The Columbia History of British Poetry (48 page)

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Page 202
Miller, Naomi J., and Gary Waller, eds.
Reading Mary Wroth: Representing Alternatives in Early Modern England
. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991.
Norbrook, David.
Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance
. London: Routledge, 1984.
Spearing, A. C..
Medieval to Renaissance in English Poetry
. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.
Waller, Gary F.
English Poetry of the Sixteenth Century
. London: Longmans, 1986.
 
Page 203
Spenser, Sidney, Jonson
Paul Alpers
Spenser, Sidney, and Jonson stand out, among their Eliza bethan and Jacobean peers, as poets of the English Renaissance. They not only contributed to the body of writings that made English poetry worthy of comparison with the Greek and Latin classicsthe ambition common to the modern vernacular literatures that partly constitute the Renaissance as a cultural movementthey consciously cultivated various ancient and modern genres that, once given a local habitation, entitled English poetry to be considered part of European literature. Spenser, regularly compared by contemporaries to Virgil, emulated the Roman poet's career by writing an inaugural book of eclogues (
The Shepheardes Calender
), which was the groundwork for a national epic,
The Faerie Queene
. Sidney, although not the first to write love sonnets in English, deserved to be called the "English Petrarch" as author of the first true sonnet sequence, that is, a collection that continuously represents a single love situation and uses it to evaluate love as emotional experience, social phenomenon, and cosmic reality. Jonson domesticated the verse letters of Horace, claimed to write the first true epigrams in English (in imitation of the Roman poet Martial), and cast one of his greatest lyrics in the form of a Pindaric ode (another "first" in English).
Exact contemporaries and well acquainted, although not social equals, Spenser and Sidney must have regarded each other as collaborators in establishing the authority of English poetry. But Jonsonwhose most famous remark about Spenser is that "in affecting the
 
Page 204
ancients [he] writ no language"has often been considered their antagonist. The generational difference between them corresponds to a difference in historical and cultural circumstances.
Whereas Sidney and Spenser were Elizabethans (in the fullest sense, since their careers in several ways involved the queen herself), Jonson was a Jacobean writer: he was the main writer of court masques for James I, and, more broadly, his works reflect the world, both city and court, of early seventeenth-century London. Moreover, he was a man of the theater, where his greatest and most distinctive achievements were comedies. These, unlike Shakespeare's, bore out the traditional idea of stage comedy as a realistic, urban form. Although, like Sidney and Spenser, Jonson modeled his poems on traditional types of European poetry, they were distinctly different types. Where Spenser and Sidney emulated the epic and pastoral, among ancient genres, and the grander forms of the Italian love lyric (canzones, hymns, sonnet sequences), Jonson eschewed the love-centered forms of modern lyric and imitated the ironic and realistic types of classical poetry, like epigrams and epistles.
How do these differences manifest themselves in actual poems? For a useful comparison, we do not want the extremes of, say, idealizing in Spenser or Sidney and satiric coarseness in Jonson. The following two short poems by Sidney and Jonson seem genuinely comparable. Each takes as its point of departurewhat the Renaissance would call its "invention," or seed ideathe correction of a cliché about love.
Not at first sight, nor with a dribbed shot
Love gave the wound, which while I breathe will bleed:
But known worth did in mine of time proceed,
Till by degrees it had full conquest got.
I saw and liked, I liked but loved not,
I loved, but straight did not what Love decreed:
At length to Love's decrees, I forced, agreed,
Yet with repining at so partial lot.
Now even that footstep of lost liberty
Is gone, and now like slave-born Muscovite,
I call it praise to suffer tyranny.
And now employ the remnant of my wit,
To make my selfe believe that all is well,
While with a feeling skill I paint my hell.
                                               (Astrophel and Stella, 2)
 
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I now think Love is rather  deaf than blind,
   For else it could not be
           That she
Whom I adore so much should so slight me,
   And cast my love behind;
I'm sure my language to her was as sweet,
       And every close did meet
       In sentence of as subtle feet,
           As hath the youngest he
   That sits in shadow of Apollo's tree.
Oh, but my conscious fears
   That fly my thoughts between,
   Tell me that she hath seen
   My hundreds of grey hairs,
   Told seven-and-forty years,
   Read so much waste, as she cannot embrace
   My mountain belly, and my rocky face;
And all these through her eyes have stopped her ears.
                                  ("My Picture Left in Scotland")
These poems have a good deal in common. In denying that he fell in love at first sight (as Petrarch had fallen in love with Laura), Sidney/Astrophel makes love a social experience, a matter of the powerful effect of knowing Stella in the world and circumstances of which
Astrophel and Stella
often gives a quite circumstantial account. This social anchoring of Petrarchan ideality underlies what the two poems share: each employs witin both our sense and the larger sense (reason, judgment) it had in early modern Englishto understand the dilemmas and painfulness of love. Just as each poem begins with a denial of a love cliché, so each ends wittily, with a striking turn in the final line.
Nevertheless, there is a fundamental difference between the poems, of which Jonson's reference to his physical appearance is only the most striking symptom. Despite his initial move Sidney's poetizing has the effect of recuperating the mythology of Petrarchan love. The brilliant handling, in the second quatrain, of the rhetorical figure known as
gradatio
not only plays out the idea of falling in love "by degrees," but with deeper wit recasts "what Love decreed," which may simply be a metaphor for the strength of one's feelings, as "at length to Love's decrees," where the emotion, fully personified, is reestablished as a deity. The revived figure of Love the tyrant underlies the concluding

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