Early Modern Metaphysical Literature: Nature, Custom and Strange Desires

Early Modern Metaphysical Literature Nature, Custom and Strange Desires

Michael Morgan Holmes

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Early Modern Metaphysical Literature

10.1057/9780230287075 - Early Modern Metaphysical Literature, Michael Morgan Holmes

Also by Michael Morgan Holmes

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MARY DI MICHELE: Her Life and Works

10.1057/9780230287075 - Early Modern Metaphysical Literature, Michael Morgan Holmes

Nature, Custom and Strange Desires Michael Morgan Holmes

10.1057/9780230287075 - Early Modern Metaphysical Literature, Michael Morgan Holmes

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Early Modern Metaphysical Literature

© Michael Morgan Holmes 2001

No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P 0LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2001 by PALGRAVE Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE is the new global academic imprint of St. Martin’s Press LLC Scholarly and Reference Division and Palgrave Publishers Ltd (formerly Macmillan Press Ltd). ISBN 0–333–76021–2 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Holmes, Michael, 1966– Early modern metaphysical literature : nature, custom, and strange desires / Michael Morgan Holmes. p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0–333–76021–2 (cloth)

1. English literature—Early modern, 1500–1700—History and criticism. 2. Sex in literature. 3. Difference (Psychology) in literature. 4. Manners and customs in literature. 5. Metaphysics in literature. 6. Nature in literature. 7. Desire in literature. I. Title. PR428.S48 H65 2000

820.9'353—dc21

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire

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All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission.

John Donne, `Farewell to Love'

Let us train ourselves to look. . . . In Nature Study we seek to ®nd out how animals and plants live; we note the dif®culties which they encounter, and see how in some cases these are overcome, whilst in others they prove too great. We are not concerned merely with the life-history of a single isolated animal or plant. No animal or plant lives or dies unto itself. As we study living things we shall ®nd out how closely they are related to one another, and to their habitat. Donald Patton, Nature Study for Beginners (1928)

Enjoy yourself and try to remember that life is real, life is earnest and the grave is not the goal. Noe l Coward, `Pretty Polly' (1964)

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Thus when Things not yet knowne are coveted by men, Our desires give them fashion, and so As they waxe lesser, fall, as they sise, grow.

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This book is dedicated to my companion, Dennis, for trust and renovations along the way

10.1057/9780230287075 - Early Modern Metaphysical Literature, Michael Morgan Holmes

List of Illustrations

ix

Acknowledgements

x

Introduction: Sublunary Things

1

Authors and their texts Nature and custom

6

9

1 Strangeness and Desire

19

`Metaphysical'?! Getting Metaphysical Desire is strange

19

28

34

2 Edward Herbert: Handsome, Chivalrous, and Strange

44

Truth, concept, and perception Wonder-ful Lord Herbert Poetry, desire, and the limits of perception Edward and John on the brink

46

50

58

66

3 Green Desires: Andrew Marvell and the Pursuit of Pleasure

69

Sapphic pleasures Marvell's bent The convent, marriage, and desire Into the woods `Streightness'

71

72

78

83

86

4 Rich Chains of Love: Desire and Community in Aemilia

Lanyer's Salve Deus Rex Judñorum Desire, devotion, and companionship Love's green shelter Coda 5 The Science of Possession: Conscience and Hagiology in

Early Stuart England Hagiology and cultural power Donne and liberty of conscience

89

91

101

104

106

109

112

vii

10.1057/9780230287075 - Early Modern Metaphysical Literature, Michael Morgan Holmes

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Contents

viii Contents

122

128

135

144

Afterword: Saints and Sinners for a New Millennium

149

Notes

157

Bibliography

181

Index

199

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Lyric contemplations Crashaw's Saint Teresa The afterglow of kings and martyrs Coda

1 Emblema LXXX: `Aduersus naturam peccantes', from Andreas Alciatus, Emblemata (Padua, 1623) (courtesy of Glasgow University Library, Department of Special Collections). 2 Miniature portrait of Edward, Lord Herbert of Chirbury, by Isaac Oliver (courtesy of the Rt Hon. The Earl of Powis). 3 Frontispiece from Robert Brown, The Subjects Sorrow: Or, Lamentations upon the Death of Britaines Iosiah King Charles (London, 1649) (courtesy of McGill University Libraries, Rare Books and Special Collections Division). 4 Frontispiece from John Donne, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (London, 1638) (by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library). 5 Portrait from John Donne, Poems (London, 1635) (by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library).

11 56

137

145 146

ix

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List of Illustrations

This book would never have been cobbled together without the friendship and intellectual stimulation of the following people: Mary Bly, Michael Bristol, Viviana Comensoli, Dennis Denisoff, Peter Holland, Leanore Lieblein, Robert Martin, Jeffrey Masten, Kevin Pask, Ted-Larry Pebworth, Sasha Roberts, Sera®ma Roll, Elizabeth Sauer, Barbara Seeber, Jessica Slights, Bruce Smith, Goran Stanivukovic, Claude Summers and, of course, my mother, Judy. As the manuscript began to take shape, the knowledgeable and welcoming librarians at the Folger Shakespeare Library and the faculty of the English Department at Georgetown University made a year in Washington, DC, a very rewarding and amicable time. I would also like to thank the rare books staff at the British Library and Glasgow University Library, as well as my publishers' anonymous reviewers and my kind editors, Eleanor Birne and Charmian Hearne (who even offered timely advice on a back-packing expedition in East Anglia), and my copy-editor, Valery Rose. I ®rst began vagabonding through these strange old texts as an undergraduate in classes led by Fr. Claude Arnold and Peter Marinelli ± tante grazie. My scholarly and physical well-being has been aided by grants from the McGill University Shakespeare in Performance Research Group, the President of McGill University, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the Dean of Humanities at Brock University. Thanks are also due to Glasgow University Library, McGill University Libraries, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Earl of Powis, and the National Trust for permission to reproduce copyright photographs. A version of Chapter 4 originally appeared in Aemilia Lanyer: Gender, Genre and the Canon; I appreciate the University Press of Kentucky's permission to reprint this material in revised form.

x

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Acknowledgements

Like many other people, I possess standards of beauty, truth, order, and justice that, most days, appear to me to be rooted in obvious common sense. Why, I sometimes wonder, don't all my friends agree with me that Andy Warhol can't hold a candle to Georges de la Tour or, a little more controversially, that the quest by some activists for same-gender marriage rights entails an unnecessary endorsement of an unpleasant status quo? It's only natural to think the way I do. This book is a study of writings that continue (thank heavens) to challenge and to change the ways I see the world. Despite the great age of the texts I explore, they possess a remarkable ability to unsettle my mind and knock me off whatever hobby-horse I am currently riding. Over the course of this introduction and the following chapters, I hope to show that early modern Metaphysical literature held a similar dissident potential when it was ®rst written and read. My primary contention is that certain texts by Edward Herbert, John Donne, Andrew Marvell, Aemilia Lanyer, and Richard Crashaw ingeniously disturb and estrange ®ctions of `natural' perception, desire, and identity that continue to inform Western culture. For almost a century the majority of scholars have regarded early modern Metaphysical literature as an upholder of traditional morality and religion ± indeed, a harmonizer of the personal and the universal ± at a time of social transformation and crisis. Metaphysical poetry and prose may appear unusual and dally with disorder, conventional wisdom asserts, but its true orientation is towards spiritual transcendence and the recognition of a unifying divine presence in a fragmentary and disappointing material world. By re-examining the 1

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Introduction: Sublunary Things

seventeenth- and eighteenth-century reception of these texts in connection with early modern and current theories of cultural reproduction and dissent, I attempt to develop a new understanding of the ways in which literary Metaphysicality prompts readers to discern the ideological work performed by `nature' and `naturalness' in human affairs.1 One of my principal tenets throughout this book is that much of Metaphysical literature is deliberately, strategically, and wonderfully strange. Creatively resisting and discohering the concepts of nature and naturalness as all-encompassing heuristic and ethical principles, it often reveals that nature, paradoxically, is what we make it. Metaphysical denaturalization occurs most provocatively in the context of mental perception, gender identi®cation, sexual morality, and political organization. The specimens of poetry and prose that I discuss are not in themselves subversive of hegemonic tradition and authority. They are able, however, to provoke potentially dissident re¯ection on cultural orthodoxies and they frequently encourage habits of mind that can accommodate non-normative desires and identities. Many of these pieces also support an ethical commitment to the existence of more ways of identifying the self, its pleasures, and various engagements than culture disguised as nature would allow. During the course of engaging with this subject, I have found that the writings of the early modern French statesman and philosopher Michel de Montaigne cast an invaluable light on Metaphysical literature as well as on my own thoughts. Towards the end of the sixteenth century, Montaigne wrote of his quest to understand the relations between moral norms, public culture, and the self. In John Florio's 1603 translation of Montaigne's essays, for instance, we come upon the following observation: `I study my selfe more than any other subject. It is my supernaturall Metaphisike, it is my naturall Philosophy' (III.331). Based on the record of his essays, Montaigne's `Metaphisike' apparently revealed to him that, like the self which possesses `so bottomlesse a depth, and in®nite variety' (III.334), human culture is also in®nitely diverse and mutable. Laws, on this account, are `maintained in credit, not because they are essentially just, but because they are lawes. It is the mysticall foundation of their authority . . . which availes them much' (III.331). While I am not claiming Montaigne as a direct inspiration for all the writers studied in this

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2 Early Modern Metaphysical Literature

book, his `Metaphisike' of variety and variability coincides in spirit with their own inquisitive ruminations. The general goal of my study is to reconceptualize literary Metaphysicality as a loosely uni®ed aesthetic movement that underscores the complex connections between early modern writings and their cultural and discursive environments. My work is also aimed, though, at recapturing some of the liveliness and contentiousness of reading the period's non-dramatic literature. Probably because of the engaging quality of the vociferous attacks by the likes of Stephen Gosson and Philip Stubbes, early modern drama has, for a majority of academics during the last twenty years, been the pre-eminent domain of cultural representation, intervention, and dislocation. Like many other astute scholars, such as Catherine Belsey and Jonathan Dollimore, Jean Howard makes a claim for the `ideological volatility' (p. 12) of the public stage by contrasting it with supposedly docile reading practices carried out in `solitary chambers' (p. 13). It seems to me, however, that by privileging drama and theatre-going as sites `for the production of new ideological positions and new modes of subjectivity' (Howard, p. 13), numerous critics too wholeheartedly buy in to antitheatrical rhetoric. An unfortunate consequence of this investment is that one misses the subtle denaturalizations carried out by many of the period's non-dramatic texts, foremost amongst them Metaphysical writings. No doubt many plays staged at the Rose, the Globe, and the Fortune provided stimuli for dissident thoughts; however, as Paul Yachnin observes, live performances rarely (if ever) became the hydra-headed monsters of social dissolution envisioned by Puritan antagonists.2 Instead of ®xating on the theatre, I propose that we accord nondramatic literature a considerable potential for unsettling naturalized customs, norms, and identities. When I approach the early modern reception of texts by Donne, Marvell, and other crew members, the image I have in mind is of readers, individually or (given that English people were still in the habit of reading aloud to clutches of friends) collectively, unshackled from public monitoring and therefore much freer to draw on the spirit of Metaphysical denaturalization in a multitude of circumstances. Katharine Maus (1995) has recently written about sixteenth- and seventeenth-century public authorities' fear of the gap between inward dissidence and hypocritical outward conformity to law and custom. The period's prose and poetry seems

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Introduction: Sublunary Things 3

4 Early Modern Metaphysical Literature

In what follows of this introduction I explain my rationale for selecting ®ve Metaphysical writers from a ®eld of possibly dozens. These prefatory considerations conclude by pondering the cultural work performed by the moral categories of nature and naturalness during the early modern period. As a counterpoint to this paradigm of order, I examine sixteenth- and seventeenth-century voices that interrogate the universality of what are assumed to be exclusively natural ways of thinking and being. Metaphysical denaturalization did not occur ex nihilo; rather, it emerged out of a frequently dissident tradition which asserted that culture is a transitory human creation. It was Aristotle who noted that `authors should compose without being noticed and should seem to speak not arti®cially but naturally. . . . The latter is persuasive, the former the opposite' (On Rhetoric, 3.2 [1404b]). Aristotle's paradoxical insight that, at least in terms of public oration, naturalness is a human contrivance, resonates with the Metaphysicals' more general apprehension that what society takes to be natural morality, identity, desire, and perception are instead deep-seated cultural habits. That this theme runs through some of the most stylistically arti®cial English texts, contributes a suitably droll irony to the study of Metaphysical literature. My ®rst chapter functions as a launching pad for the literary studies that comprise the major part of this book. I begin here by providing a detailed history of the ways literary Metaphysicality has been discussed from its inception through to the present. In this section I also attempt to draw together early modern and current understandings of desire and cultural reproduction in a provisional theory of how the Metaphysicals imagined estrangement. This endeavour is based on the premise that in a number of Metaphysical texts the relations between the material and the theoretical dimensions of existence come under intense scrutiny. Because it is directly implicated in these negotiations of theory and praxis, ideals and reality, desire is central to each of the investigations I conduct. I am particularly concerned, therefore with the ways in which Metaphysical literature asserts a connection between desire and the

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especially well-suited to engaging with this ungovernable interiority. Left to their own devices, what strange thoughts might readers of Metaphysical literature have produced within the private spaces of desire and the conscience?

denaturalization of customary and frequently oppressive ways of knowing and ordering the self and the world. In Chapter 2 I focus on the work of Edward Herbert, a remarkable ®gure who in most current estimations languishes in the shadow of his younger brother, George.3 The sheer delight produced by reading the elder Herbert's poems would, I think, be reason enough for his critical resuscitation. Amongst the more important contributions Edward Herbert's work makes to my book, however, is his recurring engagement with the relationship between culture, individual perception, and identity. Moving in turn from his philosophy of mind, to his poems about worldly corruption and the barriers to perfect insight, and then ®nally to his autobiographical representation of a public±private self, I suggest that Herbert's multifaceted oeuvre both testi®es to the power of Metaphysical estrangement and reveals the potent in¯uence of cultural ideals on the shaping of identity. Chapters 3 and 4 pursue denaturalization in terms of female homoeroticism, an area of early modern culture too often ignored by literary and historical scholars. The representation of `lesbian' passions in Metaphysical poetry goes beyond individual concerns to confront the public policing of desires and pleasures.4 Turning to Donne's elegy `Sapho to Philñnis' and, more extensively, Marvell's country-house poem Upon Appleton House, I illuminate the ways in which the Metaphysical mode draws attention to the coercive limitations of conventional sex and gender paradigms as well as underscores the subjective variability of moral interpretation. Donne and Marvell, I contend, make available opportunities to re¯ect on and contravene purportedly everlasting truths about human erotic proclivities and capacities. If, as Simon Shepherd holds, `dominant ideologies, perhaps at all historical junctures, need their distinct types of sexual deviance' in order to assert and reproduce moral and behavioural norms (p. 18), then Marvell's poetic treatment of sensual grati®cation in particular encourages readers to recognize the historical contingency of `deviance' and the plethora of other available erotic desires and practices. The subject of early modern poetic representation of lesbian desires persists in my next chapter which explores Aemilia Lanyer's book, Salve Deus Rex Judñorum. Here, I endeavour to show, Lanyer draws together religious devotion and homoeroticism in ways that Marvell glimpsed but did not fully explore. Attempting to reinterpret not only religious consciousness but also erotic devotion, Lanyer's work forthrightly

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Introduction: Sublunary Things 5

unites spirituality and eros, thereby emphasizing the legitimacy of women's mutual love routed through Christ. In so doing, the poet offers same-gender affection as a way for women to overcome the ravages of class divisions and men's proprietary claims, and as a positive ground for real-world communities. The last chapter of my book turns to Metaphysicality in relation to the dangerous politics of religio-political identity. Hagiological discourses were often employed in the period to cohere populations and to secure political agendas. The cases of Protestant and Roman Catholic martyrdom, as well as the vexed canonization of King Charles I ± the Royalists' `monarch martyr' and the Roundheads' Antichrist ± clearly reveal the political capital to be gained by supernatural sancti®cation. Reading in the context of these early modern debates Donne's lyric `The Canonization', his treatise Pseudo-Martyr (a response to the Oath of Allegiance controversy), and Crashaw's passionate panegyrics on  vila, I argue that in these works hagiology also provides a St Teresa of A potentially oppositional discourse that valorizes personal desire and liberty of conscience over normative formations. With Donne and Crashaw we encounter desire's ability to reconstruct myths of public identity and to fashion a critical, inward space for the survival of personal intellectual, spiritual, and possibly political commitments. Early Modern Metaphysical Literature ends with a conclusion in which I ponder the ways that the perspectives engendered by the texts addressed in this book need not be con®ned to antiquarian fetishism. `Most of the occasions of this worlds troubles are grammaticall', wrote Montaigne in the mid-sixteenth century (II.233). While we might today substitute `representational' for `grammaticall' ± in Stuart Hall's sense of `the active labour of making things mean' (p. 64) ± it seems to me that Metaphysical literature con®rms Montaigne's insight and gives us provocative opportunities to re¯ect on the persistent impact of naturalized habits of thought and identity in contemporary Western cultures. Re-encountering these centuries-old texts, we might just ®nd that the dawn of a new millennium is not a bad time to revisit some of their strange ways of seeing and writing about the world.

Authors and their texts In most enumerations, four or ®ve poets comprise the established canon of quintessential Metaphysicals: Richard Crashaw, John Donne,

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6 Early Modern Metaphysical Literature

George Herbert, Andrew Marvell, and Henry Vaughan ± these are the prime suspects.5 Other writers, such as William Alabaster, John Cleveland, Abraham Cowley, Edward Herbert, Thomas Traherne, and even Richard Lovelace and John Wilmot often get described either as `minor' Metaphysicals or as having exhibited Metaphysical traits in their writings. Despite the fact that it is a welcome event for scholars interested in reception history, Oxford University Press's 1995 reissue of Sir Herbert Grierson's foundational 1921 anthology, Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Century, perpetuates a rather worn catalogue. In his preface to this new edition Alastair Fowler notes that Grierson's conception of Metaphysical literature was `wider than ours'; however, he only asserts (without explaining why) that Sir John Suckling and Sir William Davenant ought to be expunged from the group (p. viii). The wide availability of Helen Gardner's collection The Metaphysical Poets (1957, rev. edn 1966, 1972) as an inexpensive Penguin paperback has further consolidated the standard list of authors and texts.6 In addition, except in the case of Donne (and occasionally Lancelot Andrewes) there is comparatively scant critical interest in exploring Metaphysical prose. Rather than attempting to fabricate a theory or approach that is suf®ciently vague to cover all the diverse authors who have been classed as Metaphysical, I have chosen to zero in on what might be called secular Metaphysicality. The removal of the primarily religious authors George Herbert and Henry Vaughan has enabled me to include discussions of Edward Herbert and a relative newcomer to the ®eld, Aemilia Lanyer. In making my decision to pursue this angle, I acknowledge the justness of the claims made by scholars such as Richard Helgerson and Debora Shuger that the frontier between the sacred and the secular in the early modern period is far from impermeable.7 To be sure, Crashaw, Donne, and Lanyer are steeped in theology and religious controversy; yet, many of their texts also deeply engage issues germane to gender, sexuality, and social control. My discussion of national identity and private conscience in Donne's Pseudo-Martyr and Crashaw's Saint Teresa odes, for instance, underscores the interanimation of religion and politics in seventeenth-century England. A fairly simple razor has, nevertheless, allowed me for the purposes of this project to distinguish between two sets of authors. On one hand are those whose principal preoccupations were with topics such as divinity, the afterlife, and the soul ± matters that even they would have identi®ed as sacred or

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Introduction: Sublunary Things 7

religious. On the other are writers who, although they often had much to say about spirituality, also produced a relatively large number of texts not explicitly orientated around transcendent concerns, and/or who incorporated a strong concern with secular politics and culture in their religious writings. While an awareness of sacred and secular mingling is justi®ed for the period's literature, it is also true that the Metaphysicals wrote at a time when distinctions between the two realms were becoming increasingly rei®ed. In sixteenth-century Italy, for instance, the impasse between a Platonic acknowledgment of physical love and a Christian repudiation of the body strongly contributed to Michelangelo Buonarotti's poetic rejection of carnal desire and his embrace of mystical rapture.8 Pressure to turn entirely to a spiritual relation with Christ was also felt in England; although scholars have problematized utterly chaste readings of George Herbert's poetry, the strongest persona he presented to the world was a holy man who had forsaken ¯eshly self-interest for spiritual enlightenment.9 As will become clear later, my decision to focus attention on secular matters also arises from my interest in seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury evaluations of Metaphysical writings. In their commentaries, John Dryden and Samuel Johnson ± two of the more in¯uential early commentators ± avoided discussing religion. It was not, in fact, until Grierson's anthology appeared that religious texts were thought of as central to the Metaphysical canon. In making my selection of what to study and what to exclude, I also wanted an opportunity to engage with the exciting work currently under way on early modern women's lives and writings. Very much a boys' club of authors, the Metaphysicals are due for some new members of another gender. While she may not have composed her poetry in Donne's `masculine perswasive' voice (`On his Mistris', l. 4), Aemilia Lanyer's Salve Deus Rex Judñorum engagingly shows the relevance of Metaphysical denaturalization to early seventeenthcentury feminist concerns. I hope that my inclusion of Lanyer in a discussion of literary Metaphysicality will encourage readers to reexamine the non-dramatic canon and to make other scholarly and pedagogical innovations. In addition to expanding the Metaphysical library to include a female writer, a principal aim of my project has been to establish a

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8 Early Modern Metaphysical Literature

dialogue between lesbian and gay issues and more so-called mainstream issues. The analysis of gender and sexuality in terms of their relation to homoeroticism is currently one of the most active ®elds in early modern studies; however, there is a tendency for these inquiries to remain isolated from other concerns.10 There are, of course, important historical reasons to do with prejudice, community empowerment, and plain old institutional habit which explain why this is so. Literary Metaphysicality, however, offers a colourful umbrella opportunity for a number of apparently discrete questions to be asked and explored together. By treating the subject of samegender eroticism as part and parcel of wider debates surrounding cultural reproduction, I believe that we can produce a fuller account of the ways in which early modern people ordered, interpreted, resisted, and changed their world.

Nature and custom What the Stoics called the summum bonum, `to live according to nature', has this meaning, in my opinion: always to agree with virtue, and to select all other things that might be `according to nature' only if they do not con¯ict with virtue, . . . nature desires the right, the appropriate, the consistent, and shuns their opposites. Cicero, De Of®ciis, III.13, 35 Our understanding of early modern literature and cultures is signi®cantly enhanced by taking account of the profound roles played by nature and custom in establishing the boundaries of truth, justice, identity, and a host of other socially organizing phenomena. Until around 1660 in England, one of nature's most penetrating manifestations was in the realm of Natural Law. In his exemplary recent study, Natural Law in English Renaissance Literature, R. S. White addresses the ways in which a wide spectrum of politicians and men of letters (including More, Bacon, Shakespeare, and Milton) drew on and manipulated Natural Law precepts in their representations of individual rights and responsibilities. White's

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Introduction: Sublunary Things 9

account makes clear that while `assuming some ethical dimension beyond man-made systems and positive laws' provided an effective rhetorical and jurisprudential groundwork (p. 106), that which monarchs, law courts, poets, and ordinary people called natural was subject to multiple competing de®nitions.11 As Bernadette Brooten observes in her exploration of female homoeroticism in the ancient Roman and early Christian world, `we can recognize ``natural'' and ``unnatural'' as categories born of controversy, as the result of disputes about social order' (p. 301). Indeed, the topic of same-gender erotic desire and activity is especially well suited to an investigation of how concepts of human nature and natural desires and identities were produced and contested. Jeffrey Richards, for instance, points out in his study of minoritizing vili®cation in Western cultures from the late-mediaeval period forward, that sexuality has frequently been a prime component of an ethical system riven by hard-and-fast de®nitions of naturalness and perversion. Along these lines, Andreas Alciatius' startling Emblem LXXX, `Aduersus naturam peccantes' [`Those sinning against nature'] offers visual con®rmation of a growing early modern demonization of nonheteronormative sexuality (see Figure 1).12 The emblem's creator so despises any departure from of®cially sanctioned eroticism that he likens this behaviour to defecation into a receptacle (a choenix) intended for measuring rations of food. Located amongst an array of emblems treating erotic and moral sins, the sexual perversity Alciati's emblem denotes is part of a chaotic spectrum of vice that supposedly infects Europe's moral clime. This example (and many others of its ilk) underscore the validity of Bruce Smith's claim that until very recent times (and the attitude sadly persists in many places) Western European Christian society has followed the grim pronouncements of St Paul in elevating nature `to the status of an ethical criterion' and thereby condemning, with especial vehemence, homoerotic desire and behaviour (p. 172).13 Nature's supposed erotic moral imperatives form part of a unifying theory of divinely inspired order. Drawing on a reservoir of classical proverbial wisdom, Erasmus pithily glosses the issue when he notes that `In Latin there is another very popular saying, ``against Minerva's will'' [Invita Minerva], for something which is done against one's bent, in de®ance of nature, without the blessing of heaven' (Adages, I.i.42).

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10 Early Modern Metaphysical Literature

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Introduction: Sublunary Things 11

Figure 1 Emblema LXXX: `Aduersus naturam peccantes', from Andreas Alciatus, Emblemata (Padua, 1623)

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12 Early Modern Metaphysical Literature

a righte, that phantasie hath not framed, but God hath graffed, and geuen man power therunto, wherof these are deriued. Religion and acknowlegyng of God. Naturall loue to our children, and other. Thankfulnesse to all men. Stoutnesse both to withstande and reuenge. Reuerence to the superiour. Assured and constaunt truthe in thynges. (eir ) In keeping with this approach, in Pierre Viret's seventeenth-century dialogue The Worlde Possessed with Deuils, nature receives the epithet `Schoolemistres'. Carrying out God's work in the world, nature instructs us, for instance, `to honour age, and to reverence the horie heared and graie bearded'; when we transgress nature's commandments, however, we `willingly resist her as Monsters' (Bir ). While these examples state matters rather bluntly, such attitudes also often appeared in more subtle and decorous form. Ben Jonson's apostrophe in `To Penshurst' detailing a naturally harmonious life offers a clear example: And though thy walls be of the country stone, They're reared with no man's ruin, no man's groan; There's none that dwell about them wish them down; But all come in, the farmer and the clown, And no one empty-handed, to salute Thy lord and lady, though they have no suit. (ll. 45±50) A smartly attired and literate ant colony, the aristocratic Sidneys preside over the well-oiled Penshurst-machine that embodies a mythologized feudal past in which England's happy peasants warmly embrace natural obedience to their social betters.14

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The sixteenth-century sociolinguist Thomas Wilson ¯eshes out this perspective when he de®nes nature as

One of the most notorious of early modern actualizations of nature is the gendered allocation of rights and power. John Knox's ®ery midsixteenth-century misogyny offers a revealing instance.15 `Nature,' he blusters, `doth paynt them [i.e., women] furthe to be weake, fraile, impacie[n]t, feble and foolishe: and experience hath declared them to be vnconstant, variable, cruell and lacking the spirit of counsel and regime[n]t' (10r ). Because of these manifold inadequacies, Knox concludes, `it is a thing moste repugnant to nature, that women rule and gouerne ouer men' (12v ); instead, `woman in her greatest perfection, was made to serue and obey man, not to rule and co[m]mand him' (13r ). A depressing cornucopia of misogynist vitriol and ostensibly rational argumentation could be cited as further proof of the political work undertaken during the period by using nature's ideological weight.16

`nil absuetudine maius' (nothing is mightier than custom) Ovid. Ars Amatoria, II.345 Despite the widespread conservative injunction to follow nature, many early modern people actively contested essentializing ®ctions, asserting instead that what is commonly called natural is, in reality, merely custom. An early spokesperson in England for this view was Thomas More's ®ctional globe-trotter, Raphael Hythlodaeus. This Portuguese adventurer's encounters with foreign cultures led him to conclude that `It needs must be almost always the rule that, as far as a thing is unlike the ways of the hearers, so far is it from obtaining their credence' (p. 85); in other words, cultural habits of mind and body dictate what people de®ne to be natural and perverse.17 Gender identity is an excellent case in point. Early on in Thomas Lodge's prose romance, Rosalind (the inspiration for Shakespeare's As You Like It), Sir John of Bordeaux rails to his sons that women are the most despicable creatures on earth: `A woman's eye, as it is precious to behold so it is prejudicial to gaze upon, for as it affordeth delight so it snareth unto death' (p. 100). Thankfully, it does not take Lodge too many pages to recast these attitudes as the ravings of a cross old codger. Rosalind, the text's eponymous heroine, brilliantly exposes gender's customary basis when, cross-dressed as a merry young man named Ganymede, she appears at ®rst to endorse Sir John's misogyny by labelling women as capricious `mad cattle' (p. 125). Surprised and

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Introduction: Sublunary Things 13

horri®ed by her splenetic speech, Rosalind's boon companion Celia (disguised as a shepherdess named Aliena) calls her on this abuse of their sex. Rosalind's reply is instructive: ` ``Thus,'' quoth Ganymede, ``I keep decorum; I speak now as I am Aliena's page, not as I am Gerismond's daughter, for put me but into a petticoat, and I will stand in de®ance to the uttermost that women are courteous, constant, virtuous, and what not.'' ' In this brief exchange, Lodge draws attention to the arti®ciality of frequently essentialized gender distinctions. Moreover, his witty and likeable heroine (who by this point in the story has secured most readers' sympathies) also reveals misogyny to be a custom contingent on whatever gender role a person happens to be performing. On a more general level, nature's limitations for explaining the complexity of human social existence receives theoretical expansion in John Donne's `Paradox IV,' `That Nature is our worst Guide'. In this piece, Donne boldly rejects nature as a suf®cient model for human belief and behaviour. He asks: `Can she be a good guide to us which hath corrupted not us only but her selfe? Was not the ®rst man by desyre of knowledg corrupted, even in the white integrity of Nature?' (p. 6). According to Donne's provocative logic, nature's supposed innocence ± its `white integrity' ± is a sham; nature has no `integrity' in the sense of its Latin root integritas (wholeness and purity). Repudiating a myth of unsullied virtue, Donne contends that even when understood as personal `essence' or intellectual `reasonablenes', nature conforms to corporeal desires because `our mind is heavy in our bodyes af¯ictions, and rejoyceth in the bodyes pleasures' (p. 7). Having debunked simplistic accounts of natural purity, Donne quali®es his bold materialism by according to culture a dynamic and positive role in human existence. By following mere nature, he argues, we loose the pleasant and lawfull commodityes of this life, for we shall drinke water, and eate akornes and rootes, and those not so sweete and delicate as now by mans art and industry they are made. We shall loose allso the necessityes of Societyes, Lawes, Arts, and Sciences, which are all the workmanship of man. (p. 8)18 From at least this early point forward, it is not supposedly natural states but cultural `workmanship' that comprises an abiding focus for Donne's Metaphysical contemplations.

