Reading Green in Early Modern England

Leah Knight

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781409446644
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317071228
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Green in early modern England did not mean what it does today; but what did it mean? Unveiling various versions and interpretations of green, this book offers a cultural history of a color that illuminates the distinctive valences greenness possessed in early modern culture. While treating green as a panacea for anything from sore eyes to sick minds, early moderns also perceived verdure as responsive to their verse, sympathetic to their sufferings, and endowed with surprising powers of animation. Author Leah Knight explores the physical and figurative potentials of green as they were understood in Renaissance England, including some that foreshadow our paradoxical dependence on and sacrifice of the green world. Ranging across contexts from early modern optics and olfaction to horticulture and herbal health care, this study explores a host of human encounters with the green world: both the impressions we make upon it and those it leaves with us. The first two chapters consider the value placed on two ways of taking green into early modern bodies and minds-by seeing it and breathing it in-while the next two address the manipulation of greenery by Orphic poets and medicinal herbalists as well as grafters and graffiti artists. A final chapter suggests that early modern modes of treating green wounds might point toward a new kind of intertextual ecology of reading and writing. Reading Green in Early Modern England mines many pages from the period - not literally but tropically, metaphorically green - that cultivate a variety of unexpected meanings of green and the atmosphere and powers it exuded in the early modern world.

PART I
Impressed by Nature

Chapter 1
Seeing Green: Early Modern Optics on Gardens of Verse

Why is the sight recreated and refreshed by a greene colour, as the verse doth shew?¹

In The Key of Green, Bruce R. Smith establishes the extent to which many of the better-furnished houses in early modern England were practically camouflaged throughout their interiors—not to mention the evermore extensive parks, orchards, and gardens surrounding their walls—in representations of vegetation, resulting in what he presents as a pervasive ambience of green: “The sheer number of objects colored green, their expansive sizes, and their conspicuous positioning on walls, windows, table tops, and floors suggest an ambience in which green functioned as the matrix against which other colors stood out as isolated elements.” Relying primarily on an extensive inventory survey of Kentish households between 1560 and 1600 conducted by Catherine Richardson, Smith notes in particular that “soft furnishings”—cushions, carpets, wall hangings, bed linens—“were most usually described as green” and that, within these categories, “green subjects” were among the most popular of the patterns embroidered on them, so that some tapestries were even known as “verdures” for their vivid representation of such lush scenes.² Paula Henderson makes a similar point: “Textiles were among the most valued possessions and as in the medieval period could be simply of greenery and flowers, referred to in inventories as ‘verdures’, ‘parkwork’, ‘forestwork’ or ‘millefleurs.’.… Bed and table dressings were alive with embroidered flowers [and] garden scenes.”³ So much was the case, moreover, not only in the bedrooms of the elite, since even “commonplace bed hangings were woven with leaves, plants, and trees” such that on the whole “inhabitants of Renaissance England—at least those wealthy enough to possess a bed—did their sleeping, dreaming, copulating, and dying within green enclosures.”⁴ That fact may be peculiarly illuminating to the imaginative projections of contemporary unrequited lovers, whose agonies are frequently canvassed in literary works of the period in verdant terms, as gardens of verse enclosing bowers of bliss set within fanciful forests.

Later in this book I explore the surprisingly widespread phenomenon in Renaissance England of writings inscribed on trees by means of penknife carvings, not least by the scores of such unrequited lovers who did so much to enliven the Elizabethan lyric; but unlike the hard trunks of trees, the soft furnishings described above were not especially susceptible to calligraphic carving, in cases where inclement weather might have encouraged such poets to move their miseries and matching inscriptions indoors. The ubiquitous household upholstery and textile hangings might, however, quite easily participate in a related aspect of the early modern literary habit of writing on trees: that is, the suspending of pages from branches, such as when Orlando papers the forest of Arden in As You Like It. In that play, one scene opens with Orlando’s order to his compositions to take their places within a tree—“Hang there my verse, in witnesse of my loue”—while later in the same scene Celia reads aloud from one of his efforts which self-referentially emphasizes its own material format as a hanging as well as its arboreal habitat: “Tonges Ile hang on euerie tree, / that shall ciuill sayings shoe.”⁵ Such fantastic textual habits might be imaginable in Arden, but could they have any bearing on the swathes and swags of greenery that abounded throughout the early modern English domestic interior?

It turns out that some evidence of such a practice taking place offstage, and being practiced at home by one of the period’s least romantic of heroines, may be found in print in Edward Rainbowe’s eulogy for Anne Clifford, who was known variously throughout her long life (1590–1676) as the Countess of Pembroke, Montgomery, and Dorset, among a grab bag of lesser titles. Rainbowe, the Bishop of Carlisle and a personal acquaintance of Clifford, recalled the manner in which she chose to ornament “her Walls, her Bed, her Hangings, and Furniture” with sententiae from her reading and her recollections of it: “causing her Servants to write them in Papers, and her Maids to pin them up, that she, or they, in time of their dressing, or as occasion served, might remember, and make their descants upon them. So that, though she had not many Books in her Chamber, yet it was dressed up with the flowers of a Library.”⁶ Rainbowe’s final metaphorical phrase may allude to the tendency in the period to treat the choicest selections made from one’s reading in botanical terms, but it is also suggestive, in this context, of the material ambience of greenery in early modern domestic settings evoked by Smith and Henderson. Rainbowe specifies several sites where Clifford wanted to see these slips of paper grafted that correlate closely to those in which Smith locates a “high proportion of green stuff” in contemporary households.⁷ Leaves of paper may thus have mimicked the leaves stitched on trees in florally embroidered canopies or forest-work tapestries; similarly, Clifford’s paper “slips” in some ways echoed, especially if they were pinned to pictured trunks, the grafting shoots known by the same name.⁸ Like the many books from the period that identified themselves as gardens and groves, Clifford appears to have made the most of this mode of mediation between art and nature, human and non-human. Clifford thus generated an ideal habitat for herself as a Renaissance reader by surrounding herself with a physical environment of laudable texts; of more particular significance for this chapter, however, is the likelihood that she did not only surround herself with such texts but surrounded the texts in turn with greenness. The significance of seeing green, indoors and out, for Clifford and other early modern readers, is the subject of this chapter.

