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Electronic Reserve Text From: Arthur
Marotti, John Donne, Coterie Poet Introduction: Donne and the Conditions of Coterie Verse To understand Donne's context-bound verse historically, it is important to recognize its place in the dominant system of manuscript transmission of literature to which the poetry of courtly and satellite-courtly authors belonged. In the Tudor and early Stuart periods, lyric poetry was basically a genre for gentleman-amateurs who regarded their literary "toys" as ephemeral works that were part of a social life that also included dancing, singing, gaming, and civilized conversation. Socially prominent courtiers like the Earl of Oxford, Sir Edward Dyer, and Sir Walter Ralegh, like, Sir Thomas Wyatt and the Earl of Surrey earlier, as well as other less-important figures like George Gascoigne, essentially thought of poems as trifles to be circulated in manuscript and not as literary monuments to be preserved in printed editions for posterity. For most sixteenth-century poetry the book was an alien environment. Gentlemen-amateurs avoided what J. W. Saunders has called the "stigma of print" by refusing to publish their verse, publishing it anonymously, or (accurately or inaccurately) disclaiming responsibility for its appearance in book form.(1) Sidney's poems, for example, particularly the carefully restricted songs and sonnets of Astrophil and Stella, were coterie works, intended for an audience of close friends, clients, and family members. Shakespeare, despite his professional status as theatrical shareholder and playwright, at least initially followed the gentlemanly custom in limiting the circulation of his sonnets to his patron and his "priuat frends."(2) Philip Rosseter's introduction to the published version of Campion's airs refers to the lyrics as "made at his vacant hours, and privately emparted to his friends."(3) |
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[4] In Epigram 424 Sir John Harington proudly asserts a poetic amateurism not unlike that practiced by Donne and many of his contemporaries: I near desearvd
that gloriows name of Poet; In such circumstances, poetic "discourse" was deliberately adjusted to the "Occasion," written sometimes to please an audience of friends and, supposedly, always to please oneself.(5) Saunders describes
the system of amateur versifying in which Greville, Dyer, Sidney, Harington,
and others participated: "Whether poetry was produced in isolation,
in the quiet of a study, in prison, in idleness or 'furtive hours,'
on guard in a lonely outpost, or in melancholy solitude, or whether
it was produced as the direct result of companionship, competition,
social communion and group suggestion, it found its first audience in
the circle of friends. And whether it was communicated orally, or through
the mutual exchange of scripts, or by correspondence, the recognized
medium of communication was the manuscript, either in the autograph
of the author, or in the transcription of a friend." (6) Professional
authors like Thomas Nashe and Michael Drayton, from their socially inferior
positions, criticized the exclusiveness of such literature. Nashe introduced
an edition of Sidney's Astrophil and Stella in a way that reveals his
pleasure that such coterie verse has escaped its social confines: "although
[such poetry] be oftentimes imprisoned in Ladyes casks & the president
books of such as cannot see without another man's spectacles, yet at
length it breakes foorth in spite of his keepers, and useth some private
penne (in steed of a picklock) to procure his violent enlargement."(7)
Drayton complained about the difficulty in getting access to such poetry: [5] nothing that comes forth in Print, as if Catullus or Martials Epigrammes were the worse for being published."(9) The transmission of poems in manuscript "by transcription" took a number of forms. As Saunders has explained, "The story proper begins when a poet, either in solitude or in company, either acting on his own inspiration or the instigations of friends, writes down a poem on loose papers." (10) Although the author himself may make a "fair copy ...for a patron," if not even "a special presentation copy," (11) the next steps in the process occurred when transcriptions of the verse were made either by friends, by friends of friends, or by professional scribes. Also, frequently "fair copy of loose papers circulating among friends might . . . gather appended commendatory verses or glosses."(12) These added poems were often "answer poems" to individual lyrics.'(13) The whole procedure was one in which authorship could dissolve into group "ownership" (14) of texts: Saunders is right in calling "the poem. ..a public document shared by the circle," for "more pens than the author's might share the same paper."(15) This, of course, is to say nothing of the unconscious and conscious rewriting that occurred when poems were transcribed from memory, a practice, as J. B. Leishman has shown,(16) that accounts for some of the most striking alterations in texts of individual poems, if not for the production of virtually new texts. Beyond the uncertain circulation system involving loose papers, "quires" of poems and large manuscripts of individual poets' work, two related practices, in particular, throw light on the system of manuscript literary transmission: the keeping of manuscript commonplace books of poetry (or of poetry and prose) and the related, markedly Elizabethan, phenomenon of the published poetical miscellany. The first is a holdover, albeit a socially respected one, from a pre-Gutenberg era, and is a custom that persisted well into the seventeenth century. Standing midway between manuscript-circulated verse and professional publications like The Works of Beniamin Jonson (1616), the second is a part of the cultural transformation of the literature of social occasion into the (more aesthetically isolated) literature of a book culture. The dozens of manuscript poetical miscellanies that survive from the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries belonged to different social environments and represent different forms of collecting by individuals, families, and social groups. Men and women at Court and in aristocratic households as well as men and youths at the university and Inns of Court both gathered and composed verse in commonplace [6] books for their own pleasure and edification. The famous Devonshire manuscript (which contains many poems of Wyatt's) was owned successively by several women connected with the Howard family and includes poems transcribed by them, by the men with whom they associated at Court, and by friends to whom the volume was lent.(17) John Harington of Stepney, the pre-Elizabethan client of Protector Somerset who found courtly service under Queen Elizabeth, began a collection of Tudor verse in a book whose blank pages his son, Sir John Harington, used to record verse from the second half of the Elizabethan period.