Herrick, Fanshawe and the Politics of Intertextuality

Classical Literature and Seventeenth-Century Royalism

Syrithe Pugh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780754656142
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317122074
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Royalist polemic and a sophisticated use of classical allusion are at the heart of the two 1648 volumes which are the focus of this study, yet there are striking differences in their politics and in the ways they represent their relation to poetry of the past. Pugh's study of these brilliant but neglected poets brings nuance to our understanding of literary royalism, and considers the interconnections between politics and poetics. Through a series of detailed close readings revealing the complex and nuanced significance of classical allusion in individual poems, together with an historically informed consideration of the polemical force of both publishing acts, Pugh aligns the two poets with competing factions within the royalist camp. These political differences, she argues, are reflected not only in the idea of monarchy explicitly articulated in their poetry, but also in the distinctive theories of intertextuality foregrounded in each volume, Herrick's absolutism going hand-in -hand with his peculiarly transcendental image of poetic imitation as an immortal symposium, Fanshawe's constitutionalism with a distinctly humanist approach. Offering a new argument for the unity of Herrick's vast collection Hesperides, and making a case for the rehabilitation of Richard Fanshawe, this engaging book will also be of wider interest to anyone concerned with politics in seventeenth-century literature or with classical reception.

PART I
Ovid in the Hesperides: Herrick’s Politics of Allusion

Introduction to Part I

Herrick’s Hesperides opens and closes with lines from Ovid.1 On the title page appears an assertion of the immortality of poetry, slightly misquoted from Amores III.ix, Ovid’s elegy for Tibullus: ‘Effugient avidos carmina nostra rogos’ (‘our songs will escape the greedy funeral pyre’). The final poem,

To his Book’s end this last line he’d have plac’t,

Jocond his Muse was; but his Life was chast.

directly translates a line from Tristia II, Ovid’s letter to Augustus from exile: ‘vita verecunda est, Musa iocosa mea’ (Tr. II.354). The four poems immediately preceding this closing quotation are, moreover, calculated to evoke Ovidian endings. ‘The End of his Work’ (H-1126) is a translation of the final couplet of Book I of the Ars amatoria, ‘To Crown it’ (H-1127) a translation of the penultimate couplet of the Remedia amoris. ‘On Himselfe’ (H-1128),

The worke is done: young men, and maidens set

Upon my curles the Mirtle Coronet,

Washt with sweet ointments,

closely imitates the conclusion to Book II of the Ars,

finis adest operi: palmam date, grata iuventus,

sertaque odoratae myrtea ferte comae.

[‘The end of the work is here: give me the palm, grateful young people, and bring garlands of myrtle for my perfumed hair’, Ars II.733–4].

‘The Pillar of Fame’ (H-1129), meanwhile,

Fames pillar here, at last, we set,

Out-during Marble, Brasse, or Jet,

Charm’d and enchanted so,

As to withstand the blow

Of overthrow:

Nor shall the seas,

Or OUTRAGES

Of storms orebear

What we up-rear,

Tho Kingdoms fal,

This pillar never shall

Decline or waste at all;

But stand for ever by his owne

Firme and well fixt foundation

imitates the famous conclusion to the Metamorphoses,

iamque opus exegi, quod nec Iovis ira nec ignis

nec poterit ferrum nec edax abolere vetustas …

perque omnia saecula fama,

siquid habent veri vatum praesagia, vivam

[‘And now I have finished my work, which neither Jove’s anger, nor fire, nor the sword, nor devouring age can ever destroy … and through all the ages, if the predictions of prophets have any truth, I shall live in fame’, Met. XV.871–2, 878–9]

with shades of the final poem of Book I of the Amores,

ergo, cum silices, cum dens patientis aratri

depereant aevo, carmina morte carent.

