Poetry and Paternity in Renaissance England Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne and Jonson
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P oe t ry a n d Pat e r n i t y i n
r e n a iss a nc e e ngl a n d
Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne and Jonson
in the english renaissance, becoming a father was the main way for
a man to be treated as a full member of the community. yet patri-
archal identity was by no means as secure as is often assumed: when
poets invoke the idea of paternity in love poetry and other forms,
they are therefore invoking all the anxieties that a culture with
contradictory notions of sexuality imposed. This study takes these
anxieties seriously, arguing that writers such as sidney and spenser
deployed images of childbirth to harmonize public and private
spheres, to develop a full sense of selfhood in their verse, and even
to come to new accommodations between the sexes. shakespeare,
donne and Jonson, in turn, saw the appeal of the older poets’ aims,
but resisted their more radical implications. The result is a fiercely
personal yet publicly committed poetry that would not be seen again
until the time of the romantics.t om m ac fau l is lecturer in english at Merton college,
University of oxford. He is the author of Male Friendship in
Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (cambridge, ) and many
articles on renaissance poetry and drama.Poe t ry a n d Pat e r n i t y i n r e n a iss a nc e e ngl a n d
Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne and Jonson
toM M ac FaU l Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Dubai, Tokyo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK
Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York
© Tom MacFaul 2010 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published in print format 2010
ISBN-13 978-0-511-78945-8 eBook (NetLibrary)
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For my parents
Contents
Acknowledgements page viii List of abbreviations1 Presumptive fathers
2 Uncertain paternity: the indifferent ideology of patriarchy
3 The childish love of Philip sidney and Fulke greville
4 spenser’s timely fruit: generation in The Faerie Queene
5 ‘We desire increase’: shakespeare’s non-dramatic poetry
6 John donne’s rhetorical contraception
7 ‘to propagate their names’: Ben Jonson as poetic godfather coda: sons
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgements
My first debt of gratitude in the writing of this book is to richard Mccabe, who supervised my doctoral thesis on spenser, and who has continued to offer much-valued advice on spenserian and other matters. as an under- graduate, i was introduced to many of the authors considered here by Howard erskine-Hill and gavin alexander, and for that i continue to owe them a great deal. other friends and colleagues who have helped me clarify my thinking or given valuably of their time on matters of fact and interpretation include glenn Black, guy cuthbertson, ian donaldson, Katherine duncan-Jones, Hugh gazzard, steve gunn, amanda Holton, david norbrook, emma smith, Michael Whitworth and Kieron Winn. i am also very grateful to cambridge University Press’s readers for sug- gestions as to how the book might be improved – one of whom, Patrick cheney, having removed the veil of anonymity, i am glad to be able to thank by name. Many thanks are due to sarah stanton at cambridge University Press for having faith in the project, to rebecca Jones for seeing the book through the press, and to annie Jackson for careful copy-editing, which has saved me from many infelicities. in many ways, this book began as an attempt to answer some of the questions regularly raised by students when dealing for the first time with the poetry of the english renaissance: i’m immensely grateful to a large number of my students (too many to name here) for their enthusiasm, fresh perspectives and insight. in particular, i’d like to thank those who have taken special author papers with me on donne, spenser and Jonson. an earlier version of chapter 3, ‘The childish love of Philip sidney and
Fulke greville’ was published as an article in Sidney Journal 24 (2006); i am grateful to the editor, Mary ellen lamb, for her advice on this piece, and for permission to use this work here. a brief section of chapter 6 has appeared as donne’s ‘The sunne rising’ and spenser’s ‘epithalamion’, in
Notes & Queries 54 (2007); i am grateful to the editors for allowing me to
Abbreviations
ELR English Literary Renaissance NQ Notes & Queries
ODNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
OED Oxford English Dictionary RES Review of English Studies RQ Renaissance Quarterly SEL Studies in English Literature SP Studies in Philology
c h a p t e r 1
Presumptive fathers
When Ben Jonson wrote that his dead son was ‘his best piece of poetry’,
