Literature and Popular Culture in Early Modern England

Andrew Hadfield, Matthew Dimmock

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780754665809
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351922005
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

1978 witnessed the publication of Peter Burke's groundbreaking study Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe. Now in its third edition this remarkable book has for thirty years set the benchmark for cultural historians with its wide ranging and imaginative exploration of early modern European popular culture. In order to celebrate this achievement, and to explore the ways in which perceptions of popular culture have changed in the intervening years a group of leading scholars are brought together in this new volume to examine Burke's thesis in relation to England. Adopting an appropriately interdisciplinary approach, the collection offers an unprecedented survey of the field of popular culture in early modern England as it currently stands, bringing together scholars at the forefront of developments in an expanding area. Taking as its starting point Burke's argument that popular culture was everyone's culture, distinguishing it from high culture, which only a restricted social group could access, it explores an intriguing variety of sources to discover whether this was in fact the case in early modern England. It further explores the meaning and significance of the term 'popular culture' when applied to the early modern period: how did people distinguish between high and low culture - could they in fact do so? Concluded by an Afterword by Peter Burke, the volume provides a vivid sense of the range and significance of early modern popular culture and the difficulties involved in defining and studying it.

PART I
Defining Early Modern English Popular Culture

Chapter 1
‘Popular Culture’: A Category for Analysis?

Sue Wiseman

‘God had removed me that I might not tempt him to look back upon this world as a flaming Sodom.’¹ So wrote Lucy Hutchinson after her husband, Colonel John Hutchinson, died in prison in the rotting Sandown Castle in Kent while she was far away. Bereft, tortured by memories, herself in a kind of Limbo, Lucy Hutchinson thinks of two stories in tandem. If she evokes Lot’s wife looking back on Sodom, then that story is tangled and hybridised, mixed in a profound way with that other story in which the man looks back – Orpheus and Eurydice. As Golding puts it in his version of Book 10 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, ‘when Orphey did begin/To doubt him lest she followed not; and through an eager love,/Desirous to see her, he his eyes did backward move.’²

A number of factors impact on how we might read this complex little text. It exists in manuscript; it was generated by an elite woman; it blends a key and widely shared cultural resource (the Bible or a Bible story) with the story of Orpheus which is of a more enigmatic cultural location and purchase. It articulates the fixing experience of imprisonment and may suggest that this particular death is liberating and transforming for the subject even as it leaves the writer frozen in grief. The stories on which it draws complicate the positioning of the sex of the beloved and the one left behind. He is transfigured and she is transfixed, but the same event transforms each. As with so many pieces of textual evidence from seventeenthcentury England, the methods and categories hinted at by the term ‘popular culture’ seem both appropriate and unhelpful in relation to such a text. Both the product of an aristocratic woman and the repository of a blending of classical and biblical stories, the mixed nature of these words invites us to consider its relationship to different aspects of culture and the way, in its combining of classical and Christian stories, that it foregrounds the complexity of the relationship of distinct material. What can ‘popular culture’ as an analytical category mean, both for Hutchinson’s brief comment and more widely?

In what follows texts of transformation are used as examples in an argument that is primarily concerned with the relationship between cultural evidence and the approaches and assumptions to such evidence. Responding to the mixed nature of early modern textual evidence this essay returns to the category of ‘popular culture’. It examines three areas – the nature of materials that might or might not be grouped as ‘popular’ and how those tend to have been treated (thus it explores what might be called the differential reflexes of scholarly practices); the contrasting influential interventions in shaping approaches to this material; and the ways in which some contemporary writings that discuss the models of ‘popular culture’ indicate a response to those formulations.