cedant carminibus reges regumque triumphi …

vilia miretur vulgus; mihi flavus Apollo

pocula Castalia plena ministret aqua,

sustineamque coma metuentem frigora myrtum …

ergo etiam cum me supremus adederit ignis,

vivam, parsque mei multa superstes erit

[‘So, though hard stones, though the tooth of the enduring plough are ruined by time, songs know no death. Let kings and the triumphs of kings yield place to song … Let the vulgar gawp at base things: for me let golden-haired Apollo pour cups full of the Castalian waters, and may I bear on my locks the myrtle which fears the cold … I, too, when the last fire has consumed me, shall live, and the greater part of me will survive’, Am. I.xv.31–3, 35–7, 41–2]

and of the final poem of the Tristia,

Quanta tibi dederim nostris monumenta libellis,

o mihi me coniunx carior, ipsa vides …

dumque legar, mecum pariter tua fama legetur,

nec potes in maestos omnis abire rogos

[‘You see yourself what a monument I have given to you in my books, oh wife, dearer to me than myself … while I am read, your fame will be read together with me, and you cannot entirely vanish into the sad funeral pyre’, Tr. V.xiv].

As far as allusion to and imitation of Ovid in the Hesperides goes, these instances are only the tip of the iceberg. I single them out for mention here because their prominent position, framing the Hesperides (if we ignore the appended Noble Numbers with its separate title-page), suggests a deliberate act of self-presentation: the Ovidianism of the collection is foregrounded as partly constituting its identity, and therefore as something of which interpretation must take account.

The frontispiece (see Figure 1) reinforces this impression. Before a landscape which contains a rearing Pegasus on Helicon, the springing Hippocrene, and a ring of dancing Cupids (or amores) stands an impressive bust of the author, towards which two other amores fly bearing garlands of roses. This bust has two striking peculiarities: firstly its immense nose (indeed, as if to draw attention to this, one of the amores seems to be about to hang his rose garland over it), and secondly that despite its marmoreal and sculpted appearance it is endowed with luxuriant dark curling hair and a moustache. The nose I take as Herrick’s jocular self-presentation as another Ovidius Naso, about whose cognomen (naso = Lat. ‘nose’) Shakespeare’s Holofernes puns ‘Why, indeed, Naso but for smelling out the odoriferous flowers of fancy?’ (Love’s Labours Lost IV.ii). Herrick makes a similar pun in ‘To live merrily, and to trust to Good Verses’ (H-201), but he and Holofernes are only making explicit a joke implied by Ovid himself in the Fasti, when he refers to himself by his cognomen in prayer to the goddess Flora, whose breath smells of roses, as she vanishes after their interview:

Figure 1 Frontispiece engraving from Robert Herrick, Hesperides (1648) (British Library G.11495 ©The British Library Board. All Rights Reserved 08/01/2009)

mansit odor: posses scire fuisse deam.

floreat ut toto carmen Nasonis in aevo,

sparge, precor, donis pectora nostra tuis.

[‘Her fragrance remained: you might know the goddess had been there. That the song of Naso may flourish for all time, shower my breast with your gifts, I pray’, Fasti V.376–8].

The long locks, meanwhile, like the ‘Curles’ mentioned at the ends of two outspokenly Royalist poems, ‘The bad season makes the Poet sad’ (H-612.11) and ‘To Prince Charles upon his coming to Exeter’ (H-756.17), are a badge of allegiance to the King’s party and a mark of differentiation from the asceticism of the Puritans. The monumental classical poet is revivified, through this sprouting hair, as a defiantly partisan Herrick, whose engagement with his classical models will be inextricable from his lively engagement with contemporary politics.