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14 Early Modern Metaphysical Literature

Written with the enthusiasm and bravado of youth, Donne's `Paradox IV' is a mini-manifesto calling for the demysti®cation of received explanations of human nature and culture. Such attitudes and pronouncements aptly suit their author's apparently roaring life in the early 1590s as a part of the subcultural, iconoclastic environment of the Inns of Courts (see Marotti, pp. 25±34). Notwithstanding their highly charged resonance with his personal situation, Donne's brash soundings in `Paradox IV' also set out a crucial element of Metaphysical ruminations more generally: an awareness that humans lead their lives in constant negotiation not with simple, unadulterated nature but with received organizational and conceptual norms that, in fact, de®ne naturalness within prescribed boundaries of sin and virtue. As Donne puts it in a 1607 letter to his friend Sir Henry Goodyer, there is a purely physical nature that `hath made all bodies alike, by mingling and kneading up the same elements in every one,' and `the other nature, Custome, [that] hath made every minde like some other; we are patterns, or copies, we informe, or imitate' (Letters, p. 96). Unlike essentialized dicta, but in keeping with Rosalind's anatomy of theatricalized gender, Donne's customary nature leaves room for criticism, negotiation, difference, and change.19 One of the most thoroughly articulated early modern discussions of the role custom plays in the process of moral and behavioural naturalization is found in Michel de Montaigne's essays. Montaigne's interpretations of human existence through a dual ®deist and sceptical lens are some of the most striking meditations on cultural contingency and the dif®culty of knowing the truth about the world, other people, and the self to have affected English writers.20 While empirical evaluations are important for information gathering, Montaigne concludes that sense perceptions are incapable of conveying the truth: `who judgeth by apparences, judgeth by a thing different from the subject' (II.322). Even if it engages reason, the mind cannot formulate a genuine picture of reality because people, as well as natural phenomena, are unstable and mutable: `we, and our judgement, and all mortall things else do uncessantly rowle, turne, and passe away. Thus can nothing be certainely established, nor of the one, nor of the other; both the judgeing and the judged being in continuall alteration and motion' (II.323; cf. I.350±1, III.23, 37±8). All that humankind can af®rm is that God exists: `there is nothing that truly is, but he alone' (II.325). For the most part, however, Montaigne does not write about theology but instead addresses sublunary knowledge and social organization. His principal object of criticism is an habitual acceptance

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Introduction: Sublunary Things 15

of philosophical and cultural convention. According to him, most de®nitions of truth are founded on a spurious supposition that what is known represents essential nature or the way things necessarily must be ordered, a belief that is patently absurd given that incessant `motion' characterizes all of existence. Succinctly dashing normative evaluations, Montaigne asks: How many things doe we name miraculous and against Nature? Each man and every Nation doth it according to the measure of his ignorance. . . . for us to goe according to Nature, is but to follow according to our understanding, as far as it can follow, and asmuch as we can perceive in it. What soever is beyond it, is monstrous and disordred. By this accompt all shall then be monstrous. (II.232) As Montaigne points out, de®nitions of what is natural and perverse are contingent on the subjective interests of individuals and societies. Grounding one's morality, politics, or religion on nature is thus a certain (and well-trod) route to sustained controversy. Nature, after all, `is nothing but an ñnigmaticall poesie' (II.245). Montaigne does not deny that there is an underlying reality to nature; like Dr Johnson, he too would bruise were he to kick a rock. Investigating the habits of wild `beasts', Montaigne reasons, does provide some insight into fundamental nature; however, given his sustained sense of the ways in which human conventions intrude on perception and knowledge, this option does not hold out much hope. The one unadulterated encounter humans have with nature occurs when they die (III.306). In the present sophistical state of the world, meanwhile, nature `is become variable and peculiar to every man, and hath lost her proper, constant and universall visage' (III.305). This view is shared by Count Lodovico da Canossa in Baldassare Castiglione's courtesy treatise The Courtier (written approximately ®fty years earlier): `And thus dooeth euerye man prayse or dysprayse accordynge to hys fansye, alwayes couerynge a vyce with the name of the next vertue to it, and a vertue with the name of the nexte vice' (Ciir ).21 Despite the fact that people cannot justify their opinions and institutions by recourse to nature, Montaigne observes that they nevertheless establish and maintain social relations. His explanation of how this occurs involves an understanding of the role custom and

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16 Early Modern Metaphysical Literature

tradition play in normalizing certain habits of thought and action. Montaigne asserts that `Custome is a violent and deceiving schoole-mistris' (I.105). This rather brusque evaluation relates not only to outward show (he offers the humorous example of blowing one's nose in a handkerchief, I.109), but even to how people think and judge. `What cannot she bring to passe in our judgements, and in our conceits?' (I.108), he rhetorically queries; even the `lawes of conscience, which we say to proceed from nature, rise and proceed of custome' (I.114). Later in the next century one of the last Metaphysical writers, Thomas Traherne, echoed this understanding of habitual repetition in his denial that original sin and corruption are hereditary: `Misery proceedeth ten thousand times more from the outward Bondage of Opinion and Custom, then from any inward corruption or Depravation of Nature: And . . . it is not our Parents Loyns, so much as our Parents lives, that Enthrals and Blinds us' (p. 268).22 Notwithstanding Montaigne's ability to evaluate rationally the cultural origins of conscience, he confesses that entirely liberating the self is a vain ideal: the chiefest effect of her [i.e., custom's] power is to seize upon us, and so entangle us, that it shall hardly lie in us, to free our selves from her hold-fast, and come into our wits againe, to discourse and reason of her ordinances; verily, because wee sucke them with the milke of our birth, and forasmuch as the worlds visage presents it selfe in that estate unto our ®rst view, it seemeth we are borne with a condition to follow that course. (I.114; cf. 218±19, 269, 336, 342±3) Montaigne's ingestion metaphor evokes custom's intimate relation to human life. Its power is so immense that, as the speaker of Donne's `Holy Sonnet 19' confesses, customary habit even draws him away from a spiritual life that he knows to be correct: `Inconstancy unnaturally hath begott / A constant habit; that when I would not / I change in vowes, and in devotione' (ll. 2±4). Montaigne does not claim that people can transcend or be entirely immune to the customs that govern their society. Yet, through his own writing endeavour, he (not unlike the Metaphysicals) attests to the human ability to consider sceptically the normative contours, wrinkles, and colourations of custom's `visage' (I.114). Montaigne

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Introduction: Sublunary Things 17

illustrates this critical vantage in his remarkably modern-sounding essay `Upon Some Verses of Virgil', in which he contemplates gender construction and desire. Writing about women and men's attitudes toward them, Montaigne observes that `Even from their infancy wee frame them to the sports of love: their instruction, behaviour, attire, grace, learning and all their words aimeth onely at love, respects onely affection' (III.80). When, however, as a consequence of this early habituation, women (especially those who are also wives) independently attempt to satisfy their desire for affection, men `cry out, but oh, but oh the belly' (III.85). This hypocrisy leads Montaigne to conclude that `we frame vices and waigh sinnes, not according to their nature, but according to our interest; whereby they take so many different unequall formes' (III.85). Men's principal reason for controlling women's lives is a concern with bloodlines and inheritance: `The use and interest of mariage concerneth our off-spring, a great way beyond us' (III.72). Not nature, but custom and interest; those principles, Montaigne argues, most powerfully inform personal aspirations and the cultural patterning of nature.

This short investigation of attitudes towards nature and custom has, I hope, shown that Metaphysical writers inhabited a cultural environment that was deeply concerned with the role custom plays in various forms of naturalization. I suggest that it is principally through desire and its tendency to undermine absolute pronouncements of what is natural and unnatural that the Metaphysicals sought to estrange in¯uential cultural norms. The texts I explore seem often to presage Thomas Hobbes's demystifying claim that the `Desires and other Passions of man, are in themselves no Sin. No more are the Actions, that proceed from those Passions, till they know a Law that forbids them' (Leviathan, p. 187). Desire, on this account, is radically threatening; it does not allow for either a stable or a predictable conformity to culture disguised as nature. Whether in terms of sexuality, philosophy, religion, or politics, the poems and prose pieces studied in this book similarly encourage readers to acknowledge that natural precepts and identities derive not from divine revelation but from the contingent elevation of certain values and desires over (and often at the expense of) others that are deemed to be unnatural deviations.

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18 Early Modern Metaphysical Literature

Strangeness and Desire

`Metaphysical'?! What am I thinking, entitling my book and fashioning an argument using a word that, not long ago, Judith Herz (an executive of®cer of the John Donne Society) castigated as a `war horse term' (Review, p. 13)? Indeed, bedevilled by a rather chequered past, `Metaphysical' can often seem like quite an unstable moniker; certainly, few words in literary studies can rival it for dif®culty in nailing down their salient characteristics. Perhaps, in our post-postmodern era, there would be a virtue in jettisoning this comfortable but tattered old jersey. While I am all for reimagining the critical landscape ± and I hope that this study carries such work forward ± there does, however, seem to me to be value in retaining a term that is both familiar to many readers of early modern literature, yet which is semantically unstable enough to allow for fresh perspectives to emerge. Pace Herz's scepticism, I suggest that the term `Metaphysical' can still serve us well if we embark with an awareness of conventional de®nitions but do not limit ourselves to the pronouncements of literary handbooks and similar standardizing authorities. Most importantly, taking account of the fascinating semantic and critical history embedded in the word's usage equips us to evaluate more precisely the ways in which certain texts offer dissident murmurings and counterblasts to the naturalization of custom and habit that I addressed at the end of the introduction.

19

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1

It has long been recognized that in his biography of the poet Abraham Cowley, Samuel Johnson effectively canonized the term `Metaphysical' as descriptive of the unnatural style and content of writings by John Donne and his supposed followers. Yet, despite the fact that virtually every scholar in the ®eld has noted Johnson's seminal in¯uence, people have rarely asked why he chose this particular word to describe certain authors and their texts. Johnson's terminology appears most surprising given that, in the eighteenth century (as now) the principal meaning of `metaphysics' was a particular type of philosophical investigation.1 From the early modern period forward, `metaphysics' has most commonly signi®ed the `branch of speculative inquiry which treats of the ®rst principles of things, including such concepts as being, substance, essence, time, space, cause, identity, etc.; theoretical philosophy as the ultimate science of Being and Knowing' (Oxford English Dictionary (OED), 1.a). While the ®rst English dictionary, compiled by Robert Cawdrey, does not de®ne `metaphysics' or any related term, in his dictionary which appeared in 1616, John Bullokar explains `metaphysikes' as those Arts which lifting themselues aboue the changeable nature of things, doe consider of such as do subsist in their owne essence, not subiect to any alteration; so that the Metaphysickes dealeth onely with incorporall, and euerlasting things; and in this sense schoole Diuinitie is the highest part of the Metaphysickes, being chie¯y ocupied in contemplatory knowledge of God, angels, and soules of men. (K6r ) It is also in this sense that Sir Francis Bacon employs the word in his socioscienti®c treatise The New Organon: let the investigation of Forms, which are (in the eye of reason at least, and in their essential law) eternal and immutable, constitute Metaphysics; and let the investigation of the Ef®cient Cause, and of Matter, and of the Latent Process, and the Latent Con®guration (all of which have reference to the common and ordinary course of nature, not to her eternal and fundamental laws) constitute Physics. (p. 384) Thus, despite Donne's characteristically levelling declaration that the `poore knowledge wherby we but conceive what raine is, what wind,

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20 Early Modern Metaphysical Literature

what thunder, we call Metaphisique, supernaturall' (`Paradox IV', p. 8), in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England it was generally held that, whereas physics engaged the intellect in a study of material phenomena, metaphysics orientated the mind towards the contemplation of universal Ideas (often construed in a Platonic sense). This conceptual divide was due in large measure to the spurious Latinization of the Greek word " as `beyond' or `transcending', a practice that came about by the corruption of the original meaning of   "    '  ± `the (works) after the Physics' ± which was the `title applied, at least from the 1st century A . D . , to the 13 books of Aristotle dealing with questions of ``®rst philosophy'' or ontology' (OED s.v. `metaphysics'). In early modern England, "a was often rendered as `super' or `hyper'. Henry Cockeram's 1623 de®nition of `metaphysics' as `Supernaturall arts' (The English Dictionarie G8r ) offers an instance of this etymological reinvention. John Florio provides similar renderings in his various Italian±English dictionaries. In A Worlde of Wordes, for instance, he translates `Meta®sica' as `things supernaturall'; `Meta®sico', meanwhile, de®nes someone who `professeth things supernaturall' (p. 224).2 Once the adjective `supernatural' became tied to metaphysics, it did not take a great semantic leap for `Metaphysical' to garner a sense of being contrary to nature and even rather dangerous. We catch a glimpse of this view in an anonymous play from 1600, The Wisdom of Doctor Dodypoll. In one scene, a character named Alphonso advances two early modern dream theories: My lord, know you, there are two sorts of dreams,

One sort whereof are onely phisicall,

And such are they whereof your Lordship speakes,

The other Hiper-phisicall; that is,

Dreames sent from heauen, or from the wicked ®ends,

Which nature doth not forme of her owne power,

But are extrinsecate, by maruaile wrought,

And such was mine.

(D2r ; emphasis mine) Like its cousins supernatural and Metaphysical, the term `hiper-phisicall' denotes things that are `extrinsecate' to nature ± that is, phenomena operating outside of or beyond the natural order of things and which are,

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Strangeness and Desire 21

Alphonso maintains, quite possibly demonic emanations. This is the sense in which Lady Macbeth speaks a few years later when she soliloquizes that `fate and metaphysical aid' seem to have crowned her husband (I.v.29). In the context of Shakespeare's play about bloodthirsty regicide, this adjectival deployment (by a hyper-masculine woman no less) of a usually philosophical term reveals an emerging link between things Metaphysical and unnatural perversity, an association that gains cogency in literary criticism even as the word sheds its spectral aura.3 This connotation of frightening unnaturalness appears to have led to uses of Metaphysical in connection with imaginative literature which, using the words of Doctor Dodypoll, might be thought of as language `by maruaile wrought'. After all, this type of writing had for centuries been regarded by many people as illicit and quite probably a work of the devil. While Sir Philip Sidney would have denied vehemently that his conception of poetry was in any manner linked to debased art and morality, the possible social and ethical dangers inherent in, as he puts it in his Apology for Poetry, a poet `freely ranging only within the zodiac of his own wit' (p. 14), had been discussed and condemned at least as far back as Plato (cf. The Republic X, 605C±608B). In his gloss to the `October' eclogue of Edmund Spenser's Shepheardes Calender, E. K. concludes that `Poetry is a divine instinct and unnatural rage passing the reache of comen reason' (p. 183). While this comment is intended to shut down anti-poetic opposition, it also carries with it the potential to restoke anxiety by presenting poetry as something alien to the common course of rational thought. During the sixteenth century, in fact, Protestant reformers were quite concerned by the potential deviance that poetry's unnatural journeys could involve.4 In the Schoole of Abuse, for instance, the polemicist Stephen Gosson hailed Plato's exclusion of poets, commenting that it was `no marveyle though Plato shut them out of his Schoole, and banished them quite from his common wealth, as effeminate writers, unpro®table members, and utter enemies to vertue' (p. 20). As Alan Sin®eld points out, Sidney's quasi-apotheosis of the poet and his asseveration that poetry must `give right honor to the heavenly Maker of that maker' (Apology, p. 17) were attempts to quell this sort of Puritan accusation of ungodliness and to harness poetical reveries to religious orthodoxy thereby obscuring the possibility of literary dissidence (Faultlines, pp. 201±2).5 A crucial anxiety in such defences, however, is the awareness that any ideal can easily be perverted from its supposedly natural function.

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22 Early Modern Metaphysical Literature

Strangeness and Desire 23

the phantasticall part of man (if it be not disordered) [is] a representer of the best, most comely and bewtifull images or apparances of thinges to the soule and according to their very truth. If otherwise, then doth it breede Chimeres & monsters in mans imaginations, & not onely in his imaginations, but also in all his ordinarie actions and life which ensues. (p. 19) In The Faerie Queene, Spenser illuminates the tension inherent to Puttenham's unsettling `If otherwise' contingency. When Prince Arthur and Sir Guyon visit the House of Temperance (a representation of the human body), the ®rst room in the head to which Alma takes them is occupied by a ®gure named Phantastes. Allegorically, this chamber and its inhabitant signify the imagination. Spenser's description of the place deploys language that sounds very much like Sidney's (see Apology, p. 14) to summarize the contemporary fascination with, and distrust of, the mind's ability to generate unnatural thoughts: His chamber was dispainted all within, With sundry colours, in the which were writ In®nite shapes of things dispersed thin; Some such as in the world were neuer yit, Ne can deuized be of mortall wit; Some daily seene, and knowen by their names, Such as in idle fantasies doe ¯it: Infernall Hags, Centaurs, feendes, Hippodames, Apes, Lions, ágles, Owles, fooles, louers, children, Dames. ... All those were idle thoughts and fantasies, Deuices, dreames, opinions vnsound, Shewes, visions, sooth-sayes, and prophesies; And all that fained is, as leasings, tales, and lies. (II.ix.50±1) Spenser's trepidation over poetry's potential to stray from nature's bounds is given shape earlier in his romance by an example of the

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The early modern literary theorist George Puttenham makes this problem explicit when he argues that

corrupt artist whose images confuse even the righteous elect. Adding fuel to the ®res of Protestant paranoia, in Book I Spenser narrates the effect on Redcrosse and Una of supernatural Archimago, a Roman Catholic-like warlock whose `diuelish arts, / . . . had such might ouer true meaning harts' (I.ii.9). In Paradise Lost, Milton displays a similar anxiety over the imagination. Adam, for instance, explains to Eve that `Fancy' ideally `forms Imaginations, Aery shapes' out `of all the external things, / Which the ®ve watchful Senses represent' (V.105, 103±4); reason then takes these creations and produces sound `knowledge or opinion' (108). When reason is asleep, however, `mimic Fancy wakes / To imitate her; but misjoining shapes, / Wild work produces oft' (ll. 110±12). Not by chance, I would argue, such anxieties over deliberate bewilderment through corrupt imaginings ®nd echoes in the rhetoric levelled against Metaphysical unnaturalness.6 Having absorbed the spectre of perversion associated with poetry, many people in the sixteenth century and afterwards came to the conclusion that, if one absolutely must write, the best thing to do in order to avoid depravity would be to stick closely to facts gathered by sensory experience and informed by conservative tradition. The basis of this imperative was the belief that, to the properly educated and ordered mind, the world contains clear moral meanings. This is the attitude taken by the Scots poet William Drummond of Hawthornden, the person usually regarded as the ®rst English-speaking critic to have employed the term `Metaphysical' to describe the literary `school' now identi®ed by that term (Gardner, p. 15).7 Early in the seventeenth century, Drummond wrote a letter to his friend Dr Arthur Johnston (King James's physician) in which he set down his thoughts on the contemporary abusers of `right poesie': In vaine have some men of late (Transformeres of evrye thing) consulted upon her [i.e., poetry's] reformation, and endevured to abstracte her to Metaphysicall Ideas, and Scholasticall Quiddityes, denuding her of her own Habites and those ornamentes with which shee hath amused the World some thousand yeeres. (p. 191) This modern `Metaphysicall' poetry, he argues, is `as if Nature should bring forth some new animal', an engendering that, to him, is utterly corrupt (p. 191). Looking back to a golden age of literature as it was

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24 Early Modern Metaphysical Literature

written by `the ancientes', Drummond suggests that the poets of his day create something which is `no more Poesie than a Monster is a Man' (p. 192). Drummond's use of the language of monstrosity to characterize a new type of literature registers not only a disgust with its form but also a profound sense that these poems and even their authors are innately rotten to the core.8 And yet, it was none other than the venerable Sidney who counselled that poetry should create `forms such as never were in nature' (Apology, p. 14). And on its own, novelty does not distress Drummond either; what upsets him is the conviction that casting aside `habites' of thought and expression threatens the essential values and principles of civilization. Good and true poetry, by contrast, is transhistorical and transcultural; it appears `where any ray of humanitie and civilitie hath shined' and it guards against cultural decadence (p. 191). The Metaphysicals have spent too much time whirling madly about the `zodiac' of their solipsistic wit and not enough conforming to the time-honoured conventions of `civilitie'. They have produced a transformative literature that affects `evrye thing' including, presumably, ethics, politics, sexuality, and other matters of public order. Towards the end of the seventeenth century, John Dryden resumed the attack along similar lines. In A Discourse Concerning the Original and Progress of Satire, Dryden compares Donne to his own patron the Earl of Dorset and Middlesex. Not surprisingly, he ®nds the earlier poet wanting because Donne `affects the metaphysics, not only in his satires, but in his amorous verses, where nature only should reign; and perplexes the minds of the fair sex with nice speculations of philosophy, when he should engage their hearts, and entertain them with the softnesses of love' (p. 19). Slightly earlier in his essay, Dryden asserts that `good nature, by which I mean bene®cence and candour, is the product of right reason' (p. 17). When Dryden argues that Donne's cerebral erotics left nature behind, therefore, he impugns both Donne's moral constitution and his mind. In light of these comments, it is not dif®cult to imagine what Dryden would have made of the claim, put forth by one of Donne's speakers to his beloved, that `all such rules, loves magique can undoe, / Here you see mee, and I am you' (`A Valediction of my name', ll. 11±12). Busily challenging conventional spatio-temporal norms through a strange reinvention of identity, Donne could only have become the

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Strangeness and Desire 25

whipping-boy for one who advocated entertaining women with conventional `softnesses of love'. Although separated from Drummond's comments by over 150 years and from Dryden's by just under a century, Dr Johnson's pronouncements in his life of Cowley share many of the same misgivings about Metaphysical writers and texts.9 Not unlike those of his predecessors, Johnson's vehement animadversions derive from a particular outlook on human life and literature which places enormous value on the stable representation of an essential, transhistorical order that is visible to all rational men who seek it out. Indeed, although Johnson was a High Church Anglican, there is an eerie resemblance between his thoughts on the Metaphysicals and earlier Puritan pronouncements on poetry in general. Contrary to philosophical relativists, Johnson argues that `Truth indeed is always truth, and reason is always reason; they have an intrinsic and unalterable value, and constitute that intellectual gold which de®es destruction: but gold may be so concealed in baser matter that only a chemist can recover it' (Lives, p. 39). Alexander Pope's roughly contemporaneous Essay on Man is one of the most famous expressions of this precept: Take Nature's path, and mad Opinion's leave,

All states can reach it, and all heads conceive;

Obvious her goods, in no extreme they dwell,

There needs but thinking right, and meaning well.

(IV.29±32) While one can speculate on how widely credited such an attitude ever really was, Pope and Johnson do express views that had for several centuries represented a hegemonic myth of natural aesthetic and social propriety.10 According to Johnson, however, the Metaphysicals inverted the proper relation of art to society and rebelled against creating literature that furthers social harmony and genuine cultural reproduction: they had no regard to that uniformity of sentiment which enables us to conceive and to excite the pains and the pleasure of other minds: they never inquired what, on any occasion, they should have said or done, but wrote rather as beholders than partakers of

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26 Early Modern Metaphysical Literature

Strangeness and Desire 27

An absence of proper `sentiment' for their fellow humans is on this account one of the Metaphysicals' greatest sins and a trait that makes them truly despicable.11 Epicurean antisentiment is also associated in Johnson's mind with an equally blameworthy form of originality that does not involve understanding one's uniqueness in and through tradition and community. Recasting Pope's dictum that `True Wit is Nature to Advantage drest, / What oft was Thought, but ne'er so well Exprest' (An Essay on Criticism, ll. 297±8), Johnson asserts that the Metaphysicals violated literary and social decorum by wishing `only to say what they hoped had been never said before' (p. 12). The Metaphysicals did not adorn nature in lovely garments; rather, they pushed her aside in favour of insubstantial, soulless chimeras. Accused by such a powerful adversary of the sin of negative originality ± that is, of straying from tradition and looking only for personal acclamation through bizarre novelty ± it is small wonder that it took a century for the Romantic backlash against neoclassicism to restore even partially the Metaphysicals' reputation.12 As grumbly as Johnson shows himself to be in The Lives of the Poets, he nevertheless often discerns qualities of authors and their texts that escape idiosyncratic taste and, in fact, actually exist. Two linked features of Metaphysical writing become particularly clear in the midst of Johnson's cavils. The ®rst emerges in his claim that the Metaphysicals' `attempts were always analytic; they broke every image into fragments' (p. 12; cf. p. 29); the second appears in his conclusion that Metaphysical poetry shows `that whatever is improper or vicious is produced by a voluntary deviation from nature in pursuit of something new and strange' (p. 23). As Johnson sees matters, these writers unjustly strayed from nature in a wilful pursuit of things `new and strange'. It is this charge of unnaturalness that appears to me to be most crucial to re-evaluating Metaphysical literature. `No man', Johnson remarks, `could be born a Metaphysical poet' (p. 13). These writers `neither copied nature for life, neither painted the forms of matter, nor represented the operations of intellect'; `[t]heir thoughts are often new, but seldom natural'; `[t]he most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by

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human nature; as beings looking upon good and evil, impassive and at leisure; as Epicurean deities, making remarks on the actions of men, and the vicissitudes of life, without interest and without emotion. (Lives, p. 12)

violence together'; `[o]f thoughts so far fetched, as to be not only unexpected but unnatural, all their books are full' (pp. 11, 15). The Metaphysicals' ingenuity ± a trait that Johnson does appreciate ± derives purely from strained intellectual speculation and `perverseness of industry' (p. 13), attributes that situate Metaphysical writers worlds away from William Shakespeare, the model of a truly natural author. Over a decade earlier, Johnson had written that `Shakespeare is above all writers, at least above all modern writers, the poet of nature; the poet that holds up to his readers a faithful mirror of manners and of life' (Preface, p. 4; cf. p. 20). The Metaphysicals' looking-glass, meanwhile, was cloudy and prone to re¯ecting distorted, unnatural visions.13 In the process of forging their `enormous and disgusting hyperboles', `violent and unnatural' ®ctions (p. 17), and `grossly absurd' thoughts and expressions (p. 19), these strange writers dissected traditional values and undermined the myth that desire, perception, identity, and aesthetic taste are always and everywhere the same.

Getting Metaphysical Despite the fact that most people who address Metaphysicality refer to Johnson's biography of Cowley, few people take his perceptive comments as more than an example of Enlightenment values anachronistically applied to earlier texts; strangeness, it would seem, has gone missing from the lexicon. Beginning with the late-Victorian renewal of interest in Metaphysical literature, a persistent detoxi®cation and normalization of literary Metaphysicality has been carried out right up to the present time. As Dayton Haskin remarks in his discussion of Donne's nineteenth- and early twentieth-century reception, customary habits of interpretation forcefully dissuade critics from asking certain questions. The views of T. S. Eliot, Helen Gardner, Joseph Mazzeo, Earl Miner, and others have indeed acquired near-sacrosanct status; even scholars in other disciplines repeat them as obvious truths. Nevertheless, as the Metaphysicals themselves recognized, the fact that normative habits can be changed makes one hopeful of bringing about new insights.14 In one of the most erudite studies of Metaphysical texts to have appeared in recent years, an assumption that Metaphysicality concerns an essentially civilized, non-confrontational view of the world combines with a belief that all manifestations of Metaphysical wit

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28 Early Modern Metaphysical Literature

inevitably express a belief in a telos of spiritual human progress. Not unlike Helen White's 1936 study of Metaphysical poetry and spiritual crisis, A. J. Smith's learned book Metaphysical Wit documents poetical attempts in Europe and England to perceive in the mundane the workings of a powerful spiritual force: true Metaphysical wit is not theology or rhetoric but a way of experiencing. . . . Wit is the means of putting at issue our own involvement in a natural world which always fails our desires yet intimates a providence in its working. . . . For the English Metaphysical writers human nature epitomises a universe which works as a living organism and manifests sacred purpose in all its processes. (pp. 245±7; cf. pp. 43±4)15 By fusing together `wit', `providence', and `sacred purpose', Smith ignores the fact that, as Ernest Gilman observes, wit `deforms' the conventions of logic as well as artistic and social meaning and that, in certain talented hands, it is capable of performing `parodic internal subversion' (p. 86). Malevolently exploiting this aspect, wicked Iago hisses: `Thou know'st we work by wit, and not by witchcraft, / And wit depends on dilatory time' (Othello, II.iii.372±3). Less craftily, the early modern language theorist Thomas Wilson noted that `witte' could also function as a way of coercing others into doing normally objectionable and even dangerous labour (Rhetorique, Aivr ). `The saiynge of Poets and all their fables,' Wilson continues, are manifestations of this side of wit, `. . . for by them we may talke at large, and winne men by perswasion' (Ccivr ). Smith's insight that Metaphysicality is not about mere `yoking' together of heterogeneous images (p. 76), coupled with his conclusion that much of Metaphysical literature evinces a sceptical awareness of relativism in the formulation of values and behaviour, are useful corrections to much of twentieth-century criticism (see pp. 100±5, 123±8, 132, 213, 226). Nevertheless, his drive to demonstrate providence at work in every nook and cranny of these writers' psyches, lives, and texts, uncompromisingly attempts to foreclose substantial or lasting heterogeneity and dissidence on the political or cultural planes. Indeed, the book's lengthy section devoted to Donne structurally mirrors Smith's endeavour to contain oppositionality, beginning as it does with representations of a relativist Jack Donne and concluding

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Strangeness and Desire 29

with af®rmations of Doctor Donne's godliness and piety, a biographical reading straight out of Izaak Walton's hagiological accounts.16 Smith's book is itself literally framed by a reliance on religious experience to explain almost all manner of Metaphysicality. Metaphysical Wit opens with a discussion of a sermon by Lancelot Andrewes that is said to `witness an engrained habit of mind' (p. 2) and ends with the argument that the `sea-change' from Metaphysical `sentience' to Enlightenment science `con®rms a decisive shift of faith' (p. 252), a narrative that resembles Eliot's seminal positing of a radical `dissociation of sensibility' (p. 28) that had supposedly occurred during the late seventeenth century.

My own attempt to recover a sense of Metaphysical strangeness begins with George Puttenham's socio-aesthetics. `Stile', Puttenham argues, is the image of man [mentis character] for man is but his minde, and as his minde is tempered and quali®ed, so are his speeches and language at large, and his inward conceits be the mettall of his minde, and his manner of vtterance the very warp & woofe of his conceits, more plaine, or busie and intricate, or otherwise affected after the rate. (p. 148) For early modern theorists and writers, style is not merely surface ornamentation; vehicle and tenor are inextricably bound together. In addition, style is an art of seduction used not only to delight but also to persuade: to say truely, what els is man but his minde? which, whosoeuer haue skil to compasse, and make yeelding and ¯exible, what may not he commaund the body to perfourme? He therefore that hath vanquished the minde of man, hath made the greatest and most glorious conquest. (p. 197) Puttenham's military metaphors underscore the political seriousness of contemporary worries over literature's public effects. The `phantasticall' endeavours of poets, argues Puttenham, are of a kind with the `ordinarie actions' of `Captaines strategematique, all cunning arti®cers and enginers, [and] all Legislators Polititiens & Counsellours

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30 Early Modern Metaphysical Literature

of estate' (p. 19). If Metaphysical writings are in fact doing something new and strange with style, on this account they are quite likely also engaged in a `strategematique' reimagining of the cultural and political landscape. My approach to this aspect of Metaphysical literature shares much in common with the work of Richard Strier, who has recently de®ed conventional interpretative habits by arguing for Donne's `independence' of mind, a trait that he sees exempli®ed in `Satire III'. `The radicalism in the poem is genuine', Strier maintains; it proves that Donne would have comprehended our modern notion of `ideological state apparatuses', but would not have regarded such power as `irresistible' (pp. 121, 137). On Strier's account, Donne's poem exempli®es the fact that the great variety of cultures and ideas in so `yeasty' a time as the Renaissance meant that heterodoxy was always a possibility and that literary texts were not con®ned to reproducing traditional values (p. 25). P. M. Oliver's 1997 study of Donne's religious writings similarly challenges critical orthodoxy. Instead of seeing Donne's texts as uni®ed, coherent statements of the author's true beliefs, Oliver insists that they are literary exercises characterized by multiple voices and personae, a re¯ection of the `consistently hybrid' (p. 5) nature of Donne's theology.17 As Strier readily admits, his Donne is an `Empsonian' creature (p. 118). During much of the middle part of this century, British scholar William Empson challenged critical orthodoxy by maintaining that dissident thought was possible in the early modern period and was often present in texts by Donne, George Herbert, and others. Empson's arch-nemesis was the formidable Rosemond Tuve who advanced her views in the 1947 tome, Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery: Renaissance Poetic and Twentieth-Century Critics.18 In this study Tuve attacks what she regards as wrong-headed interpretations of Metaphysical writers' `rebellious indecorum' (p. 228). Gainsaying notions of a `revolt' carried out by the Metaphysicals, Tuve contends that for both Elizabethan and Metaphysical poetics the `principle of decorum is the most important regulatory principle determining the nature of images' (pp. 226±30; 422 n.P). Taking a formalist approach to her subject, Tuve discards the possibility that `images' contain meanings which go beyond their conventional tropical uses, what she labels as `the habits of a gentleman' (p. 330). Tuve defends her position by claiming that readers who ®nd

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Strangeness and Desire 31

unsettling the allusions, tropes, and ®gures in Metaphysical literature have not realized that `Certain forms of sensibility had always been communicated to readers by such types of image' (p. 137). To transgress the gentlemanly habits enshrined by tradition, remarks Tuve, could only have been regarded by the Metaphysicals as a form of `Pride', the gravest of sins (p. 368; Tuve's majuscule). Metaphysical oppositionality, therefore, must be understood to be merely an anachronistic pasting of modern desires and preoccupations onto past texts and authors whose `sensibility' was no different from that of earlier writers or cultural orthodoxy (e.g., pp. 128±30, 379, 382±4). When Tuve concludes that `strangeness' is central to Metaphysical poetry (p. 138), she clearly has a radically different de®nition in mind than Dr Johnson had.19 Contrary to Tuve's vision, but much closer to Johnson's, Empson portrays Donne as not a little averse to gentlemanly decorum. As he put it in his 1949 review of Tuve's book, `the only possible objection to the exercise of analysing Donne's rhetoric is that it tends to ``explain things away''', including potentially unsettling matters such as Donne's belief in the value of personal experience and desires, the possible existence of separate worlds, and that an ordered cosmos was crumbling around him (Essays, p. 69, and passim). Most importantly, Empson argues, Tuve's emphasis on rhetorical consistency inhibits readers from seeing that Donne `had a deeply sceptical and inquisitive mind' (p. 75). In a 1957 piece on Donne's engagement with Copernicanism and the rami®cations of extraterrestrial life, Empson cogently posits that Donne `needed to be allowed to recognize the variety of the world' (Essays, p. 84). Arguing against Eliot, Gardner, and their followers' elevation of the pious over the genuinely sceptical Donne, Empson contended in 1966 that `It is only our modern orthodox young Donne who has to be made to express a speci®c sense of sin even while writing a love-poem' (Essays, p. 134). Notwithstanding the fact that Donne could, at times, be as conservative as his king, Empson ± like Dr Johnson before him ± saw that a tendency to eschew and often challenge habitual ideas and opinions is threaded throughout his visions and those of numerous of his Metaphysical contemporaries.20 A representative divergence of opinion between Tuve and Empson over Donne's Anniversaries illustrates the impact that their differing interpretative orientations have on literary study. In formulating their positions, both critics take up the poems' reception by Ben Jonson. William Drummond (whom we earlier met chastising

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32 Early Modern Metaphysical Literature

Metaphysical poets) reports that on a visit to Scotland, Jonson had observed to him that `Dones Anniversarie was profane and full of Blasphemies that he told Mr Donne, if it had been written of ye Virgin Marie it had been something to which he answered that he described the Idea of a Woman and not as she was' (Jonson, Works, p. 133). Jonson, Tuve contends, `mistook' Donne's `ampli®cation of a universal for a description of an exception' (p. 149). Empson disagrees with this analysis and reclaims Jonson as a perfectly competent reader who saw into Donne's unusual practice; `it is tedious', he concludes, `to be assured that they were only talking about rhetorical rules' (Essays, p. 70). A brief consideration of the Anniversaries and their reception strongly supports Empson's position that Jonson actually hit on a crucial difference between his own poetic vision and Donne's. In order to produce two poems that represent a fourteen-year-old girl he had never met as one `whose rich eyes, and brest, / Guilt the West Indies, and perfum'd the East', Donne necessarily had to deal in fantastical ideas that far surpassed anything or anyone nature had or ever could produce (`Anatomie', ll. 235±6). For Jonson, such a representation was apparently only acceptable if it were safely harnessed to conventional devotion to the mother of Christ. Donne's poetical and possibly doctrinal heresy is, however, a Metaphysical representation that de®es habitual literary and religious decorum. His ungentlemanly writing disturbed readers like Jonson because it contested received assumptions about such things as sacred devotion and gender identity. Further con®rmation that Jonson did not misunderstand Donne's endeavour appears in the poem that Donne's friend Joseph Hall wrote as a preface to the second of the two Anniversaries. Hall, an intelligent theologian and poet, reveals some of the anxieties produced by Donne's texts when he bizarrely exclaims: `Still upwards mount; and let thy makers praise / Honor thy Laura, and adorne thy laies' (ll. 35±6). Seriously misrepresenting the poems' strange utterances, Hall's sentiments are most probably a friend's defensive attempts to recuperate what are perhaps the most un-Petrarchan of early modern English elegies into normative canons of poetical correctness. In a letter written from France in April 1612, Donne himself addresses the circumstances surrounding Hall's salvage operation, commenting that he has `hear[d] from England of many censures of my

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Strangeness and Desire 33

book, of Mris . Drury' (Letters, pp. 74±5). In order to accept Tuve's explanation, one must wonder how and why there were so many mistaken readers in early seventeenth-century England. It seems more logical to join Empson in acknowledging that these `many censures' were generated by readers' encounters (like the one Ben Jonson had) with troubling material actually present in Donne's texts.