(18) John Finet, who later became one of Sir Robert Cecil's secretaries, served King James, and was appointed Master of Ceremonies by King Charles, compiled a miscellany in the late 1580s while at Court and at Cambridge (Bod. Rawl. Poet. MS. 85),(19) a volume that contains as rich a collection of courtly poems as almost any published Elizabethan anthology. Another courtly academic collection is to be found in BL Harl. MS 7392, a volume L. G. Black calls "an Oxford counterpart to the Cambridge RP 85."(20) One of the most interesting manuscript miscellanies, Cambro Univ. Lib. MS Dd. 5.75, is a collection compiled by Henry Stanford, who moved from Oxford to service in several noble households, and who not only composed verse himself and collected courtly poems, but who also transcribed the novice poetry of the young boys he tutored in the Paget and Berkeley families.(21) Some volumes were associated particularly with the milieu in which Donne wrote many of his poems, the Inns of Court: both the Farmer-Chetham MS, which has the largest surviving manuscript collection of John Hoskins's poems, Rosenbach 1083/15 and Bod. Add. MS B.97, large portions of which contain the epigrammatic verse of which Inns and university students were fond, include much Inns-of-Court verse.(22) Those volumes that are classified as manuscript miscellanies constitute a range of texts bounded, at one extreme, by the system of circulating loose poems and sets of poems and, at the other, by the carefully arranged published volume. Black has noted that BL Add. MS 28253 begins with thirteen folios made up of "a number of sheets which were at one time loose and folded separately (like a letter), and each has been inscribed on the back with the description of its contents. These sheets are apparently a little collection made by Edward Bannister of Putney between 1583 and 1602 (each sheet is dated)."(23) Bod. MS Rawl. poet. 172 is a collection "of loose sheets of different sizes in different hands." (24) The small Ann Cornwallis miscellany (Folger MS V.a.89), which I have examined, appears to be a similar collection of loose poems on different-sized paper.(25) Other commonplace [7] books are composites of separate parts, often in different hands. Most manuscript miscellanies, however, began with the purchase or gift of a blank book or "table book" in which poems or poems and prose were meant to be transcribed by its owner-usually without a governing plan or arrangement. Shakespeare's Sonnet 77, in fact, seems to have been written to accompany just such a gift to his patron.(26) Other manuscripts represent systematic efforts to collect poems by author, by genre, or by topic. Some volumes, like BL Harl. 6910, record the texts of published poems, reversing the movement from manuscript to print.(27) In format, some manuscript miscellanies resemble published anthologies or, it would probably be more accurate to say, some published miscellanies resemble manuscript anthologies. As Ruth Hughey has observed, those portions of the Arundel-Harington Manuscript transcribed by John Harington of Stepney constitute a midcentury poetical miscellany comparable to the famous one printed by Richard Tottel in 1557.(28) Although some published miscellanies are further than others from the social situation of manuscript-circulated verse, there is a continuum from, rather than a sharp boundary between, commonplace-book anthologies and those printed volumes that disseminated coterie literature to a wider readership. Tottel's Miscellany (1557), Hyder Rollins argues, was probably based on a single courtly manuscript collection that fell into the hands of a printer, who then added poems he obtained from other sources.(29) The most popular Elizabethan miscellany, The Paradise of Dainty Devices (1576) is a printed version of the commonplace book compiled by Richard Edwards, the courtier-dramatist who served as Elizabeth's Master of the Children of the Royal Chapel until his death in 1566.(30) The Phoenix Nest (1595) and A Poetical Rhapsody (1602) were edited by gentlemen who probably had better access than commercial printers to the verse that circulated in manuscript in polite society. The first collection is an anthology compiled by an Inns-of-Court man who addressed his collection to his peers, printing a number of poems that originated, no doubt, in the Inns environment as well as in the Court itself. The second volume was edited by Francis Davison, a former Gray's Inn man who had just lost his government position as secretary to Sir Thomas Parry. Both collections are addressed to an audience of gentlemen and include previously unpublished poems by gentlemen-amateurs.(31) Although published miscellanies clearly came into being as products of the information explosion caused by the invention of movable type, they actually presented themselves as a kind of compromise between two coexistent systems of "publication," the circulation of liter [8] ature in manuscript to restricted audiences and the printing of individual authors' works for different (narrow or wide) readerships. Even as they helped to bring about a more modern conception of literature as a (supposedly) distinct order of discourse set apart from the culture-specific languages of social, economic, and political transactions, they affirmed the primacy of poetic amateurism, associating literary merit with the social prestige of aristocratic and genteel authors, and emphasizing the connection between literary works and the social milieus in which they were written. When George Gascoigne decided to publish a collection of his various literary works in order to relieve his financial distress, he chose the miscellany form as a way of protecting his courtly amateurism even as he sought, in print, the kind of laureateship he imagined for himself in the picture of his presentation to Queen Elizabeth of his manuscript text for the entertainment "Hemetes the Hermit." (32) In A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres, Gascoigne disguised his prose and poetry as a courtly commonplace-book manuscript collection of works by a number of authors rather than offering it, as he did two years later in The Posies, as a compilation of the literary productions of a single writer. A fictional editor "H. W." explains to the reader the supposed source of the volume: In August Last passed my familiar friend Master G. T. bestowed uppon me ye reading of a written Booke, wherin he had collected divers discourses & verses, invented uppon sundrie occasions, by sundrie gentlemen (in mine opinion) right commendable for their capacitie. And herewithal my said friend charged me, that I should use them onely for mine owne particuler commoditie, and eftsones safely deliver the original copie to him againe, wherein I must confesse my selfe but halfe a marchant, for the copie unto him I have safely redelivered. But the worke (for I thought it worthy to be published) I have entreated my friend A. B. to emprint: as one that thought better to please a number by common commoditie then to feede the humor of any private parson by nedelesse singularitie.