Herrick’s political engagement with his turbulent times has received much valuable comment in recent years, but the role of the Hesperides’ oft-noted and pervasive allusiveness within its political programme has escaped attention. Treatment of Herrick’s classical allusion and imitation seems influenced by some idea that the classicizing habit necessarily tends toward that turn away from the ‘troubled age’ into a ‘timeless Arcadia’ of poetry which used to be supposed characteristic of him – that if history enters this Arcadia after all, it does so despite and not through its allusiveness.2 The most sustained account of Herrick’s classical allusions, Gordon Braden’s, is relentlessly attached to the idea of Herrick’s aesthetic retirement from the world. Finding in Herrick something ‘approaching … latter-day notions of “pure poetry”’, Braden strictly delimits the meaningfulness of his imitative practices, concluding that Herrick is ‘less interested in what his poets mean than in what they say’ and responds ‘primarily to moments of verbal grace rather than to structures of meaning’.3 For the most part this assumption of a cherry-picking approach to the classics on Herrick’s part endorses an old-fashioned Quellenforschung-type critical approach which merely catalogues ‘borrowings’, and rules out more intensive and systematic intertextual study (‘Source hunting that brings context to bear can make Herrick seem rather shallow’, he warns).4 Where Braden allows Herrick a more continuous engagement with a particular poet, expressing a form of identification or analogy, he refuses to read it as an intentional and meaningful strategy. Herrick’s ‘special regard for Horace’, for instance, is due to their coincidental ‘congruence of situation’ as ‘two aging bachelors piddling around in their rustication, celebrating moments of pleasurable transiency’, whose allusions and imitations are alike devoid of meaning: ‘They are both songsters borrowing words to make their tunes visible.’5

What I shall argue here is that Herrick’s imitation of one classical author, Ovid, is systematic, strategic and meaningful, foregrounded as an act of self-presentation which functions as a guide to the unifying polemical purpose of the collection.6 Ovid appeals to Herrick as a model precisely as a figure of politically oppositional poetics. The Hesperides invokes Ovid’s whole career from the perspective of its final phase, his exile: it is Herrick’s Amores, Ars amatoria, Metamorphoses, Fasti and exile poetry rolled into one. From Ovid’s amatory elegies, whose flouting of Augustus’ moral legislation was the ostensible cause of Ovid’s exile, he learns to publish erotic poetry in defiance of a puritanical regime, and the Amores furnishes him with what is only the first of many Ovidian assertions of the immortality and political invulnerability of poetry. From the Metamorphoses he derives his themes of universal mutability and of metamorphic etiology (explaining the current appearance of a thing through a tale of metamorphosis, as in ‘How Roses came red’), as well as numerous images and mythological references. From the Fasti he learns again of ‘Times trans-shifting’ (H-1.9), to tell of ‘the succession of months’ (H-70) and of stars and stellification (‘To the most illustrious … Charles’, H-226, H-336, H-351, H-516), and the conservative project of detailing religious rites and festivals, classical and contemporary, in what he calls his ‘eternall Calender’ (H-545.10; cp. H-444.6). Above all, he learns from Ovid’s exile poetry a deep strategy for articulating his oppositional political stance. Like the space of the Tristia and Ex Ponto, the space of the Hesperides is double. On one hand Herrick’s Devon, like Ovid’s Tomis, is portrayed as a harsh and uncivilized environment in which the poet suffers ‘exile’, his ‘discontents’ in a geographically marginalized position figuring his political disaffection and ideological distance from the centre of power. On the other, this site of Western rustication is transmuted into an idealized haven, in the metaphorical space of his poetry, for the old-fashioned values banished by the current regime, a mythological garden space transcending the reality of political disempowerment, in which the mind remains free and sustains an alternative virtual society by communing with like-minded friends and poets. As the Muse whisks Ovid away from the Hister to He...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I OVID IN THE HESPERIDES: HERRICK’S POLITICS OF ALLUSION
• PART II POETIC IMITATION AND LIMITED MONARCHY IN FANSHAWE’S 1648 IL PASTOR FIDO
• Appendix A Translation of Fanshawe’s Maius Lucanizans ‘May Lucanizing’ (or ‘Lucanizing More Greatly’)
• Bibliography
• Index locorum
• Index