Reading Transformations: Ovid and the Cats

Transformation, though limited and shaped by divine power, was strongly imagined in Renaissance England. One text to which Hutchinson’s brief comment seems to be responding is Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Translators of Ovid were forced to explore the implications of the transition of material from Latin into English, from one sphere of culture to another. The cultural exchanges implied by its Englishing were both linguistic and also involved an unavoidable challenge to central cultural assumptions about change. In 1567 Arthur Golding, publishing his 15-book version of the Metamorphoses, translated Ovid’s opening as ‘Of shapes transformed to bodies strange I purpose to entreat/Ye gods, vouchsafe (for you are they that wrought this wondrous feat)/To further this mine enterprise’ (Golding, Book I, ll. 1–3). By 1622 Sandys had returned to Ovid and produced a different version:

Of bodies chang’d to other shapes I sing,

Assist, you Gods (from you these changes spring)

And, from the Worlds first fabrick to these times,

Deduce my never-discontinued Rhymes.

In translating Ovid into English both poets find themselves committed to the pagan understanding of transformation. The opening lines of Ovid’s poem inescapably foreground bodily transformation as ordained by the pagan Gods whose aid the poet asks in the enterprise. Golding and Sandys’s readers lived in a world where a single Christian god was in charge of all the shapes of the universe. For all its resemblances to Ovid’s creation myth, the Christian creation story meant that claims to later transformations were highly controversial and brought into play the question of how to interpret ‘transformation’ in a world whose shapes were fixed by God and, in most theories, changed only by him. As we know, those readers and listeners who received Ovid’s translated poem also lived in a culture in which transformation within and outside the limits proposed by most theologians was imagined so regularly that it must be considered a major cultural resource. Indeed, mysteries of transformation were foundational Christian ceremonies – we can think of the eucharist and of baptism.³ But at the same time early modern thinkers imagined werewolves, possession and the formation of the human embryo in sympathy with the mother’s experience of animals, three distinct topics which suggest the permeation of the idea of transformation in the imaginative world of most people in early modern England, high and low born, rural and urban.

The Englished Ovid has generally been studied in terms of its cultural reception. A fair proportion of the huge critical industry on Ovid’s Metamorphoses is devoted to the ways in which Ovid’s text found its way into English minds and writings. Much of this – such as almost all the material debating the status of the Metamorphoses as an epic text in relation to Renaissance accounts of epic – assumes that it needs to be examined as a part of elite or even scholarly culture. Douglas Bush’s observation that Sandys’s version of Ovid’s opening, ‘Of bodies chang’d to other shapes I sing’, is more ‘in tune’ with Ovid’s highly valued text than Golding’s ‘Of shapes transformed to bodies strange’ until relatively recently expressed the ways in which the two translations have been interpreted by contemporary critics. However, the diverse cultural locations of the Metamorphoses in English have been more productively followed up in the important editorial work of Madeleine Forey, and by the careful literary and cultural locating of the text undertaken by scholars – including Raphael Lyne and Liz Oakley-Brown – who have recognised that the Metamorphoses entered English vernacular culture and texts with a powerful force not necessarily best located in relation to an ‘original’.⁴

If fidelity to the essence of Ovid’s text was not at the forefront of the minds of his translators, the question of reception certainly was. As Golding himself worries in his prefaces, the ‘wonderful exchange/Of gods, men, beasts and elements to sundry shapes right strange’ needs to be understood as distinct from the Christian soul as designated in the three soul model. The soul removing in Pythagorean fashion ‘out of men/To birds and beasts both wild and tame’ (‘To the’ ll.27–8) is ‘not to be understood of that same soul whereby/We are endued with reason and discretion from on high’. As critics have repeatedly noticed, in two distinct introductions Golding sought to accommodate the power of transformation offered by Ovid’s stories to an English and Christian context.⁵ Golding articulated these concerns in terms of his audience, distinguishing Latinate and ordinary readers, who he addressed as follows:

I would not wish the simple sort offended for to be

When in this book the heathen names of feigned gods they see.

The true and everlasting gods the paynims did not know,

Which caused them the name of gods on creatures to bestow.