Desire is strange As I proceed throughout the rest of this book, it will become clear that my principal mode of reading is largely indebted to Samuel Johnson, William Empson, and others who have recognized the denaturalizing cultural work performed by Metaphysical literature's marvellously strange visions. In the pages that conclude this chapter, I want to explore some of the early modern and current theories of cultural reproduction that I have found most useful for understanding these challenging texts. In particular, I hope to illuminate the importance of desire (especially its unruliness) to Metaphysical estrangement. As a ®rst step towards comprehending the relationship between Metaphysical literature and early modern cultural dynamics, we might consider some of Aristotle's remarks on the intersection of morality, politics, and enculturation. In The Nichomachean Ethics, he argues that a harmonious state requires obedience to laws that are formulated according to a de®nition of what is morally good (1179b35±1180a5). Ethical virtue, Aristotle contends, `is acquired by habituation (ethos), as is indicated by the name ``ethical'', which varies slightly from the name ``ethos''. From this fact it is also clear that none of the ethical virtues arises in us by nature [at birth], for no thing which exists by nature can be changed into something else by habituation' (1103a14±25; translators' parentheses). According to this vision of social order, moral habits are a secondary formation in the human character brought about through law, custom, teaching, and practice. Indeed, `the soul of the listener, like the earth which is to nourish the seed, should ®rst be cultivated by habit to enjoy or hate things properly' (1179b20±30). Like Aristotle, numerous early modern philosophers, legislators, and artists regarded the cultural production of `proper' desires to be fundamental to personal and public stability. In his autobiography, for instance, Edward Herbert lectures that young gentlemen must be

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34 Early Modern Metaphysical Literature

`by degrees habituated in virtue' in order to roust out a proclivity for `doing ill' (p. 47). The implicit acknowledgement that unruly desires can resist conventional morality and order makes Aristotle's theory of ethical habituation and the suppression of non-normative thoughts, feelings, and actions especially conducive to an investigation of cultural standards and deviations in subsequent Western cultures. In the early modern context, an Aristotelian understanding of cultural habituation helps to make sense of the relationship between nature and custom. In his seminal treatise De pueris statim ac liberaliter instituendis (On giving children an early and a liberal education), Erasmus comments at length on the necessity of shaping the mind and behaviour. Unlike animals, which rely on instinct, `man neither can eat, nor go, nor speak except he be taught' (quoted in Martindale, p. 53). `Nature', Erasmus concludes, `is an effectual thing, but education, more effectual, overcometh it' (Martindale, p. 54); he therefore counsels parents that `Nature, when she giveth thee a son, she giveth nothing else than a rude lump of ¯esh. It is thy part to fashion after the best manner that matter that will obey and follow in every point' (p. 56). Erasmus's optimistic stance is predicated on a humanist belief in the malleability of human character to conform to those principles which are deemed best by God and civilized society. This fashioning process carries with it, however, the potential for the habituation of vice instead of virtue. Thomas Nashe's garullous cultural commentator, Pierce Penniless, speaks to this concern when he observes that Consuetudo peccandi tollit sensum peccati.21 Custom is a law, and lust holds it for a law to live without law. Lais, that had so many poets to her lovers, could not always preserve her beauty with their praises. Marble will wear away with much rain; gold will rust with moist keeping; and the richest garments are subject to time's moth-frets. (p. 117) Similarly, in his discussion of the reasons for social decadence, the conservative Puritan, John Northbrooke, argues that `The third cause is the custome of sinne, which is in a manner made naturall in long continuance. For like as it is harde for a man to alter nature, so custome, if it be once rooted, cannot easily bee plucked vp and expelled; and

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Strangeness and Desire 35

therefore it is, that learned men doe cal custome another nature' (p. 10). Despite the differences in terms of their speci®c concerns and agendas, Erasmus, Nashe, and Northbrooke all recognize custom's immense social power. This awareness of the unsteady naturalization of values, attitudes, ideas, and behaviours provides a context for Metaphysical writers' habits of cultural estrangement. The literary practices under scrutiny in this book can be further illuminated by taking stock of current theories of cultural reproduction and innovation, followed by a consideration of some of the ± perhaps surprising ± similarities between these and early modern formulations. Since the 1960s in Britain, cultural materialist critics have been exploring the naturalization of ideals and the potential for dissent. Their insights draw together the symbolic and material elements of cultural reproduction in order to interpret local and broad-based formation and change. On Raymond Williams's account, culture is `the signifying system through which necessarily (though among other means) a social order is communicated, reproduced, experienced and explored' (Sociology, p. 13). Viewing culture as a `signifying system' frees it of a supposed essential nature; moreover, because signi®cation is subject to change, culture can be examined not only for continuities, but also for tensions, con¯icts, and innovations (p. 29). As Michael Ryan adds, the reproduction of culture entails material as well as symbolic distributions of power and resources (pp. 15, 19±21), a factor that underscores the importance of cultural analysis. Turning to the early modern context, one can see the relevance of these insights. In his study of the intersection of religion and literature in England, Sin®eld observes that the humanist rehabilitation of the classical literary and philosophical traditions coincided with a Protestant focus on spiritual life; together, these enabled the formation of an `autonomous secular morality' (Protestant, pp. 131±4, 7±10).22 This shift to secularism is well attested in the writings of the seventeenth-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes. While Hobbes does not deny moral order, he locates its origin precisely in the contingent human domain (see Sin®eld, Protestant, pp. 140±1, 137). In Sin®eld's follow-up book, Faultlines, he reiterates his belief in Protestantism's effect on secular morality; the `protestant subject arises', he contends, `not in the accomplishment of domination or negation, but in the thwarting of harmony, cogency, common sense'

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36 Early Modern Metaphysical Literature

(p. 174). Mervyn James similarly argues that the early seventeenthcentury merging of providentialism and Puritanism engendered `the possibility of a new style of dissidence' (pp. 413±14; see also pp. 12±13). Countering those who analyse ideology only in terms of entrapment (p. 39; also pp. 80±1, 284±5), Sin®eld proposes instead a theory of interpretive `faultlines' that enable `dissident reading' of naturalized precepts (pp. 9, 41±5). Ideology, Sin®eld argues, endeavours to obscure contradiction and con¯ict in its formation of subjects and communities (pp. 9±10, 83, 173). Like Williams, who dissects the `naturalization' of exploitation and inequality (`Marx on Culture', p. 209), Sin®eld contends that ideology strives to produce `good subjects' who experience discomfort when they transgress and who believe in the need to conform to an `absolute idea of the natural' (pp. 45, 213, 299). Who, for instance, would want to upset a social system that she understood to be divinely ordained and buttressed by a catalogue of eternal rewards and punishments? Niccolo Machiavelli, early modern Europe's arch-debunker, knew this principle well: `It will be seen by those who pay attention to Roman history, how much religion helped in the control of armies, in encouraging the plebs, in producing good men, and in shaming the bad' (Discourses, I.11). Internalized superstition would go a long way, he felt, to quelling contemporary Italian political disorders.23 Embracing Michel Foucault's position that `where there is power, there is resistance' (p. 95), Sin®eld theorizes that dissidence is a `potential' that emerges from the `con¯ict and contradiction that the social order inevitably produces within itself' (Faultlines, p. 41; also 45, 77).24 Because culture is always in the process of emerging and changing, Sin®eld reasons, no cultural form can ever be taken for granted and con¯icts and opportunities for dissidence will inevitably emerge. Unlike the term subversion, dissidence does not necessarily imply an overthrowing of normative systems; rather, dissidence signi®es a `refusal of an aspect of the dominant, without prejudging an outcome' (p. 49). This potential for strategic leverage and dissidence from within a cultural formation or traditional order aligns with Edward Herbert's claim that `whatsoever art doth in way of defence, art likewise, in way of assailing, can destroy' (Autobiography, p. 51). While the context of his observation is geometry in the service of war, Herbert's maxim relates metaphorically (as we will shortly see) to his sustained interest in oppositional thought and action.

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Strangeness and Desire 37

The interrogation and reformulation of cultural givens are persistent features of the writings examined in this book. In order to grasp this aspect fully, a critical approach is required which recognizes an individual's desires, initiatives, and ability to dissent from and possibly intervene in dominant discourses, while still acknowledging the complexities of historical situatedness. In my endeavour to comprehend Metaphysical strangeness, I have found Ross Chambers's theory of desire and `oppositionality' (his term for dissidence) to be a useful analytic lens. Chambers's approach takes into account the often subtle interventions of human agents, particularly as they communicate their thoughts in a literary mode. Basing his insights on a recognition that there is a close relation between sociopolitical structures and forms of communication, Chambers asserts that `in the universe of discourse, which is that of human ``reality,'' oppositional behavior has a particular potential to change states of affairs, by changing people's ``mentalities'' (their ideas, attitudes, values, and feelings, which I take to be ultimately manifestations of desire)' (p. 1). While he embraces the Foucauldian principle that power generates opposition as a part of its own existence (pp. xiii±xv, xviii), Chambers turns to a theory of desire in order to avoid a model of tragic entrapment. One of the most important points to note about desire, Chambers maintains, is that changes in it affect social relations (p. xv). A phenomenon that is predicated on the expectation of or hope for change in the life of an individual or community, desire in¯uences how such things as identity and authority are received, understood, and reproduced.25 Once desires have shifted, the cultural text itself will be read in new ways and possibly altered. As a way of understanding this theory of desire and its applicability to early modern culture, one might re¯ect on the different ways Satan in Milton's Paradise Lost wreaks vengeance on God. Describing the fallen angels' original attack on heaven as a `rebellion' (V.715), Raphael warns Adam and Eve that Satan `now is plotting how he may seduce / Thee also from obedience . . . Which would be all his solace and revenge, / As a despite done against the most High' (VI.901±2, 905±6). Satan accomplishes his seduction ± `Into the Heart of Eve his words made way' (IX.550) ± thereby bringing about a shift in Eve's desires that makes her interpret God's edicts in a dissident manner. In his narration of Eve's spiritual turning on the brink of sin, Milton graphically explains the effects of Satan's intrusion:

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38 Early Modern Metaphysical Literature

Meanwhile the hour of Noon drew on, and wak'd

An eager appetite, rais'd by the smell

So savory of that Fruit, which with desire,

Inclinable now grown to touch or taste,

Solicited her longing eye.

(IX.739±43) Satan the `Tempter' (IX.678) manages to make the inanimate apple itself `solicit' Eve, not by giving the fruit a conscience and voice but by eloquently evoking the virtues of the `Sacred, Wise, and Wisdomgiving Plant' (IX.679) and thereby effecting a change in Eve's own vulnerable desires. Indeed, through Milton's linguistic ®nesse, Eve and the apple become united in illicit appetite. Eve's new reading of the apple is oppositional or dissident in the sense that she criminally reinterprets God's hegemony: `What fear I then, rather what know to fear / Under this ignorance of Good and Evil, / Of God or Death, of Law or Penalty?' (IX.773±5). In his lengthy seduction of Eve in Book V, Satan addresses his victim with the epithet `Nature's desire' (V.45), thereby preparing readers for the centrality of desire to Eve's crime. After her ®rst dream-state temptation, Eve also reveals the importance of desire to her actions by her comment to Adam that `the pleasant savory smell / So quick'n'd appetite, that I, methought, / could not but taste' (V.84±6). From a normative Christian standpoint, it may seem perverse to take Eve's seduction as an example of oppositionality which, as Chambers discusses it, is generally involved in resistance to social inequalities. From a secular, cultural materialist perspective, however, Eve's demysti®cation of a biased religious and gender status quo does not seem too far off (at least in spirit) from many modern endeavours at working for liberatory change from within oppressive systems. Certainly, as virtually any experience of teaching Milton's poem in the late twentieth century shows, Paradise Lost is itself vulnerable to oppositional readings ± by feminists, lesbians and gays, members of marginalized racial groups, non-Christians ± that potentially alter people's desires and, in turn (one hopes), cultural norms. The example of Paradise Lost illuminates early modern writers' familiarity with the centrality of desire to social existence. This awareness is not surprising given the intimate association of desire and identity since at least St Augustine. In the Confessions, Augustine

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Strangeness and Desire 39

prefaces the account of his conversion experience with comments on his inner state leading up to that transformative moment. Referring repeatedly to his `secret heart' and `the hidden depths of my soul', he passionately relates that `I wrangled with myself, in my own heart, about my own self' (pp. 175, 177). This inward struggle, however, instantly disappeared at the moment of his Christian conversion: `it was as though the light of con®dence ¯ooded into my heart and all the darkness of doubt was dispelled' (p. 178). Clearness and unity of purpose characterize Augustine's metamorphosis and, in keeping with his philosophy of identi®cation, the change is described as a transformation of desire. He says to God: `You converted me to yourself, so that I no longer desired a wife or placed any hope in this world but stood ®rmly upon the rule of faith' (p. 178). With this statement, Augustine reveals that he has become a Christian, an identity that was brought about by, and grounded in, a shift in his desires. The widespread in¯uence of Augustine's life and writings in Western Europe solidi®ed desire's place in discussions of selfhood and identity. According to this model, desire purportedly reveals the truth about who and what a person is; however, as Eve's case shows, desires can transform, thereby altering (sometimes severely) what had been commonly considered to be coherent, essential, and knowable. As a speaker in one of Andrew Marvell's poems puts it of his lover's in¯uence: `how should I avoid to be her Slave, / Whose subtile Art invisibly can wreath / My Fetters of the very Air I breath?' (`The Fair Singer', ll. 10±12). Seduction and the mutation of desire take place in a person's `secret heart' often, as this lyric suggests, without a person's full awareness or even consent. One might also consider here Richard III's bravura seduction of Lady Anne Neville, another instance of desire's surprising malleability in the hands of a talented seducer (Shakespeare, Richard III, I.ii.1±224). Because of desire's private nature and vulnerability to change, it has proved to be a principal locus of innovation and dissent. Indeed, since the time of Augustine a major trope of social and religious epistemology has been the routing of transgression through desire. As Jonathan Dollimore explains, Augustine saw evil as an `aberrant movement' manifested in desire (Dissidence, p. 118). Augustinian theology (and postAugustinian Western cultures), meanwhile, have traditionally based moral goodness on the suppression of lewd affections and the redirection

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40 Early Modern Metaphysical Literature

of desire entirely towards God and virtue.26 This struggle surfaces at a fairly innocuous though revealing level, for instance, in Sidney's sonnet sequence. Poor Astrophel; for the ®rst thirteen lines of sonnet 71 he chastely warrants that Stella's beauty provides her admirers with a moral education: `So while thy beauty draws the heart to love, / As fast thy Virtue bends that love to good' (ll. 12±13). Well and good, except in the ®nal utterance his pretensions crumble and out gasps ¯esh-and-blood reality: `But ah, Desire still cries, give me some food' (l. 14). In the next sonnet Astrophel tries again to bid farewell to his `old companion' Desire (72, l. 1); from henceforth, he declaims, `Virtue's gold now must head my Cupid's dart' (72, l. 8). The ®nal couplet, though, leaves Astrophel sweating: `But thou Desire, because thou wouldst have all, / Now banisht art, but yet alas how shall?' (72, ll. 13±14). `How shall?' indeed; Sidney puts his ®nger here on the cat-like indestructability of desire, a less-thanchaste component of human existence that leads to morally dangerous phenomena such as the real-life adulterous passion for a married woman that the sequence probably encodes. As Sidney's near-contemporary, Sir Walter Ralegh, sighs, `Desire, nor reason hath, nor rest, / And blind doth seldom choose the best' (`Conceit begotten by the Eyes', ll. 21±2); love, desire certainly is not.27 In the early modern period as well as now, the desire to experience pleasures and to accomplish goals other than those determined to be morally correct throws into question how and why identities and moral norms are produced. Hobbes presents an in¯uential theory of the connections between desire, morality, and identity that demonstrates the internal weaknesses of the Augustinian system and illuminates some of the Metaphysicals' abiding concerns. Desire, in Hobbes's sense, is always orientated towards a future acquisition of some pleasure, power, or commodity (cf. Leviathan p. 119). As he notoriously states, the principal human desire for power `ceaseth onely in Death' and happiness springs from a continual gaining of that for which we yearn (pp. 160±1). This notion of incessant desire stems from a theory of physical and mental inertia that sounds very much like Montaigne's earlier-noted observations on `continuall alteration and motion'; in Hobbes's terms: `there is no such thing as perpetuall Tranquillity of mind, while we live here; because Life it selfe is but Motion, and can never be without Desire, nor without Feare, no more than without Sense' (pp. 129±30; cf. p. 120).

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Strangeness and Desire 41

42 Early Modern Metaphysical Literature

Morall Philosophy is nothing else but the Science of what is Good, and Evill, in the conversation, and Society of mankind. Good, and Evill, are names that signi®e our Appetites, and Aversions; which in different tempers, customes, and doctrines of men, are different: And divers men, differ not onely in their Judgement, on the senses of what is pleasant, and unpleasant to the tast, smell, hearing, touch, and sight; but also of what is conformable, or disagreeable to Reason, in the actions of common life. Nay, the same man, in divers times, differs from himselfe; and one time praiseth, that is, calleth Good, what another time he dispraiseth, and calleth Evil. (p. 216; cf. pp. 120, 187, 697) Not unlike Chambers or Milton's Satan, Hobbes's basic point is that changes in desire effect transformations of morality because moral categories do not signify transcendent absolutes but only mutable cravings and emotions. Even reason ± which in classical and early modern philosophy is often considered to be a guarantor of, or means to achieve, moral and political order ± is spoken of by Hobbes in purely functional terms as `nothing but Reckoning (that is, Adding and Subtracting) of the Consequences of generall names agreed upon, for the marking and signifying of our thoughts' (p. 111). In terms of Metaphysical literature, a particularly crucial aspect of Hobbesian theory is the designation of morality as part of human `conversation', by which Hobbes draws on the dual sense of the word as a dialogic exchange and as a turning ± from the Latin verto or vers ± of the mind. Bringing to the fore Aristotle's anxious awareness of nonhabitual, possibly dissident errancy, and Augustine's paradigm of desire's mutability, Hobbes argues for an understanding of morality as a set of potentially alterable norms. Such ideals are themselves based on desires which, as Hobbes and Chambers would agree, are the products not of a solitary agent but of continued interaction between people who possess `different tempers, customes, and doctrines'. In the chapters which follow, I hope to show that Hobbes's argument that desire is the motivating force behind diversity and

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Coterminous with Hobbes's formulation of desire in terms of perpetual motion is his understanding of contingent and unstable morality. Throughout Leviathan, Hobbes makes points such as the following:

change in individual, cultural, and political life is conducive to understanding Metaphysical literature. Dr Johnson's complaint that the Metaphysicals' ideas are `not only unexpected but unnatural' acquires new vigour and resonance when we ponder the operations of desire in bringing about surprising estrangements of thought and identity. As the speaker of Marvell's `Damon the Mower' exclaims: `Oh what unusual Hearts are here' (l. 9).

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Strangeness and Desire 43

Edward Herbert: Handsome, Chivalrous, and Strange

It is clear, therefore, that truth is dif®cult and subject to conditions. De Veritate (pp. 236±7) In 1764 Horace Walpole's press at Strawberry Hill issued 200 copies of Edward, Lord Herbert of Chirbury and Castle-Island's autobiography. While he went to the bother and expense of bringing (for the ®rst time ever) this obscure manuscript to public attention, Walpole's admiration was far from unequivocal. Similar to Samuel Johnson's contemporaneous comments on Donne and Cowley, Walpole's introduction to the volume and several related letters to friends indicate that he regarded Herbert's persona and work as being frequently over-mannered and contrived. This facet of Herbert's character and book could, however, be the source of substantial mirth, as Walpole mischievously reveals in a letter in which he describes reading the text aloud to friends: `My Lady Waldegrave was here in all her grief ± [Thomas] Gray and I read it to amuse her ± we could not go on for laughing and screaming' (Correspondence 2: 130).1 While I too have found myself chuckling over certain outlandish passages in Herbert's self-narration ± a proposed duel over the snatching of a little French girl's favourite ribbon springs to mind ± I believe that a study of Herbert's autobiography, in conjunction with his theory of perception, epistemology of truth, and demanding corpus of poetry, reveals elements of cultural interrogation that are germane to other Metaphysical writers' approaches to knowledge, desire, and identity. 44

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2

If they have heard of him at all, for most people today Edward Herbert is merely the footnoted elder brother of the revered poet and Church of England divine, George; a few others may be aware of him as the `father of English Deism'.2 My present chapter is thus, in part, a work of historical recuperation. I hope to show that Herbert's work is not merely the curious engendering of a `minor' poet and philosopher's eccentric lucubrations, but is instead of signi®cant worth for deepening our understanding of early modern literature and culture, particularly in terms of the negotiation between conventional desires and identities and ones that challenge their naturalized authority. From at least 1608 until his death in 1646, Herbert composed philosophical treatises, a history of his life up to 1624, and numerous poems. Many of these texts challenge readers to think again about the customary ideals through which the world and the self are commonly perceived. Herbert frequently explores the contingency of perception and belief on personal desires, cultural norms, and material contexts; in addition, he credits people with the ability to recognize and critically evaluate these mediating in¯uences. Because so many of Herbert's writings invoke a strong sense of personal identity and intellection, it would seem odd if at the outset of my discussion I did not mention Stephen Greenblatt's in¯uential account of `Renaissance self-fashioning'. Although he belongs to a social rank above that of most of Greenblatt's ®gures, Herbert does evince many of self-fashioning's central elements; most importantly, perhaps, the interweaving of literature and life and the in¯uence of cultural norms on the production of identity. It seems to me, though, that Herbert's life and writings depart most signi®cantly from Greenblatt's model by providing opportunities for a denaturalizing purchase on the very elements which have combined to produce the self. Having said this, I want to emphasize that I do not regard Herbert as a paragon of self-creating Renaissance individualism. Indeed, that identity ®ction is one of the things that his life and work estranges. In whatever genre he wrote, Herbert reveals a penchant for abstract speculation. Along this line, one of the most famous contemporary observations made about Herbert's work is Ben Jonson's comment (as reported by William Drummond) that `[John] Don[n]e said to him he wrott that Epitaph on Prince Henry [``]Look to me Fath[''] to match Sir Ed: Herbert jn obscurenesse' (Jonson, Works, p. 136).3 While the reference here is to a single poem by Herbert ± his funereal `Elegy for

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Herbert: Handsome, Chivalrous, and Strange 45

the Prince' ± I hope to show that Herbert's pervasive `obscurenesse' is not, as Jonson implies (and Samuel Johnson would certainly have concurred), cerebral unintelligibility, but is instead central to his denaturalization of perception and identity. Further, in the context of this study as a whole I suggest that Herbert's treatment of these concerns in his philosophy, autobiography, and poetry, perform a valuable heuristic function in relation to the other Metaphysical writers and texts I examine.

Truth, concept, and perception Herbert's Latin treatise De Veritate (1624, rev. edn 1633, 1645) offers the most direct entryway into his understanding of truth, culture, and perception. In this `systematic and comprehensive enquiry into the complex processes of knowing' (Carre , p. 66), we ®nd one of Herbert's strongest assertions of personal intellectual freedom against the truthclaims of traditional authority. Notwithstanding John Carey's remark that this text reveals its author's `intellectual innocence' (p. 218), De Veritate's commitment to a rational inquiry into the nature of truth lays a useful philosophical groundwork for comprehending other Metaphysical authors' negotiations of naturalized custom.4 In his introduction to Herbert's widely read and appreciated work (Gassendi, Descartes, and Grotius were amongst its admirers), Meyrick Carre points out that the treatise is partly a response to a contemporary encouragement of faith as a solution to reason's inability to know the truth (pp. 14±15). Michel de Montaigne's well-known essay `An Apologie of Raymond Sebond' provides one of the most cogent statements of this position. Wryly mocking the quest for absolute certainty, Montaigne queries: `When I am playing with my Cat, who knowes whether she have more sport in dallying with me, than I have in gaming with her?' (II.142). Contrary to the aspirations of natural philosophy and physics, Montaigne concludes that `Onely things which come to us from heaven, have right and authority of perswasion, and markes of truth' (II.277; cf. pp. 323±6). In De Veritate, meanwhile, Herbert sets aside divine revelation and asserts instead the validity of human reason. While he is on numerous accounts sympathetic to a Montaignean epistemology of truth, Herbert nevertheless proposes a modi®ed

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46 Early Modern Metaphysical Literature

®deism based on ®ve `Common Notions' largely drawn from Cicero and the Stoics. R. D. Bedford points out that in formulating these principles, Herbert, like Montaigne, adheres to a sceptical rejection of moral dogmatism; like Descartes, meanwhile, Herbert develops a methodical approach to knowledge that is intended to facilitate intellectual clarity and certainty (p. 59).5 Brie¯y, the Common Notions are a belief that there is a `sovereign deity' who `penetrates all things'; that `adoration ought to be reserved for the one God'; that virtue and piety are essentially connected and are fundamental to religious practice; that an `inner witness' alerts people to their wicked deeds and encourages a cleansing repentance; and that every person will be subject to reward or punishment after death.6 For Herbert, the Common Notions prove that the various religious practices developed over time and scattered across the globe all relate to a bedrock of transhistorical and transcultural truth: `my conclusions', he maintains, `are those which have been most widely accepted by every type of philosophy, religion and period' (DV, p. 81). If a person honestly separates the Common Notions from the mass of `false opinions' that infect society, they will `prevail over mysteries and faith and the arrogance of authority, and enable us to make a clean sweep of fables, error and obscurities' (DV, p. 106). Because of this universality, a comparative study of world religions provides the grounds for Herbert's advocacy of private difference within spiritual community (DV, p. 303); indeed, this pluralist sociology of religion, Michael Bristol argues, anticipates contemporary bourgeois society's secular humanism (`Sacred', 16, pp. 31±3). Herbert's later treatise, De Religione Gentilium, expands this universalist aspect through an encyclopaedic inquiry into the religions of the known world. This research, Herbert claims, proves the foundational existence of the ®ve Common Notions and the deleterious effects of adhering only to received `traditions'. Out of all the possible religio-philosophical options, these ®ve articles are best quali®ed to `promote public peace and tranquility' (DRG , p. 337; cf. p. 352). Herbert's understanding of an ancient and widespread perception of truth provides a basis for eirenic philosophical and cultural toleration that, when read in the context of seventeenth-century religio-political violence, suggests the possibility of more peaceful ways than were found to negotiate personal and ideological differences.7 In De Veritate, Herbert grounds his pluralist message in a theory of perception and truth. According to Herbert, there are four `elements of

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Herbert: Handsome, Chivalrous, and Strange 47

truth': `truth of thing, truth of appearance, truth of concept and truth of intellect' (p. 88). In a search for essence, a person ought to adhere to `truth of thing' (veritas rei) and `truth of intellect' (veritas intellectus); the former represents `the thing as it is' (p. 84) while the latter embodies an instinctual apprehension of the Common Notions (p. 106). The publication of De Veritate, Herbert claims in his memoirs, was itself the result of making contact with the truth of God's will. Praying for a sign whether or not to disseminate his work, Herbert recounts that `I had no sooner spoken these words, but a loud though yet gentle noise came from the heavens, for it was like nothing on earth, which did so comfort and cheer me, that I took my petition as granted, and that I had the sign I demanded, whereupon also I resolved to print my book' (Autobiography, p. 249). In the more common or everyday course of life, however, Herbert's writings reveal that such supernatural illumination is a most rare occurrence. In addition to veritas rei and veritas intellectus are two other more customary avenues of insight that involve external and internal in¯uences on perception. `Truth of appearance' (veritas apparentiae) is `highly conditional' and is frequently at odds with the truth of `things in themselves' (p. 84). Apparitional truth, Herbert remarks, `can be analysed, and even to some degree separated from the object', while no such division is possible for veritas rei which `remains always identical with itself' (p. 84). Although Herbert does not refer speci®cally to poetry, his observations on mimetic appearance draw the concerns of philosophy and literature close together: `conditional truths are the basis for the images which are retained in memory. . . what is beautiful in imagery moves us in the same way as the beautiful object itself' (p. 84). Rather like poetry as it was understood by many early modern theorists, `appearances may be deceitful while things in themselves cannot be' (p. 84). As we will see, Herbert's autobiography and much of his poetry is deeply concerned with the role of appearance in fashioning belief and public identity which may or (more likely) may not offer transparent access to essential being. `Truth of concept' (veritas conceptus), meanwhile, lies closest to the core of Herbert's self-understanding and literary undertakings. While an object's truth of appearance `consists in a precise external conformity with its original', truth of concept `consists in an exact internal conformity with the object as it appears' (p. 101). Rather like

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48 Early Modern Metaphysical Literature

Montaigne on custom, Herbert argues that truth of concept involves a personal mediation of information that is supplied by representations; it is the only truth `for which we are responsible' (p. 100). Because of its personal nature and level of abstraction, truth of concept is `very subject to conditions' (p. 100). As an example of a mediating condition, Herbert adduces the case of seeing an object `through a coloured transparent medium' or a diseased eye: `what is white in the object may be purple in the transparent medium and yellow to a jaundiced eye'; while these conditions may effect departures from veritas rei, the distorted images are nevertheless still true as concepts. It is up to the `intellect' to sort out the perceptual deception, yet even this faculty can be misled (p. 101). `Anything we perceive,' Herbert maintains in De Veritate, `is seen to stand in relation to our minds' (p. 89); while capital-T, fundamental truth does exist, truth of concept is often the last stop on the epistemological road. The sheer abundance in the everyday world of motivations, interests, and desires produces a constant shaping of the truth into highly personal and contingent representations. In Herbert's terms, this phenomenon manifests itself in `discursive thought' (DV, p. 232). This lowest and frequently abused form of knowledge is primarily concerned with the manufacture of analogies (which, we might note, is a hallmark of Metaphysical writing) between objects' images as they are apprehended by the external and internal faculties of perception (DV, pp. 232, 235). Discursive thought, Herbert claims, is `undisciplined'; it wanders among bypaths, often stumbling in its tracks, and when it seeks support from the yielding confusion of truths it brings to the ground its whole crazy structure of principles. Thus man, though bound by birthright only to the law of Nature, submits himself to a different code. He transfers his loyalty from the law of Nature to the law of religion, and then to civil law, and ®nally to the rule of his own caprice . . . so far from keeping to any ®xed course he recklessly involves himself and everything else in ruin through his trust in mere phenomena. (DV, pp. 233±4) This disparaged yet common `trust in mere phenomena' ± by philosophers, politicians, prelates, and most other people too ± forms a central preoccupation in numerous of Herbert's writings.

