Echoes of Desire

English Petrarchism and Its Counterdiscourses

Heather Dubrow

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781501722837
• eBook ISBN:
  9781501722851
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Echoes of Desire variously invokes and interrogates a number of historicist and feminist premises about Tudor and Stuart literature by examining the connections between the anti-Petrarchan tradition and mainstream Petrarchan poetry. It also addresses some of the broader implications of contemporary critical methodologies. Heather Dubrow offers an alternative to the two predominant models used in previous treatments of Petrarchism: the all-powerful poet and silenced mistress on the one hand and the poet as subservient patron on the other.

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION: LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLER

I

Author. In all world I thinke none lov’s but I.

Echo. None lov’s but I. Auth. Thou foolish tattling ghest,

In this thou telst a lie. Echo. thou telst a lie.

Author. Why? Love him selfe he lodgeth in my brest.

Echo. He lodgeth in my brest. Auth. I pine for griefe;

And yet I want reliefe. Echo. I want reliefe.

Author. No starre more faire then she whom I adore.

Echo. Then he, whom I adore. Auth. Herehence I burne

Stil more and more. Echo. I burne stil more and more.

Author. Love, let my heart returne. Echo. my heart, returne.

Auth. Is then the Saint, for whom thou makest mone,

And whom I love, but one? Echo. I love but one.

Author. O heav’ns, is ther in love no ende of ills?

Echo. In love no ende of ills. Auth. Thou pratling voyce,

Dwelst thou in th’ayre, or but in hollow hills.

Echo. In hollow hills. Auth. Cease of to vaunt thy choyse.

Echo. Cease of to vaunt thy choyse. Auth. I would replie,

But here for love I die. Echo. for love I die.

(Watson, Hecatompathia, 25)¹

Thomas Watson’s dialogue between a lover and Echo might well tempt literary critics themselves merely to echo the conventional wisdom about Petrarchan poetry. Though published in 1582, the poem is in many ways representative both of earlier Tudor sonnets and of those that appeared in the 1590s. It invokes the diction of Petrarchism when its author describes the mistress as a saint and compares her to a star. It confirms the ideology of Petrarchism when Echo assents, “In love no ende of ills” (14). And it not only exemplifies but also enacts the repetitiveness that is the fundamental praxis of Petrarchism, typically realized on levels ranging from diction to stanzaic structure to plot: if the speaker named Author is trapped in repeating sentiments from which he cannot escape, that process itself is replicated when Echo mimes his words. All these mirrorings are ironically played against the dialogue form, which normally implies their opposite, a give-and-take conversation.

Yet by turning the dyad of Petrarchan lover and mistress into a triad whose third member, Echo, in some sense rivals the lover (“he lodgeth in my brest. / Echo. He lodgeth in my brest” [4–5]), Watson directs our attention to an often neglected aspect of Petrarchism: the significance of competition, whether with other poets or other lovers. As we see, not only texts participating in that movement but also ones reacting against it are triangulated in this and many other ways. More to our purposes now, if in some respects Watson’s dialogue substantiates the conventional wisdom about Petrarchism, in others it challenges both that discourse and our critical perspectives on it. Certain passages in the lyric render this apparently straightforward Petrarchan poem anti-Petrarchan in at least the broadest senses of that contested and complex term. And the text calls into question as well many of the academic discourses that examine Petrarchism.

These interrogations of Petrarchism begin when the poem itself does: lines one and two, as well as lines seven and eight, draw our attention to the deceptions inherent in Petrarchan rhetoric. If both Author and Echo can claim that no one is fairer than their beloved, that commonplace assertion is revealed as at the very least hyperbolic, and thus the absolutes favored in Petrarchan diction and exemplified by the opening of this poem are challenged. Echo not only repeats the words of Author but mimes and even mocks his literary enterprise in that he too is echoing the conventional language associated with his genre. Like her prototypes in classical mythology, Watson’s Echo is variously pathetic shadow and powerful satirist.²

Lines seven and eight also embody a more unsettling subversion. Despite the explanatory note in the text, “S. Liquescens immutat sensum” (“the elision of S. changes the sense”),³ more than the sense is being changed: a female voice is praising Narcissus in terms usually reserved for a female Petrarchan mistress. The transgression here is recognized and intensified when the author asks if they love the same person, a decidedly unconventional question that Echo finesses with a return to the most conventional of sentiments, “I love but one” (12). While one should avoid the temptation to make too much of this confusion of gender boundaries (its subversion is, after all, contained by the obvious explanation for Echo’s words, the myth starring herself and Narcissus), its unresolved undertones remain and again call into question the workings of Petrarchism.

Moreover, the poem complicates and even compromises some common critical assumptions about the connections between gender and power in Petrarchism. If this lyric is read as an instance of the dependency that the Petrarchan lover shares with the client in a patronage system, an interpretation many new historicists would favor,⁴ the ways the name “Author” draws attention to the lover’s power of speech are neglected. Alternatively, one might cite the poem in support of the feminist argument that Petrarchism is both source and sign of male potency: after all, not only does Watson literally give his fictive Echo her words, but that authorial power is replicated when his alter ego in the poem does so as well.⁵ Yet in merely repeating what has been said, Echo occasionally challenges it as well. Thus an ostensibly powerless female voice achieves some types of agency. Moreover, the speaker, like Echo, claims to die at the end; his power of speech culminates in a statement about the ultimate loss of power, the loss of life itself. If storytelling is an assertion of male power,⁶ what happens when a man tells stories about his own defeat?

