A Companion to Renaissance Poetry

Catherine Bates

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781118585191
• eBook ISBN: 9781118584903
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The most comprehensive collection of essays on Renaissance poetry on the market

Covering the period 1520–1680, A Companion to Renaissance Poetry offers 46 essays which present an in-depth account of the context, production, and interpretation of early modern British poetry. It provides students with a deep appreciation for, and sensitivity toward, the ways in which poets of the period understood and fashioned a distinctly vernacular voice, while engaging them with some of the debates and departures that are currently animating the discipline.

A Companion to Renaissance Poetry analyzes the historical, cultural, political, and religious background of the time, addressing issues such as education, translation, the Reformation, theorizations of poetry, and more. The book immerses readers in non-dramatic poetry from Wyatt to Milton, focusing on the key poetic genres—epic, lyric, complaint, elegy, epistle, pastoral, satire, and religious poetry. It also offers an inclusive account of the poetic production of the period by canonical and less canonical writers, female and male. Finally, it offers examples of current developments in the interpretation of Renaissance poetry, including economic, ecological, scientific, materialist, and formalist approaches.

• Covers a wide selection of authors and texts

• Features contributions from notable authors, scholars, and critics across the globe

• Offers a substantial section on recent and developing approaches to reading Renaissance poetry

A Companion to Renaissance Poetry is an ideal resource for all students and scholars of the literature and culture of the Renaissance period.

Part I
Contexts

TRANSITIONS AND TRANSLATIONS

1
The Medieval Inheritance of Early Tudor Poetry

Seth Lerer

Among the many poems attributed to Sir Thomas Wyatt that have been preserved in the famous Devonshire Manuscript (British Library MS Add 17,492), the one beginning “Absence absenting causeth me to complain” has largely been ignored. Unlike the sonnets, lyrics, and ballades that have defined Wyatt’s “unquiet” sensibility for generations—poems such as “They flee from me,” “Mine own John Poyntz,” and the Petrarchan translations—this poem lacks what we have come to expect from the poet at his best. Rather than strut in careful iambs, this verse seems to limp along in uneven stresses. Rather than looking forward to the Italianate sprezzatura of Sidney or Spenser, this one seems to look back to the aureate diction of Stephen Hawes or John Lydgate. And rather than developing an argument through sinuous logic, the quatrains of this poem appear only to repeat themselves. The poet’s isolation builds through iteration, echoing the final phrasing of each quatrain in the opening words of the next. And while the text is no less clear than that of any other poem in the Manuscript, its verbal insecurities have led one of its most recent editors, R. A. Rebholz, to emend its phrasings for regularization and, most strikingly, to edit its final two lines out of existence (Rebholz 1978, 277, 524).

Readers of late medieval and early modern English poetry will recognize the problems posed by such a poem. Scholarship since the 1980s has revealed that there was no clear break between the “medieval” and the “Renaissance” in English literature (Spearing 1985; Ebin 1988; Lerer 1993, 1997; Scanlon 1994; Trigg 2002; Meyer‐Lee 2007; Wakelin 2007). Chaucer, for example, continued to be read and copied, imitated and alluded to, throughout the Tudor age. The Devonshire Manuscript itself (compiled by members of the Howard and Shelton families in the 1520s and 1530s) offers a remarkable poetic exchange drawn from selected stanzas of Troilus and Criseyde (Heale 1998). Richard Tottel printed Chaucer’s “Truth” (albeit unattributed) in his Songes and Sonettes of 1557. And provincial anthologists included selections from Chaucer’s poetry, as well as that of Lydgate and Hawes, until well into the reign of Elizabeth I (Lerer 1997).

Our categories of medieval and Renaissance are both cultural and retrospective. While we may find Lydgate’s Fall of Princes or Hawes’s Pastime of Pleasure to be irrevocably grounded in fifteenth‐century allegory and idiom, they were among the most popular texts published by England’s earliest printers. Wynkyn de Worde, Robert Copeland, and Richard Tottel kept these authors in circulation well into the middle of the sixteenth century (King 1987; Gillespie 2006). It was only with the Elizabethan rejection of much of this earlier poetry as “papist” and sacramental that it fell out of favor. Roger Ascham’s comment, in his Scolemaster of 1570, represents changes in literary ideology and taste that firmly demarcated medieval verse for early modern readers:

In our forefathers’ time, when papistry as a standing pool covered and overflowed all England, few books were read in our tongue, saving certain books of chivalry, as they said, for pastime and pleasure, which, as some say, were made in monasteries by idle monks or wanton canons.

(Ryan 1967, 68)

John Lydgate, known in his afterlife as the “Monk of Bury,” could not have been far from Ascham’s contempt for these “idle monks,” and the reference to those books read “for pastime and pleasure” cannot but evoke the title of Hawes’s best known poem. These were, in fact, precisely the writers that the Marian interregnum saw reprinted—as if Mary Tudor’s resurgent Catholicism gave permission, after Henry VIII’s condemnations, to recirculate those narratives of pilgrimage and chivalry characteristic of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries (King 1987).