(33) In the letter of "G. T." to "H. W." that follows, the book is identified as a courtly anthology, partly because of the social prestige such volumes possessed for gentlemen readers. Gascoigne created the illusion that the literary works contained in A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres passed through the normal stages of manuscript transmission, but he obviously set up a situation in which he could enhance his own literary fame through print. G. T.'s letter offers an explanation for the orderly arrangements of the supposedly miscellaneous works in the collection and pretends that it is not intended to be made "common" (i.e., transmitted further either in manuscript or in print), even as it [9] announces the existence of other meritorious works of "one" of the authors represented, copies of which have not yet been obtained. After Gascoigne has dropped the mask of anonymity midway through the collection, the fifty-seventh through sixty-first poems are introduced as works associated with an Inns-of-Court environment not unlike that in which Donne functioned a generation later:
The practice of composing verse on set themes, a holdover from the grammar school and university, was a common one in both courtly and satellite-courtly environments, like the Inns of Court, a coterie game especially suited to the system of manuscript transmission of literature with which Gascoigne affiliated his book.(34) Like the genuine manuscript and published anthologies, Gascoigne's counterfeit miscellany creates the impression that poetry was properly a social activity. We can see from both manuscript and printed evidence that poems, for example, were enclosed in letters, handed to people personally, read orally before select groups,35 given as gifts at times such as New Year's day, passed to women as complimentary trifles (like Ralegh's poem put into Lady Laiton's pocket), composed at the request of a mistress or at the challenge of a competitor, written on set themes agreed upon by both authors and audiences, and designed as response or answer poems to other lyrics. In A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres, the elaborate editorial-narrative comments prefixed to the lyrics provide social contexts for poems, sometimes producing, in effect, a "title" that is longer than the work that follows it. After a particular poem and answer set, for example, Gascoigne provides the following heading for a nine-line poetic riddle: And for a further
profe of this Dames quick understanding, you shall now understand, that
soone after this answer of hirs, the same Author chaunced to be at a
supper in hir company, where were aJso hir brother, hir husband, and
an old lover of hirs by whom she had bin long suspected. Nowe, although
there wanted no delicate viands to content [10] him. Hir old lover occupied his eyes with watching: and hir brother perceyving all this could not absteyne from winking, wherby he might put his Sister in remembrance, least she should too much forget hirself. But most of all hir husband beholding the first, and being evill pleased with the second, scarse contented with the third, and misconstruing the fourth, was constreyned to play the fifth part in froward frowninge. This royall banquet thus passed over, G. G. knowing that after supper they should passe the tyme in propounding of Riddles, and making of purposes: contryved all this conceipt in a Riddle as followeth. The which was no sooner pronounced, but she could perfectly perceyve his intent, and drave out one nayle with another, as also enseweth. (pp. 117-18) Whether or not the poems Gascoigne included in his collection were actually ever part of the contexts he constructed for them, the act of social-narrative articulation in which he engaged is found, in shorter or longer form, in prose works like his own novella "A Discourse of the adventures passed by Master F. J.," Sidney's Arcadia, and Thomas Whyhorne's Autobiography as well as in a miscellany like Tottel's.(36) From such evidence we can perceive some of the distinctive features of courtly and satellite-courtly verse and understand what happened to such work once it left its original environment. Most poems written by gentlemen-amateurs were occasional in nature, their production and reception strongly involved with their biographical and social contexts. Whatever its conventional literary features, such verse was attuned to the personal circumstances of the authors and to the social, economic, and political milieus they shared with their chosen audiences. Inevitably, contextual particularity was lost when such work passed to a wider audience both within and beyond the writers' own times. Sir Philip Sidney's Astrophil and Stella provides a good example of coterie literature and of the fate of such work beyond its original reader ship.(37) Read by modern critics as the literary masterpiece of an English Petrarch, a man of letters whose powerful dramatic lyrics were aesthetically more sophisticated than the work of his contemporaries, received by a general Elizabethan audience as the love poems of a martyred culture hero whose artistic achievements (supposedly) compensated for his lack of political success, the Astrophil and Stella poems were far more historically particularized for Sidney's primary readership. Friends like Sir Edward Dyer and Fulke Greville brought to their experience of the sonnet sequence a knowledge of the precise personal and sociopolitical contexts that were involved in the poems and manipulated by Sidney with ironic wit. They knew the author as a politically, economically, and socially disappointed young man-someone who had recently lost his prospects of inheriting the Leicester |
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nd Warwick estates when his aging uncle, the Earl of Leicester, had a son by his mistress-turned-wife, a woman who also happened to be the mother of the person fictionalized as "Stella" in the sequence, Penelope Devereux, Lady Rich. They saw Sidney, despite his impolitic intervention in the French marriage negotiations, as unfairly ne" glected or rejected by the Queen after his prodigious beginning in national and international politics and diplomacy. They could, there" fore, perceive the way Sidney made Lady Rich, as Wyatt had Anne Boleyn, into a symbol of his unattained social economic, and politi" cal goals.(38) They understood this poet's disavowals of ambition in the sonnets as disingenuous ones and saw that he was using erotic desire for the sexual favors of a Petrarchan mistress as a metaphor for his worldly aspirations. For example, in Sonnet 64 they knew how to interpret the amorous protestations of Astrophil whose fictional identity merges with the actual one of the poet in the following amorously self-sacrificial words to Stella: I do not envie