he was not merely following a common convention of analogizing writing and fatherhood, but tapping into a deep well of feeling about children, poems and what they mean to one’s sense of selfhood. elizabethan and Jacobean poets make paternity a central preoccupation: it is a model for all forms of achievement (poetic, political and economic) and provides a way of imposing some unity on one’s life and one’s work. By figuring oneself as a father, or by focussing on biological generativity, one could create a sense of aesthetic order and literary authority, the idea or model of paternity also acting as a means of relating the public and private spheres. yet it is a mis- take to think of this as being founded on a stridently confident and uni- fied notion of patriarchy; male writers were anxiously aware that paternity was a position of presumption in tudor and stuart england: it was pre- sumptive in that a man could never be entirely certain that he was a father; it was also presumptuous in that it involved taking on a role and name that was properly god’s (as Matthew 23:9 has it – see below). The idea of paternity, then, was alienated, never quite wholly possessed by an indi- vidual. owing to the presence of a virginal woman on the throne, taking the place of the ultimate patriarch, paternity was further marginalized in elizabethan england, despite being the central role of masculine identity. such tensions persisted into the reign of James i, even though that king developed an increasingly insistent paternalistic ideology. conceiving of themselves as fathers in various ways, poets from sidney to Jonson tried to resolve these tensions and, though they may have failed to develop the secure and unified self-images they sought, they succeeded in creating a lit- erary tradition that was both highly personal and able to make significant interventions in the public sphere. Three major poetic purposes are served by focussing on paternity: poets create unified but alienated voices for themselves, use images of generativity to establish new accommodations
2 Poetry and Paternity in Renaissance England between the sexes, and reflect on the different spheres into which an indi- vidual may invest himself.
‘Pater semper incertus est’, runs the roman legal proverb; ‘mater
certissima’ – that is, paternity is always uncertain, but maternity is the
most certain thing of all. This simple fact implies a tremendous effect on the whole of human psychology (and that of other species), as sociobiol- if we are looking for a cross-cultural human ‘universal’, it is surely in this area that we will find it; yet it is also very much subject to cultural variation (as well as vari- ation on the basis of individual peculiarities). Precisely because paternity is uncertain, an element of flexibility enters into male identity: one can choose one’s allegiances and the nature of one’s investments. Freud would suggest that this involves the masculine ‘renunciation of instinct’:
an advance in intellectuality consists in deciding against direct sense-perception
in favour of what are known as the higher intellectual processes – that is, memor-
ies, reflections and inferences. it consists, for instance, in deciding that paternity
is more important than maternity, although it cannot, like the latter, be estab-
lished by the evidence of the senses, and that for that reason the child should bear
his father’s name and be his heir.yet instinct is not so easily renounced. Paternity involves a strange mix- ture of freedom and obligation, of uncertainty and fixity; an awareness of natural instinct cuts across cultural formations. any given social structure (but particularly a modern one) needs to police both the breeding and questions of reproduction and sexuality are always public matters, even though the feelings involved are to some degree individualistic. The pressures were particularly acute in elizabethan and Jacobean england, where a long-standing tradition of individualism was and where older customary practices were challenged by newly unified and textual- ized ideologies. one of the major functions of poetry may be to express the problems of negotiating the interaction between self and world in this case, giving meaning to individual desires within publicly negotiated structures, whilst seeking to shape those structures in ways which may better accom- modate the individual’s desires. Various factors made this agenda seem par- ticularly urgent in the period under consideration: a woman on the throne challenging normative ideas about relations between the sexes; competing religious and scientific ideas about generation; a greater consciousness of social mobility; and the rise of a semi-professional idea of authorship. all this meant that poets had to reflect deeply on their own masculinity, see-
Presumptive fathers
3 anthony Fletcher’s account of renaissance notions of gender gives important reasons for masculinity being anxious and dependent:
Their belief in the mingling of [a woman’s] seed with their own in the womb
made it impossible for men to think of themselves as wholly gendered male
beings until they had struggled free of maternal making and maternal influence.