Seemingly conventional enough to exemplify Petrarchism, seemingly unremarkable enough to invite the briefest summary of how it does so, the lyric thus twists and turns in a way that the third line implicitly glosses: “In this thou telst a lie. Echo. thou telst a lie.” Although that assertion initially refers to Echo’s claim that no one else loves, the doubled lines of the poem hint that line three could apply to other types of duplicity as well. Is Author’s claim that Echo lies itself a lie? And, in a broader sense, might the author’s claims throughout the poem be lies, as Echo’s response to his first assertion would suggest? In recognizing that Echo challenges the veracity of Author, we should recognize as well that her voice interrogates the author and the authority of Petrarchan love poetry.

Watson’s poem, then, exemplifies and examines the subject of this book: how Petrarchism is variously criticized, contradicted, and countermanded in Tudor and Stuart culture. In so doing, it introduces a range of related issues, such as the linkage between formal decisions and cultural conditions, the role of rivalry in love poetry, the workings of repetition, the paradoxes of recounting one’s own failures, and, above all, gender, that nexus of questions about sameness and difference. The relationship between Echo and Author also alerts us to another manifestation of sameness and difference: the difficulty of distinguishing the discourses and counterdiscourses of Petrarchism. Many attacks on Petrarchism can be traced to members of its own battalions. The problem of differentiating friend and foe, Petrarchan and anti-Petrarchan text, is echoed and in part generated by the difficulty of clearly distinguishing masculine and feminine in Petrarchism and in Tudor and Stuart culture.

II

Protean and pervasive in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, both Petrarchism and the reactions against it prove notoriously hard to define. The Rime sparse, a collection as variable as Laura herself, includes many characteristics that might otherwise be labeled anti-Petrarchan, such as a renunciation of love in favor of spiritual values. Moreover, the Rime sparse was read in editions festooned with lengthy and often contradictory commentaries, editions that, like some Bibles, frequently sported a relatively brief passage from Petrarch surrounded by far bulkier glosses.⁷ The very presence of these lengthy explications attests to both the cultural significance and the intellectual complexity of Petrarch’s sequence. Far from resolving the interpretive problems posed by the Rime sparse, however, Petrarch’s early commentators often confound them. William J. Kennedy has persuasively demonstrated the variety in Renaissance interpretations of the author of the Rime sparse: he is read as devout Christian, civic humanist, monarchist, and so on.⁸ “The history of Petrarchism,” as Kennedy aptly observes, “is a narrative of multiple Petrarchs.”⁹

When one turns from Petrarch to his Continental heirs and assigns, the challenges of describing and defining Petrarchism are further confounded. Categorizing the poems in this tradition is itself problematical. Donald Stone Jr., for example, observes that the twenty-third sonnet of Ronsard’s Continuation (“Mignongne, levés-vous”) “abandons Petrarchism indirectly by creating an intimacy between poet and lady unparalleled in the Italian tradition”;¹⁰ others, however, might expand their definitions of Petrarchism to include frankly erotic lyrics like this one. Even authors who are clearly writing Petrarchan poetry respond very differently to the Rime sparse and in so doing create alternative Petrarchan traditions; witness the contrast between respectful imitators like Bembo and more radical reinterpreters like Serafino.¹¹

By the time the sonnet was in vogue in England, then, poets who wished to write within or react against that tradition confronted not one but several traditions—and not one but several Petrarchs. Hence scholars debate whether the reinterpretation of Petrarch’s Poem 190 that shapes Wyatt’s “Whoso List to Hunt” should be traced to Giovanni Antonio Romanello (the Italian poet who recast the poem) or to commentaries on Petrarch himself.¹² Moreover, all these problems are further complicated in light of the historical perspective of sixteenth-century sonneteers. The tradition must have seemed even more flexible, inchoate, or both to poets composing sonnets in 1592—or even 1594 or 1595—than it does to us today. Its sixteenth-century practitioners could not turn to their Norton Anthologies for a convenient summary of its characteristics and development, and they may well not have defined Petrarchism in all the ways a twentieth-century scholar would. At what point, for instance, was the fourteen-line poem established as one of its principal norms? To be sure, most sonneteers do adopt it. Yet in 1582 Watson himself publishes eighteen-line poems that, despite their prosody, are insistently Petrarchan in other ways. Fifteen years later another minor sonneteer, Richard Tofte, calls his heroine “Laura” and puns on “laurel.” He does not, however, feel constrained to write fourteen-line poems, and, given how derivative his poems are in other respects, the absence of that noon suggests not excitement with prosodic experimentation and variation (a desire, so to speak, to wear his laurel with a difference) but a lack of concern for the verse form now considered one of the central markers of Petrarchism. Indeed, in asking how Petrarchism was interpreted by those writing within it and hence in some sense re-creating it, one needs to entertain the possibility that in some instances Petrarch himself might not have been seen as the central source for the love lyrics critics now associate primarily with him. Certainly many sonneteers are keenly conscious of their classical antecedents and insistently draw attention to them, in part, perhaps, to lend respectability to the dubious enterprise of wri...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Chapter One Introduction: Love in the Time of Choler
• Chapter Two Petrarchan Problematics: Tradition and the Individual Culture
• Chapter Three Friendly Fire: Conflict and Contravention within the Sonnet Tradition
• Chapter Four Petrarchan Executors: Sidney, Shakespeare, Wroth
• Chapter Five Foreign Currencies: John Collop and the “Ugly Beauty” Tradition
• Chapter Six Resident Alien: John Donne
• Chapter Seven Conclusion: Criticism in the Time of Choler
• Index