Aristotle's wit, Aware of Sidney's passionate love of learning, of his attraction to the kind of military heroism that led to his bravely foolish death, and, especially, of his sensitivity about his relatively inferior social status, the coterie audience could see in these amorous protestations a witty irony meant to be appreciated by a knowing readership. Disengaged from their coterie context, particularly when read by post-Renaissance readers, such lines lost the precise biographical and social matrices that enlivened their meaning, becoming conventional Petrarchan attitudinizing. But this kind of decontextualization occurred in stages for all coterie literary works that passed beyond their original social contexts. The historical vicissitudes of Sir Thomas Wyatt's poetry also illustrate the process. As Patricia Thomson, Stephen Greenblatt, and others have argued, Wyatt's verse reflects his fortunes as an ambitious courtier and government servant in the Court of Henry VIII.(39) But the conventional literary language Wyatt used to express what were probably, in context, quite specific personal responses to social and political circumstances came across to later readers as peculiarly contentless. [12] Something was lost
that had particularized the meaning of individual poems for their coterie
readers. As Jonathan Kamholtz has shown, when some of Wyatt's obviously
political lyrics were printed in Tottel's Miscellany with titles emphasizing
amorous themes, the way they were read changed as they were absorbed
into the tradition of poetic amorousness running from the troubadours
through Petrarch to the High Renaissance.(40) They lost most of their
witty topicality and artful self-dramatizing as they were converted
into typical utterances of the Manuscript and printed miscellanies often give the impression that they retain a sense of the social environment of the verse they collect. They usually present courtly or satellite-courtly poems written on particular (if conventionalized) social occasions. They insist, if only on their title pages and in the printers' or editors' prefatory letters or introductions, on the importance of the poetry's originating environment and of the contributors' social prestige. Some manuscript miscellanies incorrectly name the author and occasion of particular works: for example, Dyer's lyric, "The lowest trees have topps," a poem whose amorous language argues for a system of reward based on merit rather than on privilege, is identified in Stephen Powle's commonplace book as "Sr Walter Rawleigh's verses to the Queen Elizabeth: in the beginninge of his fauoures" (41)--a misattribution that has a certain historical appropriateness given the courtly uses of such verse. The letters by prominent courtiers like Ralegh and Essex in some manuscript poetical miscellanies preserve some sense of the social atmosphere of both the epistolary and the poetical texts.(42) Finally, the grouping in both manuscript and printed anthologies of poems by authors who either belonged to the same coterie or wrote in the same social environment preserves some sense of the original context of their poems. One section of The Phoenix Next contains series of lyrics associated with Ralegh, which (Helen Sandison argues) includes poems by his cousin Sir Arthur Gorges, with whose verse .his ,own circulated.43 Poems by Sidney and Dyer appear together in Finet s miscellany. Donne's verse is preserved in a number of manuscripts alongside the related work of John Hoskins, Sir Thomas Roe, Sir Henry Wotton, and others from the social circles to which he belonged. In both manuscript and printed collections, answer poems, parodies, and other forms of competitive versifying testify to the status of poetry as a kind of social currency. Despite all this, the texts in manuscript and printed miscellanies lost touch with their original contexts, as the very act of anthologizing dislodged poems from their place in a system of transactions within [13] polite or educated social circles and put them in the more fundamentally "literary" environment of the handwritten or typographic volume. An extreme example of decontextualization is found in one seventeenth-century manuscript anthology, Rosenbach MS 243/4, in which there is a section of poems by a number of different authors (including Donne) presented anonymously as though they were a continuous narrative sequence written by a single individual describing stages of a love affair. To keep the fictional frame intact the compiler entitled or retitled specific lyrics to fit them into the series. For example, Donne's poem "The Message" is headed "Shee continuing in her disdamfull behauiour hee desires to bee released" and the next piece, Donne's "Breake of Day," is discursively identified "At last they enioye one the other, but his business enforseth him to make an early hast. Her lines upon it." (44) Authorship and original contexts both disappear in a "new" text written, in effect, by the compiler. Such literary recontextualization, however, occurs in any formalist or ahistorical literary reading. It is visible in the Petrarch commentaries that simply paraphrase the fictional situations that can be inferred from the poems themselves, in Tottel's situating of some of the pieces he prInted m a framework of traditional literary amorousness, as well as in the very act of collecting what were often aesthetically ephemeral utterances within the pages of a printed book that designated both them and other texts as monuments of "literature."(45) The coterie poems that found their way into manuscript or printed miscellanies were, to some degree, written in the culturally encoded language of the time by the occasion that generated them. Writers in particular courtly or satellite-courtly milieus adopted socially sanctioned or coterie-specific styles that marked their texts as part of a shared language. Many sixteenth-century English poems were anonymous and still remain unidentified, despite the efforts of scholars to detect the unique stylistic features of such authors as Ralegh and Sidney, which indicates that writers produced just this kind of literature. Foucault's notion of authorless discourse(46) is useful for approaching certain literary works as the articulation of (often conflicting) cultural codes, the product less of romantically conceived individual geniuses than of the language of social life at a particular historical moment. Manuscript-circulated poetry, subject as it was to reader emendation, to answer-poem responses, to parody, to unconscious and conscious revision, approaches the condition of such authorless discourse, especially for .an audience beyond the original coterie: in a sense the published miscellanies echoed back to a general readership the language they were already speaking.