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Herbert: Handsome, Chivalrous, and Strange 49

Matters of perception are so tangled and capricious that, paradoxically, `truth is to some extent the foundation not of truth only, but of error' (DV, p. 239); that is to say, a distorted concept can, through the peripatetics of discursive thought, transform a truth into something far removed from its essence. As we will see in the discussions that follow, Herbert's less-obviously philosophical texts share De Veritate's uneasiness over the subjective nature of truth-claims. His memoirs and poetry frequently acknowledge that, while personal autonomy and the rational apprehension of absolute truth are the pre-eminent goals of life, the more usual human experience involves the mediation of the self and perception by norms and ideals that are derived from the culture in which one lives.

Wonder-ful Lord Herbert From Herbert's philosophical statements I would now like to turn to his autobiography. Not long ago, George Held claimed that this text is principally responsible for the `present devaluation' of Herbert's currency as both a writer and a political ®gure (p. 19). While Held and others have seen little more in this personal history than `a character from opera buffo, a Welsh miles gloriosus' (p. 19), I suggest that in this account of his genealogy, youth, education, government service, and adventures we ®nd an engaging working example of Herbert's theories of truth and perception as they pertain to the complexities of social existence. As we have seen, Herbert put great stock in the possibility of intellectually stripping away the veneer of convention to reveal unadulterated truth. This conviction is complemented by a corollary claim that `There is no desire closed to [man], almost nothing beyond his power. In free will, then, we arrive at the ®nal characteristic of man' (DV, p. 164).8 Herbert's theoretical adherence (which follows centuries of humanist and Neoplatonic thought) to the possibility of discovering truth and his maintaining of a doctrine of unfettered self-direction and choice founder, however, on the rocky shoals of life. While he upholds his epistemological acuity and personal uniqueness, Herbert's thrilling (and, yes, comical) memoirs testify to the weaving of a public identity out of the threads of its contemporary place, time, gender, and social rank. In an essay on what he refers to as Herbert's `Quixotry', Basil Willey observes that his subject represents the dissolution of chivalry as a way

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50 Early Modern Metaphysical Literature

of life. Caught somewhere between the mediaeval and the modern world, Herbert was, according to Willey, a `choice barbarian . . . sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought' (p. 22). While I agree that Herbert did experience discomfort at not being able to ful®ll a mythic knighterrantry, I suggest that he was neither barbaric nor intellectually sick. At the same time as his public status aligns him with a world of privilege and tradition, what Ben Jonson takes for obscurity and Willey regards as illness is actually Herbert's transmutation of the chivalric ethos into an inquisitive probing and denaturalization of habitual perceptions. In an apt turn of phrase, Richard McCoy labels the sort of ritualized chivalry to which Herbert clung as a `vigorous discordia concors' (p. 101). McCoy's use of a term familiar from Dr Johnson's days onward as descriptive of Metaphysical literature, encourages us to see the ways in which Herbert's negotiation (even integration) of sceptical inquiry and cultural norms illuminates other Metaphysical writers' related endeavours.9 A proud chivalric stance is one of the hallmarks of Herbert's autobiography; this attitude is coupled with and reinforced by Herbert's conviction that he was one of the world's great mysteries. In his memoirs, this self-conception furnishes a number of curious morsels. A rather sickly child, Herbert did not speak for an unusually long time; even after he understood what others were saying, Herbert forbore, `lest I should utter something that were imperfect or impertinent' (p. 30). When he did ®nally speak, unlike other little boys Edward did not ask for his favourite rattle but instead inquired `how I came into this world?', because, he asserts, `I found myself here indeed, but from what cause or beginning, or by what means, I could not imagine.' Despite sending his nurse and other attendant women into great ®ts of laughter, his youthful ponderings set the stage for later intellectual pursuits. Most remarkably, Herbert's uniqueness encompassed his very body which, he confesses, reveals `things alike strange of myself' such as a lightness in comparison with shorter and thinner men, as well as the presence of `a pulse on the crown of my head.' Sharing with his readers something known only to his chamber servants, Herbert con®des that `the shirts, waistcoats, and other garments I wear next my body, are sweet, beyond what either easily can be believed, or hath been observed in any else, which sweetness also was found to be in my breath above others' (pp. 112±13, 209±10). While other men were forced to travel to far-¯ung lands or to pay

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Herbert: Handsome, Chivalrous, and Strange 51

exorbitant prices to acquire exotic curios, Herbert was himself a veritable human Wunderkammer.10 This sense of personal uniqueness cannot be divorced from what Bristol identi®es as Herbert's `exacerbated aristocratic ressentiment' (`Sacred', p. 25). In his narration of a journey to the English College in Rome, Herbert illuminates the centrality of social rank to his selfunderstanding. When asked by the gatekeeper what the reason was for his visit to such a controversial Jesuit foundation, Herbert claimed that ` ``I come not here to study controversies, but to see the antiquities of the place'' ' (p. 154). While Herbert was able to rise above factionalism and claim (sounding rather like Sir Thomas Browne here) that `I loved everybody that was of a pious and virtuous life, and thought the errors on what side soever, were more worthy pity than hate' (p. 155), the College would not admit this nominal Protestant. We are told, however, that Herbert's interlocutor `approved much my freedom, as collecting thereby I was a person of honour'; indeed, upon learning that this inquisitive traveller was none other than `Sir Edward Herbert', the gate keeper informed him that `he had heard men oftentimes speak' of him `both for learning and courage' (p. 154). The word `freedom' in the Jesuit's reported statement offers a key to Herbert's self-conception and intellectual pursuits. On Sir Edward's account, `freedom', `honour', `learning', and `courage' are intimate facets of his social rank, an aspect of his character that supposedly empowers him to rise above petty controversy and enter uncontaminated the purer realm of ideas.11 In De Veritate, he cautions that `However true any book may be in respect to the truth of object, your own truth must be derived from yourself' (p. 217). For Herbert, personal chivalry was the vehicle bestsuited for accomplishing his personal truth's discovery to the world. While he was not of Britain's ®rst-order nobility ± Bristol calls him part of the `cadet' branch of the Herbert clan (`Sacred', p. 21) ± his family connections, money, and titles afforded him a degree of expressive and agential liberty that was off-limits to untitled individuals like Donne, Lanyer, and Marvell. Towards the end of his life, Herbert's independence empowered him to withstand numerous calls to join the Royalist forces, a potent seduction considering his membership in the peerage, his history of ambassadorial service for King James (1619±24), and the fact that his sons and favourite grandson were ®ghting for King Charles. Even on his deathbed,

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however, Herbert refused to cave in to orthodoxy. The seventeenthcentury biographer John Aubrey reports that when the Lord Primate of Ireland, James Ussher, visited the dying man in order to administer the sacrament, Herbert turned to him and `sayd indifferently of it that if there was good in any-thing 'twas in that, or if it did no good `twould doe no hurt' (p. 135). At that lacklustre response, the angry prelate refused to give him communion and Herbert thereupon `turned his head to the other side and expired very serenely.'12 As we will see shortly, this ultimate association of death and cultural non-conformity was presaged by Herbert's earlier textual considerations of mortality. Herbert's deathbed religious dissidence was, as I have noted, foreshadowed by his more politically unconventional actions (given his rank and frequently Cavalier manner) during the Civil War. Besieged with his daughter Beatrice inside Montgomery Castle, Herbert surrendered (without a struggle) his Welsh estate to Parliament and moved to London. This surprising behaviour caused Herbert to fall in the estimation of his friends and relatives; reacting to this supposed poltroonery, the Royalist commander Sir Michael Ernely, for instance, vili®ed him as `the treacherous Lord Herbert' (Sidney Lee, p. 288). Like Ernely, Sidney Lee regards Herbert's decision to quit Wales and the Royalist cause in favour of a quiet life amongst his books at Camden House as having been `at the expense of his honour' (p. xxxiii). Lee, though, bases his evaluation solely on a public understanding of honour and neglects the vital importance Herbert placed on personal desire and liberty of conscience. In De Veritate Herbert asserts that `free will has been given us for our bene®t, that we may devote ourselves by our free choice to the means which lead to Happiness'; a few lines on, he concludes that `A man should give thanks for the gift of freedom to resist' (p. 164). However much other aristocrats' verbal sniping may have upset him, the fact remains that Herbert successfully played a high-stakes political game and kept possession of his life, liberty, and library (like Prospero, this latter was his most valued possession). When one takes into account King Charles's reprobate behaviour towards him and the nation, Herbert's resistance ± his active defence of his happiness ± even makes justi®able political sense.13 The independent cast of mind Herbert displayed dovetails with the version of chivalric nobility upon which a number of late-sixteenthand seventeenth-century aristocrats based their identities. Indeed, as McCoy points out, some peers supported the Parliamentarians because

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Herbert: Handsome, Chivalrous, and Strange 53

of what they regarded to be the king's pusillanimous usurpation of their time-honoured rights (p. 159). Clinging to an increasingly superannuated conception of noble identity, the lives and writings of men such as Herbert, Fulke Greville, the Earl of Arundel, and Robert, Earl of Essex indicate that chivalric honour could provide the foundation for dissident thoughts and actions.14 As McCoy notes, deference and aggression coexisted in many noblemen in a `dangerously incompatible' way (pp. 3, 9±27). Late-Elizabethan chivalry, in fact, set the stage for the development in the next century of a philosophy of subjects' private rights unconstrained by the king's wishes (McCoy, p. 3).15 In his study of the `crisis' that af¯icted the early modern English aristocracy, Lawrence Stone underscores the persistence of a `hypersensitive insistence upon the overriding importance of reputation' to chivalric masculinity (p. 25). Accordingly, in an ambassadorial letter to King James, Herbert defends himself against slanderous accusations, noting that `the evill power of Calumny, doth usually leave some impression behinde it; as writinge defaced in itselfe, will yet remaine in the blot' (Rossi, p. 461). During the early Stuart period, this aristocratic fetishization of reputation led, as Herbert's autobiography amply demonstrates, to a proliferation of the private `code of the duel' (Stone, p. 119).16 In Herbert's case, the personal emotional motivation behind such violent displays of chivalric egotism is revealed in his re¯ection that as a young man at school he could not emulate his master's equanimity in the face of insult: I confess I could never attain that perfection, as being subject ever to choler and passion more than I ought, and generally to speak my mind freely, and indeed rather to imitate those, who, having ®re within doors, choose rather to give it vent than suffer it to burn the house. (p. 38) The sheer number of duels Herbert attempted to ®ght testi®es to the fact that he believed strongly in public displays of `passion', a typically aristocratic code of gallant deportment and public identi®cation. While many contemporaries viewed it as reprehensible behaviour, duelling does appear to have ful®lled for Herbert a worldly expression of his philosophical tenet that all-important free will is only possible if `we have courage and vigour' (DV, p. 164). In accordance with what he

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took to be the proper ful®lment of his `oath of knighthood', however, Herbert asserts that his vigour was never misdirected: `I never without occasion quarrelled with anybody, and as little did anybody attempt to give me offence, as having as clear a reputation for my courage as whosoever of my time' (p. 96). On the surface, chivalric masculinity appears to be rooted in uniqueness and self-creation. One might therefore be tempted to associate Herbert (or at least his memoirs) with Michael Masuch's account of the `individualist self' which was formed and instantiated in autobiographies written between 1591 and 1791. As Masuch anatomizes it, this ®gure is principally a `storyteller' who produces narratives of an `autonomous' and self-creating, self-directing `unit' (20±3).17 In actual fact, however, chivalry was ± as Ariosto, Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, and numerous others show in their romances and plays ± a far from culturally unencumbered identity. Anthony Fletcher's discussion of duelling as a principal expression of conventional masculine honour amongst the Elizabethan and early Stuart gentry, helps to illuminate the extent to which Herbert's apparent uniqueness was informed by the public context in which he lived (130±1). Herbert's version of romantic knighthood would have made a great deal of sense to literary characters such as Hotspur and Sir Guyon, particularly in its deep indebtedness to traditional rank and gender norms. The earliest surviving evidence of how his autobiography was received indicates that its readers quickly perceived this interanimation of the personal and the cultural in Herbert's self-representation. In his preface to the ®rst printed edition of Herbert's autobiography, Walpole astutely notes the in¯uence on Herbert's self-portrayal of highly-scripted cultural norms: `As a knight his chivalry was drawn from the purest founts of the Fairy Queen' (A4r ). Along similar lines, Walpole's friend William Cole wryly asks in a letter: `Who could have believed that the philosophic author of De Veritate could have lived and acted the part of Don Quixote in reality?' (Walpole's Correspondence, 1:70).18 Walpole's and Cole's citations of literary exempla as the sources and analogues of Herbert's self-portrayal evince the blending of life and art, the individual and the cultural, that characterizes so many of Herbert's writings. One of the most famous of all the surviving painted portraits of Herbert crystallizes this con¯uence of private and public. Isaac Oliver's wonderful cabinet miniature (Figure 2) dates from about 1612±14 when, as the autobiography informs us, Herbert was living in

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56

Figure 2 Miniature portrait of Edward, Lord Herbert of Chirbury, by Isaac Oliver.

England.19 As Sir Roy Strong observes, while Oliver was at the time busily introducing to English high society new continental styles and techniques, this painting is decidedly `old-fashioned' and glances back to Nicholas Hilliard's Elizabethan work (pp. 180±4).20 Lounging in a multi-hued green glade, probably prior to a knightly tournament (his squire, horse, and armour are visible in the background), Lord Herbert appears before us as a chivalrous knight, fashionable melancholic, and poet-philosopher. Along the left-hand margin of his shield one can read the motto `MAGICA SYMPATHIá', while in the centre an impresa depicts a scarlet heart rising from golden ¯ames. Strong explains the emblematic signi®cance of these features as, in turn, references to the occult doctrine of sympathetic magic and to an ascent of the mind and/or soul to heavenly mysteries (p. 184); both these interpretations square with the aims expressed in De Veritate, De Religione Gentilium, and, as we will see, much of Herbert's poetry.21 John Peacock points out that it was incumbent upon any lateRenaissance courtier who sought political status and power to have his portrait painted and put into circulation (pp. 209, 211±12). Oliver's miniature interests me here, however, because in eschewing the artist's characteristic naturalism for emblematic ornament, it evocatively conveys the interweaving of Herbert's sense of personal uniqueness and his pursuit of uncommon knowledge. In the context of her examination of early modern sonnets and miniatures, Patricia Fumerton notes that Oliver's usual `psychological realism' worked to evaporate the sitter's privacy by making public his or her true self (p. 106). By hearkening back to an older representational economy, meanwhile, Oliver's cabinet miniature depicting Herbert in the full ¯ower of knighthood shields its subject's secret self by confronting viewers with a veil of enigmatic charms. Over two hundred years ago, Walpole observed the continuity of spirit between Herbert's memoirs and that which he had tried to achieve in his philosophical writings. In the autobiography, Walpole notes, Herbert displays `Foibles, passions, perhaps some vanity, surely some wrongheadedness'; as he goes on to comment, though, `these he scorned to conceal, for he sought Truth, wrote on Truth, was Truth' (Life, A3v ±A4r ). Walpole's insight suggests to me that in order to understand the character, thought, and writings of a man who derived his sense of self from the likes of the Redcrosse Knight and Sir Scudamore, we must take into account that, for Edward Herbert,

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Herbert: Handsome, Chivalrous, and Strange 57

truth (in this world at least) is unknowable in its absolute form. Instead, truth is presently seen and lived through a glass darkly; that is, as Herbert spells out in De Veritate, it is for most people mediated by cultural and personal contexts and considerations. If, in a metaphorical sense, Herbert indeed `was Truth', as Walpole claims, then both the autobiography and Oliver's miniature show that the `Truth' of identity is rarely, if ever, unencumbered by sublunary interests and desires.

Poetry, desire, and the limits of perception Reading Edward Herbert's autobiography, one's dominant impression is of a gregarious man who cultivated a con®dent sprezzatura and who met life's challenges with courage and zeal. Many of the more personal poems found in the posthumous collection Occasional Verses (1665), however, speak to a profound discomfort with the world and a longing to unite with a truer, more essential form of being. While in his public deportment Herbert embodied many elements of contemporary Cavalier style, his more philosophical poems (like the latter years of his life) are inhabited by a different set of concerns.22 In this part of my discussion, I propose that much of Herbert's poetry ®gures an epistemological and spiritual crisis strongly tied to an apprehension of society's moral corruption. Like many courtly ®gures of his day, Herbert composed a number of very pretty (and thoroughly conventional) madrigals, lute songs, love lyrics, and `ditties'; these widely anthologized pieces are not my interest here. In company with his philosophy and memoirs ± though in a more intimate fashion ± the poems I examine frequently glower at the world and express dissatisfaction with the veil of conventional appearances and naturalized relations. A few of these lyrics, though, pass beyond his prose statements to imagine a state of mystical unknowing that is a portal to absolute truth and beauty. In his poetry Herbert often shows that entirely unfettered perception and communication are dif®cult (and perhaps impossible) to achieve because the human mind possesses numerous deeply-ingrained habits of thought, expression, and social organization. We can begin to trace the complexity of Herbert's insights in the light shed by a challenging poetic exchange between himself and John Donne. In the summer of 1610, Herbert travelled to Holland to join his brother Thomas and the English forces assisting the Prince of Orange's siege of Juliers.23 While

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58 Early Modern Metaphysical Literature

Herbert was abroad, Donne sent him a verse epistle that expostulated at length on the decrepit state of human morality, intelligence, and behaviour.24 As Arthur Marotti remarks, in its `conceited wittiness' as well as its treatment of ethics, religion, and philosophy, Donne's `To Sir Edward Herbert, at Julyers' bears witness to its author's high regard for Herbert's own philosophical sophistication (pp. 201±2). When in society, Donne complains, man not onely is the heard of swine,

But he's those devills too, which did incline

Them to a headlong rage, and made them worse:

For man can adde weight to heavens heaviest curse.

(ll. 15±18) Donne's reference here is to the biblical Gadarene swine and the devils that possessed them; inside and out, he says, humans are prone to wickedness and bestiality. Most perversely, although God created things that potentially cause harm, people are responsible for drawing pain upon themselves (cf. ll. 23±6, 31±2). In typical fashion, Donne speaks of this phenomenon as an epistemological conundrum . He remarks that the world `is but a pill' (l. 40) that is either `Poysonous, or purgative, or cordiall' (l. 42). The root of these differences is `knowledge' which `kindles Calentures in some, / And is to others icy Opium' (ll. 43±4). On Donne's account, feverish, suicidal delirium and frozen lethargy are two of the most common and deadly states of being endured by humankind. What hope is there when `knowledge' ± the beliefs people hold about themselves and their world ± is responsible for these atrocious conditions? Despite (or more likely because of) this poem's misanthropic strain, Donne considered that Herbert would understand and probably sympathize with his ideas. This was largely because Donne's text was probably written as a response to Herbert's own 1608 satire `The State-progress of Ill', which itself might owe a debt to Donne's `Metempsycosis' (Hill, pp. 67±8). As Don Keister remarks, however, while Donne's poetic epistle is primarily interested in theological questions, Herbert infuses `The State-progress' with more speci®cally political and moral considerations (p. 433). In his poem, Herbert uses highly elliptical syntax and enjambed couplets to emphasize society's monstrous corruption.25 Like Donne,

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Herbert: Handsome, Chivalrous, and Strange 59

he concludes that `The World, as in the Ark of Noah, rests, / Compos'd as then, few Men, and many Beasts' (ll. 125±6). Along with heaping scorn, Herbert's other interest is in discerning the actual `original' of Ill (l. 4). Quickly concluding that this source must remain `mysterious still' (l. 13), Herbert proposes to examine its ®rst appearance, subsequent manifestations, and disguises. His study of statecraft, religion, and individual proclivities reveals that Ill, which was at ®rst one of God's means of just correction, has, through its `secret'st wayes' (l. 33), become an agential force of its own: I note, that in

The yet infant-world, how mischief and sin,

His Agents here on earth, & easie known,

Are now conceal'd Intelligencers grown.

(ll. 35±8) While God instituted Fear and Shame as guardians of public and personal morality (ll. 39±41), `Mischief, under doing of Good was vail'd, / And Sin, of Pleasure' (ll. 42±3). The way of the world, Herbert maintains, involves a subterfugal infection of goodness by vicious desires, a phenomenon that generally goes unnoticed on this bleak planet. At this early stage of his poetical career, Herbert zeroed in on the issue of personal responsibility which, as we have seen, is central to virtually all his writings. Herbert contends that social misery results from `freeborn man' having been `subdu'd / By his own choice, that was at ®rst indu'd / With equal power over all' (ll. 119±21). Rather than give a curative formula, however, the poem sparks a sceptical doubletake at the supposed essential nature of social iniquity. According to Herbert, the problem with much of society is that people live only according to received wisdom and surface knowledge. Solely considering `present greatness', people are sucked `Within such whirlpools, that till they be drown'd, / They n'er get out, but only swim them round' (ll. 113, 115±16). The social system and conventional morality perversely encourage this lethargic capitulation. Herbert calls the state `a proportion'd colour'd table' (l. 81); in keeping with his devotion to the active version of knighthood spoken of in the autobiography, he describes the nobility's elevated status as only the result of `the Painters Art' (l. 95). `Honours', similarly, are merely `Figures compos'd of lines

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irregular' (ll. 99±100). Taking a typically hard line against received religion, Herbert chastizes priests as often being the men most responsible for maintaining an unjust status quo because they advocate falsely construed ideals of humility and patience (ll. 101±10).26 After his irascible `State-progress', Herbert seems largely to have abandoned matters of public order as topics for poetry. His turn to more intimate considerations, however, is founded on the same belief in the corruption of this world, often coupled with a yearning to escape it. The (today) relatively well-known `Ode upon a Question moved, Whether Love should continue for ever?' is a visionary lyric that eschews personal, psychological, and materialist accounts of human existence in order to assert transcendent principles. Herbert's `Ode' melodically conveys Melander's reassurances to his partner Celinda that their love is inviolable, even by death. The ®nal stanza portrays an enchanted moment of absolute perfection: While such a moveless silent peace Did seize on their becalmed sense, One would have thought some In¯uence Their ravish'd spirits did possess. (ll. 137±40) Alone together in an ideal green world of mutual devotion, Melander and Celinda differ markedly from Donne's lovers in `The Extasie', the poem on which Herbert probably modelled his own. Superlunary love has its place, Donne's speaker af®rms; however, as he famously concludes: `Loves mysteries in soules doe grow, / But yet the body is his booke' (ll. 71±2). As Barbara Everett points out, in this text Donne produces a `rational ecstasy' that draws in a community of readers by appealing to strongly felt physical satisfaction (p. 30). Herbert's speaker, meanwhile, cares little about shared human experience or the body, instead taking spiritual Platonic transcendence as a cure for worldly doubt and stress.27 Given that Herbert believed (as his autobiography testi®es) that his own body produced and contained private mysteries, it is little wonder that he was so drawn to phenomena that fall outside the pale of conventional experience. Strangeness and ambiguity attracted Herbert, I suggest, because they indicated to him that there is more to life than meets the eye or is explicable by recourse to custom and tradition.

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Herbert: Handsome, Chivalrous, and Strange 61

Rather than turning to orthodox religion, as Montaigne counsels, Herbert often rejects devotional solace and meditates fully on the strange wonder and beauty of, to use Ben Jonson's term, `obscurenesse'. Based on the evidence of his surviving poems, the colour black and the mystical phenomenon of blackness repeatedly intrigued Herbert. Other poets before him, such as Sir Philip Sidney, had meditated on the paradoxical presence of black features in a beautiful mistress.28 Sidney's Stella, for instance, ¯ashes black eyes at the world, and Astrophel devotes his seventh sonnet to puzzling out why Nature would have made them this colour. He concludes that `whereas black seems Beauty's contrary, / She even in black doth make all beauties ¯ow' (ll. 10±11) and, rather more preciously, that `she minding Love should be / Placed ever there [i.e., in Stella's eyes], gave him his mourning weed, / To honor all their deaths, who for her bleed' (ll. 12±14). Kim Hall has recently discussed the racial politics of Petrarchan `dark ladies' in general and of Sidney's Stella in particular. She argues that the `poetics of color' that informs these literary ladies cannot be separated from a colonialist history of exploitation (pp. 62±122). While his own representations and anatomies of blackness must to some extent participate in this racialized (and gendered) economy of value, and while Herbert is surely indebted to the musings of Sidney and other sonneteers, Hall's argument does not explain the decidedly philosophical bent which a number of his poems display.29 This disembodied aspect of his verse arises clearly in three (probably linked) poems: `To Mrs. Diana Cecyll', `To her Eyes', and `To her Hair'. Typical of Herbert, especially in the ®nal two he makes it clear that the real object of his verses is less Petrarchan praise than an opportunity to meditate on abstract philosophy. `To her Eyes', for instance, fashions an elaborate conceit whereby the blackness of a lady's eyes are the `image' of `that ®rst cause' which established the `Laws' of the universe (ll. 23, 15±16); as the rapt speaker concludes: `beams which pass / Through black, cannot but be divine' (ll. 32±3). The concluding stanza of `To her Hair' waxes even more Metaphysical: Tell us, when on her front in curls you lye So diapred30 from that black eye, That your re¯ected forms may make us know That shining light in darkness all would ®nd,

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Herbert: Handsome, Chivalrous, and Strange 63

Were they not upward blind With the Sun beams below.

In the ®rst printed collection of Herbert's poetry, these three erotic celebrations are immediately followed by two sonnets that pick up on and extend the line of abstract analysis which informs all three and, especially, the lines just quoted.31 As in the stanza above, in the sonnets blackness registers the insuf®ciency of human knowledge and expression to grasp and articulate veritas rei. In his `Sonnet of Black Beauty', Herbert extols the virtue of blackness, writing that When all these colours which the world call bright, And which old Poetry doth so persue, Are with the night so perished and gone, That of their being there remains no mark, Thou still abidest so intirely one, That we may know thy blackness is a spark Of light inaccessible, and alone Our darkness which can make us think it dark. (ll. 7±14) This poem echoes Herbert's philosophical conviction that conventional (poetical) categories of beauty limit one to an awareness of surfaces. The profoundest truths, meanwhile, are `inaccessible' to the customary ways of seeing and therefore we mistakenly think that blackness and darkness are the same. Accordingly, in `Another Sonnet to Black it self', Herbert fashions a direct apostrophe to that most mystical colour: Thou Black, wherein all colours are compos'd, And unto which they all at last return, Thou colour of the Sun where it doth burn, And shadow, where it cools, in thee is clos'd Whatever nature can, or hath dispos'd In any other Hue: from thee do rise Those tempers and complexions, which disclos'd, As parts of thee, do work as mysteries,

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(ll. 31±6)

Of that thy hidden power; when thou dost reign The characters of fate shine in the Skies,

And tell us what the Heavens do ordain,

But when Earth's common light shines to our eys, Thou so retir'st thy self, that thy disdain All revelation unto Man denys. In De Veritate, De Religione Gentilium, and elsewhere, Herbert urges people to apply their reason to the search for truth. In his poetry, blackness is the locus of this truth that we are to seek; `Earth's common light', however, distracts us from the quest and we therefore remain captivated by the mere painted shows of this world. Herbert's reverent, almost erotic celebration of blackness is reminiscent of a pseudo-Dionysian tradition of occult knowledge that rejects inquiry and analysis and instead celebrates impenetrable mystery. These poems on blackness come closest to those of his nearcontemporary, the Spanish mystic St John of the Cross. For both men, `una noche obscura' gave more profound satisfaction than any earthly forms.32 For Herbert, black's beauty lies in the tension between an awareness that blackness contains mystical truths and the veil that it draws over those same secrets. A shimmering black surface or an unfathomable spiritual pool into which a mystic might plunge can be adored and venerated; however, the truth of what blackness obscures will remain unknown until the end of the world. This deferral of ultimate truth explains why some of Herbert's most powerful insights into human desire and knowledge arise out of considerations of death and the swallowing of life in the maw of oblivion. For Herbert, the contemplation of mortality generates a sustained emotional and intellectual independence. Herbert's lissom metre in `Elegy over a Tomb' lulls a reader into expecting a straightforward depiction of loss. This monody on an unnamed individual, however, offers an unsettling representation of a world in which all mental and emotional certainty has been eradicated, no conventional volta of renewal appearing in order to help mourners make sense of their loss.33 Comprised of a series of unanswered questions that continue apace until the ®nal stanza, the `Elegy' ponders what has become of the dead person's beauty. This is an important philosophical issue because, as

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64 Early Modern Metaphysical Literature

the speaker puts it, the `light and heat' in the deceased's eyes `did prove / Knowledge and Love' (ll. 5±6). The sepulchral silence which confronts the poem's speaker, though, indicates the living can no longer be certain that their desires and beliefs correspond to truth. Anxiety produced by the disappearance of certainty stimulates the switch from an interrogative to an imperative mode (one that recalls the end of `To her Hair') in the poem's last stanza: Tell us, for Oracles must still ascend, For those that crave them at your tomb: Tell us, where are those beauties now become, And what they now intend: Tell us, alas, that cannot tell our grief, Or hope relief. (ll. 31±6) Mary Norton points out the connection between these demands and Herbert's deistic call for independent discovery in his philosophical treatises (p. 68). Yet, unlike in De Veritate and elsewhere, in his `Elegy' Herbert dashes even the `hope' of knowledge. The silent tomb becomes the centre of the speaker's world, a ®tting emblem for the futility of insight and expression. Consequently, in another poem ± `To his Mistress for her true Picture' ± Herbert turns to the contemptus mundi tradition, foregoing the `slime and sluttery' (l. 76) of earthly women for a new lover, Death, whom he calls `Heaven's-Light-Usher, Man's deliverer' (l. 64). Herbert's combination of eroticism and the grave's defeat of knowledge and identity does not end with criticism of social convention, but in®ltrates even his own self-conception. Promising his `Great Mistress' that he will `maintain' her `matchless beauty' in single combat `'Gainst all men that will quarrels entertain / For a Flesh-Mistress' (ll. 133±7), Herbert poignantly associates his chivalric identity with an independently valued truth and beauty that the world refuses to acknowledge and which ultimately doom both his self and public identity to destruction. In this dark but energetic poem, Herbert paradoxically ®nds in death the personal authority that the world had denied, his impossible ®ction of chivalric knighthood being ®nally consumed in the ®res of its own passion.