Thus the legacy of the galenic heritage was the notion of human singleness being
achieved out of inherent doubleness. Men found their manhood through their
sexual potency and through the act which started the same cycle of twinship and
We might infer from this, however, that no notion of essential masculinity was available, and that masculinity was all process with no final result. This will not quite do: a male god, the ultimate sacred Father, and His representatives on earth, particularly kings and familial fathers, but also perhaps priests and educators, constituted, at least notionally, a dwelling place for the idea of the father – the sacred name of the father is therefore not merely to be treated as an object of conventional reverence, but as a guarantee of the full masculinity which is never quite realized in an indi- vidual’s life. in many societies, to become a father is to become a man in the full sense, but that full masculinity is challenged in a number of ways, not
identify
least by women. to be a man in most pre-feminist societies is to with the paternal line; the classic misogynistic trope attacking the pro- verbial mutability of women surely reflects male anxiety about women’s ability to interfere with this straightforward line, on the one hand by introducing the radical uncertainty of paternity, and on the other by
altering a man’s sons – both in carrying and in nurturing them – so that
the son is not an identical copy of the father. as sir Walter ralegh put it in his Instructions to His Sonne, ‘Wives were ordayned to continue the generation of men, to transferre them, and diminish them, eyther in countenance, or abilitie’. Women are necessary, but regarded as apt to translate men into diminished forms. denials of women’s contribution to offspring (based on aristotle’s On the Generation of Animals), mak- ing women out to be mere seedbeds for the transmission of masculinity, constitute an attempt to still this anxiety, and to pretend that masculin- ity is primary when there is a real suspicion that it is secondary. There is no doubt that much of the anxiety we see expressed in these poets is chauvinistic if not misogynistic; yet there are many varieties of sexism involved, some of which involve an awareness of their own absurdity and weakness, and many of which are rooted in more complex anxieties than
4 Poetry and Paternity in Renaissance England nature itself (or herself) could come in for some criticism. in Fletcher
The Honest Man’s Fortune (c. 1613), lady orleans, suspected of
and Field’s infidelity by her paranoid husband, articulates an understandable female desire for men’s sense of feminine mystery to be dispelled:
o Heaven, how gratious had creation been to women, who are borne without defence,
if to our hearts there had been doores through with
our husbands might have lookt into our thoughts,
By contrast, in the anonymous Swetnam, the Woman Hater ), the titular misogynist (aka Misogynos) argues
Happy were man, had woman neuer bin.
Why did not nature infuse the gift of Procreation
in man alone, without the helpe of woman, r euen as we see one seed, produce another? (B2 )Though this character is the play’s villain, and though his misogyny will be confuted by the play’s conclusion, his position is merely an extreme ver- sion of the anxieties expressed in more normative discourse. it has often been noted that elizabethan poets appropriate images of pregnancy to depict their own creativity, but there has been some debate about the reasons for this. Katharine eisaman Maus postulates that it may simply be because ‘men envy women’s ability to give birth’, but thinks this The more profound reason, for Maus, may be that men want to appropriate elizabeth d. Harvey similarly sees the appropriation of femininity as enab- Men in all cultures may envy the certainty of female creativity, and though it would be glib to suggest that this impels male artistic creation, an aware- ness of this aspect of the artist’s motivation is quite commonplace (it goes back at least as far as Plato); when such an awareness is allied with an active cultural disparagement of motherhood, the most thoughtful poets may have to respond by acknowledging the anxieties that lie behind the asser- tions of masculine primacy. When patriarchal manliness is taken as too absolute a value, the threats to it become all the more troubling, particu- larly if it is recognized as being founded on fictions; yet this frees poets up to create their own fictions – hoping to improve on the official ones.