At the same time, however, coterie work circulated in manuscript was often essentially self-advertising, deliberately part of the social performance of an individual who could play the sometimes-bland generalities of poetic conventions against perceived particularities of his personality and personal situation: authors like Wyatt, Ralegh, and Sidney were masters of this art. Like them, Donne used the literary and cultural languages of his time to fashion a self-reflexively autobiographical discourse, calling his coterie audience's attention to his implication in both the text and contexts of his writing: he consistently exploited his readers' knowledge of his personal style and social circumstances to fashion distinctive utterances from literarily and culturally familiar material. Given the various circumstances in which poems could be transmitted in manuscript to more or less private readerships, Donne's work had quite a wide range of possible forms of limited circulation short of the author's having his verse printed. The various manuscripts containing Donne's poetry, including those that also contain the work of other authors, offer some help in defining the different situations in which Donne's verse was communicated either to primary readerships or to secondary (but still restricted) audiences. Those editors who have most carefully examined the manuscripts in which Donne's verse appears, however, have done so basically to produce authoritative modern editions of this poet's work, not necessarily to place it in its social contexts. Herbert Grierson's and Helen Gardner's analyses of the complex manuscript situation of Donne's verse throw light on the early stages of literary circulation through which various poems or groups of poems passed-but their main interests lay in the establishment of texts, not in the definition of the social circumstances of the works' primary or secondary transmission.(47) Nevertheless, from what they and others have discovered we can reach some conclusions about the poems' socioliterary situations. By combining their information about the textual vicissitudes of the poems with other social-historical and literary-historical information, we can get some sense of the social conditions of Donne's coterie art. The results of
Donne's efforts in 1614 to gather his verse for publication, Gardner
argues, was "X," that ancestor of the surviving Group I manuscripts.(48)
Margaret Crum has shown, however, that, rather than a single large manuscript,
this probably comprised "a collection of books and extra sheets
which was used by the poet and the scribes." (49) It represents,
then, as the letter to Goodyer indicates, a collecting effort undertaken
after the original times of composition and [15]
We need, I think,
to postulate several stages of circulation for Donne's poems. The Problems
might serve as a model for the primary and secondary forms of transmission:
Donne gave these works first singly, then in groups, to particular readers.(53)
So too there was probably, first, an original private circulation of
individual poems or small The Elegies, which eventually were gathered into the collection represented by the group of poems found in Woodward's manuscript in this generic division, were probably first circulated individually or in small sets: lacking a consistent poetic persona, they are not, as I argue, a "book" even in the loose definition of the term used by the classical poets who composed in this form. Although Gardner does not claim that the Songs and Sonnets, composed over a greater time [16] span than the Elegies and Satires, circulated as a single collection of poems, she gives the impression that the initial manuscript circulation of these pieces was in the form of groups of poems.(58) But, since these lyrics were, demonstrably, associated with a wide variety of social circumstances, this characterization is misleading-more accurate, in many cases, for situations of transmission subsequent to their initial ones. The presence of a single lyric in the Westmoreland manuscript, the appearance of a few others in songbooks, the pointedly occasional character of several others, all point to the probability that some Songs and Sonnets, like the Verse Letters, were initially transmitted as individual poems rather than in groups. We can see eventually that there were different degrees of privacy to Donne's poetry. Setting aside the atypical case of the Anniversaries, those patronage poems whose publication Donne regretted, one can distinguish between the freer circulation of the Satires and Elegies and the more restricted transmission of most of the Songs and Sonnets, the poems that Helen Gardner claims Donne "kept. ..especially for the eyes of friends." (59) In a Latin letter to Goodyer written in 1611 before his departure for the Continent, Donne indicated that some works existed in "copies. ..which have crept out into the world without my knowledge," the "originals having been destroyed by fire. ..condemned by me to Hell." Others were obviously circulated with his consent: he calls these "virgins (save that they have been handled by many)," while still others were kept to himself, "so unhappily sterile that no copies of them have been begotten." These last he foresaw as destined for "utter annihilation (a fate with which God does not threaten even the wickedest of sinners)."(60) The omission of all of Donne's Songs and Sonnets save one ("A Jeat Ring Sent") from the important Westmoreland manuscript may point to the particularly private character of the lyrics, copies of which did not even come into the possession of a fairly close friend like Rowland Woodward. Francis Davison's wish to get copies of "Satyres, Elegies, Epigrams &c. by John Don" 61 for publication indicates those poems by which Donne was known beyond his immediate social circles: the absence of the lyrics from this list (even though they may have been covered by the "&c." in Davison's statement) is probably due to their having been less widely known than the poet's other work. Donne nevertheless probably treated some of his early Songs and Sonnets more casually than others in allowing them to circulate fairly freely in the social environments in which he functioned in the 1590S: this is suggested by the setting to music of such poems as "Breake of Day," "The Message," and "Song: Sweetest love"-a fate about which the [17] poet himself seemed