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Herbert: Handsome, Chivalrous, and Strange 65

66 Early Modern Metaphysical Literature

By way of concluding this examination of Herbert's denaturalizing representations of knowledge, identity, and existence, I would like to consider Herbert's elegy for his friend John Donne, a man who was himself one of the period's greatest writers on death. The intellectual, emotional, literary, and social bonds between the two men certainly warrant more extensive study than they have hitherto received. As Sidney Lee long ago noted, in terms of stylistic ingenuity and intellectual depth `Herbert proves himself the ablest of all the disciples of Donne' (p. xxxvi).34 In addition to their previously mentioned elegies on the death of Prince Henry, Arthur Marotti also identi®es as part of the `private literary relationship' between Donne and Herbert the former's elegies for Cecilia Bulstrode, the epistle to Herbert at Juliers, as well as the lyrics `The Extasie', `The Primrose', `The Undertaking', and `Negative Love' (pp. 195±202). Donne also presented Herbert with a manuscript of his ethically radical treatise Biathanatos; he is known to have given away only one other copy (Rossi, pp. 409±11; Keynes, pp. 112±13). The connections between the two men also extended well beyond poetry. Herbert's guardian, for instance, was Sir George More, the father of Ann More, the person with whom Donne scandalously eloped in 1601. As testament to their continuing friendship, on 19 November 1627 Donne delivered the sermon at the wedding of Herbert's eldest son, Richard, to Mary Egerton, the 1st Earl of Bridgewater's daughter. Donne was also close friends with Herbert's mother, Magdalen, to whom he dedicated his elegy `The Autumnall' and at whose funeral, in 1627, he preached the sermon. Undoubtedly, more evidence of the affection and association between the two men remains to be uncovered. Herbert's elegy is strangely absent from the printed memorials to Donne. Its earliest manuscript appearance is in British Library Add. MS 37157 (transcribed by an amanuensis c. 1631); the poem was ®rst printed in Henry Herbert's 1665 collection of his brother's poems. In keeping with what we have seen were his philosophical and personal preoccupations, Herbert's literary response to Donne's death unsettles the relations between representation and truth. As in his `Elegy over a Tomb', in his `Elegy for Doctor Dunn' Herbert avoids simplistic assertions of renewal in the face of profound loss. In fact, a meditation on Donne himself occupies a surprisingly tiny portion of the text. The poem's chief interest

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Edward and John on the brink

lies in stressing the lot of Donne's survivors, a condition characterized by a profound silence reigning over the earth. Herbert devotes just over half of his 86±line poem to a de®nition of praise; after all, encomiastic testament is, generically, one of elegy's chief functions. Praises, Herbert contends, should like de®nitions be Round, neat, convertible, such as agree To persons so, that, were their names conceal'd, Must make them known as well as if reveal'd. (ll. 39±42) Ideally, poetic revelation will be a matter of using language in such a way as to make identity entirely transparent. This is an important task, Herbert stresses, because `praise is publick inheritance' (l. 31); that is to say, community is maintained, in part, through awareness of honourable people who have gone before. As we have seen, however, Herbert is deeply mistrustful of public revelation, whether amorous, religious, political, or literary. What, therefore, is to be done about revelation when language has devolved? Herbert wants to `celebrate' Donne but requires `A language by it self, which should exceed / All those which are in use' (ll. 52±3).35 His only recourse is not to describe Donne himself or the content of his works, but only brie¯y sketch (in under three lines) the character of his friend's poetic practice: `thou did'st so re®ne / Matter with words, that both did seem divine, / When thy breath utter'd them' (ll. 61±3). While Donne possessed the gift of transforming and improving base `Matter' through language, living in this dim afterworld Herbert must content himself with only a sparse noting of his friend's practice. Some of Herbert's sentiments can be put down to rhetorical posturing and generic ful®lment; after all, elegies ideally make people understand that the world has lost an important individual. Indeed, Sidney Gottlieb notes that a number of the elegies included in the 1633 and 1635 editions of Donne's poetry mourn the loss of poetic power and inspiration that followed the poet's death (p. 32). Similarly, in his discussion of the elegies appended to Donne's poems, Robert Fallon notes the high incidence of texts that attest to the loss of language which followed Donne's demise (pp. 197±8); however, reading through them reveals Herbert's striking obsession with the subject and his relatively minuscule commentary on Donne's writings, behaviour, and habits of

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Herbert: Handsome, Chivalrous, and Strange 67

thought. Herbert's poem also stands out as one of the few that does not make a distinction between Donne's sacred and secular voices. Perhaps these departures from poetic custom are some of the reasons for its absence from the published corpus of elegies. From what we have seen of Herbert's attitudes expressed elsewhere, his `Elegy for Doctor Dunn' conforms to a sustained sense that language use amounts to a manipulation of inessential knowledge and is not a transparent conveyor of truth. The most obvious instances of distortion, Herbert claims, are the aspersive commentaries levelled against Donne by his `detractors' now that he is dead (ll. 78±82).36 In this context, Herbert's elegy can be read as a stepping outside of the discourse of commentary and criticism. Herbert praises his friend most by resisting the seduction of the world's inevitably unsatisfactory tropes and ®gures. Rather like Donne's own Anatomie, Herbert depicts the strangeness of human existence; however, unlike his friend he does so by refusing to write about that which cannot be clearly known. In Herbert's poem, Donne remains `conceal'd' from vile eyes and speech. Death has caught him up into the realm of blackness and mystery where, Herbert's writings repeatedly claim, truth silently waits. By not using such an ephemeral and deceitful tool as language, and by distinguishing Donne from a noisome and distracting world, Herbert lovingly gives to a departed friend his highest praise.

The tension between independent perception and cultural encoding that permeates so much of Herbert's writing is more than one chivalric blueblood's eccentric collision with a changing world. In the pages that follow, we will encounter similar, less aristocratic tensions between personal desires and cultural contexts. Herbert's philosophical, autobiographical, and poetic explorations of the ideals and limitations of knowledge and identity within a matrix of competing versions of the truth stand as guideposts for my consideration of many of the other Metaphysicals' more socially grounded encounters with cultural orthodoxy and denaturalization. Contrary to Ben Jonson's disapprobation, Herbert and these other writers show that Metaphysical `obscurenesse' does not obstruct knowledge, but instead thickens the light that helps people to distinguish between naturalized precepts and alternative ways of knowing the self, others and the world.

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68 Early Modern Metaphysical Literature

Green Desires: Andrew Marvell and the Pursuit of Pleasure

One of modern Western culture's more disturbing inheritances from the seventeenth century is that era's growing conviction that there is a morally essential correspondence between gender identity and sexual preference. The all-too-familiar story holds that it is unnatural to desire (let alone prefer) erotic relations with members of one's own gender. Over the past twenty years, however, scholars have uncovered vibrant literary, artistic, and historical evidence that many men in early modern England imagined and experienced a full range of homoerotic passions and practices.1 In this chapter I would like to turn attention to a more critically neglected aspect of early modern sexuality and literature: female homoeroticism. Both John Donne and Andrew Marvell composed poems which, in whole or in part, speak of passionate love between women. In Donne's elegy `Sapho to Philñnis' and, especially, Marvell's country-house poem Upon Appleton House, techniques of cultural denaturalization draw attention to the coercive limitations of conventional gender and sexuality paradigms. Literary Metaphysicality in these poems principally underscores desire's unruly potential and, as a result, the subjective variability of moral interpretation. In their portraits of `lesbian' desire, Donne and Marvell make available for readers opportunities dissidently to re¯ect on purportedly everlasting and universal truths about human sexual proclivities, capacities, and pleasures. Alan Bray, Bruce Smith, and other historians of sexuality have pointed out that the literary, philosophical, religious, and jural records of lesbian desire in early modern England differ from those that depict masculine amicitia because, in Smith's words, `women 69

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3

lived in such a different relationship to the ideology and the power structure of Elizabethan and Jacobean society' (p. 28; cf. Bray, Homosexuality, p. 17). As a result of women's marginality and the absence of a rei®ed lesbian identity in the modern sense, theorists and historians have noted that an archaeology of same-gender female desire confronts deep obscurity. At the outset of her study of `woman-identi®ed women' in mediaeval Christianity, for instance, Ann Matter confesses that hers is `by no means a statistically valid study; it is rather a venture into a realm of silence and contradiction' (p. 81). Valerie Traub reaches a similar conclusion regarding the early modern research terrain. In an essay discussing lesbian desire on the English stage, Traub `extrapolates a cultural presence from a discursive silence' (`(In)signi®cance', p. 164).2 To a great extent because of systemic prejudice and women's sociocultural marginality, readers of poems by Donne and Marvell ought not to expect the sort of sustained and often euphoric declarations of embodied homoeroticism that one ®nds in, for example, Richard Barn®eld's The Affectionate Shepheard or Christopher Marlowe's Edward II. However, though I am in general agreement with Matter and Traub on the subject of lesbian invisibility, certain poems by Donne and Marvell suggest to me that the argument for discursive invisibility needs to be modi®ed, perhaps to a model of occasional illuminations in a frequently dark environment.3 In this chapter I seek out these glimmers in Donne's `Sapho to Philñnis' and Marvell's Upon Appleton House, for it is in these poems that Donne and Marvell most cogently defamiliarize heteronormative convention as it affects the lives of women who do not conform to a crossgender paradigm of sexual pleasure and destiny. Marvellian erotic dissidence in particular undermines the supposed ethical purity of marriage and procreation, calls into question the contingency of sexual morality on material concerns, and suggests that people are capable of pursuing and experiencing a far more varied spectrum of pleasures than is commonly admitted or allowed. Finally, a consideration of female homoeroticism in the poetry of Donne and Marvell also helps to contextualize and clarify the contribution made to the subject by Aemilia Lanyer who, as we will see in the following chapter, represents love between women as a stabilizing (albeit threatened) phenomenon and basis for psycho-social well-being in her own life.

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70 Early Modern Metaphysical Literature

Marvell and the Pursuit of Pleasure 71

In his erotic monologue `Sapho to Philñnis', Donne poignantly represents the ancient poet Sappho of Lesbos' laments and pleas to her former partner, Philñnis, to give up the love of men and resume their passionate sexual relationship. Claude Summers notes of this elegy that Donne here `pointedly fails to represent lesbianism as sodomitical' (p. 31); in fact, as Janel Mueller observes, Donne's Sapho is `an ardent, active lesbian in full experiential and emotional career' (`Utopia', p. 183). Although one might quarrel with Mueller's unquali®ed application of a modern identity category, she aptly characterizes the poem's ®guration of same-gender desire as powerfully moving.4 Indeed, as she points out, while Elizabeth Harvey and James Holstun are attuned to same-gender desire in the poem, they tend to limit Donne's sympathy with Sappho and the poem's ability to critique patriarchal norms (pp. 203±4 n. 5). As I see it, `Sapho to Philñnis' departs from Holstun's `elegiac' model of early modern literary lesbianism (pp. 838±47). Instead, Donne accommodates non-heteronormative perspectives by leaving the outcome of Sappho's pleas undetermined, thereby making room for the possibility of the former lovers' reunion. Unlike the pleasures of being with another woman, Sappho complains, sex with `some soft boy . . . wants yet / A mutuall feeling which should sweeten it' (ll. 31±2). A boy's body is subject to daily changes such as the `thorny hairy' growth of a beard (l. 33); Philñnis's body, though, is an immutable `naturall Paradise' (l. 35). The georgic `tillage of a harsh rough man' (l. 38) contrasts starkly with Philñnis' golden age pastoral gentleness and fecundity which Sappho construes as germane to love between women. Sappho's strongest argument as to why Philñnis ought to abandon cross-gender eroticism rests on a defence of mutuality and likeness. `[B]etweene us all sweetness may be had', Sappho contends, principally because My two lips, eyes, thighs, differ from thy two, But so, as thine from one another doe;

And, oh, no more; the likenesse being such,

Why should they not alike in all parts touch? ...

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Sapphic pleasures

72 Early Modern Metaphysical Literature

(ll. 45±8, 55±8) Calling Philñnis her `halfe', Sappho draws on the Aristophanic myth (expressed in Plato's Symposium, 188e±193e) that sexual history involves the attempts of divinely bifurcated same-sex and cross-sex couples to reunite.5 Sappho can claim that `touching my selfe, all seemes done to thee' (l. 52), because of the notion that at one time they were the same person. Paula Blank's illumination of the ways in which Donne's poem `exposes sameness as rhetorical rather than material' (p. 359) demonstrates that mutuality is a culturally constructed way of understanding and expressing homoerotic desire and identity. Nevertheless, in the poetry of Donne, Marvell, and Lanyer, homoerotic mutuality is strategically essentialized ± it becomes a necessary ®ction ± so as emphatically to contrast the perceived fragmentary and oppressive nature of heteroerotic unions with the avowedly kinder, more equitable bonds of female companionship.

Marvell's bent To a greater extent even than Donne's, Marvell's dilations on samegender female eroticism are part and parcel of a sustained investment in exposing the limitations of heteronormative convention and imagining pleasures outside the purview of licit sexuality. At their most provocative, a number of his textual transgressions produce what Jonathan Dollimore refers to as `dangerous knowledge' of the noninevitability of social inequality and prejudice (Dissidence, pp. 88±9). Such insights in Marvell's lyric verse frequently entail the tensions and anxieties involved in the naturalization and valorization of what would eventually come to be known as `heterosexuality'. Sublunary love, Marvell shows, is altogether too complex for conventional moral and sexual categories. In his work, unruly erotic desire subjects sexual ethics to a reductio ad absurdum and exposes the fallaciousness of absolute determinations of moral worth. Before turning attention to Marvell's Upon Appleton House, however, I want ®rst to consider brie¯y the correlative presence of male

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Me, in my glasse, I call thee; But alas, When I would kisse, teares dimme mine eyes, and glasse. O cure this loving madnesse, and restore Me to mee; thee, my halfe, my all, my more.

homoerotic interest and motifs in his life and in certain of his poems. While same-gender male and female eroticism did not carry an identical moral and legal charge during the seventeenth century, Marvell's literary treatment and possible personal experience of male homoeroticism offer useful contexts for the passions and anxieties that, in Upon Appleton House, inform an exclusively female world of sensuality as well as the narrator's own sylvan erotic dreamscape. A full understanding of homoeroticism's place in Marvell's poetic oeuvre must ®rst deal with the persistent rumours and avoidances that surround the author's own sexuality. In a recondite manner, A. Alvarez intimates the complex issues at stake. Describing Marvell's supposedly Lewis Carroll-like character, Alvarez writes that he possessed `private inadequacies'; Marvell was, he claims, `a bachelor with a gift for amusing children, . . . a man who was obscurely vulnerable to women's grief but never vulnerable enough to marry. . . . A couple of centuries later, all this would have been a recipe for eccentricity and unhappiness' (pp. xxii±xxiii). More sympathetically, though still enigmatically, in 1929 Vita Sackville-West noted that in Marvell's `correspondence, as in all contemporary writings concerning him, there is no mention whatsoever of a wife; on the contrary, such allusions as were made to his private life, pointed to quite different conclusions' (p. 23). William Empson sheds a little more light on the poet's predilections in an essay that examines the case surrounding Marvell's supposed marriage late in life to Mrs Palmer. In a roundabout way, Empson concludes that Marvell's primary affections were for `young men'; on his account, `When men get drunk together they often become affectionate, but do not want to make love, only to boast about their successes with women; and Marvell would long have felt that his embarrassment at this stage was itself a betrayal' (Biography, p. 87). Putting aside Empson's curious suppositions about what men (sober or tipsy) like to do together, as well as about how Marvell might have reacted had he found himself in a homosocial tavern situation, he is probably correct that Marvell's own erotic desires ran more towards men than women.6 While I do not want to assert categorically (and anachronistically) that Marvell was a blushing `homosexual', I do believe that if we hypothesize a personal interest in male±male desire and erotic relations, a number of important readings of his poetry come more clearly into focus.7 Marvell's lyric verse often registers discomfort with cross-gender relations; at other times it expresses an appreciation of

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Marvell and the Pursuit of Pleasure 73

love between men. In `The Garden', Marvell's narrator chafes at the customary precept that men and women best ful®l their ethical natures by joining together in monogamous heterosexual unions. Marvell's sceptical dreamer passionately extols, instead, the virtues of private sequestration in a primal green wilderness: Society is all but rude,

To this delicious Solitude.

No white nor red was ever seen

So am'rous as this lovely green.

...

Such was that happy Garden-state,

While Man there walk'd without a Mate:

After a Place so pure, and sweet,

What other Help could yet be meet!

But `twas beyond a Mortal's share

To wander solitary there:

Two Paradises `twere in one

To live in paradise alone.

(ll. 15±18, 57±64) By implying a parallel between himself and Adam, Marvell's narrator infers that life without Eve would have been a sublime pleasure. It is not a huge step to see in this rejection of the ®rst woman a dismissal of all women from `paradise'. Eroticism is de®nitely not banished from the perfect garden, however, but celebrated in autoerotic ecstasy: What wond'rous Life in this I lead!

Ripe Apples drop about my head;

The Luscious Clusters of the Vine

Upon my Mouth do crush their Wine;

The Nectaren, and curious Peach,

Into my hands themselves do reach;

Stumbling on Melons, as I pass,

Insnar'd with Flow'rs, I fall on Grass.

(ll. 33±40)

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74 Early Modern Metaphysical Literature

I disagree with Jonathan Crewe's suggestion that Marvell is being `wittily misogynistic' in these dreams of a womanless bower (p. 270); the poem's speaker, after all, tells us that he wants only to `wander solitary' in the `lovely green'.8 I also see no reason to conclude, as Barbara Estrin does, that these voluptuous fruits are `feminine' (p. 280); the narrator's `wond'rous Life' instead inhabits a realm of unadulterated, genderless hedonism. Many years ago Sackville-West perceived that greenness for Marvell was `the cipher of some signi®cance that he was forever trying to capture' (p. 36). Building on her insight, I would suggest that in `The Garden', as in numerous other texts including Upon Appleton House, the Marvellian greenworld is a cipher not for opposition to women per se, but to a `rude' way of life that, we might hazard, entails normative and prescribed social rituals and commitments such as heterosexual courtship, marriage, and procreation. In another poem, `The unfortunate Lover', Marvell shows just how cruel the world rejected in `The Garden' really is. This lament for a male beloved draws on Petrarchan and elegiac conventions to detail the suffering and torment not only of a young man but also of his ardent admirer, the poem's speaker: 'Twas in a Shipwrack, when the Seas

Rul'd, and the Winds did what they please,

That my poor Lover ¯oting lay,

And, e're brought forth, was cast away.

(ll. 9±12) Without regard for the torments of hope and despair that plague him, the `poor Lover' attempts to ®ght back against cruel Fortune and the sea: See how he nak'd and ®erce does stand, Cuf®ng the Thunder with one hand; While with the other he does lock, And grapple, with the stubborn Rock. (ll. 49±52) Despite his Herculean struggle, this naked warrior succumbs to death. The speaker reminds us, however, that his brave lover ought to be

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Marvell and the Pursuit of Pleasure 75

remembered and honoured because, even in death, he `leaves a Perfume here, / And Musick within every Ear' (ll. 61±2). Much ink has been spilt trying to determine the allegorical and symbolic identity of this unfortunate person. The most common solutions are that he is either Christ (King, pp. 77±88), the suffering soul (Berthoff, pp. 75±6), or martyred King Charles I (Patterson, Marvell, p. 22). Recently, Robert Wilcher has rejected these speci®c readings for a more general sense of the text's manipulation of poetic tradition. Wilcher argues that `the ``Unfortunate Lover'' is, perhaps, best interpreted as a deliberate construct of the artistic imagination out of materials supplied by one particular poetic convention' (p. 38). That is to say, Wilcher believes Marvell has imitated the Petrarchan idiom but dropped the woman out of it because his concern was only with an aestheticized representation of an unfocused inward pain. What each of these readings rejects is the possibility that Marvell may have deployed Petrarchanism in order to describe his own tormented experiences of love for a man or, at least, of one man for another. As Paul Hammond observes, the drive to allegorize `The unfortunate Lover' has sti¯ed awareness of its concern for actual human sexuality (p. 110). While a modicum of genuine personal emotion is accorded to the ostensibly heteroerotic poems of Petrarch, Wyatt, and Donne, no such possibility seems acceptable in Marvell's case. The example of Shakespeare's Sonnets, however, famously reminds us that early modern English writers could dextrously and engagingly combine Petrarchanism and homoerotic desire, often in highly personal ways. Wilcher poses important questions when he inquires as to the purpose of the poem's opening evocation of a pastoral world, and wonders why the speaker conveys such a `proprietary air' towards his `poor lover' (p. 37). On the ®rst point, by imagining idyllic pastoral love Marvell might have been using genre to recreate a domain in which homoerotic desire is as valuable (and at times even more so) as heteroerotic longing. In the writings of Theocritus, Virgil, Marlowe, Spenser, and many others, men could love men `By fountains cool, and Shadows green' (`The unfortunate Lover', l. 4) just as easily as they could women. A recognition of homoeroticism's animating presence in centuries of pastoral literature fully explains the speaker's `proprietary' concern for his lover.9

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Marvell and the Pursuit of Pleasure 77

My Love is of a birth as rare As 'tis for object strange and high: It was begotten by despair Upon Impossibility. (ll. 1±4) Paul Hammond contends that in this text the lovers' `Paralel' (l. 27) devotion draws on a homoerotic Narcissus motif (p. 103). Taking an interpretative risk, I would like to suggest further that the voice in this text represents, to a signi®cant degree, Marvell himself. I therefore read this reference to love's `impossibility' as based, in part, on Marvell's own confrontation with his culture's prejudices against same-gender desire, shadowed here as `rare' and `strange' because it does not conform to sex-gender norms. The poem's ®nal stanza points in this direction: Therefore the Love which us doth bind,

But Fate so enviously debarrs,

Is the conjunction of the Mind,

And Opposition of the Stars.

(ll. 29±32) In the early modern period the union of two minds and souls was a familiar image of ideal love between men. Describing his perfect   de la Boetie, Michel de Montaigne waxes: `Our friendship with Etienne mindes have jumped so unitedly together, they have with so fervent an affection considered of each other, . . . that I did not only know him, as well as mine owne, but I would (verily) rather have trusted him concerning any matter of mine, than my selfe' (I.203). The bond Marvell mourns in his poem seems similarly to concern, in Montaigne's de®nition, an `indissoluble union' (I.201) of two men deeply in love.10 Given the gathering homophobia of mid-seventeenth-century England, I am inclined to wonder whether `Fate' and the `Stars' are

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One other poem helps to clarify Marvell's thoughts on erotic plurality. In `The De®nition of Love', the poet presents a philosophical gloss on desire:

merely allegorical terms for cultural prohibitions of homoerotic affection. Robert Wilcher comments that `It is a curious feature of this poem that the goal of the speaker's yearning is never once named or even accorded the minimal status as a human person that the pronouns `she' or `her' would impart' (p. 45). Yet, would the pronouns `he' or `him' signify an absence of `human' nature? Perhaps an awareness that many people do (even today) believe such a thing prompted Marvell to cloak his own desires in ambiguous language. Marvell's poetic shrouds are not so impenetrable, however, that they utterly conceal a sustained discomfort with conventional attitudes towards non-heteronormative desire and eroticism.

The convent, marriage, and desire Whatever his personal predilections actually were, Marvell's interrogations and unsettling of the exclusive virtue of heterosexual unions takes shape most provocatively in relation to female homoeroticism. In his country-house poem Upon Appleton House, Marvell explored the possibility of a same-gender locus amoenus in a community of passionately attached religious women. On occasion, masculine homoeroticism peeks out of the textual scene; for instance, when the narrator enthusiastically comments that (shades of Edward Herbert) `every Mowers wholesome Heat / Smells like an Alexanders sweat' (ll. 427±8). It is lesbian desire, however, that is crucial to understanding the ways in which Marvell's celebration of the Fairfax dynasty's martial heroism also investigates the weak points of an aristocratic chivalric ethos, queries the violent means men use to bring about social order, and suggests that humans possess options for pleasure other than conjugal domesticity and procreation. As with `The unfortunate Lover', though, I again ®nd myself writing about a poem that has been analysed principally for its generic and political interests. My interpretations do not dispute the importance of these approaches, but seek to add a customarily overlooked dimension to the conversation.11 Neither the natural landscape nor human lives, Marvell reminds his readers, need to be cultivated in only one way. As John Dixon Hunt remarks, `the poet who invented the Mower was also ready to scoff at absurd ``enforcements'' either of garden art or of personality'; on Hunt's account, an ideal of `inclusiveness' provides Upon Appleton House with a philosophical and thematic core (pp. 100, 90±1).

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78 Early Modern Metaphysical Literature

Although Hunt's comments refer speci®cally to Marvell's support of his patron Thomas `Black Tom' Fairfax's controversial decision to follow his conscience rather than public pressure when he retired as leader of the Commonwealth army, Upon Appleton House also demonstrates the absurdity and even cruelty of `enforcement' in de®ning and persecuting non-normative erotic desires and behaviour.12 One of the poem's most perceptive commentators, James Holstun, maintains that Marvell depicts lesbianism solely as `a creature of the papist past and possibly no more than a self-interested economic ®ction' (p. 851). Holstun's conclusion, though, accords too much ®nality to Fairfaxian domestic ideology. A more nuanced reading ought to consider the ways in which the text represents the nuns' passions not in isolation but in the context of the narrator's own sceptical regard for normative values and his withholding of doctrinaire moral judgements. A poem about competing desires and ways of life, Upon Appleton House ®gures a palimpsestic relationship between two sex-gender systems in a way that mirrors the relation between the new manor house and the ancient Cistercian abbey on (and with) which Fairfax's home was constructed. Just as the dwelling's original but now ruined architecture ± the `Quarries whence this dwelling rose' (l. 88) ± can still be glimpsed, so too can its initial erotic fabric.13 Similarly, although the Fairfaxes appeared publicly to be Fate's divinely-ordained progeny, Marvell suggests that they exist only by having built their alliances over the top of other desires and types of relationships that have little or nothing to do with conventional marriage, family life, genealogical continuity, and inheritance. Marvell's problematization of these cultural orthodoxies is most cogently detailed in his narration of events leading up to the 1518 marriage of Thomas Fairfax's ancestors, Isabel Thwaites and William Fairfax of Steeton, and in the forest sequence in which the poem's narrator abandons human society for erotic, dreamlike solitude. Stanzas xi to xxxv relate Isabel's seduction by the nuns who inhabited the Appleton convent, followed by William's capture of his ®ance e from them. On the surface, Marvell's representation of the nuns' homoerotic enticements might appear to be merely anti-Catholic propaganda. Conversing with Isabel through an entire summer, the `Suttle Nunns' (l. 94) weave a spell of enticing words; during that time, one of their number tells `the blooming Virgin Thwaites' (l. 90) that she ` ``resembles much'' ' the Virgin Mary (l. 132); this same nun says to

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Marvell and the Pursuit of Pleasure 79

80 Early Modern Metaphysical Literature

Each Night among us to your side

Appoint a fresh and Virgin Bride;

Whom if our Lord at midnight ®nd,

Yet Neither should be left behind.

Where you may lye as chaste in Bed,

As Pearls together billeted.

All Night embracing Arm in Arm,

Like Chrystal pure with Cotton warm.

(ll. 185±92) These enchanting treasures are never given a chance to materialize, however, because, after much deliberation, William Fairfax at last storms the monastery. Using brute force against the prioress, Anne Langton, and her nuns ± whose only meagre instruments to combat this assault are `Wooden Saints', an `old Holy-Water Brush', and the crying of their voices (ll. 249±72) ± the great warrior seizes his prize. On its own, Marvell's mock-heroic description of Fairfax's victory over a group of defenceless women would be suf®cient to render the narrative rather bathetic. In addition, the fact that Isabel's own desires in the matter remain shrouded in mystery also seriously drains the capture of its triumphant air. As Fairfax crashes into the chapel, `truly bright and holy Thwaites / . . . weeping at the Altar waites' (ll. 263±4); waiting for what, or whom, though, is never made clear. Indeed, ever deliciously ambiguous, Marvell witholds from us the actual cause of Isabel's sad tears. Quite possibly she laments the end of her life in the company of such loving women and fears what marriage will be like to such a demonstrably violent man. Along this line, of greatest signi®cance to the poem's denaturalizing effect is the genuine seductiveness of the nuns' offers, an aspect of the text's erotic landscape that calls into question strict delineations between virtue and corruption.14 Most recent critics, though, have been unwilling to acknowledge the positive dimension of the nuns' temptations. Their avoidance appears to be linked to a refusal to consider as real or worthy any desires other than cross-gender ones. For

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Isabel that she ` ``see[s] the Angels in a Crown / On you the Lillies show'ring down'' ' (ll. 141±2). In addition, this loquacious sister promises Isabel command over a nocturnal realm of mystical sensuality:

example, instead of facing the issue directly and using the term homoeroticism or something similar, A. D. Cousins hesitantly refers to the sisters' `sexual unnaturalness' (p. 68); in the same vein, Michael Wilding writes euphemistically of their `sensual misbehaviour' (p. 148) and `protected intensi®cation' of `worldly ambitions and corruptions' (p. 164). Despite her numerous insights into the psycho-erotics of Upon Appleton House, even Estrin diminishes the nuns' ardour when she argues that, like Fairfax, the `manic' Cistercians `preach[ ] insemination' of Isabel who, she claims, they envision as capable of providing a `phallic extension wherewith to ``touch'' heaven' (pp. 286±7). The seductiveness of Marvell's imagery obviates reading these lesbian desires as deviant longings or merely bizarre manifestions of male heterosexual (phallic) fantasy. In addition, the Cistercians' sensuousness represents more than, as Hirst and Zwicker see it, an opportunity for a possibly homosexual poet to `distance . . . the problem of nonprocreative sexuality and control . . . its anxieties' in his own conscience (p. 268). More dissidently, the potential attractiveness (for Isabel and the poem's readers) of the nuns' conventual pleasures denaturalizes a sexgender ideology predicated on homoerotic turpitude. Marvell certainly does not advocate monastic homo-devotion as a lifestyle to be embraced in mid-seventeenth-century England; however, its arousing incarnation in the lines of his poem dissolves a naturalized ®ction of heteronormative domestic order and propriety by belying a supposed exclusive and essential ®t between desire, pleasure, and cross-gender union. The unsettling force of the Nun Appleton community's opposition to heteronormative pleasure, desire, and destiny principally derives from the delighted ease with which the sisters do without men. As Anna Nardo comments, the convent threatens patriarchal order because it is an all-female place of work and co-operation (p. 125).15 Female clausura was, in general, considered by many people to be threatening because, as Lyndal Roper observes, nuns inverted standard economic arrangements by owning and administering property. Equally unsettling, they used `the language of kinship' but formed relationships that were `at odds with civic kin structures' (pp. 206, 216). Potentially sodomitical because they threatened conjugality, these alternative affective and economic communities gainsaid the myth that a woman's happiness can only be found by becoming a wife and mother.16 Textual evidence abounds for a reading of the Appleton community's erotic dissidence and opposition to male authority. The nuns,

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Marvell and the Pursuit of Pleasure 81

for instance, label men ` ``wild Creatures'' ' (l. 102), and one nun satirically asks: ` ``What need is here of Man? unless / These as sweet Sins we should confess'' ' (ll. 183±4). At Nun Appleton priory, the only possible use for a man would be as an animate dildo, used not for procreation but for women's pleasure (no mention is made of whether or not a man would derive satisfaction too; his feelings are of no consequence). As the sisters recognize, however, women are abundantly able to satisfy for each other cravings of both the soul and the body. Such estimations of men's low value and women's ability to ®nd pleasure and companionship in a woman-centred community, run frighteningly counter to patriarchal gender ideology as embodied in the Fairfax dynasty. The poem's narrator expostulates on this dangerous point when he apparently valorizes William's once and future identity: Is not this he whose Offspring ®erce

Shall ®ght through all the Universe;

And with successive Valour try

France, Poland, either Germany;

Till one, as long since prophecy'd,

His Horse through conquer'd Britain ride?

Yet, against Fate, his Spouse they kept;

And the great Race would intercept.

(ll. 241±8) While enthusiastic, it is dif®cult not to hear again a degree of irony or sceptical distance in these hyperbolic and apocalyptic claims more suited for King Arthur's quests or the Second Coming of Christ. Even the interrogative mood of the narrator's expostulation undermines any transparent celebration. This is especially so when one considers that the whole melodrama of Isabel's seduction and capture is, as Lee Erickson notes, a dynastic `founder's myth' intended to justify the `great Race', an aspect of the poem that its early readers would have quickly recognized (p. 160).17 Given the patron±poet relationship that existed between Thomas Fairfax and Marvell, the bravado colouring of William's supposed heroism supplied the Fairfaxes with a cover for the fact that their family fortune depended on the dowry Isabel brought with her. Erickson remarks that, from the Thwaites±Fairfax union onward,

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`there was little romance or grandeur in their shrewd marriages and careful acquisition of property for the historian or the poet to celebrate' (p. 159). In addition to this material pressure, Marvell also had to ®nd a way to smooth over the ungentle reality that, at the time of the poem's composition, his pupil's parents were busy angling to secure their only child a wealthy, titled husband by investing upon her several large estates (Erickson, p. 161).18 Marvell's myth, in this context, is an anodyne that assuages Fairfaxian anxiety over the dynasty's very legitimacy and perpetuation. Given this gulf between reality and idealization, it is little wonder that Upon Appleton House is riddled with cracks in its of®cially uni®ed facËade. While the Cistercian sisters represent a corrupt form of Christianity, the narrator makes it clear that their more serious crime lay in opposing Fairfaxian procreation and the family's dynastic agenda. The nuns depict themselves as ` ``Virgin-Amazons'' ' (l. 106); their spiritual partner is Christ, ` ``the great Bridegroom'' ' (l. 108) and, through collective worship of him, they are ` ``Each one a Spouse, and each a Queen'' ' (l. 118). The Appleton sisterhood even claims (and the narrator lends support to their assertion) that Fairfax is Christ's `Rival' (l. 149) for Isabel's hand. The notion of rivalry and the implication of equivalence between what the nuns and the Fairfaxes each have to offer is part and parcel of Marvell's treatment of lesbianism in the poem. If looked at from the sisters' perspective, homoerotic love is a sensual state of grace; examined from Fairfax's hegemonic position, however, it is a manifestation of unnatural, sodomitical iniquity. `Fate', as we saw in `The unfortunate Lover' and ®nd out again here, has an unpleasant way of becoming a synonym for the ideological triumph of heteroerotic naturalness over homoerotic perversion.