Whilst it is certainly true that reproductive sexuality was the cul-
Presumptive fathers
5 an unproblematic norm. although the patriarchal nuclear family was increasingly valorized in the elizabethan era, it was challenged by a num- ber of factors. Firstly an ideology of masculine friendship as the highest form of love made the family secondary. yet ‘homosocial’ attempts to exclude women from the father–son bond which is taken to be the fun- damental basis of society are even more doomed than similar attempts to exclude women from amicable male society in an exaggerated ideal of friendship. The patriarchal and the homosocial are bound together, but are equally unrealizable ideals. it is the fact that both are unnatural that creates a genuine sense of confusion in the renaissance period. The male line ‘ought’ to be central and primary, but many men can see that it is really secondary and culturally formed. a second major challenge came from the anomalous position of the female monarch. The family had to be validated from on high by a woman who had no family at all. These factors in some ways marginalize the heterosexual, patriarchal family – and one might even argue that this mar- ginalization contributed to a developing private sphere of the nuclear fam- ily. it is important to avoid imposing a modern dichotomy of public and but
some distinction between
equally it is important to be aware that there was the spheres, and a consciousness that it was growing. The decline of larger kinship and clientage structures, along with the emergence of the machin- ery of the modern nation state, meant that people were increasingly begin- ning to see their loyalties in terms of a division between nation and family, it is not surprising then that ‘natural’ familial urges become confused in this period; in fact, one could argue that monogamous procreative marriage is as confused a category as Foucault famously argued that sodomy is. Protestant ideology also had complex effects. Mary Beth rose argues that
although Protestant sexual discourse retains much of the erotic skepticism of
the dualistic sensibility, it nevertheless unites love with marriage and conceives
of marriage with great respect as the foundation of an ordered society. Protestant
discourse is not dualistic, but complex and multifaceted, and one of its most sig-
nificant and far-reaching changes is a shift in the prestige and centrality granted
These ideas of marriage may not have been new, but as rose shows, they were more generally disseminated in elizabethan england than they had been before. she also challenges arthur Marotti’s notion that discourses
6 Poetry and Paternity in Renaissance England it may be, love, definitely, is love.’ one of my central enquiries here is to what extent love is sex – that is, to what extent poetic discussions of love are preoccupied by sexual generation, and how far anxieties about sex and childbirth inform poets’ attitudes to their art, and their sense of its significance in the public realm. Both sex and poetry are ways of guar- anteeing the continuity of the self, preventing isolation in the here and now, and giving one an afterlife in the future, but both are also uncertain endeavours.
The major stream of paternal imagery in elizabethan verse begins with
Astrophel and
Philip sidney, whose hugely influential sonnet sequence
Stella commences with the struggles of male poetic parturition: loving in truth, and faine in verse my love to show, That the deare she might take some pleasure of my paine:
Pleasure might cause her reade, reading might make her know,
Knowledge might pitie winne, and pitie grace obtaine, i sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woe, studying inventions fine, her wits to entertaine: oft turning others’ leaves, to see if thence would flowsome fresh and fruitfull showers upon my sunne-burn’d braine.
But words came halting forth, wanting invention’s stay, invention, nature’s child, fled step-dame studie’s blowes, and others’ feete still seemed but strangers in my way. Thus great with child to speak, and helplesse in my throwes, Biting my trewand pen, beating myself for spite, ‘Fool’, said my muse to me; ‘look in thy heart, and write.’
The tension between nature and art is deeply woven into the texture of the poem: from the initial pun on fain (wanting to, or feigning to), through the structural irony of such highly wrought rhetoric being used for the purposes of supposedly simple, true love, and the pen which is truant or true-ant (truth-making?) to the final pun on art/heart, sidney continu- ously expresses the self-confounding secondariness of masculine self- expression. Though the idea of the poet as father to his words does not emerge until the sestet, it is suggested at the end of the octave, where the idea of being ‘fruitful’ prompts us to think of the ways in which an indi- vidual can come to fruition. The ways in which he may do so are many, and are at the centre of this book’s concern: he may mature, and this will involve giving fruition to his own father as well as himself; he may win the woman, and thus not only gratify himself but also beget children of his own; he may gain other kinds of grace than female favour – godly and royal; he may achieve things in the public world; finally, he may make a
Presumptive fathers
7 poem that lasts. yet the idea of fruition is not only complex in its results, but problematic as a process: however much one may want it to be a mat- ter of hard work and study, it may also involve an element of passivity. Just like a fruit, one cannot force it: external influences must bring it steadily to ripeness (which is ‘all’ according to edgar in King Lear (v. ii. 11)); those influences are experienced as female – the Queen, nature, the beloved, the Muse – and they, paradoxically, make the process of masculine self- making feel feminine, like the apparently passive suffering of childbirth.
The process of becoming fully masculine involves dealing with the femin- ine in ways that can fundamentally undermine one’s sense of masculinity.