to complain in "The Triple Foole ." But, generally, Donne
kept those lyrics he composed between about 1593 and 1610 quite close,
only allowing them to begin to circulate more freely quite some time
after their original composition: had they traveled beyond a restricted
readership earlier, they would have appeared regularly in manuscript
collections before the 1620s and 1630s. Even when the lyrics began to
show up in commonplace-book anthologies, notably absent were such poems
as "A Nocturnall upon S. Lucies Day," "The Primrose,"
"The Relique," "The Dissolution," "Negative
Love," and "Farewell to Love:' pieces that, I shall argue,
either were especially private works or were designed for particular
individuals (like Sir Edward Herbert).(62) If we look at the manuscripts that textual scholars have used to produce modern editions of Donne's poetry, we discover an interesting-though, in light of the usual processes of manuscript transmission, an unsurprising-fact: that Donne's work is frequently found in the company of that of other poets, many of whom were socially connected with him in some way. For example, the Group I manuscript BL Harl. 4064 (H 40), like Bod. Rawl. Poet. 31 (to which it is related), includes poems by Harington, Wotton, Campion, Jonson, and Beaumont along with those of Donne.65 The Group II manuscript BL Lansdowne 740 (L 74), a manuscript Gardner claims was copied out at different times by a single individual, contains sacred and secular poems [18] Donne wrote before 1610 along with poems by Sir Thomas Overbury, Sir Thomas Roe, Sir John Roe, and John Hoskins.66 Of the Group III manuscripts, the Haslewood-Kingsborough manuscript (Hunt. Lib. MS HM 198) represents the combining of two different compilations: as Gardner has shown, "each contains solid blocks of poems by Donne and so is, strictly speaking, a miscellany containing a Donne collection." (67) Although Gardner only mentions the presence in HK, part 2, of one other author's poems, Sir John Roe's epistles to Ben Jonson, it is clear that the compiler(s) associated Donne's work with that of others from the same social environments, a common practice. BL Add. MS 25707 (A 25) presents Donne's pre-1610 verse, in Grierson's words, "interspersed with poems by other writers." (68) Margaret Crum believes the volume originally started out as a collection of Donne's poems but then was expanded to include poems by other authors identified only by their initials (a .frequent method in both manuscript and printed miscellanies).(69) The Hawthornden MS (National Library of Scotland MS 2067) and the recently rediscovered Wedderburn MS (National Library of Scotland MS 6504) both record texts of poems by Hoskins, Sir John Roe, Wotton, Overbury, Pembroke, and Rudyerd along with Donne's.7o The Burley manuscript, a commonplace book kept by Donne's friend Sir Henry Wotton, contains transcriptions of poems by Jonson, Pembroke, and others, along with those of Donne.(71) Some Donne poems appear in the Farmer-Chetham manuscript miscellany as well as in Rosenbach 1083/15, both collections associated with the Inns-of-Court environment in which Donne wrote much of his early verse. Of course, the further away chronologically the manuscript miscellanies got from the times of the poems' composition, the less useful for social-historical purposes their juxtaposition of poets. Nonetheless, the presence of Donne's verse in the company of work of authors with whom he was socially connected or who wrote in the same social environments points to its coterie character.(72) The mixture of Donne poems (often without identification of authorship) with the work of other poets has led, however, to certainnproblems of ascription. As is the case with courtier poets like Ralegh, Oxford, and Sidney, in some manuscripts and in some early printed editions Donne is identified as the author of verse written by others. For generally good reasons, Gardner has placed in the category of "Dubia" such pieces as "Sapho to Philaenis," "The Expostulation," (73) "His Parting from Her," "Julia," "A Tale of a Citizen and his Wife," "Variety," "The Token," "Self Love," and "Song: Stay, a sweet, and do not rise," most of which were probably written within the same environments in which Donne composed verse.(74) This group of works [19] should probably be added to the much longer list of spurious poems attributed to Donne in various sources, works that include Sir John Roe's "Sleep, next Society," the lyric "Dear Love, continue nice and chaste" (ascribed to J[ohn] R[oe] in L 40), Lady Bedford's "Death be not proud, thy hand gave not this blow," and Hoskins's famous lyric "Absence." To a certain extent, such works represent not just the poetic "influence" of Donne, but also the sharing of certain styles of communication-a fact underscored by the games of exchange and answer poetry in which Donne and his friends participated. The very fact that some verse by other authors can be mistaken as Donne's indicates the distinctiveness of a coterie-as well as of a personal-style of writing. It may be difficult for modern readers to view Donne's poems as coterie social transactions, rather than as literary icons, but this, I believe, is necessary since virtually all of the basic features of Donne's poetic art are related to its coterie character. His creation of a sense of familiarity and intimacy, his fondness for dialectic, intellectual complexity, paradox and irony, the appeals to shared attitudes and group interests (if not to private knowledge), the explicit gestures of biographical self-referentiality, the styles he adopted or invented all relate to the coterie circumstances of his verse. Donne was obviously most comfortable when he knew his readers personally and they knew him. Ideally, the social relationship with a known audience made possible the kinds of "intercommunication" 75 Donne found congenial. He defined this creative cooperation between poet and reader in the opening lines of his epistle to Christopher Brooke, "The Storme": Thou which art
