The Columbia History of British Poetry (46 page)

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Authors: Carl Woodring,James Shapiro

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who sings the praises of his own mistress. Although she is a mere countrey lasse," he places her above all other women and shows her waited upon by the Three Graces. This rustic beauty thus usurps the place given Elizabeth in the April eclogue of
The Shepheardes Calender
. The poet still feels obliged to apologize for this presumptuous tribute to another woman in a poem dedicated to the queen, and he asks "Great Gloriana" to pardon him for "making one minime [the very smallest amount] of thy poore handmayd." By his adroit combination of deference and audacity Spenser apparently manages to balance his personal and public allegiances in his love lyrics.
Other lyric poets, more highly placed and closer to the throne, were not so successful. One who had the most difficulty in this regard was Spenser's patron, to whom he dedicated
The Faerie Queene
, Sir Walter Ralegh. A courtier with few other connections, Ralegh depended entirely on the queen's favor, and for a time, that carried him quite far, securing him court monopolies and grants and, in 1587, the valuable post of Captain of the Queen's Guarda post assuring him of constant proximity to the queen. In return, he paid fulsome tribute to her in verse, addressing her as "the true empress of my heart" in "Sir Walter Ralegh to the Queen."
Ralegh is the paragon of the Elizabethan courtly poet, adapting the compliments and conceits of Petrarchan poetry to the cult of Elizabethan elaborate system of ritualized praise and chivalric pageantry flourishing in the final decades of Elizabeth's reign. Elizabeth's chastity was the focal point for this devotion, especially after it became clear in the early 1580s that she was resolved never to marry. The cult included many other eminent worshipers, noble rivals competing to surpass one another in the eloquence and extravagance of their praise. Sir Henry Lee, the earl of Oxford, the earl of Cumberland, and the earl of Essex all wrote lyric proclamations of their love for the queen and joined in the annual tournaments held in her honor. For a time Ralegh's amorous professions proved effective, infuriating competitors for the queen's favor like Essex.
Unfortunately for Ralegh, Elizabeth found out that he had secretly married one of her maids of honor, Elizabeth Throckmorton, and she had them both imprisoned in the Tower in 1592. Spenser, a commoner far away in Ireland, could make room for more than one Elizabeth in his life, but such an accommodation proved more difficult for
 
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Ralegh at court. Consequently, Ralegh is also a figure for whom the conventional courtly role of unrequited lover became painfully real. Resorting to one of the queen's favorite comparisons, the goddess of chastity, Ralegh had intoned "Praised be Diana's fair and harmless light," but now he saw Diana's less benign aspectthat of a cruel huntress.
In
Ocean to Cynthia
(another name for Diana) Ralegh takes note of the terrifying combination of "such fear in love, such love in majesty," and he depicts himself as "alone, forsaken, friendless, on the shore." The same note of anguished isolation resounds in his adaptation of the ballad "As you came from the holy land":
She hath left me here all alone,
   All alone as unknown,
Who sometimes did me lead with herself,
   And loved as her own.
Many of Ralegh's lyrics assume the jaded and skeptical tone encountered in Wyatt's verse. Christopher Marlowe's "Passionate Shepherd to his Love" proffers all the traditional pastoral allurements, including "beds of roses . . . A cap of flowers" and the songs of "shepherd swains," exulting in the precious artifice of these tropes. Ralegh's response, "The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd," was coupled with Marlowe's poem in both
The Passionate Pilgrim
and
England's Helicon
, and rejects the seductive blandishments and ephemeral pleasures of Marlowe's verses, while raising doubts about the "truth in every shepherd's tongue.'' Similarly, "Farewell false love, the oracle of lies" laments that faith is repaid with ingratitude.
Like Wyatt, Ralegh also rebukes mistrust in love and deception at court, most defiantly in "The Lie." After instructing his soul to give the lie or challenge to a vast array of social institutions, he insists upon that soul's invulnerability to harm from this world. Similarly, in a poem addressed to Elizabethwho responded with the condescending "Ah, silly pug, wert thou so sore afraid""Fortune hath taken thee away my love," he concludes his lament by insisting that, while "fortune conquers kings; / . . . No fortune base shall ever alter me."
Ralegh sought to maintain this pose of defiant equanimity at his execution on charges of treason in 1618, but despite his bravery in the face of death, the question remains whether Ralegh achieves the autonomy
 
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that he claimed or whether he is, in Gary Waller's words, the "quintessential court poet [whose] poems are determined by and finally silenced by, the power of the Court."
William Shakespeare's
Sonnets
have provoked more critical conjecture than any other collection of love lyrics, since most (1126) are addressed to a beautiful young man and the remainder are aimed at the infamous Dark Lady. The first seventeen sonnets attempt a kind of vicarious seduction of the young man, urging him to marry and procreate, and sonnet 20 is a deliberately provocative male blazonfocusing attention at the end on the young man's genitals, even while professing indifference to them.
Shakespeare's promiscuous and fickle Dark Lady is the degraded opposite of the Petrarchan ideal, reduced in sonnet 137 to "the bay where all men ride, . . . the wide world's common place"the latter pun highlighting the exhausted banality of the woman as romantic ideal. Despite her whorish vulgarity, the Dark Lady still proves irresistible. Her continuing attraction prompts feelings of disgust and revulsion, guilt and profound cynicism. The traditional farewell to love is especially vehement in sonnet 129, where lust's evil consequences are enumerated in lurid detail, but the poem concludes with an admission of defeat: "All this the world well knows, yet none knows well / To shun the heav'n that leads men to this hell."
Instead of breaking free of his tainted mistress, the speaker in sonnet 138 engages in a pact of self-conscious mutual deception: "Therefore I lie with her, and she with me, / And in our faults by lies we flattered be." Finally, there are hints of an affair between the young man and the Dark Lady, who seduces "his purity with her foul pride" (sonnet 144), and the poet responds to this betrayal with an eerie combination of mild reproach and bland acceptance.
At the same time, Shakespeare's sequence includes some of the most resonant affirmations of true love'sand poetry'striumph over time: "Not marble nor the gilded monuments / Of princes shall outlive this pow'rful rime" (sonnet 55). And, while he doubts his own adequacy "as an unperfect actor" for the part, the speaker holds out the possibility of some ''perfect ceremony of love's rite." Such a perfect, almost sacramental declaration of love can be seen as the principal aim of lyric verse (sonnet 23).
Finally, in the most popular and frequently cited of the sonnets, the poet seems to attain his goal, declaring the changeless durability of "the
 