For this reason, hermaphroditism is a powerful notion, allowing accom- modations to be made between the sexes. The common galenic model of sex-difference considered the body as flexible; able, through the influence of the humours, to acquire characteristics of either sex, femininity being the basic condition, and masculinity being something one had to strive This model sat side-by-side with an idea that masculinity and femin- inity (as abstractions, at least) were fundamentally different, but the hows and whys of that difference required much rhetorical fancy footwork, as in donne’s ‘air and angels’. in some ways, it was masculinity that was more
added), femininity being
the abstraction (being that which needed to be associated with nature, the body and the material world. any accommo- dation between the sexes, then, would have to be figured in a hermaph- roditic manner. if offspring were a mixture of masculine and feminine, then so might be poems; for some poets that might even be a desirable result, allowing some redemption of condemned or repressed feminine elements in themselves. Mostly, however, poems are presented as male (though romances and translations might be considered as female, for reasons of genre and reflecting a sense of secondariness respectively). The ideal essence of the original poem is conceived as primarily masculine, but sometimes with feminine characteristics (such as mutability) that may enable a redemption of both sexes, or even a redemption of the anxieties created by sex-difference and masculine secondariness. For many poets, then, one of the major points of amatory verse is to negotiate better rela- tions between the sexes and therefore between the masculine and femin- ine aspects of themselves. all this said, conceiving of literary work in paternal terms is usually intended as a mode of authorial assertion. The dedication of the printed
The Knight of the Burning Pestle (1607, pub. 1613) is
text of Beaumont’s unusual in deploying the paternal conceit on behalf of a play. The publisher
8 Poetry and Paternity in Renaissance England Walter Burre writes, to robert Keysar, manager of the children of the Queen’s revels:
sir,
This unfortunate child, who in eight days (as lately i have learned) was begot and
born, soon after was by his parents (perhaps because he was so unlike his breth-
ren) exposed to the wide world, who for want of judgement, or not understand-
ing the privy mark of irony about it (which showed it was no offspring of any
vulgar brain) utterly rejected it; so that for want of acceptance it was even ready
to give up the ghost, and was in danger to have been smothered in perpetual
oblivion, if you (out of your direct antipathy to ingratitude) had not been moved
to relieve and cherish it, wherein i must needs commend both your judgement,
understanding, and singular love to good wits. you afterwards sent it to me, yet
being an infant and somewhat ragged, i have fostered it privately in my bosom
these two years, and now to show my love return it to you, clad in good lasting
clothes, which scarcely memory will wear out, and able to speak for itself; and
withal, as it telleth me, desirous to try his fortune in the world, where if yet it be
welcome, father, foster-father, nurse and child, all have their desired end. if it be
slighted or traduced, it hopes his father will beget him a younger brother, who
shall revenge his quarrel, and challenge the world either of fond and merely literal
or illiterate misprision.There may be several reasons for this: the play is an exceedingly unusual one, and had been a theatrical flop, and the printing is clearly an attempt not so much to cash in on a stage reputation as to find a different kind of audience in print, so that the paternal metaphor is used to assert the play’s status as a theatrical poem; Beaumont also was a man of consider- ably higher social status than most playwrights, and the paternal meta- phor may be a way of endowing the play with some of this status. despite the play being published anonymously, as if it were a noble foundling, Beaumont, who would be buried in Westminster abbey near chaucer and spenser (in what would become Poets’ corner), is made into a theatri- cal poet by the publisher’s gesture: the paternal metaphor insists on both familial and poetic status and gives a sense of inherent social and aesthetic value to a man’s works.
Cupid’s Whirligig, also has
a play of the same year, edward sharpham’s a dedication using the paternal metaphor, the author telling his ‘friend’ robert Hayman
I aime at you rather then the Reader, because since our trauailes I haue been preg-
nant with desire to bring foorth something whereunto you may be witnesse [a rather
, and now being brought a bed if you please to be low-church term for godfather]Godfather, I doubt not but this childe shal be wel maintained, seeing hee cannot liue
aboue an houre with you, and therefore shall intreat you, when he is dead, he may be
9 Presumptive fathers
Heere lies the childe, who was borne in mirth, against the strict rules of all childe-birth: and to be quit, i gaue him to my friend,
Who laught him to death, and that was his end.
as the play centres on a man who castrates himself in order to test his wife’s chastity, the theme of paternity is rather grotesquely appropriate . an end to paternity and therefore to masculinity may be treated comically in the play, but to be laughed to death for a failure of one’s masculine creativ- ity is a deep fear for many renaissance writers – there is a risk of humili- ation in publication which might be considered a kind of emasculation.
