John Donne's Performances

Sermons, poems, Letters and devotions

Margret Fetzer

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780719095610
  9780719083440
• eBook ISBN:
  9781847797865
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Poetry
• Index: Literature

Ever since their rediscovery in the 1920s, John Donne's writings have been praised for their energy, vigour and drama – yet so far, no attempt has been made to approach and define systematically these major characteristics of his work.

Drawing on J. L. Austin's speech act theory, Margret Fetzer's comparative reading of Donne's poetry and prose eschews questions of personal or religious sincerity and instead recreates an image of John Donne as a man of many performances. No matter if engaged in the writing of a sermon or a piece of erotic poetry, Donne placed enormous trust in what words could do. Questions as to how saying something may actually bring about that very thing, or how playing the part of someone else affects an actor's identity, are central to Donne's oeuvre – and moreover highly relevant in the cultural and theological contexts of the early modern period in general.

In treating both canonical and lesser known Donne texts, John Donne's Performances hopes to make a significant contribution not only to Donne criticism and research into early modern culture: by using concepts of performance and performativity as its major theoretical backdrop, it aims to establish an interdisciplinary link with the field of performance studies.

1
Pulpit performances – Sermons

We pray you in Christ’s stead, be ye reconciled to God. (2 Cor. 5.20)

This short verse epitomises the major purpose of Donne’s sermons. Humankind’s reconciliation with God is their central concern. There were two major channels through which such a conversion might be achieved: the sermon and the Eucharist. Despite their interrelatedness, homiletic and ritual elements of the early modern English service did not readily coexist – which is why an analysis of how Donne’s sermons combine homiletics with ritual starts off my discussion of his pulpit performances.

Moreover, the above quotation places Christ in a humble position, picturing him, together with the speaker of this verse, in the act of praying. Donne’s sermon on this text observes Christ acting here ‘as though God needed us, to intreat us to be reconciled to him’, ‘he proceeds with man, as though man might be of some use to him, and with whom it were fit for him to hold good correspondence’ (X, 5, 120). The relationship between God and humankind is imagined as one of mutuality, even interdependence, where giver and recipient, God and each man or woman, can hardly be distinguished – just as in the Bible, where often ‘the phrase is such in doing a curtesie, as though the receiver had done it, in accepting it’ (X, 5, 119). Such a view of the relationship between God and the self proves typical of Donne’s sermons.

If God and the self are mutually dependent on one another, in that salvation cannot take place unless one first accepts God’s offer of reconciliation by consenting to be converted to him, and if the preacher’s task is to encourage such consent in his hearers, this relationship corresponds to that between preacher and listener. The divisio of Donne’s sermon on this text announces how its focus will be on the preacher as God’s intermediary: ‘our parts will be three: Our Office towards you; yours towards us; and the Negotiation it self, Reconciliation to God […] for, in the two first (besides the matter) there are two kinds of persons, we and you, The Priest and the People (we pray you.) And in the last there are two kinds of persons too, you and God; Be ye reconciled to God’ (X, 5, 120).¹

The sermon constitutes a theatrical re-enactment of the Biblical word, especially concerning the ways in which it encourages listeners to imagine themselves in the examples offered by the preacher. The last part of this chapter focuses on the theatrical structures inherent to Donne’s sermons – as, for example, when the preacher encourages his listeners to re-enact the Biblical script and take St Paul’s part in his dialogue with the blinding light of Christ by responding to Christ’s question ‘Cur me?’ with the words of the Apostle: ‘Answer this question, with Sauls answer to this question, by another question, Domine quid me vis facere? Lord what wilt thou have me do?’ (VI, 10, 222). As dramatic (re-) enactments, Donne’s sermons strongly depend on the rhetorical concepts of enargia and energia, in order to make present that which is otherwise non-presentable, the divine. What is particular to Donne’s preaching is the way in which it adapts the communicative system of the theatre to the genre of the sermon in order to re-enact Christ’s sacrifice and resurrection.