Into the woods The subjective dimension of moral evaluation in the tale of the Cistercian nuns ®nds a parallel in the emphasis that Marvell places on interpretative agency in the echoic forest sequence appearing towards the end of the poem. Here, among the green trees, we come in closest contact with the Marvellian principle of inclusivity, noted above by John Dixon Hunt. Revelling in the wooded landscape, Marvell's insouciant narrator perceives things that normally go unnoticed by other people: `When ®rst the Eye this Forrest sees / It seems indeed as

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Marvell and the Pursuit of Pleasure 83

Wood not Trees' (ll. 497±8); drawing on another sense, he claims: `I have for my Musick found / A Sadder, yet more pleasing Sound' (ll. 521±2). The challenge Marvell raises is to perceive individual differences rather than producing totalizing accounts. This sylvan vision applies even to the narrator himself for, if examined in a new way, this `easie Philosopher' will be found to be `but an inverted Tree' (ll. 561, 568). While in such observations Marvell reveals a wry take on his own authorial identity and writing practice, his invitations to scrutinize appearances weave a hermeneutic mandate throughout the entire text. Taking a wander through the Nun Appleton forest, readers happen upon a celebration of erotic pleasure that mirrors and reinforces the sexual dissidence earlier encountered at the convent. While the nuns' pleasures have vanished with the dust of time, however, the narrator's own alluring fantasies energetically inhabit the immediate present: Bind me ye Woodbines in your twines,

Curle me about ye gadding Vines,

And Oh so close your Circles lace,

That I may never leave this Place:

But, lest your Fetters prove too weak,

Ere I your Silken Bondage break,

Do you, O Brambles, chain me too,

And courteous Briars nail me through.

(ll. 609±16) Resembling the spiritual-erotic aspirations we encountered earlier in `The Garden', these lines conjure a somewhat masochistic experience of surfeiting on solitary ¯eshly pleasures. Not unlike the nuns' erotic sweets, the green desires of Marvell's sylvan voluptuary are a far cry from public codes of sexual order. Yet, as readers, we are potentially tempted by the forest's embraces and drawn into sympathy with alternative modes of arousal and grati®cation. Crewe's argument that Marvell himself might be identi®ed with the abbey's prioress (pp. 282±3) further underscores the convent/ forest parallel and the likelihood that the poet intended at least some readers to experience sympathy for erotic desires and experiences that revel beyond the pale of convention.19 The appeal of the nuns' promises and of the narrator's forest reveries

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undermines Wilding's claim that, because `neither of them represents the virtues of the family', both the enticements of the nunnery and the woods must be understood as `rejected counter-retirements' (p. 166). Upon Appleton House, however, is actually quite far from being dogmatic on the superiority of `family' life; in fact, just the opposite is more likely. As Erickson notes, Marvell's narrator jettisons `fretful parenthood' from his ideal of pleasure and the good life; he wants to be `safe from the demands love and marriage would bring' (p. 167). The forest provides a quasi-pagan `Sanctuary' or `Temple green' (ll. 482, 510) to which to ¯ee from these strictures, and from which to evaluate the ideology of married life. Steven Zwicker is correct to point out that the `ethical force of monogamous heterosexual coupling is unmistakable' in the poem's treatment of Isabel's capture by William Fairfax. Upon Appleton House, he argues, weds `destiny' to heterosexuality, and judges all other expressions of human desire as `corrupt or immature' (`Virgins', pp. 86±7). Thomas Healy likewise argues that the woods are `decadent and corrupt' (p. 179). But for whom, the text prompts us to ask, do the nuns and the forest possess such disturbing qualities? Zwicker and Healy do not note that Marvell's poem offers alternative vantage points from which to critique a heteronormative ideology of `destiny' and maturity. In contrast to their views, Frank Warnke maintains that the meadow and forest sequences provide `life-giving' encounters with elemental powers (p. 248). More recently, Estrin has perceptively explained the happiness of the sylvan poet as being based on `a poetics of ``in-between'' '; that is, the Appleton speaker bypasses generic and gender conventions to inhabit a realm of pleasure outside of time and customary morality (pp. 283, 296±302). These dissenting observations underscore the fact that the narrator's and the nuns' sensual pleasures are not by nature perverse, but are only transgressive if evaluated according to naturalized moral standards. As the narrator says of the forest: `Dark all without it knits', but `within / It opens passable and thin' (ll. 505±6). The paths of knowledge, desire, and pleasure that Marvell motions toward are not the broadest or most common routes, but they are available for intrepid seekers. Marvell's convent and forest sequences illuminate the partiality of moral judgements. In these episodes the poet makes non-normative relationships and desires available for scrutiny outside of demonized categories, such as those invoked by William Fairfax when he gives a

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Marvell and the Pursuit of Pleasure 85

sodomitical reading of the Cistercians as women who `alter all', and their nunnery as a place where `vice infects the very Wall' (ll. 215±16). Marvell quali®es this cross, subjective evaluation through a manipulation of readerly sympathy brought about by ®rst presenting the nuns' seductive allure and then echoing it in the narrator's own green-world aspirations. While not subversive of Fairfaxian authority, Marvell's nuanced treatment of the Appleton nuns and their violent conquest in the name of dynastic hegemony encourages readers to re-evaluate the exclusive sanctity of heterosexual marriage, and to consider nonheteronormative (especially same-gender female) desire as potentially capable of sustaining a rich personal and community life.

`Streightness' In an attempt to verify Marvell's assumed support for the Fairfaxian agenda, critics have made much of Mary Fairfax's stellar, orderinducing appearance at the end of Upon Appleton House as well as the narrator's seemingly shamefaced comment that `The young Maria walks to night: / Hide tri¯ing Youth thy Pleasures slight' (ll. 651±2). Wilding, for instance, claims that `When Mary appears, the poet and nature both regain a discipline' (p. 166). As I read the concluding stanzas, however, the regained `discipline' involves a self-conscious but hardly unequivocal toeing of a hegemonic party line. Recollection of the earlier seductive expressions of alternative aspirations, pleasures, and lifestyles potentially intervenes to produce a sceptical perspective on the very nature of `discipline' itself. The narrator's visions of Mary turn out, in fact, not only to support a dynastic myth but also to be no less fanciful than his earlier dreams of woodland pulchritude. In what is probably an ironic redeployment of Donne's iconic Elizabeth Drury, Mary Fairfax (a girl of only thirteen) is said to be She that to these Gardens gave

That wondrous Beauty which they have;

She streightness on the Woods bestows;

To Her the Meadow sweetness owes;

Nothing could make the River be

So Chrystal-pure but only She;

She yet more Pure, Sweet, Streight, and Fair,

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Marvell and the Pursuit of Pleasure 87

Than Gardens, Woods, Meads, Rivers are.

Cousins takes Marvell's hyperbolic fantasy rather too literally when he repeatedly states that such effusions indicate Mary's transparent role as `at once sapiential and a correlative type of the Virgin Mary' (p. 65), as well as an `exemplar of renovatio' (p. 77). Marvell's text certainly allows for such interpretations but, like Donne's, also provides competing assertions regarding the subjective character of perception and identity. Barbara Lewalski reads Mary's `remarkable role (for a woman) of founder of a new dynastic line' as unproblematic for `patriarchal assumptions and arrangements' (`The Lady', p. 272). However, when one takes into account Marvell's erasure and mythologization of historical facts, his semi-jaded portrayal of Isabel's capture, and the narrator's sympathy for much of the life that is led at the Appleton convent as well as his own parallel woodland bliss, it is dif®cult not to detect at the very least an ambivalence ± if not a deep discomfort ±  vis-a-vis the young girl's relation to heteronormative and dynastic Fairfaxian ideals. Goddess-like Mary can only `bestow' her `streightness' on the woods or the former convent if other people agree to uphold the values she is made to embody. From what we know of the speaker's own desires, though, Mary's `streightening' endeavour appears to be at cross-purposes with the competing (and much more engaging) pleasures Upon Appleton House elsewhere details. The sylvan narrator-poet (and many of his readers) seem, after all, to have quite enjoyed their time spent in the pre-streight, crooked convent and forest. Not unlike what we saw in Chapter 2 when we examined Edward Herbert's contemplations of truth and perception, Marvell's narrator shows that all interpretations are partial and derive from speci®c desires, contexts, and agendas. His own praise of his patron's daughter Mary is itself, on one level, a piece of political propaganda in support of `the Fairfacian Oak' (l. 740) and its genealogical perpetuation, a goal that quite likely bore little or no relation to the desires of the young woman involved. As with her great-great-grandmother whose abduction got the dynastic ball rolling, we never hear Mary's own thoughts on where or with whom (if anyone) she might like to spend her life. Nevertheless, although Isabel and Mary are silent, other, potentially dissident voices can be heard whispering down the corridors of

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(ll. 689±96)

Appleton manor and singing a melodious refrain of pleasures sought out (and perhaps found) in the `yet green, yet growing Ark' (l. 484) of its surrounding woods. In the chapter that follows, Aemilia Lanyer will return us to a passionate space of woman-centred desire. This time, though, lesbianerotic meditations not only dissolve heteronormative ideology, but also provide a thoroughgoing cultural and ethical validation of affective women's partnerships and communities.

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88 Early Modern Metaphysical Literature

Rich Chains of Love: Desire and Community in Aemilia Lanyer's Salve Deus Rex Judñorum

Aemilia Lanyer devoted herself to God and other women. Her visions of past and future utopian worlds consistently place love of the deity in and through a community of women at the centre of personal happiness and social justice. In her only known work, Salve Deus Rex Judñorum, the commingling of religious piety, a defence of women, and a celebration of their mutual passion and devotion engagingly denaturalizes customary power relations and gender identities.1 Scholars such as Barbara Lewalski, Lynette McGrath, and Janel Mueller have discussed the importance of female association to Lanyer's poetry and vision of society. In general, though, they have not considered the relations between Lanyer's work and other seventeenth-century contemplations of love amongst women or the ways in which homoeroticism ®gures in her treatment of desire. Like John Donne, Lanyer paints the loneliness brought about by the disappearance of affective bonds between women; like Andrew Marvell, she questions the exclusive virtue of cross-gender couplings and depicts the destruction of women's collective happiness at the hands of men. Lanyer goes beyond both poets, however, in detailing the intersections amongst survival, ful®lment, and homoerotic desire. Indeed, prior to the writings of Katherine Philips in the 1650s and 1660s, Lanyer's poems include some of the imagistically richest and most sympathetic early modern conceptualizations of women's homoerotic companionship.2 In this chapter I hope to show that, by drawing together religious devotion and homoeroticism in ways that Marvell glimpsed but did not fully explore, Lanyer presents homoerotic affection as a way for women to overcome the ravages of class 89

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4

divisions and men's proprietary claims, and as a positive ground for real-world communities. In his discussion of early modern English history, Keith Wrightson observes that community `is not a thing; it is a quality in social relations which is, in some respects, occasional and temporary, and which needs periodic stimulation and reaf®rmation if it is to survive the centrifugal forces of the inevitable tensions which arise in local society' (p. 62). While Wrightson is primarily interested in large-scale threats to ideological norms of `order, harmony and subordination', his understanding of community in terms of social relations and tensions also allows room to consider the actions of particular human agents. Texts by early modern women are ripe for analysis along such lines. As Lewalski observes, much of seventeenth-century women's writings in England possessed an `oppositional nature'; that is, texts by Lanyer, Rachel Speght, Arbella Stuart and others testify to `inner resistance and a critical consciousness' capable not only of denaturalizing the status quo but also of effecting social transformations (Writing, p. 3).3 These women's insights and reformulations coincide with the various expressions of dissidence that Alan Sin®eld ®nds characteristic of many other early modern texts. As we saw in Chapter 1, rather than looking for outright subversion, Sin®eld advocates reading for perspectives that contest received norms by producing `alternative, potentially rival, subjectivities' (see Faultlines, pp. 49, 174±5). Metaphysical literature frequently accords with this understanding of cultural friction. While Lanyer often composed hyperbolic and conceited verse, she quali®es as a Metaphysical author more for her politicized denaturalization of gendered inequality than for the mannerist ingenuities through which she conveys her thoughts. In Salve Deus Lanyer does more than merely oppose misogynist norms that picture women as weak and corrupt and which mandate their subordination to men. Lanyer's dissidence also involves ± to a signi®cant degree through homoerotic desire ± the prioritization of female spiritual experience and affective communities of like-minded women. Whatever her personal desires might have been, Lanyer's integration of homoeroticism makes strategic sense given that, as Bernadette Brooten notes, from at least the ®rst century C E love between women has often been regarded as a direct threat to the naturalized principle of gender asymmetry circulated by doctrinal pronouncements (for example, Eph. 5:21±6:9) about women's sub-

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90 Early Modern Metaphysical Literature

ordination in and through marriage (pp. 265±6). By facilitating a recognition of the contingency of cultural norms, and by suggesting new ways of viewing such phenomena as class divisions, gender identity, and erotic desire, Lanyer's poems not only make a claim for one person's liberty of conscience but also encourage new ways of con®guring human relations. Salve Deus affords an opportunity to see that, despite the dif®culties faced by women who wished to write about their desires for other women, there were certain avenues of expression that could be turned to engaging use. In addition, Lanyer dedicated her work to some of the nation's most powerful individuals who also, as it happened, were women. This political positioning of the text suggests that if we accept that same-gender desire plays a vital role in Salve Deus, female homoeroticism was capable of functioning nearer to the centre of of®cial ideology than is commonly thought.4

Desire, devotion, and companionship John Dixon Hunt contends that Marvell's poems on a nymph's loss (in `The Nymph complaining for the death of her Faun') and a stormtossed lover (in `The unfortunate Lover') pivot on `the recognition of a love larger than the earth allows' (p. 67). As I attempted to show in the previous chapter, this suggestive remark applies as well to a number of other Marvellian texts. Nevertheless, the recognition of `larger' loves seems rarely to engender in Marvell's work considerations or illustrations of how such desires might circulate in actual society. With regard to female±female eroticism and companionship, however, Aemilia Lanyer gave voice to dreams of solidarity amongst women that are very much orientated towards present and future aspirations. The differences between their two approaches probably tells us much about historical transformations that occurred in evaluations of same-gender female desire and interaction. Writing forty years after Lanyer, Marvell incorporated into his poem what Valerie Traub has identi®ed in other mid-century texts (and Western culture itself) as an increasing ideological `perversion' of lesbian desire (`Perversion', pp. 25, 39±43). Earlier in the century, though, Lanyer was likely less constrained by such prejudice. Indeed, her Salve Deus Rex Judñorum prompts a modi®cation of Traub's suggestion that early modern English writers (all Traub's examples are male) imagined

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Aemilia Lanyer's Salve Deus Rex Judñorum 91

eroticism between women as either tribadic or as a past, temporary stage on the way to normative heterosexual closure (`(In)signi®cance', pp. 158±9). Differing from Marvell (although somewhat like Donne), Lanyer resists the tendency to depict female±female love in entirely elegiac terms. In actuality, we know that Lanyer was unsuccessful in her bid to establish an enduring community of supportive friends.5 Her Salve Deus presents proof, though, that it was possible at least to imagine and hope for a loving, companionate future. Like Upon Appleton House, Lanyer's book emphasizes spiritual erotics in order to address love between women. While other writers found ®gures such as Ganymede and Apollo useful for representing desire between men, Lanyer drew on classical mythology in order to assert the cultural value of women's relationships. Meanwhile, Christianity's anti-worldly orientation empowered her to think beyond immediate social and ideological restrictions to a condition such as St Paul describes when he says that all sex and gender identities vanish in Christ (Gal. 3:28).6 Lanyer's decision to employ a discourse of Christian devotion makes cultural sense, given that religion was one of the few culturally sanctioned areas of endeavour for early modern women.7 In addition, as Barbara Lewalski observes, because of their emphasis on adhering to the dictates of conscience and on believers' personal relationships with God, Christianity and, in particular, Protestantism, possessed a signi®cant potential for dissidence and destabilization (Writing, p. 8). When, for instance, Lanyer eulogizes Margaret Russell, Countess of Cumberland, as one whose `chaste breast, guarded with strength of mind, / Hates the imbracements of unchaste desires' (SD, ll. 1545±6), she puts forward her friend as a model of conscientious liberty derived from having led a godly life.8 Christian devotion also provided Lanyer with theoretical leverage to overcome social rank disparity, one of the principal stumbling blocks to the poet's friendships with other women. She does away with public hierarchies by arguing that they are merely products of `Unconstant Fortune' (CH, l. 103) and are therefore not essential. Love and solidarity between women is possible, meanwhile, if one circumvents Fortune by routing desire through Christ. Whereas Montaigne felt compelled to attempt to sublimate the erotic component of his friendship with   so as to avoid accusations of `Greek licence' (I.199), Etienne de la Boetie by turning to women's shared love of Christ Lanyer engaged a discourse that came with its own protective warrant. Because affection

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92 Early Modern Metaphysical Literature

for Christ was expected of all true believers, if challenged Lanyer could always fall back on traditional piety as an excuse for her utterances. In her own view, however, a passion for Christ and other women (even ones much further up the social ladder) went hand in hand. Lanyer's vision of an ideal female community is, like that of Donne's Sappho, predicated on mutuality. Describing the actions of a powerful ancient woman, Lanyer reasons that Spirits affect where they doe sympathize,

Wisdom desires Wisdome to embrace,

Virtue covets her like, and doth devize

How she her friends may entertaine with grace;

Beauty sometime is pleas'd to feed her eyes,

With viewing Beautie in anothers face:

Both good and bad in this point doe agree,

That each desireth with his like to be.

(SD, ll. 1593±1600) This stanza ostensibly reveals the Queen of Sheba's motivation to journey to King Solomon's court. On a more symbolic level, Lanyer's Neoplatonic lexicon of sympathy and embraces contributes to Salve Deus's investment in spiritual and physical sameness as the grounds of affection between women. In Sheba's case, the desire to be with another person who was `like' herself prompted a transgression of conventional `niceness and respect of woman-kind' (ll. 1603±4). As a ground for the rejection of normative gender behaviour, the aspiration to coexist with a wise, virtuous, and beautiful friend serves as a paradigm for Lanyer's independent-minded quest for emotional and spiritual ful®lment not in the usual environment of hetero-domesticity, but in the potentially homoerotic company of other women. Lanyer apparently bases her `extraordinary, and unprecedented' (McGrath, p. 337) step in turning from men to a community of women within which to ®nd inspiration and to fashion an identity on a belief that, with men, mutuality and peace are impossible. She takes it as a given that many men want to strip women of their liberty: greatest perills do attend the faire,

When men do seeke, attempt, plot and devise,

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94 Early Modern Metaphysical Literature

How they may overthrow the chastest Dame, Whose Beautie is the White whereat they aime.

By objectifying women, these lines suggest, courtly and Petrarchan social and literary conventions can naturalize violent attitudes and behaviour (e.g., SD ll. 825±32). Lanyer, meanwhile, is interested in likeness and equality. In a sense, she concurs with attitudes such as Montaigne expressed when he claimed that women and men could never be true friends because genuine amity can only be achieved between equals (I.199). As Lanyer and Montaigne knew it, the world showed few signs of developing parity between the genders. Salve Deus, however, clearly rejects the frequently coordinate position that women can never attain true friendship (even with each other) because they possess `a rash and wavering ®re, waving and divers', when what is needed is `a generall and universall heat' (Montaigne, I.198). Women's friendships are not only possible, according to Lanyer, but also spiritually and politically laudable. In an oddly underexamined dedicatory poem, `The Authors Dreame to the Ladie Marie, the Countesse Dowager of Pembrooke', Lanyer draws on an ancient cultural reservoir in order to depict the enchantment of women's community. The text's length (it runs fourteen lines longer than `The Description of Cooke-ham'), structural centrality, and unique verse form all suggest its thematic weight. It is therefore no surprise that the poem opens by expressing an aspiration germane to much of Lanyer's work: Me thought I pass'd through th' Edalyan Groves,

And askt the Graces, if they could direct

Me to a Lady whom Minerva chose,

To live with her in height of all respect.

(ll. 1±4) Dissidently reinscribing the practice of fathers who assign husbands to their daughters with no regard for emotional complementarity, Lanyer turns to Minerva as a better guardian who will ®nd for her a more agreeable, female partner.9 In `The Authors Dreame', Lanyer's reveries focus on a Lady (that is, Mary Sidney, Dowager Countess of Pembroke)

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(SD, ll. 205±8)

who is `ti'd' to her `thoughts' by `a golden Chaine' of Platonic love. This beautiful woman is encircled by `nine faire Virgins . . . With Harps and Vialls in their lilly hands' (ll. 9±10), a rather Spenserian scenographic indication of the poet's ideal sisterhood and evocative of the lyrical charm Lanyer associates with homoerotic desire. The events that transpire in `The Authors Dreame' bear out this promise of tranquillity and affection amongst women. First to arrive on the scene is the goddess Bellona, `A manly mayd which was both faire and tall' in whom, Lanyer records, `I tooke no small delight' (ll. 35, 40). Soon after, `faire Dictina by the breake of Day, / With all her Damsels round about her came' (ll. 45±6). Dictina, otherwise known in the poem as Diana, Phoebe, and Cynthia, is invited by the Lady to take her hand and `keepe with them continually' (l. 60), aspirations that Lanyer herself claims to share. In an episode reminiscent of courtly romance, Aurora, goddess of the morning, arrives next and competes successfully with the male god Phoebus for the assembled Ladies' `favours' (ll. 61±76). With women now fully in charge of all aspects of the pastoral landscape, Lanyer recounts that the group moved on to a secret bower with which even Minerva was not familiar, `a place full of all rare delights . . . where Art and Nature striv'd / Which should remaine as Sov'raigne of the place' (ll. 79, 81±2). Enacting principles of peace and equality, the Ladies quickly decide that `T'would be offensive either to displace' and therefore decree that Art and Nature `should for ever dwell, / In per®t unity' together (ll. 88±90). The `sweet unitie' (l. 96) of these two female creative forces, recognized and af®rmed by women, parallels an observation Sappho makes to Philñnis in Donne's poem, that `betweene us all sweetnesse may be had; / All, all that Nature yields, or Art can adde' (ll. 43±4). In each case, the perfect, complementary balance between Art and Nature represents a vision of creative mutuality that ideally characterizes women's relationships with one other. In con®rmation of this harmony, the sweet sounds of women singing Mary Sidney's `holy hymnes' (l. 116) aurally af®rm women's sublime emotional and spiritual unions. Diana ± the goddess invited to hold the Lady's hand ± is the classical ®gure who most clearly represents Lanyer's dual investment in solidarity and eroticism between women. In the poem dedicated `To all vertuous Ladies in generall', Lanyer counsels women that they ought `In wise Minerva's paths be alwaies seene; / Or with bright Cynthia, thogh faire Venus frown' (ll. 25±6). As McGrath observes, here

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Aemilia Lanyer's Salve Deus Rex Judñorum 95

and elsewhere in Lanyer's book Venus is the goddess of `heterosexual passion', whereas Cynthia is `speci®cally woman-identi®ed' (p. 339).10 While McGrath is probably not using the term `woman-identi®ed' in (as we saw in the last chapter) the eroticized sense that Ann Matter does, the contrast she draws between Dianic and Venerian passion interfaces with my own exploration of desire in Lanyer's book. `Of all the goddesses', Christine Downing notes, Diana `is most evidently one who models women's love of women' in spiritual and potentially sexual terms (pp. 210±11). Traub's commentary on lesbian desire in Thomas Heywood's play The Golden Age (which appeared the same year as Lanyer's Salve Deus) demonstrates that `the loving ministrations of Diana's circle' could signify homoerotic desire, especially when contrasted with harsh acts of `heterosexual' coercion of women by men (`(In)signi®cance', p. 161). Primarily surveying visual iconography, Patricia Simons likewise ®nds abundant evidence that scenes of Diana and her nymphs could, in certain circumstances, offer early modern women images of same-gender erotic and spiritual bonds. As in other dream visions, such as Geoffrey Chaucer's Booke of the Duchesse, the dreamer must awaken and bring to the quotidian world the lessons that have been learned. In fact, Lanyer claims (in `To the doubtfull Reader') that Salve Deus Rex Judñorum is itself the fruit of a divinely inspired dream. Yet this book is not the product of a Miltonic holy spirit writing through a human amanuensis. Instead, Lanyer takes full responsibility for her dream vision, claiming that `what my heart desir'd, mine eies had seene' (`Authors Dreame', l. 174; emphasis added). By taking seriously the enthusiasm and longing that Lanyer conveys in her depictions of female community in a mythic garden of beautiful women, we are better positioned to comprehend the ways in which her panegyrics to Christ and Cookeham also embody homoerotic desire as a key to spiritual and social happiness. Referring to her entire book, Lanyer informs the Countess of Pembroke that `I here present my mirrour to [your] view, . . . My Glasse being steele, declares them to be true' (ll. 210±12). If `Salve Deus Rex Judñorum' and `The Description of Cooke-ham' mirror the poet's mind, then they also must re¯ect the desires that inform the visions in `The Authors Dreame'. As `The Authors Dreame' leads one to suspect, the close-knit society of women that Lanyer imagines in `Salve Deus' and `Cooke-ham' is foreshadowed throughout the volume's nine dedicatory poems. In a

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number of these prefatory texts, Lanyer evokes a world of quasiCatholic devotion not unlike that which Marvell imagined in Upon Appleton House. Commenting on early modern women's opportunities in life, Retha Warnicke observes that `young Protestant females had their future mapped out for them in the words, ``women to be married,'' for no other occupation was possible for them, the last of the English nunneries having been dissolved at the accession of Elizabeth' (p. 133). Warnicke's positing of convents as valuable refuges for women whose desires ran counter to domestic ideology highlights a possible cultural source in Roman Catholic devotion and, especially, religious sisterhood for the kind of resistance Lanyer (and later Marvell) imagined.11 Drawing on imagery associated with convent life, Lanyer depicts herself as piously meditating in what appears very much like a nun's chamber when she writes to Queen Anne (a devout Roman Catholic) that she has been living `clos'd up in Sorrowes Cell, / Since great Elizaes favour blest my youth' (ll. 109±10). The queen herself functions as a kind of mother superior for the poet's devotions; Lanyer describes her as a woman who has always taken a `holy habite' in order `Still to remaine the same, and still her owne' (ll. 117±18). With a quite probable allusion to Protestant pressures on the queen to convert, Lanyer ®nds in Anne's Catholicism evidence of women's ability to remain true to their own convictions and desires. Similarly, although Lucy, Countess of Bedford, was a Protestant, Lanyer deploys rather Crashavian Catholic imagery when she imagines `the closet of your lovely breast' and `that Cabbine where your selfe doth rest' (`To the Ladie Lucie', ll. 2, 4). Striking a similar note, in `To the Ladie Susan' Lanyer asks her dedicatee to `grace' Christ's passion, which she describes as `this holy feast' (l. 5), a term reminiscent of Roman devotion. Most Catholic of all, the numerous references to Christ as spouse scattered throughout Lanyer's texts suggest nuns' spiritual marriages to Jesus (see SD, ll. 77, 253, 1170), while her baroque descriptions of Christ's both horrifying and beauteous body have a long history in Catholic poetry and visual art (see `To the Ladie Lucie', ll. 13±14; SD, ll. 1332±6, 1724±40). I do not want to imply that Lanyer was a closet Roman Catholic; my point is that Catholic devotional and symbolic traditions, especially as they relate to conventual companionship, probably appealed to her because they offered a way to imagine happiness with other women devoted to Christ.12 Given what we have

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Aemilia Lanyer's Salve Deus Rex Judñorum 97

seen of Marvell's later practice, it was certainly possible in the seventeenth century to paint a literary picture of the intersection amongst Catholicism, clausura, and female homoerotic desire. Love of Christ is at the heart of Christian sisterhood as well as of Lanyer's vision of female companionship. Even a cursory examination of her meditations on Christ con®rms McGrath's point that `The erotic implications of these images are not accidental' (p. 342). In keeping with conventional language drawn from allegorical readings of the Song of Songs, Christ is repeatedly termed the `Bridegroome' and `Husband' of the various women Lanyer addresses (for example, `Ladie Anne', l. 15; `To all vertuous Ladies', l. 9; SD, ll. 77, 253). More erotically still, Lanyer often directly calls Christ a `lover' (for example, `To the Ladie Lucie', l. 16; SD, ll. 982, 1358, 1398). She even observes that Christ is a better lover than earthly men; for instance, when she describes the Passion so that Margaret may `judge if ever Lover were so true' (SD, l. 1267), and writes to Lady Katherine, Countess of Suffolk, that Salve Deus is intended to enable readers to `see a Lover much more true / Than ever was since ®rst the world began' (ll. 2±3). The image of Christ as lover is enriched by noting (as a number of critics have done) Lanyer's sustained representation of Christ as feminine.13 In the devotional tradition outlined by Caroline Walker Bynum in Jesus as Mother, Lanyer feminizes Christ, McGrath contends, in order to strengthen women's sense of themselves as `active subjects of their own religious experience' (p. 344). While McGrath's observations are valid as far as they go, they ultimately limit the resonance of Lanyer's poetics by strangely separating an erotic from a feminine Christ. McGrath argues that in Salve Deus `gender relationships between Christ and His female followers are slipperily problematized. Christ is an androgynous ®gure, at once both male lover-Bridegroom and feminine in character' (p. 343). In terms of McGrath's understanding of Lanyer's or a reader's desire for Christ, however, her sense of con¯ation vanishes; as she sees it, as a lover Christ can only be male. Yet, Christ's androgynous nature de®es simple gender ascription and opens the possibility that `he' may be interpreted and loved as a `she'. After all, as Diane Purkiss points out, Salve Deus is a `rhetorical project of considerable complexity', one that consistently problematizes normative `protocols' of interpretation (p. xxxiv). Wendy Wall comments that Lanyer represents Christ `in the socially inscribed female position as well as the eroticized position of Otherness' (p. 67).

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I would like to take another step and suggest that Lanyer makes possible a combining of the female and the erotic in Christ as a valid way for women to satisfy their spiritual needs, relate to one another, and dissent from misogynist gender ideology. By inserting a supposedly essential boundary between eroticism and religion, meanwhile, McGrath erases the possibility that a woman might ®nd a feminine Christ erotically engaging.14 No such duality, however, exists in Lanyer's poems; in fact, they forthrightly draw eroticism and religion together in such a way as to emphasise the homoerotic potential involved in women's love of Christ.15 Lanyer searches the canon of Petrarchan and Christian ars amatoria to describe Christ's in®nite desirability, ®nding some of her most potent images in the Song of Songs. A sensual blazon based on the Canticles captures the fervour of her devotion: unto Snowe we may his face compare, His cheekes like skarlet, and his eyes so bright As purest Doves that in the rivers are, Washed with milke, to give the more delight. (SD, ll. 1307±10) In the next stanza, the erotic implications of the imagery intensify; Christ's hair is described as being Blacke as a Raven in her blackest hew;

His lips like skarlet threeds, yet much more sweet

Than is the sweetest hony dropping dew,

Or hony combes, where all the Bees doe meet;

...

His lips, like Lillies, dropping downe pure mirrhe, Whose love, before all worlds we doe preferre. (SD, ll. 1313±16, 1319±20) Like the Canticles themselves, Lanyer's descriptions generally defy strict gender classi®cation. As Woods remarks (Salve Deus, p. 107n), at one point Lanyer deploys an image that, in the bible (Song, 4: 3), is used speci®cally of a female ®gure; by portraying Christ's lips as `skarlet threeds', Lanyer draws attention to the femininity of Christ's mouth.16 This reinscription carries especial weight when one notices (as in the

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Aemilia Lanyer's Salve Deus Rex Judñorum 99

above passage) the persistently oral quality of Lanyerian spirituality. Elsewhere, Lanyer writes that Christ's blood and tears are `Sweet Nectar and Ambrosia', as well as (again) `hony dropping dew of holy love, / [and] Sweet milke' to be ingested by devoted lovers (SD, ll. 1735, 1737±8). Christ and his female devotees are thus linked through a mutual feminizing of the ori®ce responsible for the numerous ingestions of salvi®c and erotic spice, milk, honey, nectar, and dew that ¯ow throughout the text and lubricate women's bonds. For Lanyer it is only a small step from an erotic appreciation of Christ to imagining him as the locus of triangulated eroticism between women themselves. Woods comes closest to acknowledging the point I want to make here when she observes that Margaret Russell is `the location for Lanyer's sensuous vision of Christ' (`Introduction', p. xxxviii). Woods quotes the following quatrain in support of her contention: in your heart I leave His perfect picture, where it still shall stand, Deepely engraved in that holy shrine, Environed with Love and Thoughts divine. (SD, ll. 1325±8; cf. 180) Margaret is no mere passive vessel, however; the following stanzas indicate that Lanyer imagines her to be an active lover: There may you reade his true and perfet storie,

His bleeding body there you may embrace,

And kisse his dying cheekes with teares of sorrow,

With joyfull griefe, you may intreat for grace;

...

Oft times hath he made triall of your love,

And in your Faith hath tooke no small delight,

...

Your constant soule doth lodge betweene her brests,

This Sweet of sweets, in which all glory rests.