Paternal imagery is perhaps most commonly to be found in dedications and prefaces, where it frames the work and relates it to its author, often in rather ironic ways. When sidney calls the
Arcadia ‘this child i am loath to
father it is not just a modesty formula or an instance of a courtier’s reluc- tance to see his work in print (he was writing the dedication for a manuscript, after all), but rather a mark of the way in which fathering can mean acknow- ledging as one’s own, or even as a part of one’s self. His paternal reluctance may be as unaffectionate as the behaviour of the prime father in the text, euarchus, who sentences his son to death, but it shows how much of a com- mitment fathering a text might be. spenser’s dedication of The Shepheardes
Calender (1579) to sidney is still more complex; he does not address sidney,
but the book itself, presenting it as a child going out to be fostered: to His BooKe.
Goe little booke: thy selfe present, As child whose parent is vnkent: To him that is the president Of noblesse and of cheualree, And if that Enuie barke at thee, As sure it will, for succoure flee Vnder the shadow of his wing,
And asked, who thee forth did bring,
A shepheards swaine saye did thee sing,
All as his straying flocke he fedde: And when his honor has thee redde, Crave pardon for my hardyhedde. But if that any aske thy name,Say thou wert base begot with blame:
For thy thereof thou takest shame. And when thou art past ieopardee, Come tell me, what was sayd of mee: And I will send more after thee.10 Poetry and Paternity in Renaissance England The book is accorded a self and therefore an ability to act as well as speak in the world: it can move about in the world and, like Jonson’s poem on his son, it can be ‘asked’ about its origins. Those origins are ‘base’ for a num- ber of reasons: the passage reflects spenser’s sense of his own lowly status (though given his desire to be connected with the spencers of althorp this may be modesty); it is also a literary modesty formula refusing to boast of his poem’s worth; it is linked to the supposed lowness of pastoral on the hierarchy of genres, and the social lowness of the shepherds central to that genre; finally, it reflects spenser’s decision to remain anonymous, thus in a sense bastardizing his poem. His preoccupation with foundlings in the later Faerie Queene would develop from this, suggesting that one needs to form one’s own identity in a way we would call meritocratic, before one’s paternity can be acknowledged. despite later becoming a pub-
The Shepheardes
licly acknowledged poet (and implicitly acknowledging
Calender in the opening lines of The Faerie Queene), spenser would never
Calender, even in the five later editions published input his name to the This may be because, having dedicated the work to sidney, he no longer considered it his own. Poems, considered as children, take on a life of their own, and find their own way in the world like sons; yet the father’s very anxiety about them suggests how much of themselves is at stake.