Whenever Donne preached, he would have been aware of that other institution which competed with him for listeners – the theatre (Lake/Questier, 2002: 430; Michael O’Connell, 1985: 306). There were two ways of meeting this challenge: the most straightforward was to use the pulpit for a thorough denunciation of the stage as the epitome of heresy and ungodliness, in order to dissuade listeners from going anywhere near a theatre at any time, let alone on a church day. The other possible response was to seize upon the potential of dramatic communication in order to equal or even outdo the theatre on its own terms. Although the unknown author of the 1625 ‘short treatise against stage plays’ does not share this view, he concedes that some playgoers ‘will say, that sometimes the sacred Scripture is or may be acted by players on the stage, and thereby a man may learne more then at a sermon’ (Davison, 1972: 11; Lake/Questier, 2002: 447). In his youth, Donne himself had been ‘a great frequenter of plays’, and not only ‘a great visitor of ladies’ (Baker, 1641: 156).² Although no evidence exists as to whether Donne and Shakespeare ever met, Bald suspects that Marlowe may have ‘made a deeper impression on Donne than any other English contemporary’ (Bald, 1970: 47). Just as Donne did not leave behind his erotic passions when approaching God in his divine poetry, so did he retain his predilection for the theatrical mode in his preaching. Although Puritans denounced the theatre for the way it manipulated the senses of its audiences, its great potential in doing so did not go unnoticed (cf. P. W. White, 1993: 173). Preaching and stagecraft are closely linked, for ‘[a]t the center of Protestant worship stands an essentially dramatic performance: the sermon’ (Döring, 2005: 20). The relatedness of Donne’s sermons to the theatre was a consequence of the liturgical shifts that were still taking place in the aftermath of the Reformation: ‘the Reformation insistence on the centrality of the spoken word reintroduced an element of theater into the liturgy – albeit theater of a different order from the theatricality of which the medieval liturgy stood accused’ (Crockett, 1995: 6).

The preacher’s persona functions ‘in Christ’s stead’, meaning that he is importantly associated with Jesus, who was both God and man. Christ’s passion features significantly here and is not limited to the preacher alone, as listeners are encouraged to reenact his suffering. But despite the preacher’s reliance on Biblical example, there are some instances where the inherent risks of acting by precedent come to the surface and will not be contained, as will be illustrated by a detailed analysis of two individual sermons which is to conclude this chapter.

Although I shall be quoting from a broad variety of Donne’s sermons, this chapter draws on three sermons in particular: first, I have chosen the above-mentioned sermon on the conversion of St Paul (Acts 9.4), since this event was of evident interest to the convert John Donne. It is one of four sermons he preached, in various years, on the Conversion of St Paul at St Paul’s. In furthermore choosing an earlier sermon on the Psalms (Psalm 38.4 (Lincoln’s Inn, 1618)) and one on the Epistles, namely the one on 2 Corinthians 5.20 (St Paul’s, of unknown date), I have followed Donne’s own preference. He claims to favour those two Biblical books over all others ‘because they are Scriptures, written in such forms as I have been most accustomed to; Saint Pauls being Letters, and Davids being Poems’ (II, 1, 49). What he does not mention is that the poetic style of the Psalms often resembles his own: the dramatic immediacy with which these texts confront their implied addressee (i.e. God) and the dynamics with which they often move from an accusation of God to an avowal of his eternal trustworthiness is typical also of many ‘Holy Sonnets’, and it is probably no coincidence that Donne should have chosen Psalm 38 as the textual basis for a series of no fewer than six sermons at Lincoln’s Inn in 1618. Psalm 38 is a grand display of a sinner’s penance: ‘For mine iniquities are gone over mine Head: as a heavy burden they are too heavy for me. / My wounds stink and are corrupt because of my foolishness’ (Ps. 38, 4–5) – and this performance of iniquity, the speaker hopes, will be witnessed by God, so that he will eventually relent towards him: ‘For in thee, O LORD, do I hope: thou wilt hear, O Lord my God’ (Ps. 38, 15). Although the whole Psalm represents quite a thorough declaration of transgression, the speaker promises not to waver in this performance of penance, ‘[f]or I will declare mine iniquity; I will be sorry for my sin’ (Ps. 38, 18). The Epistles, on the other hand, probably aroused Donne’s interest not least because he liked to align himself with St Paul as a prominent preacher, and frequently he considers the Epistles as sermons in themselves.