For the modern reader coming to Wyatt’s “Absence absenting causeth me to complain,” there will be much that resonates with the legacy of the Monk of Bury and the author of the Pastime of Pleasure. Is this a modern or a medieval poem? Is it a throwback to an earlier, aureate practice or is it an example of how a distinctively forward‐looking writer could adapt old idioms to new aesthetics?

This essay begins with a literary text that straddles old and new forms of poetic expression. It seeks to expose our critical presuppositions about literary periods, but also to expose our expectations of aesthetic value in the early modern lyric. What is the relationship between the medieval and the early modern, and how do our categories of authorship inflect our sense of literary history? What are the canons of vernacular verse‐making and how do they bear on the social, cultural, and political contexts of, in this case, the early Tudor court? In the course of answering these questions, this essay will look back to the inheritances of Chaucer’s vernacular authorship: to his synthesis of Boethius’ philosophical laments with contemporary courtly complaint and to the impact of that synthesis on writers such as Lydgate, Hawes, Skelton, and Charles D’Orleans. This is an essay, then, less about shifts from medieval to Renaissance than about how the English verse associated with those periods could coexist and couple.

Absens absenting causithe me to complaine

my sorowfull complaints abiding in distresse

and departing most pryvie increasithe my paine

thus lyve I vncomfortid wrappid all in hevines

In hevenes I am wrapid devoyde of all solace

Nother pastyme nor pleasure can revyve my dull wytt

My sprites be all taken and dethe dothe me manace

With his fatall knif the thrid for to kitt

Ffor to kit the thrid of this wretchid lif

And shortelye bring me owt of this cace

I se yt avaylith not yet must I be pensif

Sins fortune from me hathe turnid her face

Hathe turnid with cowntenance contrarious

And clene from her presens she hathe exilid me

Yn sorrowe remaining as a man most dolorous

Exempte from all pleasure and worldelye felicitie

All wordelie felicitye nowe am I private

And left in deserte most solitarilye

Wandring all about as on withowt mate

My dethe aprochithe what remedye

What remedye alas to reioise my wofull herte

With sighis suspiring most rufullie

Nowe welcome I am redye to deperte

Fare well all pleasure welcome paine and smarte

(Devonshire Manuscript, 81v–82)

To read Wyatt’s poem not in a modernizing paperback but in an edition faithful to this manuscript is to read it through in the legacy of late medieval poetics (see A Social Edition). Absence here is a personification, a kind of embodied condition on a par with the personifications of late medieval complaint. Old Age, Sorrow, Fortune—all stand, in the poetry from Lydgate through Charles D’Orleans, as instigators of the poet’s complaining. Here, in a bit of repetitive verbal trickery, the poet affirms what Absence does: it creates a state of absence. The poem also affirms what Fortune does: turns her face away and generates a heaviness and lack of comfort in the poet. His “dull wit” (a touchstone phrase of post‐Chaucerian abnegation; see Lawton 1987) cannot be revived by “pastime nor pleasure”—a verbal collocation that, much like Ascham’s rebuke half a century later, evokes Hawes’s courtly allegory. Fortune has turned her face “with countenance contrarious,” an alliterative pairing worthy of Skelton, whose character Counterfeit Countenance in the play Magnyficence embodies all that is duplicitous about the courtly life. But such duplicity hearkens back to the Consolation of Philosophy itself, whose prisoner laments that Fortune’s “clouded, cheating face has changed” (fallacem mutavit nubile vultum) (Stewart, Rand, and Tester 1973, 132–133). The poet’s exile from felicity recalls, too, the terms of the Boethian prisoner’s opening condition, while the request for a remedy similarly brings to mind the figure of Lady Philosophy as the soul’s physician. The narrator’s is now a “dolorous” state, and that word chimes with the laments of Lydgate, Skelton, and Hawes throughout their poetry. Indeed, a search of this poem’s key words against the online databases of medieval and early Tudor verse firmly enmeshes the text in the verbal net of Chaucer’s heirs. There is, here, a pervasive aureation, an insistent repetition, and a use of alliteration far less evocative of Langland or Sir Gawain than it is of Skelton.

“Absence” had emerged as a characteristic term of Chaucerian and post‐Chaucerian lament. It shows up as early as the Book of the Duchess, when Alcyone fears the worst when her husband, Cyex, does not return: “His absence filled her with alarm” (Benson 1987, line 81). This sense of abandonment—by a lover, a friend, a ruler, a set of joys and rewards—inspires the complaints of Lydgate, and the word “absence” appears repeatedly in just about everything he wrote, from devotional verse to courtly lyrics to historical epic to social satire. Chaucer’s son, Thomas, for example, in the poem Lydgate wrote on his departure to take up the French ambassadorship, generates a sense of mourning and loss on his leaving: “His absence eke ye aught to compleyne …. For he absent, farewell youre reconfort” (MacCracken 1934, 659). In the Complaint for My Lady of Gloucester and Holland, the poet write...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part I: Contexts
• Part II: Forms and Genres
• Part III: Positions and Debates
• Index
• End User License Agreement