The circulation of poems in manuscript and the inevitable distortions this produced made it clear to authors that they were not in total control of their works any more than they could be in total control of their off- spring; that uncertain model of reproduction even carried over into print, where an author had little control once he had handed over his text (or e author’s sense of investment in his text therefore, it may seem paradoxically, goes hand-in- hand with a need to be phlegmatic about others’ appropriations of one’s text. The idea of paternity allows poets to express their ambivalent feel- ings about this state of affairs, and contributes to the need to play with voice: the text itself must be imagined as its own speaker, even as it chan- This is mainly an issue for the elizabethans and Jacobeans, fading as James’s reign goes on: as Jonson professionalizes authorship, making it a more secure alternative to paternal immortal- ity, he does away with some of the anxieties associated with letting one’s poems go out into the world, reducing the metaphoric power of natural or artistic generativity, and thus of the investments poets make in it. The very confidence of his own voice militates against the tensions we find in
Presumptive fathers
11 The analogy between poetry and paternity is so obvious that it can seem
makers; yet,
transparent: poets and fathers are both culturally privileged whilst the analogy may be intended to validate both roles, the effect tends to be much more complex, as neither role has as much real power as people would like. Privileged as fathers and poets were, they also knew that their privileges depended on an uncertain system that patronized them and put them in their place. Fathers remain uncertain that they are really fathers, and can see that their power within the family is subordinated to other power structures. Poets, particularly in a culture of print-publication without authorial copyright, know that they have relatively little con- trol over the fate of their works, and are as aware of themselves as sons to a larger tradition as they are of their paternal relation to their poems. instead of providing mutual validation of two important roles, then, the analogy in fact enables the expression of anxieties about selfhood, even as the self tries to extend itself into the wider world and claim some of it for its own. The fact that such anxieties get expressed does, however, imply or even insist that the self may be transmitted into the world: some real and important part of one’s individuality is at stake in both poetry and pater- nity. However distorted – or even autonomous – the version of the self that comes out may be, some kind of organic connection with the world is established. among other things, then, the paternal analogy is a way for poets to signal their personal investment in their works. This notion needs to be approached with caution: teachers of literature probably find this issue to be the one on which we most frequently have to correct our students, so that it has become an automatic reflex to remind ardent youth of the impersonality of poetry. ‘it is not the poet speaking directly; we must refer to “the speaker of the poem” (however clumsy that may seem)’; ‘sincerity is not necessarily an aesthetic virtue’: these have become professional shibbo- leths, and up to a point this is right and proper; Harold Bloom’s sugges- tion that university gates should be adorned with Wilde’s dictum ‘all bad yet there are occasions when we must consider that the student’s supposedly naïve per- spective has something valuable in it. of course poets use masks of various sorts when they write, but then almost every speech-act can be treated in this way: ‘i’ is always alienated to some degree. it is one of the critic’s tasks to assess what degree of selfhood can be found in a work of art. of course, we may further contend that selfhood is an illusion and the attempt to fix it a bourgeois mystification, but these ideas are, i think, more useful as
12 Poetry and Paternity in Renaissance England assumption that the poet feels himself to have some sort of self, illusory or not, and that he wants to communicate this to some degree. He may find that he can only confirm his feeling of selfhood by investing it in something he knows not to be himself, and the more sophisticated he is as an artist the more aware he may be of the paradoxical nature of this pro- ceeding. Most of the poets examined here took their investment in their works very seriously even as they played with their poetic identities. The differing degrees to which they found satisfaction in this activity and the different modes by which they attained it will be central preoccupations of this study. none of this is to say that renaissance poets really antici- pated the romantics in a preoccupation with subjectivity, or at least not in a straightforward way. They are interested in themselves, but they see themselves as divided into many spheres of interest. endowing their works with a sense of agency by regarding them as children may be an attempt to create some unity which resolves the divisions of selfhood. in that much, at least, they may have some resemblance to the coleridgean yearning for wholeness. some of the more important connections of poetry and paternity to selfhood can be captured in the connotations of the word ‘conceit’ or
OED gives the
‘concept’ (used quite interchangeably in the period): the two main meanings of ‘conceive’ as ‘i. to conceive seed or offspring: with yet the core meaning of the word points, i think, to an originating moment which gives some kind of unity to the productions of the self; the ultim- ate etymology of the word involves taking together, either within oneself or with someone else; it implies understanding and, through that under- standing, making something new; though basically a subjective process, it can either be wholly internal or be linked, however tenuously, to the outer world. sidney and spenser could think of their works as having a ‘conceit’ from which all the various aspects of the whole ramify. sidney argues that ‘any understanding knoweth the skill of each artificer standeth in that
Here the ref- erence is to the originating Platonic idea that allows the poet to conceive the whole, yet sidney must bolster this essentialism by an appeal (which is more than rhetorical) to truly insightful understanding. similarly, spenser, who repeatedly uses the word ‘conceive’ in describing his plan for
The Faerie Queene, tells ralegh that his letter is intended ‘to direct your
vnderstanding to the wel-head of the History, that from thence gathering the
whole intention of the conceit, ye may as in a handfull gripe al the discourse’
Presumptive fathers
13 here are powerful indicators of the desire for conception to be single, con- tained within the mind, but focussed and communicable; nonetheless, spenser’s conceit is famously a ‘ darke conceit’ (letter to ralegh, 3). such a conceit is mysterious because it is concealed in the writer’s mind but nonetheless is supposed to manifest itself throughout the work. a similar sense of mystery is found in thinking about biological conception, another form of conceit, which is also considered to reveal itself, however fitfully and uncertainly, in a child. The almost arrogant hopefulness and obses- siveness of this idea (which the modern word ‘conceit’ conveys) is often recognized by writers, who know that the unity they claim is elusive and may be illusory – that it may amount to an idol of the mind. nonetheless, it provides a valuable fiction of integrity – and, yes, even of sincerity – to the process of artistic creation.