Ritual performativity

In their introduction to Protestant preaching, Albrecht and Weber characterise Reformation theology fundamentally as a theology of homiletics, so much so that the sermon gradually came to surpass the relevance of the Eucharist, as its words increasingly acquired the status of sacrament (Albrecht/Weber, 2002a: 2; Targoff, 2008: 158). In England, even fairly close to the beginning of the Reformation, the sermon also gained in significance: ‘The Book of Common Prayer has from its first version in 1549 prescribed a dual ministry of word and sacrament’ (Carrithers, 1972: 10) – under different monarchs, one or other of these ministries was emphasised more (McCullough, 1998: 6). As a priest of the English Church under King James I, Donne appears to have ‘favoured communication over Communion’ (Ferrell, 1992: 63), and, clearly, the differences between the celebration of the Eucharist as an instance of ritual and the sermon as an act of performative language cannot be denied. In a sideswipe at Roman Catholic priests, the speaker of one sermon confesses that ‘whereas these men make man, and God too of bread, naturally wholly indisposed to any such change, for this power we confesse it is not in our Commission’, but, ‘for that power, which is to work upon you, to whom we are sent, we are defective in nothing’ (X, 5, 129). Since this sermon is explicitly concerned with the function of preaching, the ‘power’ referred to here is that of the pulpit.

In the following, I shall explore the differences between sermon and sacrament while at the same time drawing attention to the ways in which reformed homiletics echo the practices of ritual, how the English sermon’s ‘newly embodied word superseded the traditional sacraments, refiguring in the physical presence of the speaker the Word that had been incarnate in bread and wine’ (Crockett, 1995: 6; Whalen, 2002: 85; Webber, 1963: 133). ‘[R]itual is a distinctive way in which an action, probably any action, may be performed’ (Humphrey/Laidlaw, 1994: 3; Catherine Bell, 1992: 7). This implies that preaching may also be subject to processes of ritualisation, especially if we assume that an action’s being ‘intrinsically directed’ marks the ‘difference between ritualized and unritualized action’ (Humphrey/Laidlaw, 1994: 4). Sermons are directed in that they are minutely planned and aim at having some particular effect on their hearers who are consequently implicated in the ritual process. As a genre, the sermon is always audience-oriented or even audience-dependent and may be regarded as an instance of performance-centred rather than liturgy-centred ritual such as the Eucharist (Humphrey/Laidlaw, 1994: 8).

These two types of ritual differ further in that the latter is concerned with ‘getting it right’ whereas the former’s efficacy rather depends on ‘making it work’ by whichever strategy is viable. Performance-centred ritual relies much more on subjective and idiosyncratic convictions and is consequently far less rigorously ritualised than liturgy-centred acts such as the Eucharist (Humphrey/Laidlaw, 1994: 8–11). Nor is performance-centred ritual as much concerned with the search for a prototype (cf. Jonathan Smith, 1987: 103; Lukken, 2005: 55); whereas liturgy-centred ritual aims at as close a re-staging as possible of its founding moment, in the case of the Eucharist that of Christ’s last supper with his disciples,³ the sermon aims at making meaning present at the very moment of listening. This does not entail that the sermon would rid itself of ritualistic strategies such as ‘formality, fixity, and repetition’ (Catherine Bell, 1992: 91–2) – but it certainly employs them less rigorously (cf. Lukken, 2005: 66). Whereas ‘routinized’ liturgy-centred ritual underwent critical scrutiny during the Reformation, performance-centred ritual such as a sermon presupposed that each actor must submit to ‘“ritual commitment”, a particular stance with respect to his or her own action’ (Humphrey/Laidlaw, 1994: 12; 88).