Golding, communicating with this reader and partly, it seems, with readers who might be worried about other readers’ corruptibility, writes: ‘whoso doth attempt the poets’ works to read/Must bring with him a staid head and judgement to proceed’ (139–40). However, if the readers behave like the industrious bee they will find themselves ‘conveying home’ knowledge which they ‘may put to wholesome use’. Golding makes the issue of transformation productive for the reader through a nuanced understanding of its relationship to Christian culture. The interaction of human souls and animal bodies is the key issue that enables the paratextual material of his translation to assert its Christian orthodoxy and so forestall potential accusations concerning the prioritisation of classical ideas over Christian.

If we look at Golding’s translation as a text of transformation it is clearly concerned to target and complicate the unruly power of the ideas it brings alive – at the same time as it is sharply aware of their potential as imaginative resources. Simultaneously, it becomes clear that what some critics see as an eccentric mediation of Ovid can also be seen as the establishment of a vocabulary of and iconography of transformation which, as Michael Bull has argued for the visual arts, was utilised not necessarily in an ‘Ovidian’ way but in ways that made immediate sense to that culture.⁶

It seems that readers encountered transformations directly in Golding’s or Sandys’s Metamorphoses, but that they might also have known them from more distant sources. As Liz Oakley-Brown notes, women embroidered Ovidian stories at Hardwick.⁷ We find Orpheus’ taming of the animals decorating an aristocratic fireplace in Derbyshire. We find a story from Ovid returned to its source as the audience observes Lavinia rummaging bloodily through the book in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. They are invited to know the story as both a familiar Ovidian motif and an immediate and compelling part of the drama before them. Such evidence suggests that transformations did come to inhabit strains of culture which, arguably, Ovid never reached. Given that examples can be multiplied in this way, perhaps we can ask to what extent we can, even should, understand at least some of the Ovidian stories of transformation as ‘popular culture’? However, as well as teasing out specific cultural locations for Ovidian stories, we need to see them in the context of overall texts of transformation. What other kinds of transformations might readers and non-reading users have known?

One example of a text of transformation which seems to come from a very different cultural location is offered by William Cotton, Bishop of Exeter in 1600:

A dangerous increase of Papists about the coasts and country. Profane Atheists: A matter very common to dispute whether there be a God or not. A slender and loose observation of the Sabbath and holy days. Many hundred stand wilfully excommunicate, not caring for their absolution or for coming to church. There was ridiculous and profane marriage of a goose and a gander. A cat having an apron, and a partlet, brought to the church to be baptised. A horse head at Launceston lately lapped in a mantle and brought to the church for baptism, and afterwards the bell told and rung out for the death of this head. A dead horse brought to the communion table with its feet spread upon it, as being prepared to receive the Sacrament. A young youth of 16 years baptised by the name of Gurlypott, at which time the font was overthrown. Libels made upon every sermon almost in every town.

After much more Cotton ends with the plea – ‘These and many such abuses cannot be redressed by a due course of law’ and begs to be sent ‘an Ecclesiastical Commission’.⁸ Cotton is using the symbolic substitution of animals for humans to imply that radical challenges to the most fundamental tenets were taking place in his diocese. His comments begin with the ‘dangerous increase of Papists’, but go on to note ‘A matter very common to dispute whether there be a God or not.’ We have two kinds of transformation at play here. First, the sacred transformation of the sacraments and ceremonies of the church, and second – not strictly transformation but substitution – the use of animals where humans should be. The animal parodies are understood by Cotton as assaults on the church at the key points of ‘absolution’, ‘marriage’, ‘baptism’ and ‘the Sacrament’.

Cotton was not alone in knowing, seeing, imagining or inventing animal parodies. In fact there are numerous accounts of cat baptisms. If we expand the category to include the baptism of other animals the incidents become even more numerous, and if we expand it again to include further rituals then the grouping becomes larger still. What could these incidents or descriptions mean and what approaches and materials are likely to tell us more about them? Insofar as this material has been studie...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Defining Early Modern English Popular Culture
• Part II Varieties of Popular Culture
• Afterword
• Index