We need go no further than the works of shakespeare to demonstrate how the word ‘conceit’ is used to intimate the extraordinary and mys- terious powers – for good and ill – of the mind’s creations, and to relate these to the idea of biological generativity. seemingly simple jokes link the idea of understanding to that of procreative conception, as in the comic exchange at the end of The Taming of the Shrew:
WidoW: He that is giddy thinks the world turns round. petruchio: roundly replied. k atherine: Mistress, how mean you by that? WidoW: Thus i conceive by him. petruchio: conceives by me! How likes Hortensio that?
For her to conceive from him would indeed be to make her grow round; her understanding of Petruchio, limited as it is, is related to the diffi- culty of conceiving the world going round, unless one is as giddy as he is. Mutual incomprehension is at the heart of this linguistic play: people are always conceiving each other wrongly, but it is the only link they have
King Lear, goneril, having given hints of her desires
with one another. in to edmund, tells him ‘this kiss, if it durst speak, / Would stretch thy spirits up into the air. / conceive, and fare thee well’ (iv. ii. 22–4); he is bidden to make an imaginative leap, and to begin the growth of his fortunes; right understanding will enable self-development, the mysteries of the mind are presented as setting things in motion, for good or ill. When lorenzo, in
The Merchant of Venice, tells Portia that she has ‘a noble and a true conceit /
of godlike amity’ (iii. iii. 2–3), he is not just saying that she understands antonio’s true friendship for Bassanio, but that her understanding will be
14 Poetry and Paternity in Renaissance England he wanted to be ‘dress’d in an opinion / of wisdom, gravity, profound conceit’ (i. i. 91–2), making him seem like an oracle, and nicely expressing the idea that conceit is mysterious – comprehension involves something incomprehensible. such an idea is perhaps most satisfyingly found in Bottom’s discussion of his dream: ‘The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to con- ceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was’ ( A Midsummer Night’s Dream, iv. i. 211–14); famously a parody of 1 corinthians 2:9, this syn- aesthetic garbling points to the difficulty of separating inward and out- ward conception and of drawing any crisp distinction between objective reality and the imagination. to conceive, which seems to involve not just understanding, but understanding of something fresh, is to bring some- thing wholly into consciousness, but even as one does so it strikes one with a kind of unreality. Thus Macduff, having seen the murdered duncan, can only say ‘o horror, horror, horror! tongue nor heart / cannot con-
Macbeth, ii. iii. 64–5); as with Bottom, conception
ceive nor name thee!’ ( is seen as something which might be felt inside the heart and expressible on the tongue, but which seems more often to be a matter of profound difficulty, if not error. othello, observing iago’s gnomic evasions, accuses
Othello, iii.
him of having shut up in his brain ‘some horrible conceit’ ( iii. 115); already, we have the sense that othello understands this to be desdemona’s infidelity, but though he is right that this is what iago wants him to think, and though he is ironically right that iago has a horrible plot conceived (his ‘monstrous birth’, i. iii. 404), all this conceiving is only hor- ribly in error. subjective, imaginative and erroneous though it may be, conceit has considerable power to impel action. This is forcefully communicated in titania’s description of the indian child’s mother: Full often hath she gossip’d by my side.
and sat with me on neptune’s yellow sands, Marking th’ embarked traders on the flood; When we have laugh’d to see the sails conceive and grow big-bellied with the wanton wind; Which she, with pretty and with swimming gait,
Following (her womb then rich with my young squire)
Would imitate, and sail upon the land to fetch me trifles, and return again, as from a voyage, rich with merchandise. But she, being mortal, of that boy did die,