Through a Glass, Greenly

It is hard to spend any amount of time looking at early modern books without noticing how many are presented through their titular metaphors as well as their prefatory rhetoric as forms of vegetable material: as gardens, and orchards, or posies, and forests, to name only some among the many variations on this longstanding ligature between plants and texts. Among those who have asked, with an awareness of the lengthy classical tradition behind the topos of the book as garden, what allowed this particular commonplace of textual culture to remain so common for so long, answers have rarely attended to the common visual element among the vehicles in this cluster of figuration: that is, to greenness itself.⁹ One rationale for linking the green world to the literary one in early modern England may, however, be sought in ancient but enduring ophthalmological theories that were taken up in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as they connected both to the physiological processes and physical practices involved in reading. In such theories, the color green was, simply put, understood to be beneficial to gaze upon. More specifically, though, it was considered a relatively simple way in which to mitigate the difficulty and danger associated with reading—a task that had become more ubiquitous in early modern England, and so perhaps more noticeably arduous and deleterious to the eyesight of a broader segment of the population in the decades that followed the first appearance of printed works, which appeared predominantly during the first century of printing in England in a blurred and ink-blotted variety of notoriously headache-inducing Gothic typefaces. As more texts were made, bought, housed, and read in early modern England, two other developments helped, I argue, to impel people to read textuality itself through a filter of green: the coordinated rise of the domestic garden and the greater use of large panes of window glass throughout the sixteenth century and after. I will briefly outline both historical phenomena before investigating evidence from the period for the treatment of green as an optical restorative and thus for the perceived benefits of “reading green,” whether by gazing through green glass, on green plants, or simply on texts masquerading to match.

With a national culture of vernacular print production speeding into being toward the end of the sixteenth century in conjunction with what is often considered the English literary renaissance, more and more books began to find themselves located in early modern homes.¹⁰ As book ownership proliferated and home-owned collections prompted more frequent consultation, spaces dedicated or at least conceded to the housing of books also became more prevalent in the renewed domestic architecture of the period. Margaret Spufford links what is sometimes known as the Great Rebuilding to the sudden surge in popular poetry publication in the second half of the sixteenth century:

The appearance of a great number of popular songs of satisfying content and artistry at just this point in time, in the half-century or so after 1550, is a form of phenomenon a little like the phenomenon of the Great Rebuilding and is very likely related to it. The same upsurge of spending power in the countryside which permitted the yeomanry to rebuild their houses, also permitted them to send their sons to school and to free them from the labour force.… The appearance of popular literature just at this time is surely related to a rise in the availability of popular education and literacy and goes with an increase in schooling.¹¹

Whatever the cause, reading rooms of various kinds were incorporated into homes, not least in the novel form of the long galleries found in upper stories of the elite domestic spaces that were most likely to be associated with literate culture at this time. When such rooms for reading were designed, moreover, they tended to be set out in judicious proximity to nearby gardens, orchards, and green groves. Lena Cowen Orlin offers a compelling account of the intimate material and conceptual interrelations between gardens grown in the period and the galleries built “either running alongside them, providing private entrance to them, or offering overviews of them.” When such views were not available, substitutes (as Smith’s work, quoted above, confirms) were engineered indoors instead: “In the earliest long galleries, the principal decorations were painted cloths which brought nature scenes indoors.”¹² These were green rooms avant la lettre, setting the stage for green reading.

In such buildings the largest window openings tended to be set in the highest rooms in order to enable the best prospect of the hortulan scenes set out below and designed, in geometric units, to be appreciated from such a bird’s-eye view. As Francis Bacon put it, “Knots in Gardens shew best from an Vpper window, or Tarras.”¹³ This trend toward the functional interrelation of gardens and windows underlies a comment of William Lawson’s in his horticultural manual of 1618: “It is (no doubt) a comfort to them, to set open their Cazements into a most delicate Garden and Orchard, whereby they may not only see that, wherin they are so much delighted, but also to give fresh, sweet, and pleasant ayre to their Galleries and Chambers.”¹⁴ Similarly, in the garden designs envisioned in The English Husbandman in 1613 for “a plain countryman’s house,” Gervase Markham foregrounds the outlook offered by the latter on the former: “On the South side of your house, you shall plant your garden and orchard … for the prospect thereof to all your best rooms.”¹⁵ The horticulturalist John Parkinson thus only echoes a common period sentiment in his gardening book of 1629, Paradisi in Sole, on the subject of pleasure gardens: one should, he asserts, arrange to have

the fairest buildings of the house facing the garden … [so that] the buildings and roomes abutting thereon, shall haue … the beauti...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: First Impressions
• Part I Impressed by Nature
• Part II Impressing Nature
• Part III Lasting Impressions
• Conclusion: Easy Being? Green in Early Modern England
• Bibliography
• Index