(ll. 1331±4, 1337±8, 1343±4) Such encounters with Christ are not limited to the Countess of Cumberland. Throughout `Salve Deus' Lanyer deploys imagery of

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internalization and privacy in order to express the most intimate moments of devotion and erotic engagement between Christ and her female lovers. By routing desire through Christ, women's mutual love acquires a truthfulness that is unavailable in conventional female± male relations.17 As the focal point of various women's religio-erotic desires, Christ is the locus amoenus in which they can all share love for one another. Lanyer imagines herself and her female companions on a `friendly' progress to God. While Christ is in Margaret's heart, in a loving envoi to `Salve Deus' Lanyer speaks of the Countess as existing inside of her. `Your rarest virtues did my soule delight, / Great Ladie of my heart', writes Lanyer in Petrarchan language. Not unlike Philip Sidney's Astrophel, who eulogizes his beloved as the `star of heavenly ®re, / Stella, lodestar of desire' (`Eighth Song', ll. 31±2), Lanyer celebrates Margaret as the `Great Ladie of my heart' and `the Articke Starre that guides my hand', assuring her that `All what I am, I rest at your command' (SD, ll. 1836, 1839±40). Like Chinese boxes, Aemilia, as poet and lover, contains her friend Margaret who, in turn, shelters Christ. The trio are now primed to discover and enjoy the fruits of homoerotic love and devotion.

Love's green shelter The ®nal portion of Lanyer's book that I want to discuss is `The Description of Cooke-ham'. In this text Lanyer explores most incisively the ®ssures between ideals and reality, at the same time as she makes explicit that the perfect real-world ful®lment of her spiritual reveries would be mutually respectful cohabitation with one or more women. Because her poem contemplates the harsh realities of life for women who are dependent on men's economic favour, it comes closest to embodying the elegiac strain Traub notes in early modern female± female homoeroticism. Lanyer attests to `Memorie . . . [of] Those pleasures past, which will not turne againe' (ll. 117±18), and she describes Anne Clifford's `preservation' of the natural world's affection as taking place through `noble Memory' (ll. 155±6). Whereas the examples Traub cites, however, exist irrecoverably in the past and give way to heteronormative closure, Lanyer draws on the mind's power to overcome loss by presenting comforting remembrances of former happiness between women.18

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As she makes clear in `Cooke-ham', remembering is not about repeating the past in exactly the same forms as it was once known. Rather, Lanyer undertakes a creative manipulation as, for instance, in her description of Anne in terms of Neoplatonic perfection: her `virtues did agree / With those faire ornaments of outward beauty, / Which did enforce from all both love and dutie' (ll. 100±2). Lanyer also requests her Memory to `Remember beauteous Dorsets [i.e., Anne's] former sports' and informs the reader that, in these recreations, `my selfe did alwaies beare a part, / While reverend Love presented my true heart' (ll. 119, 121±2). As Lewalski notes, because of differences in age and social rank it is unlikely that Lanyer actually ever participated in her noble friend's `sports' (Writing, p. 239). Yet, this is an egalitarian fantasy of love which, through the ameliorative power of nostalgia, can easily mingle aristocratic and common hearts in a garden of pleasure. In `The Description of Cooke-ham', Lanyer's deepest sympathies are for Anne's mother, Margaret, a woman only nine years older than herself who had also experienced less-than-entire happiness in her married life. Lanyer paints a reverent but fanciful portrait of Margaret as a goddess of Nature for whom `The very Hills right humbly did descend, / When you to tread upon them did intend' (ll. 35±6). As a part of this idealization process, Margaret acquires a distinctly Dianic identity, for example when Lanyer addresses her as holding a `Bowe in your faire Hand' (l. 51; see Woods, `Introduction', p. 132n). The formerly dream-state ®gure of a divine huntress who protects other women resurfaces in Lanyer's imagination at a moment when, attempting to ease the pain of real-life separation, such a womanidenti®ed deity is needed most. One scene in particular captures the erotic element of Lanyer's devotion to Margaret. Returning to the tree `Whose faire greene leaves much like a comely vaile' (l. 63) had so often sheltered her from the sun when she had walked abroad as Dianic mistress of the park, Margaret guides Lanyer to the site of her former happiness: To this faire tree, taking me by the hand,

You did repeat the pleasures which had past,

Seeming to grieve they could no longer last.

And with a chaste, yet loving kisse tooke leave,

Of which sweet kisse I did it soone bereave:

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Aemilia Lanyer's Salve Deus Rex Judñorum 103

Scorning a sencelesse creature should possesse So rare a favour, so great happinesse.

In this episode, which Elaine Beilin notes is `the single dramatic event of the poem' (p. 205), Lanyer posits her own belief in the worthiness of homoerotic love and companionship. Lewalski comments, however, that, with the theft of the kiss, `the scene turns sentimental' (Writing, p. 240); Coiro, meanwhile, suggests that while readers `are moved by the act of sisterhood' which the theft entails, Margaret's kissing of a tree is `at once gaspingly funny' and demeans her character (pp. 372±3). Despite their differences, these two responses characterize the majority of critics' reluctance to consider seriously the eroticism of Lanyer's confessed transgression. This evasion contrasts with, as noted above, their willingness to address the erotic (albeit supposedly hetero- ) component of Lanyer's portrayals of Christ. It is not coincidental, however, that Lanyer's stealing of the kiss, her fantasies of Christ's embrace and oral delectableness, and her dream of an all-female pastoral bower pivot on homoerotic intimacy. They all, in fact, involve a recognition that women's desires are neither exclusively heteroerotic nor are they invariably orientated towards marriage and procreation. Labelling Lanyer's action as merely `sentimental' misconstrues not only her earnest expression of friendship but also her rebuttal to patriarchal gender ideology. The `faire tree', after all, was the site where Margaret and her daughter had gone to `take the ayre' and read books together (ll. 157±61). In her memory, Margaret `repeat[s]' those past `pleasures' and bestows a kiss on the tree as a sign of nostalgic affection. However much sympathy Lanyer may have for melancholic plants, she places her own desires ®rst when she steals Margaret's `sweet kisse'. As Lanyer admits, her action has brought about a participation in Fortune; yet, in a larger scheme, she has also imaginatively triumphed over Fortune's habit of erecting class divisions and prescriptive gender norms that separate women from one another. `[N]othing's free from Fortunes scorne' (CH, l. 176), Lanyer attests; by fantasizing about an egalitarian community of loving women, she nevertheless strives to make Fortune survivable. The sestet that concludes `The Description of Cooke-ham' intertwines Salve Deus's various strands of desire:

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(ll. 162±8)19

This last farewell to Cooke-ham here I give, When I am dead thy name in this may live, Wherein I have perform'd her noble hest, Whose virtues lodge in my unworthy breast, And ever shall, so long as life remaines, Tying my heart to her by those rich chaines. (ll. 205±10) While Lanyer draws on the familiar conceit of poetry's ability to effect immortality for its subject, her more pressing concern is to testify to Margaret's continued presence in her living `breast'. At the end of `Cooke-ham', Lanyer looks back to `Salve Deus' and echoes her own earlier ®guration of desire and mutuality: Christ is inside Margaret who is again thought of as within Aemilia. The `rich chaines' of love that unite Margaret and Aemilia's hearts echo the `golden Chaine' of Platonic love which joins together the poet and Mary Sidney in `The Authors Dreame' (l. 7; cf. Woods, `Introduction', p. 21n). Whereas in her dream world Lanyer sought to live with the Dowager Countess `in height of all respect', in the real world she articulates her wish to remain with women whom she actually knows and cherishes.

Coda It has not been my purpose in this chapter to argue that Aemilia Lanyer, late of the parish of St James, Clerkenwell, was a lesbian. Although I would not want to rule out the possibility that, at the time she composed Salve Deus, Lanyer's principal erotic desires were for other women, that is not my interest here. I hope to have shown instead that Lanyer found images of same-gender desire to be useful and emotionally engaging vehicles through which to express religious devotion, as well as to explore and document solidarity and love between women as a remedy for worldly vicissitudes brought about by people of both genders. Homoeroticism enabled Lanyer to negotiate the complex relations between social hierarchies and gender identities; it also assisted her in moving beyond a mere rebuttal of patriarchal ideology to envision the psychological groundwork for a classless, affective community between women. Finally, like other Metaphysical authors we have encountered, homoeroticism provided her with a symbolic repertoire with which to intervene in the naturalization of

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gender norms by positing the agency of desires that do not conform to normative de®nitions of female identity and destiny. As Montaigne remarks in his essay on friendship: `our genuine libertie hath no production more properly her owne, than that of affection and amitie' (I.198). Salve Deus Rex Judñorum indicates, I believe, that this ancient association between freedom and homoerotic desire was far from lost on Aemilia Lanyer.

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The Science of Possession: Conscience and Hagiology in Early Stuart England

Following the execution of King Charles I on 29 January 1649, there appeared an anonymous pamphlet entitled A Miracle of Miracles: Wrought by the Blood of King Charles the First, of happy Memory. This curious chapbook narrated the fate of a young Deptford woman who had contracted an untreatable strain of scrofula, the `Kings Evill': `thus was the poore silly soul past all hopes of recovery, being discomforted with words, blind of her sight, forsaken by the Physicians, and left off by acquaintance' (p. 3). Happily, though, God intervened in the girl's sorry plight by inspiring Master John Lane, a London woollen draper, to share with her a piece of his handkerchief `which had been dipped in the Kings blood on the day that he was beheaded' (p. 5). When this precious fabric touched the girl's eyes her sight was restored and her strength returned; because of the fame of this restoration `many hundreds of people came daily to see her both from London and other places' (pp. 5±6). Pilgrims and readers alike, we are informed, took away with them the certainty that the regicides were nothing but `envious Matchevils' (p. 9) who reft England of `a precious Jewell' (p. 6). Like so much else that was written about the death of King Charles in the decade following his execution, this short text engages in a discourse of hagiology in order to accomplish real-world political work. By establishing the saintly identity of the dead monarch, A Miracle of Miracles dichotomizes English society into wicked murderers (the Parliamentarians) and virtuous victims (the Royalists and honest commoners). This quasi-canonization encourages sympathetic readers to acknowledge `the happy estate that we lived in while the King lived, and how our fortunes are crost by His death' (p. 7), a recognition that 106

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5

the author presumably hopes will help to spur on a rising against Cromwell's government and restore the monarchy. The religio-political inscription of the `royal martyr' in this and numerous other texts of the Interregnum ± a topic to which I will return at greater length ± intersects with a number of issues that we have been exploring throughout this book: most importantly, the agency of representation in naturalizing ideology and identities, as well as people's ability to think critically about this process. I have been arguing that Metaphysical writers continue to speak across the centuries both through their sceptical apprehension of the transformation of custom into nature as well as by their willingness to imagine other cultural possibilities than those most commonly de®ned as essential and absolute. In this ®nal chapter I would like to examine some of the struggles over identi®cation that took place during the ®rst half of the seventeenth century. My primary focus will be on the ways in which certain texts by John Donne and Richard Crashaw negotiate hagiology ± that is, the discourse of martyrdom and canonization ± and thereby problematize de®nitions of `real' and `pseudo' spiritual, political, and gender identities. The example of King Charles's martyrdom, which I consider at length in the ®fth part of the chapter, will, I hope, help to illuminate the real-world signi®cance of these issues during a dangerous period of religious and political upheaval. Annabel Patterson notes that Donne frequently `challenges us to conceive of subjectivity in environmental terms'; that is, he draws attention to the intersection of social context and personal character in people's awareness, performance, and modi®cation of the `rules' and `roles' deemed culturally and politically appropriate (`Quod oportet', p. 145). Adding further speci®city to Donnean worldliness, Arthur Marotti similarly comments that before and even after he took holy orders, Donne treated the composition and circulation of his `coterie' poetry as part and parcel of his quest to gain the attention, respect, and patronage of those in political power. His verse is acutely attuned to general sociocultural as well as personal contexts of inscription and reception (Marotti, pp. x, 14±24). In the hands of Donne and Crashaw, hagiology is more than a vehicle with which to explore issues of personal and national religious commitment. A sensitivity to the `environmental' aspects of their work helps us to see that hagiology also provided these writers with a potentially oppositional discourse that negotiated subjects' liberty of con-

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Conscience and Hagiology in Early Stuart England 107

science, desire, and identity in socially strati®ed and ideologically constrained situations. In a 1608 letter to Sir Henry Goodyer, Donne expresses a conviction that illuminates his thoughts on the heterogeneous plurality of minds and desires: though our souls would goe to one end, Heaven, and all our bodies must go to one end, the earth: yet our third part, the minde, which is our naturall guide here, chooses to every man a severall way: scarce any man likes what another doth, nor advisedly, that which himself. (Letters, p. 72) Donne asserts that there are as many paths to follow in temporal matters as there are people on earth; his words even posit that individuals are rarely content for very long with the route they have selected. Change, deviation, and difference are, according to this letter, part and parcel of being human. So too in the hagiological writings of Donne and Crashaw do we ®nd mixed in with an awareness of doctrinal and political constraints, a strong investment in the survival and expression of non-normative personal beliefs and desires. In modern terms, Donne and Crashaw understood culture along the lines of what Raymond Williams calls `the signifying system through which . . . a social order is communicated, reproduced, experienced and explored' (Sociology, p. 13). Given their shared interest in, to use Donne's earlier-encountered expression from his `Paradox IV', `the workmanship of man', it is little wonder that Donne and Crashaw turned to hagiology which, in early modern Europe, was a principal discursive component in the formation and reproduction of customary `social order'. Saturated by ideology and politics, early modern writings about martyrdom and sainthood provide rich terrain for Metaphysical insights and our own modern critical investigations. By de®nition, saints are metaphysical; that is, supernatural, beyond the pale, extraordinary. At the same time, though, they are highly naturalized beings who are fashioned to signify and uphold particular values, desires, and identities. It is this paradoxical combination of ontological strangeness with cultural and political workmanship that probably made them so fascinating to certain Metaphysical writers.

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108 Early Modern Metaphysical Literature

The political philosopher Nancy Fraser observes that social identities are achieved principally through the `construction of consent' to aesthetic and political orthodoxies (p. 117); these normative models are themselves circulating discourses which `construct the common sense of the day and represent the existing order as natural and/or just' (p. 139, n. 13). It is important to remember, though ± and this is a point the Metaphysicals repeatedly make ± that natural ®ctions (political, textual, and critical) are neither inherently irrefragable nor immune to internal resistance. Henry Cockeram's English Dictionarie makes matters appear very simple; `martyrdome' is there glossed as `A suffering of grieuous torment vnto the death for constant perseverance in true Religion' (G6v ±G7r ). The history of early modern hagiology, however, gainsays any easy determination of what `true Religion' (and therefore real martyrs) might be. In the case of both Donne and Crashaw, exploration of and resistance to this political overdetermination of faith and identity are channelled through hagiology in such a way as to provoke a reconsideration of natural identi®cations. This process in turn holds the potential to unsettle the vaunted coherence and inevitability of the social order itself.

Hagiology and cultural power Writings about saints, martyrs, and miracles tell us much about the ways in which people negotiate everyday norms and political emergencies. On a micropolitical level, for nearly two millennia hagiology in¯uenced the ways in which people thought of themselves, were publicly identi®ed, and behaved towards one another. For instance, one of the earliest stories in the Venerable Bede's eighth-century History of the English Church and People recounts the proto-martyrdom of St Alban, a man who `bore the most horrible torments patiently and gladly' (p. 46). This stalwart image of St Alban (in company with numerous other later holy ®gures) helped Bede in his project of galvanizing a collective sense of what it meant to be Christian Englishmen in the wake of the divisive Synod of Whitby. The case of St Pelagius's tenth-century martyrdom and textual afterlife offers another fascinating example of the multiple and often unexpected ways in which hagiological discourse shapes politics and culture. As Mark Jordan explains, the early

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Conscience and Hagiology in Early Stuart England 109

hagiological accounts of this beautiful young man's death not only contributed to anti-Muslim polemic in Iberia and elsewhere, but also participated in the Western European sublimation and demonization of homoerotic desire through the construction of that most fearful catch-all sin, sodomy (pp. 10±28). Martyrdom and sainthood certainly continued to divide up populations along political lines in later mediaeval England. Drawing on pre-Tudor sources, the Elizabethan chronicler Raphael Holinshed reports that King Edward II's execution of the treasonous Earl of Lancaster provoked `great strife . . . amongst the people, whether he [i.e., Lancaster] ought to be reputed for a saint or no.' In order to prevent popular devotion towards the dead peer, Edward was forced to bar the door of the priory in which the Earl was buried. Matters became so intense that the king's ally, Hugh Spenser, Jr, also stationed an armed guard on the hill `where he suffered . . . to the end that no people should come and make their praiers there in worship of the said earle, whom they tooke verilie for a martyr' (pp. 569±70). Ironically, Edward II ultimately achieved a kind of canonization when following his demise, Holinshed notes, `manie miracles' were attributed to his bene®cent intervention (p. 587). During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Roman Catholics and Protestants similarly attempted ± through e lite as well as popular channels ± to af®rm their exclusive grasp of `the truth' by declaring members of their own communities to have been specially chosen by God. Commenting on the politics of canonization in post-Tridentine Italy, Peter Burke points out that early modern Catholic saints represent more precisely the ideological norms and political agendas current when of®cial canonization took place than they do the times at which these women and men actually died (p. 53). The Vatican's resumption of saint-making in 1588 (Armada year) after a sixty-®ve-year hiatus witnessed a marked increase in institutional power, bureaucratization, and standardization: `At a time of centralising monarchies, which included the papacy, the next world was being remade in the image of this one' (Burke, p. 51). Canonization's political edge is also quite apparent in a late sixteenth-century poem by the English Jesuit Robert Southwell (who was himself beati®ed in 1929 and canonized in 1970): Alive a Queene, now dead I am a Sainte; Once N [i.e., nama or name]: calld, my name nowe Martyr is.

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Conscience and Hagiology in Early Stuart England 111

From earthly raigne debarred by restraint,

In liew whereof I raigne in heavenly blisse.

In two of the ®ve surviving late sixteenth- and early seventeenthcentury manuscript copies of this monologue, the poem's historical allegory is solved by ®lling the space of `N' with `Mary' (that is, the recently executed/martyred Mary Queen of Scots), a name that answers to both poetic scansion and religio-political turmoil. By a simple addition of two letters, Mary then metamorphoses into martyr at the line's end. In addition to offering sustenance and vindication for a beleaguered recusant community, this example neatly underscores the agency of language and representation in politicized hagiological alchemy.1 Discussing the Protestant side, John Knott contends that the martyrological works of sixteenth-century polemicists such as John Foxe and Miles Coverdale (which depict the stoical and even triumphant demeanour of physically powerless though heroic martyrs) were intended to demonstrate the inability of church or state to coerce `the faithful Christian' whose `subversive spirit' reveals God's power and favour (p. 8). Unlike their Catholic counterparts whose martyrs and saints were principally drawn from ecclesiastical and aristocratic ranks (Burke, pp. 54±6), the martyrs whom Protestants embraced were largely lower- and middle-class secular people. An important factor shaping the Protestant selection process was, as Richard Helgerson notes, a commitment to an anti-hegemonic, populist spirit that spilled over into ballads and broadsides (Nationhood, pp. 252, 264±5). The violent history of Anne Askew's ®nal years vividly captures the spirit and form of Protestant hagiology. In John Bale's preface to The First Examinacyon of Anne Askewe (a text that combines Askew's reported words and Bale's commentary), we ®nd a lengthy comparison between the text's eponymous heroine and a famous second-century martyr: Blandina at the stake shewed a vysage unterryfyed. So ded Anne Askewe a countenaunce stowte, myghtye and ernest. Infatygable was the sprete of Blandina. So was the sprete of Anne Askewe. The love of Jesus Christ, the gyft of the holye Ghost, and hope of the crowne of martyrdome, greatlye mytygated the payne in Blandina.

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(`Decease Release', ll. 13±16)

So ded these iii. Worthye graces, the terrour of all tormentes in Anne Askewe. The strong sprete of Christ gave stomack to Blandina, both to laugh and daunce. The same myghtye sprete (and not the popes desperate sprete) made Anne Askewe both to rejoyce and synge in the preson. . . . Manye were converted by the sufferaunce of Blandina. A farre greatter nombre by the burnynge of Anne Askewe. (p. 12)2 Following Askew's skilful and con®dent debates with Church authorities over the nature of the sacrament, the last we hear of her is the strangely moving ®rst-person ballad: I am not she that lyst My anker to lete fall For everye dryslynge myst My shyppe substancyall. (p. 150, ll. 33±6) Though her body was destroyed on the pyre at Smith®eld on 16 July 1546, Askew's religious rectitude, intellectual prowess, and physical fortitude were long remembered and deployed by English Protestants who sought to uphold their claim to be God's chosen people.3

Donne and liberty of conscience When Donne's lengthy treatise Pseudo-Martyr appeared seven decades later in 1610, Protestants and Catholics were particularly busy manipulating hagiology in an effort to gain political and spiritual control over the English people.4 Pseudo-Martyr is Donne's intervention in the ongoing struggle between King James and Pope Pius V over the Oath of Allegiance, part of the anti-recusant legislation promulgated in 1606. Devised in response to the foiled Gunpowder Plot of November, 1605, the Oath required English Roman Catholics to accept the king's temporal authority and to reject the pope's injunction to commit regicide: I will bear faith and true allegiance to his Majesty, his heirs and successors, and him or them will defend to the uttermost of my power. . . . And I do further swear, that I do from my heart abhor,

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Conscience and Hagiology in Early Stuart England 113

The intense religious and political controversy surrounding the dispute is revealed by the pontiff's two breves of 21 September 1606 and 21 August 1607 instructing his English ¯ock not to succumb, and by the powerful polemical rejoinders issued by Cardinal Robert Bellarmine and the English Jesuit, Robert Parsons. To resist taking the Oath, however, was to risk death at the Tyburn gallows.5 In his Triplici Nodo, Triplex Cuneus. Or an Apologie for the Oath of Allegiance, King James notes that he is in agreement with his Roman Catholic adversaries `that Martyrs ought to endure all sorts of tortures and death, before they suffer one syllable to be corrupted of the Law of God' (p. 104).6 As the history of religious antagonism graphically shows, however, the apparent transparency of doctrinal truth and corruption was contingent on political interest. In addition, seventeenth-century English legal theory pertaining to allegiance and its con®rmation through oath-taking understood loyalty to be a natural duty owed by subjects to their king.7 Given this dual political context, from virtually any angle Donne's foray into hagiology was of necessity implicated in worldly matters such as the construction of consent, the fashioning and circulation of identities, and the resistance to encroachments on liberty of conscience. Recognizing the politicized nature of Donne's endeavour, various critics have adduced reasons to explain why Donne ± an apparently lapsed Roman Catholic who had not yet of®cially joined the Church of England ± rushed to defend King James in his paper war against the pope and the Jesuits. John Carey argues that Donne's writing and personal presentation of Pseudo-Martyr to James was a `shrewd move, for Donne was able to appear as a skilful controversialist, upholding the of®cial policy of the state and helping his sovereign out of a tight corner' (p. 17).8 Not entirely altruistic, Donne evidently hoped for a resultant strengthening of his position in relation to England's ecclesiastical and political e lite.9 Addressing the navigation of Jacobean politics in Donne's early seventeenth-century prose works, Marotti contends that these texts incorporate two different `culture-speci®c idioms', divided according to private and public sentiment and modes

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detest and abjure as impious and heretical this damnable doctrine and position that princes which be excommunicated and deprived by the Pope may be deposed or murdered by their subjects or any other whatsoever. (quoted in Kenyon, p. 459)

of expression. On one hand, Marotti proposes, Biathanatos and The Courtier's Library express a sceptical, oppositional perspective informed by feelings of alienation and disappointment; on the other, Ignatius His Conclave and Pseudo-Martyr uphold and further `the mysti®cation of royal authority and the established hierarchical order' (p. 183). According to this interpretative schema, Pseudo-Martyr is a prime example of `opportunistic public prose' intended to preserve King James's majesty and mystery from `critical scrutiny' (p. 187). It seems to me, however, that this bifurcated view of Donne's work leads us astray from the text's subtle reasonings on authority, knowledge formation, and identi®cation.10 Marotti is surely correct that Donne was `obsessed with the realities of patronage and preferment' (p. 186). Yet, while political opportunism did play an important role in Pseudo-Martyr's composition, a quest for patronage tells only a partial story. Patterson, meanwhile, contends that rather than endorsing monarchical supremacy and unquali®ed subjection, a variety of Donne's works (including selected satires, Essays in Divinity, Pseudo-Martyr, Ignatius His Conclave, and others)  display the author's `self-division' and `self-contradiction' vis-a-vis King James's rule (`Quod oportet', p. 143). While I would qualify Patterson's notion of a divided mind with a reading of Donne as more coherently and methodically introducing opportunities to unpack and perhaps resist Jacobean absolutism, her analysis provides a more useful starting point for my own detection of Donnean nuance and negotiation. Between 1601, when he eloped with Ann More and his `world fell about his ears' (Carey, p. 57), and 1615, when he took holy orders in the Established Church, Donne was ravaged by withdrawal of patronage, unemployment, poverty, and illness. Despite these dif®culties and relative powerlessness, however, Donne's writings from this tortuous period frequently indicate that he demanded to be reckoned with as an intelligent and useful player in the often high-stakes world of Jacobean political intrigue and manoeuvring. To cite a brief but telling example, in the preface to Pseudo-Martyr Donne associates himself with the Queen of Sheba (p. 4), evidently hoping that King James ± England's Solomon redivivus ± will act like his ancient prototype who, according to the Bible, gave the savvy queen `whatsoeuer she wolde aske, besides that, which Salomon gaue her of his kinglie liberalitie' (1 Kings 10: 13). When we recall too that in his debates with the Pharisees, Christ

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prophesies that `The Queene of the South [i.e., Sheba] shall rise in iudgement with this generation, and shall condemne it' (Matt. 12: 42; cf. Luke 11: 31), Donne's casting of himself as a Sheba-like ®gure gives added moral and political force to his provocative commentaries.11 In approaching the subject of Donne's dissident intervention, I have focused attention on the ways in which Donne unsettles the naturalness of hagiological de®nitions and his more personal ± though still highly political ± interest in employing the discourse as a vehicle through which to advocate liberty of conscience. References to the conscience abound in Donne's writings, especially the ones that possess religious content. For instance, in the peroration to Deaths Duell, his ®nal sermon, Donne tells the congregation that meditation on Christ's last days ± `this Inquisition, this examination, this agitation, this cribration, this pursuit of thy conscience' ± is `time spent like thy Saviours' (Sermons, X.247). In Pseudo-Martyr, Donne unites this understanding of the conscience as key to spiritual wholeness (along the lines of William Baldwin's account; see p. 140v ), with a more politicized Protestant tradition of representing it as the principal warrior in the struggle to resist illegitimate temporal authority. As John Knott argues, this `fundamental con¯ict' between the conscience and its worldly oppressors is central to Foxe's formative Acts and Monuments and in most Protestant texts written in its shadow (p. 13). More immediately, Donne's concern for the conscience in PseudoMartyr registers an engagement with one of the principal elements of contention between King James and the Vatican. In Triplici Nodo James himself numerous times characterizes `libertie of conscience' as being amongst the most important things a just monarch must respect (p. 76; cf. pp. 72, 74, 77). His argument is in keeping with and supports the Oath itself which calls on a person to swear loyalty `in my conscience' (quoted in Kenyon, pp. 458±9). Robert Parsons, meantime, vigorously asserted that the king was cruelly pressing his Roman Catholic subjects to contravene their consciences. Of this `grieuous sinne', he argues, `almost nothing can be imagined more heinous: for it is to thrust men headlong . . . into the very precipitation and downfall of hell it selfe'; even Jews and Turks should be spared this wickedness (p. 22). Later in the same text, Parsons claims that Catholics and Protestants are united by the basic right to `libertie of breathing' and conscience (p. 38). With both sides claiming to represent its inviolability best, in the Oath of Allegiance controversy the conscience emerged as a faultline that

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Conscience and Hagiology in Early Stuart England 115

demonstrated the contingency of religious doctrine on political interest. Drawing on this legitimation contest, Donne advanced a more personal account of the conscience in sceptical relation to both state and ecclesiastical authority over personal identity and belief. In a recent essay on Donne's treatise, Phebe Jensen convincingly argues that Pseudo-Martyr is a `partially obedient' text that supports only a `moderate' monarchical absolutism (p. 48). Indeed, it might be argued that James's uncharacteristic near-silence in Triplici Nodo on the topic of his absolute authority provided an opening for Donne to advance liberty of conscience in Pseudo-Martyr.12 Building upon Jensen's insight, it is possible to see in Pseudo-Martyr a potentially dissident valuation of personal liberty of conscience that hinges, in large part, on a demystifying of public identi®cation and allegiance. In a letter to Sir Henry Goodyer that dates from May or June 1609 (that is, about the time he began work on Pseudo-Martyr), Donne privately opined of the Oath controversy that `truly there is a perplexity (as farre as I see yet) and both sides may be in justice, and innocence'. He acknowledges that the nation's security requires the Oath; yet, despite government claims to the contrary, `as clearly, the Supremacy which the Ro. Church pretend, were diminished' by it. On Donne's account, `temporall Kings' and `Roman Bishops' share a selfinterested defence of `prerogative'; the thinly-veiled implication is that political considerations rather than spiritual conviction motivate both James and the pontiff (Letters, pp. 160±1). Appearing two years later, Pseudo-Martyr recasts these demysti®catory insights in a public medium. Donne's treatise is not a call to revolution; however, written during the same period as much of, for instance, Richard Hooker's The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, it diverges from conservative ideology and inspects the inward modalities of the conscience in ways that still resonate with current Western commitments to the value of independent judgement and the sceptical inspection of received customs and beliefs.13 Although Pseudo-Martyr is ostensibly a work of public apologetics, right from the start it also contains strong indications that Donne is exploring the subject of allegiance in a highly personal sense. The text's most recent editor, Anthony Raspa, views this aspect of the treatise as Donne's reaction to his own apostasy and his supposed attempt `to convince himself that his religious convictions are settled' (p. xl). Such a narrative of theological `settlement', however, ¯attens

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the complexity with which Donne imbues ethico-political questions of conscience, subjection, and allegiance. Consider, for instance, Donne's prefatory statement ± `I am, I confesse, obnoxious enough' ± followed by his recognition of a `naturall impatience not to digge painefully in deepe, and stony, and sullen learnings' and of an `Indulgence to my freedome and libertie, as in all other indifferent things, so in my studies also, not to betroth or enthral my selfe, to any one science, which should possesse or denominate me' (p. 12). Donne's representation here of his intellectual and emotional complexion is not super¯uous to the subtler reasonings of the rest of Pseudo-Martyr. His self-depiction encourages us to read the text in a manner similar to that proposed by Richard Strier for Donne's mid-1590s `Satire III', a poem that, Strier argues, embodies a support for religious `neutrality' and a `defense of such suspension' (p. 123).14 Donne's resistance to `possession' and `denomination' (a stance that, we will see, connects Pseudo-Martyr to `The Canonization') provides the groundwork for imagining religious conviction and political allegiance that, in this life, are never once-and-for-all complete or settled and which, in fact, problematize the ideological necessity (or even possibility) of such completion itself. Donne recognized that early modern hagiology is, in large measure, a `science' of possession and denomination. For Protestants and Catholics, hagiology involved more than spirituality; it was a means of cohering and controlling individuals and entire populations. In the context of a discussion in which he surveys the worldliness of hagiology as well as the origins and legitimacy of temporal and spiritual governments, Donne's provocative support for liberty of conscience take on urgent political signi®cance. Indeed, his support for personal freedom from possession af®liate him with what he later in Pseudo-Martyr extols in a happy metaphor as `the free spirit of God, which blowes where it pleaseth, not tied nor imprison'd to any place or person' (p. 111). Alan Sin®eld argues that in attempting to formulate and promulgate air-tight versions of truth and identity, agents of power and ideology such as the state and the church `tend to construct alternative, potentially rival, subjectivities' (Faultlines, p. 174). In Donne's case, King James's own arguments in support of the Oath of Allegiance provided him with a framework within which to theorize a potentially oppositional liberty of conscience. In the last version of his Triplici Nodo, the king contests the Vatican's position that

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118 Early Modern Metaphysical Literature

specially to make a separation betweene so many of my Subiects, who although they were otherwise Popishly affected, yet retained in their hearts the print of their naturall dutie to their Soueraigne; and those who . . . could not conteine themselues within the bounds of their naturall Allegiance, but thought diuersitie of religion a safe pretext for all kinde of treasons, and rebellions against their Soueraigne. (pp. 71±2; cf. pp. 79, 85, 97) Endeavouring to separate the wheat from the chaff ± loyal Roman Catholics from the traitorous ± James's probative loyalty oath differentiates between, on one hand, doctrinal `affection' and, on the other, `naturall' `dutie' and `allegiance' to one's temporal governor.15 Against his enemies who asserted that such a formulation constitutes a despicable split loyalty, James contends that Catholics can have rich spiritual lives and society can still function quite harmoniously if `diuersitie of religion' does not upset allegiance to the monarch. A number of English Catholics evidently accepted this argument; even their leader, the Archpriest George Blackwell, took the oath and wrote an epistle encouraging his co-religionists to do the same.16 James's rhetoric of `hearts' that bear the `print' of `naturall dutie' and his description of subjects who `conteine themselues within the bounds of their naturall Allegiance', attempts to naturalize an inward assent that many in the government believed was necessary for a smoothly functioning state. True subjects, James contends, must be vigilantly distinguished from `false-hearted traitours' (p. 97), those people whose consciences have been corrupted by dangerous ideas and objectives. The swearing of an oath ideally prints on the heart in permanent type a particular set of values. The heart's resulting legibility and conformity to normative volitional and behavioural strictures ensures that any dissident thoughts are safely `conteined' by a prior commitment to the bond between the king and his subjects.17 Early modern legislators, theologians, and philosophers recognized, however, that most people have the ability to dissent even after they have sworn ®delity. Noting this potential, Parsons ominously forecasts that, if compelled by fear to swear, a Catholic will be likely to `breake his Oath, after he hath sworne, vpon like motiues, if occasions doe