No less than the distributor of bread and wine, whose words, before the Reformation, had been believed to effect the transubstantiation, was the preacher, too, expected ‘to do’, and not merely say, ‘things with words’, both to and together with the people before him. The sermon was to alter people’s lives, just as the consecrated host had always been (and still was) considered to have a conversional effect on those who received it. It would be wrong to assume that a preacher like Donne, although he attributed great significance to the sermon, would be negligent in the celebration of the Eucharist (cf. Dawson/Yachnin, 2001: 28). Nevertheless preachers ‘saw the end of their eloquence as nothing less than salvation’ (Crockett, 2000: 61), the salvation which was to be brought about by each congregation member’s individual conversion. As Donne himself puts it: ‘It hath alwaies beene the Lords way to glorifie himselfe in the conversion of Men, by the ministery of Men’ (VI, 10, 205). The traditional conclusion of each sermon – the word ‘Amen’ (from the Hebrew, meaning ‘So be it’/‘Truly’) – attests to the performative potential with which the sermon was believed to be endowed. The preacher was eager to exploit the sermon’s performative power, for example when he urges his listeners to dedicate themselves to Christ at the very moment of hearing him preach: ‘Yet if we have omitted our first early [i.e. the earliest occasion for converting ourselves to Christ], our youth, there is one early left for us; this minute; seek Christ early, now, now, as soon as his Spirit begins to shine upon your hearts’ (I, 5, 250; cf. Chuilleanáin, 1984: 198). Similarly, in Essays in Divinity, the speaker admonishes himself: ‘so, though this soul of mine, by which I partake thee, begin not now, yet let this minute, O God, this happy minute of thy visitation, be the beginning of her conversion’ (Essays 37). According to Pfister’s scale of performativity, the relevance of an audience together with the effect which an utterance is meant to have on it are typical markers of performativity (Pfister, 2001; Crockett, 1995: 8). Moreover, Donne’s sermons frequently employ questions and exclamations rather than statements, and make use not only of the third but also of the first and second person; and the ‘hic et nunc’ of their original performance context becomes obvious both in their argumentative urgency and the numerous dialogues they imagine. In repeatedly insisting on the individual’s conversion to God which must precede salvation, they focus much less on what is given than on that which is to happen, to be done, to be undergone and to be experienced: the current process matters more than the eventual product, which is why one may even think of conversion as a rite of passage, resembling baptism or marriage.

Most importantly, however, Donne’s sermons are performative because they perform what they are speaking of (Pfister, 2001: 302). As a preacher, Donne ‘does not reduce the sense from the verbal medium but lets the meaning of the sacred words realize itself’ (Chamberlin, 1976: 157). The ‘sacred words’ are, after all, already performative, and the preacher’s task consists in interpreting and translating the words and decrees of God as found in the Scriptures:

Our Regeneration is by his Word; that is, by faith, which comes by hearing; The seed is the word of God, sayes Christ himselfe; Even the seed of faith. Carry it higher, the Creation was by the word of God; Dixit, & facta sunt, God spoke, and all things were made. […] the second Person in the Trinity, was so much by the Word, as that he is the Word; Verbum caro, It was that Word, that was made Flesh. So that God, who cannot enter into bands to us, hath given us security enough; He hath given us his Word; His written Word, his Scriptures; His Essentiall Word, his Son. […] there was not onely a word, the Word, Christ himselfe, a Son of God in heaven, but a Voyce, the word uttered, and preached; Christ manifested in his Ordinance: He heard a voice’

(IV, 10, 216–17)