I, ('tis nothing to be soe) Donne was doing more than simply appealing to his addressee's goodwill or alluding to the epistolary convention of the friend as an alter ego. In the specific context of their friendship and common social and political aspirations, Donne clearly knew that Brooke was aware of his personal motives for serving as a gentleman-volunteer on the expedition to which the poem refers. Donne could thus feel con [20] fident that his primary reader could make do with relatively few aesthetic cues to read this verse letter perceptively. The "lines" of the poem, like those of the skillful painter, suggested much to a knowledgeable perceiver: this is, of course, the basic assumption behind the Renaissance idea of connoisseurship,(76) but the notion took on a special definition in the case of coterie art like Donne's. Donne expected certain intellectual, aesthetic, and social knowledge or sophistication of his readers-the capacity to understand the nuances of his witty manipulation of literary conventions, genres, cultural codes, and specific social and rhetorical circumstances. "I would have no Readers as I can teach," he proclaimed in the preface to Metempsychosis, expressing a wish for what Ben Jonson called an audience of "understanders," (77) the admission to which was not simply a matter of moral and intellectual qualifications, as it was for Jonson. It was probably the coterie character of Donne's audience that led Jonson to postulate that "Done himself for not being understood would perish," 78 a statement that has proved accurate enough in predicting some of the historical vicissitudes of Donne's verse. Many readers have found the poems perplexingly difficult, "a continued Heap of Riddles" as Lewis Theobald (79) called them--a consequence not only of the general changes in cultural conditions from the Renaissance to more recent periods, but also of the loss of the special contexts in which they were originally set. Dryden's famous comment that Donne" affects the Metaphysicks, not only in his Satires, but in his Amorous Verses. 'and perplexes the Minds of the Fair Sex with nice Speculations of Philosophy" (80) reveals the later poet's unawareness of the prImarIly male readership of most of the love lyrics and of the shared background they would have brought to an understanding of the verse. If we approach Donne's poetry in terms of the kind of text-context interaction implied by courtly and satellite-courtly verse, we can perceive some of the pointedly witty ways he handled his poetic materials as he adjusted his rhetoric to specific audiences, occasions, and milieus. This context of interpretation, however, is one in which we need to play down the importance of explicit discursive statements in the poems and attend more closely to the metacommunicative (or metapoetic) level of discourse. As defined by Gregory
Bateson, "metacommunication" is that (usually implicit) form
of communication in which "the subject of discourse is the relationship
between the speakers."(81) It constitutes, he writes elsewhere,
"all exchanged cues and propositions about (a) codification and
(b) the relationship between the communicators."(82) The [21] increased its meta communicative power, for author and reader had a social relationship apart from the text that could be evoked as a context of composition and of reception/interpretation.83 In fact, all the contextual messages of Donne's verse have meta communicative implications, since they refer back to and further define the relationship of writer and reader in a particular social milieu. Donne highlighted his relationship with his coterie readers both explicitly and implicitly. Often he put self-reflexive statements in his poems-e.g., "Sooner then you read this line" ("The Storme," 29); "Venus heard me sigh this song" ("The Indifferent," 19); II. ..by these hymnes, all shall approve/Us Canoniz'd for Love" ("The Canonization," 35-36); "Be this my Text, my Sermon to mine owne" ("Hymne to God, my God, in my sicknesse," 29). But, in fact, Donne's whole rhetorical manner is generally self-reflexive, manifesting an acute consciousness of language and style as well as of the socioliterary circumstances of individual works. Donne often depicted or fictionalized the poet-reader relationship within the inner rhetorical space of particular poems in the interaction of poetic speaker and fictive listener (or implied reader). Any time he suggested by direct or indirect means that he knew that his reader knew or that he knew that his reader knew that he knew something, he emphasized the metacommunicative aspect of his verse. In his letters, Donne set forth a model of communication with his coterie reader that he sought, I believe, in most of his poetry. He told his close friend Goodyer in one missive that he conceived of letters as "conveyances and deliverers of me to you" (Letters, p. 109): the interpersonal relationship, then, not the circumstantial content, was what mattered. He wished for or fantasized a perfect mutual understanding with his correspondent-friend: "Angels have not, nor affect not other knowledge of one another, then they list to reveal to one another. It is then in this onely, that friends are Angels, that they are capable and fit for such revelations when they are offered" (Letters, pp. 109-10). In another letter, Donne emphasized the metacommunicative aspect of epistolary communications, telling Goodyer, "I have placed my love wisely where I need communicate nothing" (Letters, p. 115)-by which he meant that he felt that the letters' information content was much less important than the friendship they mediated. Defending the absence of "news" from his prose epistles, Donne said that "their principall office. ..[is] to be seals and testimonies of mutuall affection, but the materialls and fuell of them should be a confident and mutuall communicating of those things which we know" (Letters, p. 121). He regarded the content of his correspondences as "nothing" (Letters, p. 121), but such "nothing" was the rhetorical
