Gascoigne saw himself as a worthy heir to Chaucer, England's greatest early poet, yet was ambivalent and uncertain about how to present himself and his work. Neither noblemen nor gentlemen were supposed to publish their work willingly because it was thought to be demeaning to seek fame or gain in print. Moreover, lyric verse was supposed to be the amateur pastime of a leisured elite, rather than the mercenary endeavor of professional writers. Wyatt and Surrey were published posthumously, but while they were alive, their work circulated in manuscript within a courtly coterie.
 
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Gascoigne's solution was highly equivocal. He published a large collection of his verse and his prose entitled
A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres
(1573), describing it as a "notable volume" worthy of the poets of antiquity. Yet in his prefatory letters Gascoigne pretends that the collection is actually a miscellany of lyrics by a number of different nameless gentlemen-poets, even while assigning authorship of most for most of the poems to himself in the table of contents. Finally, he claims that the work was unauthorized, having been given to a printer without his permission. This was a common expedient at the time, also resorted to by Barnabe Googe, who claimed that his
Eglogs, Epytaphes, and Sonnettes
had been passed on to a printer by a friend in his absence.
There were certainly instances where the complaints were genuineSamuel Daniel and Nicholas Breton actually had their work stolen and printed by unscrupulous publishersbut Gascoigne's complaints seem to be part of his fictional ruse. Aimed at titillating the initiated and mocking the obtuse,
A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres
is framed as an elaborate and somewhat defensive literary joke that also allows the poet to blow his own horn behind a subterfuge of irony and evasion. But Gas-coigne's strategy was not entirely successful. The work was attacked and suppressed as slanderous and lasciviousespecially the amusingly bawdy
Adventures of Master F. J.
and a supposedly expurgated and more didactic revision was banned again in 1576.
Gascoigne has conventionally been seen as a paragon of the plain style, and his presentation of himself as a reformed prodigal near the end of his careerpartially aimed at placating his criticsreinforces the moralistic interpretation of his poetry.
Gascoigne also wrote the didactic verse favored in the collections of his day: poems resembling Lord Vaux's "Aged Lover Renounceth Love" in
Tottel's Miscellany
or George Turberville's "The Lover Abused Renounceth Love" in
Epitaphs, Epigrams, Songs, and Sonnets
(1567). "Gascoigne's Goodnight" contemplates the poet's own mortality and anticipates the last judgement, and one of his final undertakings was a translation of Pope Innocent III's
De Contemptu Mundi
, which Gas-coigne titled the
Droome of Doomesday.
However, in some instances, these moralistic verses are more a display of virtuosity than of conviction, and he warns his readers in another prefatory epistle not to mistake "in sad earnest'' a renunciation of love written in jest.
Moreover, Gascoigne exults in his craft in every sense of the termthe intricate framing devices of
The Adventures of Master F. J.
that pro-

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