When acknowledging the performative potential of the Biblical word, the preacher is faced with a dilemma: performatives are in principle not translatable. Each sermon faces the threefold challenge of translating historical specificities of Christianity into a present reality, of realising eternal Christian truths in the here and now, and of making generalities applicable to each individual listener (Ueding, 1992–2005: 47). This task is much more complex than it sounds in Rom. 10.17, which comprises rather a prominent Biblical definition for preaching: ‘So then faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God’. The hearing necessitates the co-operation of those who are meant to hear, and the sermon herein echoes the sacrament of the Eucharist: ‘In the same way […] as each Christian participates in the activity which is the Lord’s Supper, taking and eating the Bread, receiving and drinking the Wine, so also in the audible Sacrament which is the sermon he actively hears and takes into himself the Word of God’ (Parker, 1992: 48; Targoff, 2008: 158) – the Christian, so to speak, has to swallow that for himself which the preacher brings before him, the ‘preacher should be heard by a communicant somewhat as he receives the Eucharist’ (Carrithers, 1972: 125; Johnson, 1999: 144). In the context of the Reformation, the sacred began to be less related to material objects than to transcendent, internal and, we may add, personally individualised experience (Pfister/von Rosador, 1991: 21). As Donne argues in a sermon on one of the Psalms:

But these Psalmes were made, not onely to vent David’s present holy passion, but to serve the Church of God, to the worlds end. And therefore, change the person, and we shall finde a whole quiver of arrows. Extend this Man, to all Mankind; carry Davids History up to Adams History, and consider us in that state, which wee inherit from him, and we shall see arrows fly about our ears, A Deo prosequente, the anger of God hanging over our heads, in a cloud of arrows; and à conscientia remordente, our own consciences shooting poisoned arrows of desperation into our souls (II, 1, 55)

How then do Donne’s sermons manage to ‘[e]xtend this Man, to all Mankind’, in order to turn the hearing of a transforming voice into a transformation of their audience (Esterhammer, 1994: xiiv)? If Donne’s translations of the Biblical performatives are to be crowned with success, their communicative strategies must owe something to the processes of ritual, for ‘ritual communication is not just an alternative way of expressing something but the expression of things that cannot be expressed in any other way’ (Catherine Bell, 1992: 111).

God and self

In turning to the sermons themselves, we should start by asking what exactly the primary interest is and what consequently has to be translated. Most basically, they engage in a characterisation of one’s relation to God and/or Christ, and they ponder how one’s conversion to God can be effected. Consider the following passage, which distances itself very literally from the Calvinist doctrine of the ‘irrestibility of grace’ (cf. Cummings, 2002: 389): ‘Christ promises to come to the door, and to knock at the door, and to stand at the door, and to enter if any man open; but he does not say, he will break open the door: it was not his pleasure to express such an earnestness, such an Irresistibility in his grace, so’ (I, 6, 255–6). Humankind has not yet opened its door to God and, unless it does so, it cannot be reconciled to him. As another sermon makes clear, the term reconciliation implies ‘a present enmity’ with God, as well as ‘a former friendship’ (X, 5, 134). Attention is drawn to the (dangerous) miracle of humankind being ‘allowed so high a sinne, as enmity with God’ (X, 5, 135). So appalled is the speaker at this idea that his metaphors begin to become slightly confused as he marvels at that ‘confounding honour, to be the enemy of God, of God who is not merely a multiplied Elephant, millions of Elephants multiplied into one, but a multiplied World’ (X, 5, 135).⁴ Yet there is hope, and the speak...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction – Beginning Donne
• 1 Pulpit performances – Sermons
• 2 Promethean and protean performances – Worldly poems
• 3 Passionate performances – Poems erotic and divine
• 4 Patronage performances – Letters
• 5 (Inter)Personal performances – Devotions
• Conclusion – Being Don(n)e
• Bibliography
• Index