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marriage of true minds" (sonnet 116). These articles of romantic faith are still undermined by the depravity of the objects of desire, both of whom prove false. Even more unsettling is the unreliability of a poetic persona whose "perjured eye" (sonnet 152) distorts everything, allowing "no correspondence with true sight" (sonnet 148). Shakespeare's final sonnets raise anew the doubts Sidney barely allayed in his
Defence
and revived in
Astrophil and Stella
. Poetry's links to emotion, which Sidney saw as a force for the good, here become a source of distortion and self-deception.
Many readers regard Shakespeare's
Sonnets
as the reflection of a terminal crisis of lyric poetry, and certainly that impression is reinforced by their arrival in print at the end of the sonnet vogue. Joel Fineman argues in
Shakespeare's Perjured Eye
that the
Sonnets
initiate a kind seismic shift in consciousnessfrom a visionary poetry of praise, transparency, and presence to a rhetorical poetry of disillusion, opacity, and irony. Fineman also sees them as the source of the modern conception of poetry, fashioning a self that is eccentric, alienated, inaccessibly inward, and hopelessly cut off from object relations. Like Hamlet, this new lyric protagonist proudly declares that I have that within which passes show," while sadly admitting that "Man delights not menor woman neither." This is a persuasive and powerful argument, but the notion of a radical break in the lyric style is overstated.
A review of the development of the English lyric shows that Shakespeare's
Sonnets
simply intensify many of the conflicts inherent in the lyric mode. The beloved proves unworthy of devotion, but the Tudor lyric has incorporated such disappointments from its beginnings. The lover deceives himself and others, but complicity in deception and betrayal is again a familiar story. Finally, the slippery ironies of the lyric persona, which is usually a consciously assumed role, are often acknowledged in this poetry, and its paradoxical blend of passionate intensity and impersonality are constant and familiar features. The case for a dramatic departure from past traditions by Shakespeare or the Metaphysicals depends in part on the older view of the lyric as sweetly immediate and transparently simple.
Shakespeare's plays include a number of more traditional lyrics sung in performance, and these songs present an intriguing contrast to his sonnetssince many evoke the golden world conventionally associated with the lyric. His romantic comedies are, like John Lyly's plays for the choristers of the Chapel Royal, almost musical comedies in their com-
 
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bination of song and drama.
Twelfth Night
is suffused with music from the startthe duke asks the musicians presumably on stage to continue playing until his emotions surfeit on their own excess: "If music be the food of love, play on. . . .." Feste, the most musical of Shakespeare's clowns, sings several pieces, including "O mistress mine"a piece resembling airs by the contemporary composers Thomas Morley, William Byrd, and Thomas Campion.
The song's auditors are a drunken, aged playboy, Sir Toby Belch, and his feeble dupe, Sir Andrew Aguecheek, whose futile suit of the Countess Olivia is being encouraged by Sir Toby. Thus the song's poignant theme of carpe diem"Then come kiss me sweet and twenty, / Youth's a stuff will not endure" (2.3.48-49)is rendered somewhat ironic, if not ridiculous. Here as elsewhere in Shakespeare's plays the conventional sentiments of his lyric songs are profoundly complicated by the dramatic circumstances of their performance. Similarly, Feste's lament for unrequited love"I am slain by a fair cruel maid"; (2.4.50-65)mocks the extravagantly melancholy pose of Duke Orsino. Finally, the play ends with the duke's enigmatic song of the passage from childhood to "man's estate" and the old age of the world.
In
As You Like It
the singer Amiens welcomes anyone who wishes to escape the afflictions of the "working-day world" to join the banished duke and his merry company in the forest of Arden "under the greenwood tree," where each shall find "No enemy / But winter and rough weather" (2.5.18). The song is in turn mocked by Jaques, who ''can suck melancholy out of a song, as a weasel sucks eggs" and whose own verses provide a tart counterpoint to the song's cheerful pastoral images. Amiens's next song draws a harsher distinction between the true companionship found in the greenwood and the hypocrisy that prevails at court and elsewhere:
Most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly
   Then heigh-ho, the holly,
   This life is most jolly.                    (2.7.181-183)
Similarly, "It was a lover and his lass, / With a hey and a ho and a hey nonino"with its nonsense syllables and trite rhyme wordscan be seen as a kind of parody of conventional ballads, and it too is derided by the clown Touchstone (5.3.1437). Nevertheless, this perennially popular song sets the stage for the marriage of the "country copulatives" and the happy ending of the last act. Both the play and its hero-

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