in which the interpersonal transaction with his reader could take place. This negation or absence of discursive meaning is that condition toward which all Donne's writing moves--not only his poems, but also his prose, especially his Sermons. For example, in a letter he wrote to accompany a copy of a sermon requested by the Countess of Montgomery, he used a theological language to portray the kind of contextual relationship of preacher and congregation the written text only partially captures: I know what dead carkasses things written are, in respect of things spoken. But in things of this kinde, that soul that inanimates them, receives debts from them: The Spirit of God that dictates them in the speaker or writer, and is present in his tongue or hand, meets himself again (as we meet our selves in a glass) in the eies and eares and hearts of the hearers and readers: and that Spirit, which is ever the same to an equall devotion, makes a writing and a speaking equall means to edification. (Letters, p. 25) Donne's dream of communication was one in which the reader or audience or congregation repeated, or mirrored in their responses, the thoughts and feelings of the author who made the text. In the letters, as in the poetry, personal psychological struggles were used as a medium of communication with a sympathetic reader. As a consequence of his communicative purposes, Donne often undid or aborted the discursive lines of development in his writing, making his works often virtually "self-consuming artifacts." (84) But this was one of his habitual ways of fostering intuitive understanding he felt he could share with his chosen audiences. In particular lyrics, the failure or subversion of rationality often makes possible both emotional closure and complex forms of understanding that transcend the bounds of narrow logic. Critics like Joan Webber and Donald Friedman recognize that, in both his Sermons and some of his best poetry, Donne enacts a process of discovery that necessitates such witty destruction of rational discrimination and control for the sake of emotional and intuitive apprehension of complex or mysterious subject matter.(85) To this end, Donne used a strategy of deliberate confusion to clear the way, in his own and in his reader's minds, for higher understanding.86 Donne used many means to produce such creative discordance in his works, including the deliberate clashing of vehicle and tenor, the noncongruence of statement and tone, the witty misalliance of dramatic situation and actual speech performance, the opposition of rhetorical manner and stylistic decorum. The wit of many of Donne's poems depends on his awareness of his readers' responses to his manipulation and conflation of generic expectations: in his love lyrics, [23] literary forms,
modes, conventions, and idioms, his decisions to observe and/ or subvert
decorum, the choice of literary forms, modes, conventions, and idioms,
his adoption of styles of address and of selfpresentation, and his exploitation,
within the constraints they imposed, of contextual resources. It is
obvious that the different socioliterary circumstances of "The
Indifferent," Metempsychosis, "The Extasie," "Twicknam
Garden" and "Goodfriday, 1613. Riding Westward" greatly
affected the composition and original reception/interpretation of these
works. Donne's poems were products less of the study than of a series
of social relationships spread over a number of years. The special character
of this verse with its rich interplay of text and context has been falsified
since its posthumous publication in 1633 as a poetical corpus.(89) This
study attempts to recover some of what has been lost through the literary
institutionalization of Donne's verse. |
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Notes to Marotti's "Introduction": [293] 1. See J. W. Saunders,
"The Stigma of Print: A Note on the Social Bases of Tudor Poetry,"
Essays in Criticism 1 (1951): 139-64, and The Profession of English
Letters (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul and Toronto: Univ. of Toronto
Press, 1964), pp. 31-48.
age, or characteristic
feature of rhythm or style of the original poem" (25), and "'Mock-songs'"
(27). The custom of composing answer poems is a longstanding one by
the seventeenth century. [295] ed. with analytic
commentary by Stephen Booth [New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press,
1977], p. 267). [296] of particular poems.
Vellutello, for example, makes the relationship of lovers in the Canzoniere
into a romantic narrative (see Luigi Baldacci, II Petrarchismo Italiano
Nel Cinquecento [Milan and Naples: Riccardo Ricciardi, 1957], p. 52). [297] the Group I manuscripts
associated with Donne's attempt in 1614 to gather his verse for publication
generally lack titles for individual poems (showing signs of Donne's
only having begun the job of providing them), while the Group II manuscripts
contain more titled pieces probably because Donne felt the need, in
giving his work to Ker in 1619, to include them since the poems were
far removed from their original socioliterary circumstances. Significantly,
the Westmoreland manuscript, associated with a close friend of the poet,
lacks titles entirely ("The Titles of Donne's Poems," in Friendship's
Garland: Essays Presented to Mario Praz on His Seventieth Birthday [Rome:
Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1966], 1: 189-207). Manuscript-circulated
verse and poems in manuscript miscellanies usually lack titles (and
often authors' names), their original social contexts having served
to frame them. [298] Farewell to Love,"
"Witchcraft by a Picture," "The Expiration:' and "The
Computation")-poems that he didn't get back into his possession
in 1614 when he was gathering in his verse. Of the others, "The
Dissolution," "Nega [299] preacher applies,
I believe, to Donne the poet as well-that "the building of [300] 87. Thomas Carew,
"An Elegie upon the death of the Dean of Paul's, D'
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