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Catholics executed at Tyburn are real martyrs. James maintains that the Oath was devised

mooue him' (p. 21).18 In a subtler, less threatening way, King James's argument for distinguishing between private belief and public conformity provided Donne with an opportunity to assert his own liberty of conscience, and to produce a potentially dissident recognition that the self is not necessarily contained by public identity inscriptions. The separation of spiritual and temporal commitments was, in the seventeenth century, a hotly debated concept. Thirty-odd years after Pseudo-Martyr appeared, for instance, both Parliamentarians and Royalists were attacking, often in apocalyptic terms, the idea that religious belief does not de®ne the nature of a subject's civil rights. Yet, both Donne and James claimed that peace could only come about through such a division.19 Donne, a descendant of Thomas More and a man who had witnessed the persecution of a number of his Roman Catholic relations, knew from personal experience the life-and-death issues at stake in this controversy.20 The ultimate goal of secular government, he argues, is to enable subjects to `live peaceably and religiously' (p. 132). The Oath of Allegiance is a form of `physick' necessary for safeguarding the king as well as `the civill and Ecclesiastique state' from the `perils of shipwracke' (p. 124). While anti-recusant laws may `incovenience' Roman Catholics by stopping the ¯ow of priests into England, the `principall intention of the lawmaker' who forged these statutes and the Oath was `preservation of the publique' (p. 125).21 According to Donne, the pope and his sybaritic ministers shatter social harmony by importing the pontiff's spiritual authority into all of life's nooks and crannies: `by a new Alchimy, they doe not onely extract spirit out of every thing, but transmute it all into spirit, and by their possessing them, Houses, Horses, and Concubines are spirituall' (p. 85). By this metamorphic concupiscence masquerading as pseudo-logic, he later fumes, the Pope might canonize the entire 1588 Spanish Armada (p. 123). On Donne's bathetic account, pseudomartyrdom arises when people are said to have died for spiritual causes that, on closer scrutiny, turn out to be quite profane (cf. pp. 122±3). Eighteen years after the publication of Pseudo-Martyr, we ®nd Donne continuing to associate real martyrdom with a private relationship between the self and God. In a sermon delivered at Whitehall on 29 February 1628, Donne warmed to the subject of martyrdom's causes, noting that `All Martyrdome is not a Smithfeild [sic] Martyrdome, to burn for religion'; in addition, there is a `Court Martyrdome', a

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Conscience and Hagiology in Early Stuart England 119

`Westminster Martyrdome', an `Exchange-Martyrdome', a `ChamberMartyrdome', and a `Bosome-Martyrdome' (Sermons, VIII.186). Especially given the courtly context of his oration, one must work rather hard not to hear the mocking tone in which Donne probably characterized as martyrdom these worldly examples of foregoing revenge, pro®t, reputation, and the like. Following this list, however, Donne more seriously re¯ects that `all ®ghting of the Lords battails, all victory over the Lords Enemies, in our own bowels, all chearful bearing of Gods Crosses, and all watchful crossing of our own immoderate desires is a Martyrdome acceptable to God' (Sermons, VIII.186). While perhaps unlikely, it is therefore possible according to Donne's de®nition that honest dealing at the Exchange can be considered a type of martyrdom because it goes against common temptation and practice. At base, however, only the conscience can tell whether people have truly martyred their desires; to the rest of society one's conscience remains a mystery.22 In Pseudo-Martyr, Donne's support for a spiritual/temporal dichotomy enables him to argue for personal integrity based on liberty of conscience. Donne posits that a king's power is `infused' into him by God, and loyal subjects `obey it temporally as a beame derived from him, without having departed with any thing from our selves' (p. 132; my emphasis). The self is not threatened by any transmutational alchemy unless it relinquishes control over its own conscience. Donne vehemently asserts that Roman Catholic priests have fallen prey to this evil and bestial loss of selfhood: the Hyena, sayes Chrysostome, hath but one backe bone, and cannot turne except it turne all at once. So have these men, one back bone, the Church. . . and this Church is the Pope; And they cannot turne, but all at once, when he turnes; and this is the Integritie of the faith they talke of. (p. 154)23 Donne's truculent comments imply that, even in his role of Defender of the Faith, James (unlike the Pope) allows his subjects real `integritie' and self-possession; that is, liberty of conscience, something that Donne elsewhere in Pseudo-Martyr terms the `purest part' of his `person' (p. 12; cf. p. 174). On Donne's account, the conscience is a private realm unknowable to outsiders; it is, though, capable of critically evaluating naturalized

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®ctions of authority and identity. Meg Lota Brown has shown the ways in which a concern for rational deliberation and the inviolability of the conscience af®liate Pseudo-Martyr's lucubrations with a Reformed tradition of casuistical ethics (pp. 83±91).24 Her insights into casuistry's role in this text encourage us to recognize that one of Donne's major points is that while certain articles of faith are God-given and cannot be questioned, there is much in the world that is culturally-derived and deserves interrogation. Like Edward Herbert, Donne is philosophically committed to discerning the differences between nature and culture, God's order and that of humans: though those things which appeare to us out of the ®rst intrinsique light of Nature and reason, claime the same authoritie in us (as no man doubts whether he have a soule or no, though many dispute whether we have it by infusion from God, or by propagation from our parents) yet in things further removed, and which are directed by more wheeles, and suggestions, and deducements, we cannot know certainely enough . . . that they are, except we know ®rst how, and in what manner they are. (pp. 171±2) Not `Nature', but `wheeles, and suggestions, and deducements'; these latter forces (which, ®ve years later, Donne would again refer to as `the whole frame and machine of the businesse' [Essays, p. 96]) comprise the mechanisms of a social engine that generates `things further removed,' such as pseudo-martyrologies and the political agendas they support and advance.25 Because political, ethical, and theological disputes are so complexly entangled with one another, people must consistently inquire into the foundation of their beliefs and actions; on this phenomenological account, when a person `examines himselfe, and calls himselfe to account, he must ®rst know how it is, before he can resolve, that it is' (p. 172; cf. p. 178). Jonathan Dollimore argues that certain early modern writings are capable of generating `dangerous knowledge' of `political domination' that discoheres orthodox ideologies (Sexual Dissidence, pp. 86±91). In Donne's text, to comprehend the `how' and `manner' of worldly authority and identi®cation facilitates a potentially dissident reckoning of the grounds of allegiance and the scope for personal conscience and desires. The possible `danger' of the knowledge Donne seeks arises from what Katharine Maus asserts was a crucial issue for late sixteenth- and

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Conscience and Hagiology in Early Stuart England 121

seventeenth-century English people, what she calls the `strategic difference between thought and utterance' (p. 19). In the Oath of Allegiance itself, Catholics were required to forswear `any equivocation or mental evasion or secret reservation whatsoever' (quoted in Kenyon, p. 459). Responding in part to this spectre of inward dissent embedded in the Oath (and certainly rampant in many Protestants' views of treacherous Catholic duplicity), Donne's text asks us to consider how secure or `real' is outward allegiance and identi®cation when that which is within passes all show. Anthony Raspa posits that what was `at stake' in the Oath of Allegiance controversy was `the question of whose martyrs and saints were the real ones' (p. xv). Taking seriously Donne's claims for the integrity of the self and the conscience, however, necessitates that we revise such a claim and acknowledge that he showed hagiology to be more crucially a debate over how to de®ne `real subjects' and `real governors', and, more fundamentally, over what constitutes identity `realness' itself. Hagiology, in this sense, is a principal cog or wheel in the ideology-producing machinery of statecraft that characterizes and categorizes people as natural and true or unnatural and false-hearted. While Donne sought patronage and struggled with whether or not to capitulate to the king's demand for him to become a priest in the Established Church, such issues were of urgent personal concern. In addition, the hindsight of history shows us that while Donne was not ready to dismantle the government and church, his contemplations were concurrent with an in®ltration of England's political scene by new models of civic participation that challenged absolutist ideology and asserted subjects' personal rights and liberties. Donne's hagiological investigations add to our understanding of the roles liberty of conscience and personal integrity played in the formation of a modern sense of individual selfhood.

Lyric contemplations As Donne rather acerbically puts it in Pseudo-Martyr: `you suffer as busie bodies in other mens matters, if you suffer for the Oath' (p. 152).26 Of all the things that rankled him in life (there appear to have been a few), Donne seems to have been most disturbed by `busie bodies' meddling with his personal affairs. We encounter a vivid expression of this habit of mind in one of his most famous poems, `The Sunne Rising', in which

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the speaker rails: `Busie old foole, unruly Sunne, / Why dost thou thus, / Through windowes, and through curtaines call on us?' (ll. 1±3). Considering the social torment and hardship Donne experienced as a result of his elopement with Ann More, it is hardly surprising that he had a phobia of prying eyes. Indeed, Meg Brown associates Donne's parodic casuistry in a number of the Songs and Sonnets with his decision to ¯out authority and marry the woman he loved (p. 128; see, generally, pp. 99±138). Donne's 1601 prison letters attest to the poet's unswerving devotion to the marriage; as he punningly puts it in a letter to Ann's angry father: `it is irremidiably donne' (Loseley MS L.b.526). In his poem `The Relique', Donne explores erotic privacy largely through the language of hagiology. This text's speaker imagines what might happen if the grave in which he and his beloved are buried is one day opened and the person responsible notices the reliquary bracelet that he wears of his lover's hair: If this fall in a time, or land,

Where mis-devotion doth command,

Then, he that digges us up, will bring

Us, to the Bishop, and the King,

To make us Reliques. (ll. 12±16) In this text Donne scoffs at absurdly superstitious saint-making practices. In his elegiac Second Anniversarie, Donne says that he might `invoque' the name of Elizabeth Drury (a deceased adolescent) because he is in France, `a place, where mis-devotion frames / A thousand praiers to saints, whose very names / The ancient Church knew not, Heaven knows not yet' (ll. 511±13). Canonization, Donne contends, is all too often a fanciful confection akin to `what lawes of poetry admit' (l. 514). A phenomenon that inspires pseudo-canonizations, `mis-devotion' constitutes for Donne an erroneous and intrusive presumption that one can know and signify who other people really are, a fallacy that, the satiric tone of both poems informs us, infects both sacred and secular life. In `The Relique', Donne's anti-Petrarchan stance includes a refusal to evaluate his beloved against conventional canons of beauty, love, or truth. The speaker and his partner `knew not what wee lov'd, nor why' (l. 24). This admission that experience and identity cannot

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Conscience and Hagiology in Early Stuart England 123

ever be entirely known or articulated checks other poets' claims for the superior virtue of their Lauras, Stellas, or Delias, or church authorities' decisions as to who is a true Christian and who merits damnation. The concluding lines of `The Relique' further illuminate Donne's antipathy to canonizing endeavours: `but now alas, / All measure, and all language, I should passe, / Should I tell what a miracle shee was' (ll. 31±3). Falling silent at the end of the poem, the speaker attempts to short-circuit canonization by declaring that, even for him, conventional language is an insuf®cient tool with which to `measure' and de®ne his lover. In `The Canonization', however, Donne fashions a preservation of privacy that hinges, paradoxically, on an embracing of `mis-devotion'. One can only guess at the extent to which this tactic and the poem itself re¯ect Donne's own beliefs and concerns. Marotti's observation, though, that writing religious works in Jacobean England was a `political gesture' (p. 246), does lead me to suspect that this poem (which de®antly makes a religion out of love by toying on the fringes of Roman Catholic idolatry in an of®cially Protestant state) resonates with Donne's highly politicized situation and desires.27 In his study of Donne's coterie verse, Marotti contests traditional readings of `The Canonization' that emphasize a politically disengaged series of abstruse Petrarchan and Neoplatonic images and conceits. He suggests that we instead regard the poem as Donne's anxious attempt to con®rm his `intellectual authority' and to relieve his psychological pain (pp. 163, 165) at the time of extreme helplessness attendant on his rash elopement and betrayal of his patron's trust. Using this plausible reading as my starting point, I propose that Donne's incorporation of hagiological discourse in his poem demonstrates an additional element of rather combative self-preservation. Persona non grata in the upper echelons of society, Donne's ironic deployment of hagiology both denaturalizes Jacobean allotments of prestige and status and recasts such public inscription as the means of securing his own authority over the conscience's inviolable private domain. Drawing on a recognition that hagiology is a discourse that shapes and rei®es identities in a political matrix, in `The Canonization' Donne's speaker encourages the public sancti®cation of him and his beloved. Midway through the text, the narrator expostulates: Wee can dye by it, if not live by love, And if un®t for tombes and hearse

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Our legend bee, it will be ®t for verse; And if no peece of Chronicle wee prove, We'll build in sonnets pretty roomes; As well a well wrought urne becomes The greatest ashes, as half-acre tombes, And by these hymnes, all shall approve Us Canoniz'd for Love. (ll. 28±36) John Carey takes such utterances as signifying a `welling up' of `holiness' in the poem's author; he argues that the prospect of being canonized `calms' Donne with the image of `being received back, through make-believe, into the Catholic Church' (p. 29). Carey's reading of `The Canonization' accords with his view of virtually all of Donne's texts as implicated in the psychomachia brought on by religious apostasy. This psycho-biographical speculation belies, however, the varied voices and tactics that Donne deploys in `The Canonization', the cumulative effect of which unsettles claims for religious sublimation and encourages one to see that identities are produced, manipulated, and circulated through representational tactics. `The Canonization's ironic demysti®cation of this process can be appreciated in light of Judith Herz's point that the Songs and Sonnets as a whole are best read as examples of a Donnean `instability and dislocation' of theme and persona (`Excellent', p. 6). On Herz's account, the single `stabilizing element' in `The Canonization' is its rhyme scheme (p. 7); otherwise, the poem is a congerie of perspectives, voices, and relationships. This recognition of `instability' as a principal element of Donne's poetics encourages a critical awareness of his longstanding interest in the contingent shaping and contesting of identities. Considered in this light, the statement `all shall approve / Us Canoniz'd for Love', admits that both sacred and secular canonization occur as a result of social labelling whereby identity is `approved' ± that is, authoritatively con®rmed as true or sacred ± not according to transcendent principles but through correspondence to public ideals. In other sections of `The Canonization', plenty of nervousness over this process emerges because, I would argue, as in Pseudo-Martyr, Donne recognizes that hagiology involves not just dead saints and faithful prayers, but the public identities and very survival of living people. The

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Conscience and Hagiology in Early Stuart England 125

poem, after all, begins with the famously theatrical (though rather anxious) line: `For Godsake hold your tongue, and let me love' (l. 1), an imperative exclamation that is basically lost on the wind. By halfway through the poem, the speaker resignedly admits that identi®cation is beyond purely personal control and depends, to a large extent, on the efforts of people external to the lovers themselves: `Call us what you will, wee are made such by love' (l. 19). Even love, on this account, lacks a stable, transparent meaning. Love (perhaps better translated here as `desire') does not provide access to the couple's real identity, but instead exists as an opportunity for their public interpellation. The love at stake in this line (and much of the poem) turns out not to be so much the passion which the couple shares, but the imposed desires of watchful and coercive people. There is even an added ironic sense in this line (and throughout the lyric) that the public's fascination with this particular pair arises out of quasi-erotic love for one or both of them. Instead of advocating the separation of temporal and spiritual matters as he had in Pseudo-Martyr, in `The Canonization' Donne actually demands their `alchemical' fusion. This sentiment is most fully expressed in the poem's ®nal stanza, in which the speaker instructs his readers to thus invoke us; You whom reverend love Made one anothers hermitage;

You, to whom love was peace, that now is rage,

Who did the whole worlds soule contract, and drove Into the glasses of your eyes So made such mirrors, and such spies,

That they did all to you epitomize,

Countries, Townes, Courts: Beg from above A patterne of our love. (ll. 37±45) Redeploying a centuries-old literary tradition of treating love as a religion, the speaker amusingly fancies that his romance has assumed such a level of public currency that it has become a devotional cult, a veritable `patterne' for apotheosis. Manipulating lyric poetry's epideictic rhetorical agenda to praise and persuade, Donne mischievously imagines a situation in which he has resisted worldly persuasion but

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has, in turn, successfully moved others to transform him into the chief object of their adoration. On a more political level, Donne also shows that pseudo-canonization, like the pseudo-martyrdom addressed in his public treatise, occurs as a result of hagiological manipulation.28 In `The Canonization', Donne encourages us to see that through `sonnets', `urnes', and `hymnes' ± devices which are not dissimilar to the canonizing initiatives of papal breves and bulls ± people imprint supposedly ideal ®gures with values that have more to do with `Countries, Townes, [and] Courts' than with Neoplatonic or Christian perfection. A few years later, Donne concluded An Anatomie of the World along similar lines, noting that `Verse hath a middle nature: heaven keepes soules, / The grave keeps bodies, verse the fame enroules' (ll. 473±4). The literary enrolling of Elizabeth Drury's fame is, however, also the poet's way of `trying to emprison her' (l. 470). Just as writing becomes a means of taming and containing the dead girl's `incomprehensiblenesse' (l. 469), so too in `The Canonization' does Donne foreground (albeit more subtly) the potentially imprisoning nature of public identity inscription. Having experienced ®rst-hand the grim reality of gaol as a result of his elopement, incarceration was not for Donne an idle metaphor. By the end of `The Canonization', however, instead of debunking this phenomenon of public identi®cation Donne's speaker comes around to encouraging pseudo-canonization as a means not only to de¯ect attention away from private matters, but also to gain a modicum of control over his social context. The devotional script has, after all, been penned and disseminated as part of a deliberate seduction of other people into believing that the lovers are central to their lives and faith. At the end of the poem's third stanza, Donne's speaker claims that he and his bed-mate `prove / Mysterious' by their love (ll. 26±7). Having given the people what they want ± idols to worship ± the blissful couple can retreat unobserved behind a veil of `mystery'; in certain cases, `mis-devotion' has its uses. As far as `mystery' in the sense of spiritual truth is concerned, however, Donne's Metaphysical poetics clarify that hagiology is often as much an opportunity for public mysti®cation and control as a re¯ection of sacred nature. If we attend to the poem's speci®cally Jacobean setting and likely references to Donne's immediate concerns, `The Canonization' ironically suggests that the social status denied the poet is little

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Conscience and Hagiology in Early Stuart England 127

more than another form of hagiological manipulation based on subjective assessments of worth. It is clear from his poems and letters that Donne would not have been averse to courtly canonization; however, if such `mysterious' preferment was to be withheld, then the sceptic in him was ready and able to denaturalize worldly prestige and to assert the authority and even sanctity of his own thoughts and desires.

Crashaw's Saint Teresa Donne's estranging treatment of hagiology acquired new vigour and dimensions in Richard Crashaw's panegyrics on the sixteenth-century  More intimately focused on desire and the Spanish saint, Teresa of Avila. life of the soul than were Donne's hagiological writings, Crashaw's poems extend Donne's sense of cultural `workmanship' through luminous reconsiderations of gender, sexuality, religion, and nationality. Writing in the midst of England's Civil War turmoils, Crashaw endeavoured to overcome brutal factionalism and advance ± in a way that is reminiscent of Edward Herbert's philosophical claims ± the fundamental unity of spiritual life despite local differences. A recent convert from Protestantism to Catholicism who had been ejected from an emotionally and spiritually rich Cambridge life ± his `little contentful kingdom at Peterhouse' (George Williams, p. xvii) ± to a grinding exile on the Continent, Crashaw knew personally the dreary violence that accompanies prejudicial determinations of religio-political `truth'. As a Metaphysical writer steeped in Laudian High Church and Roman Catholic mysticism, Crashaw was probably drawn to the subject of sainthood and martyrdom in large part because of their utter strangeness from his own dif®cult quotidian reality. At the same time, martyrs' passionate suffering for their faith would have resonated with his painful situation. In one of his sacred epigrams, Crashaw celebrates martyrs as fortunate beings who have escaped the turmoils of this unpleasant world: Not overburdened by too many storms, the skiff bore you thither through the little sea of your blood; while the scarcely trustworthy force of the inexhaustible sea carries us toiling under such slow rowing. (`In felices Martyres', ll. 3±6)29

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128 Early Modern Metaphysical Literature

As we have repeatedly seen, however, sainthood and martyrdom also unsettle conventional identities, desires, and behavioural norms in this life. In the following discussion I hope to show that sainthood's ability to render inadequate received ways of knowing and experiencing the self and the world, empowered Crashaw to think beyond claustrophobic limitation and to imagine a future of personally satisfying re-creation. Maureen Sabine has recently illuminated the ways in which Crashaw's oeuvre exhibits a multifaceted responsorial relationship to Donne's earlier religious poetry. In particular, Sabine posits, Crashaw revisits the issue of feminine spirituality and, contrary to Donne, celebrates its lively continuance in a post-Reformation environment. In his `Teresiad', for instance, Sabine discerns a replacement by Crashaw of the gloomy prognostications in Donne's Anniversaries with Marian visions of comfort and renewal (pp. 213±32). I would like to add to this picture of literary relations by suggesting that Crashaw's work also engages a Donnean understanding of the role ideologically informed interpretation plays in establishing virtue, truth, and holiness. Indeed, it is this awareness in Crashaw's St Teresa poems that enables him to revise gendered norms of desire and public comportment, and to countenance a more inclusive spiritual kinship that runs counter to prejudice and sectarian interest. Donne's theoretical groundwork is thus the basis of Crashavian hagiological reinvention of both spirituality and the self.30 Crashaw's attempts at encouraging new ways of seeing and desiring rely on the conviction that, especially when it comes to issues involving religion, it is possible and even necessary to move beyond stif¯y traditional and literal interpretations. His sacred epigram, `On the still surviving markes of our Saviours wounds', highlights this approach: `What ever story of their crueltie, / Or Naile, or Thorne, or Speare have writ in Thee', Crashaw maintains, `Are in another sence / Still legible' (ll. 1±4). The literal `sence' or meaning of the cruci®xion inscribed on Christ's text-like body can be read in `another', spiritual manner. Not only is it crucial to Christian theology, but this hermeneutic phenomenon provides a background for numerous other of Crashaw's attempts, as he also puts it in his epigram, to `spell' (ll. 6) ± that is, write out and interpret ± naturalized precepts and traditions in strange new ways. `Sweet is the difference' (l. 5), he maintains, between surface appearances and the soul's private communion with God.31

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Conscience and Hagiology in Early Stuart England 129

In his Teresa odes, Crashaw personalizes to an extraordinary degree the passion and desires aroused by this Spanish mystic. As Paul Parrish observes, these verses are his `ultimate achievement in Baroque art and the most consequential examples of his allegiance to the via af®rmativa' (pp. 149±50). A recent convert, Crashaw might be expected to have written a straightforward glori®cation of a ®gure who was central to Counter-Reformation politics. In an effort to combat Protestant allegations (such as we meet in Pseudo-Martyr) of Catholic venality and doctrinal obscurantism, Counter-Reformation artists strove through visual and literary media to depict saints and martyrs as models of a caring, immediately recognizable, and personally consequential faith. Crashaw's Teresa partakes of this politicized aesthetic programme; however, more than being just a stock celebration of the saint's devotional ecstasy, his poems underscore the conventional rhetorical dimensions of saintly adoration and query the limitations of standard ways of interpreting her life. In so doing, Crashaw reverses what we have seen to be canonization's usual role in upholding normative categories, and makes of it instead a vehicle for the discohering of prescriptive gender and national identities in ways that af®rm liberty of conscience and desire. Crashaw's (re)visionary poetics is predicated on the existence of a substratum of holiness that uni®es all of humankind. In the ®rst of his Teresa odes, `A Hymn to the Name and Honor of the Admirable Sainte Teresa', Crashaw devotes many lines to considering the signi®cance of Teresa's youthful endeavour to become a martyr ± to `travail to a Martyrdom' (l. 44) ± by preaching amongst the Muslims. The young girl's actions, Crashaw reports, were enigmatic even to herself: Nor has she e're yet understood Why to show love, she should shed blood Yet though she cannot tell you why, She can LOVE, and she can DY. (`Hymn', ll. 21±4) Here we ®nd an appraisal of martyrdom that sounds like a poetic version of Henry Cockeram's earlier-noted dictionary de®nition; to die for `the truth', even if it is not fully understood, is all that martyrdom concerns. Indeed, in all of Crashaw's poems about her, Teresa's relationship to holiness is similarly non-rational; it evades, somehow,

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130 Early Modern Metaphysical Literature

the clutter of worldly identi®cation. `'Tis LOVE, not YEARES or LIMBS that can / Make the Martyr, or the man' (`Hymn', ll. 33±4), Crashaw advances. Like so many of the other Metaphysical writers whom we have encountered, Crashaw detected what he apparently believed was genuine truth now obscured in a fallen world. Saintly ®gures like Mary  Magdalene, the Virgin Mary, and Teresa of Avila had access to this essential core; however, while these women could provide other people with ¯eeting glimpses of spiritual perfection, the rest of humanity must rely on the mediation of cultural artefacts in order to achieve a limited encounter with grace. `Love' might produce `the Martyr, or the man', yet Crashaw is also aware that all too often local expressions lead one astray from the unity that love holds in potentia. His religious and poetic conundrum is to ®nd a means of rechannelling contingent doctrine and representation into a more peaceful and personally ful®lling apprehension of holiness. One of Crashaw's most provocative interventions in Teresian hagiology is his inversionary reinscription of gender. The most intriguing example of this is found in `The Flaming Heart', the third text in a series of four `numinous visions' (Sabine, p. 213).32 In the headnote to this piece Crashaw draws attention to the aesthetic mediation of public knowledge of the Carmelite nun. This is a poem, he declares, `Upon the Book and Picture of the seraphicall saint Teresa, (as she is usually expressed with a Seraphim biside her)' (my emphasis); it is, therefore, quite explicitly not so much a poem about St Teresa per se, as it is about the manner in which she is most commonly depicted in visual and verbal media. The conventional Teresa ± a plain, darkly garbed ®gure (often about to be pierced by a luminous angel's arrow or spear) ± clearly did not meet Crashaw's vision of the saint.33 While Diana Trevino Benet is surely correct to see Crashaw's Teresa poems as implicated in Renaissance paragoni debates between poets and painters, I believe that Crashaw, like numerous other Metaphysical writers, focuses even more intently on the process of meaning construction which involves a dialogic encounter between texts, readers/viewers, and contexts. In `The Canonization', Donne slyly underscored the agency of representation in saintly inscription. John Milton, as we will soon see, also endeavoured in his Eikonoklastes to show that King Charles's martyrdom was the product of aesthetic manipulation. While Crashaw directed his own energies towards more spiritual ends, particularly in his hagiological works there is a recognition of the roles

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Conscience and Hagiology in Early Stuart England 131

that imagery and reception play in producing and mediating religious and social experience.34 Addressing from the outset of the poem proper his `Well meaning readers' (l. 1), Crashaw pays sustained attention to the ways in which representation and interpretation alter understanding of individuals, events, and cultural norms. In this piece, Crashaw challenges naturalized paradigms of gendered identity coherence which, in the case of standard Teresian iconography, amounts to what he calls `prñscription' and `proud wrong' (l. 61): Readers, be rul'd by me; and make Here a well-plac't and wise mistake, You must transpose the picture quite, And spell it wrong to read it right; Read HIM for her, and her for him; And call the SAINT a SERAPHIM. (ll. 7±12) Estranging falsely essentialized gender, Crashaw argues that masculinity and femininity are performative roles fashioned and reproduced according to prescriptive readings of gender identity. In his view, it is what bodies and individuals do, not the labels attached to them, that really matters. `Painter', he admonishes, `what didst thou understand / To put her dart into his hand!' (ll. 13±14). Recasting the conventional gender associations of activity and passivity, Crashaw encourages a new understanding of Teresa as the spear-thruster in this drama of transverberation. `Redeem this injury of thy art; / Give HIM the vail, give her the dart', Crashaw demands; `Give her the DART for it is she / (Fair youth) shootes both thy shaft and THEE' (ll. 41±2, 47±8).35 As these lines attest, and as Richard Rambuss has observed, Crashaw was obsessed with the sexual and, especially, the homoerotic implications of love shafts, darts, wounds, and bodily ¯uids. Calling him `the queerest poet of the period' (p. 264), Rambuss demonstrates that in Crashaw's writing `gender never really poses a limit to what the devout body can perform or what can be performed on it' (p. 271).36 Taking seriously Crashaw's baroque gender transitivity, I would like to go a step further and argue that his interest in opening the body and devotion to a fuller range of emotional-erotic options than heteronormative tradition offers, depends upon an initial recognition that

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132 Early Modern Metaphysical Literature

public identity is a product of malleable and contingent signi®ers. Towards the end of `The Flaming Heart' the poet calls out to his subject, saying: `O thou undanted [sic] daughter of desires!' (l. 93); suggestively allusive, this apostrophe limns the Spanish saint as the product not only of her own interior life but also of readers' and worshippers' own polyvalent, shifting fantasies and yearnings. By focusing attention on gender's representational `fallacy' (l. 4) ± a word Crashaw uses in connection with the seraphim, and certainly not without its `phallic' homophone in mind ± in the context of a politically in¯ected hagiological discourse, Crashaw potentially also undermines a broad spectrum of identities, including religious and national ones. `For in love's feild [sic] was never found / A nobler weapon than a WOUND', Crashaw asserts, concluding that `Love's passives are his activ'st part. / The wounded is the wounding heart' (ll. 71±4).37 Written by a dispossessed, persecuted exile from a warembroiled homeland, these lines reverberate with a profound dissatisfaction over available models of identity that, in large part, had stripped him of an earlier felicity. As he earlier pointed out in the `Apologie': `Christ's faith makes but one body of all soules / And love's that body's soul, no law controwlls / Our free traf®que for heav'n' (ll. 17±19). In these provocatively enjambed lines, Crashaw defends having written about a Spanish saint despite his English nationality. His countrymen must open their minds which have been longimprisoned by nationalist pride and xenophobic suspicion: If, what to other tongues is tun'd so high,

Thy praise might not speak English too; forbid

(By all thy mysteryes that here ly hidde)

Forbid it, mighty Love! Let no fond Hate

Of names and wordes, so farr prñjudicate.

Souls are not SPANIARDS too, one freindly ¯oud Of BAPTISM blends them all into a blood. (ll. 10±16) Crashaw's apology takes its inspiration from St Paul's admonition that, in heaven, there is neither nationality nor gender (Gal. 3:28; cf. Parrish, pp. 157±8); here on earth, meanwhile, the soul, the essence of a person and his or her link to God, resists the cartographic inscription and division which has soaked Europe in an `unfreindly ¯oud' of blood.

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Conscience and Hagiology in Early Stuart England 133

Not unlike its role for a number of female authors of the period, this utopian potential held profound signi®cance for Crashaw's perilous navigation and estrangement of actual prejudice and misfortune. Crashaw's most recent editor, George Williams, is puzzled by the deliberate echo in the concluding twenty-three lines of `The Flaming Heart' of the Litany found in the Church of England's Book of Common Prayer (p. 61). Yet, this intertextuality makes sense when viewed as being of a kind with his earlier disintegration of gendered norms and categories. Desires evade naturalized `prñscription', Crashaw demonstrates, by redeploying in strange manners and places the multiple languages and dialects of identity.38 By blending his sexual unconventionality (most evidently in `The Flaming Heart') with a celebration of the canonical ®gure of St Teresa, Crashaw discoheres an ideology of power and gender that are based on a unitary coherence of the self and public norms. The ®nal quatrain of `The Flaming Heart' speaks to broader possibilities than his world conventionally allowed: By all of HIM [i.e., Christ] we have in THEE;

Leave nothing of my SELF in me.

Let me so read thy life, that I

Unto all life of mine may dy.

(ll. 105±8) The yearning for mystical rapture that these lines convey also reveals, I would suggest, a profound dissatisfaction with the identi®catory norms Crashaw found thrust upon himself. While the poem opens with a call for a revised `reading' of St Teresa, it ends by claiming that a new interpretation of the Spanish saint holds the potential to perform a dissolution of the poet's own identity shackles. Leaving unitary identity behind as a textual conceit of artists, hagiographers, and politicians, Crashaw instead locates multifaceted desire and eroticism as fundamental to transgressing and overcoming convention and prejudice. Because his Metaphysical wit relies on a community of sympathetic readers, Crashaw's recasting of religious, gender, sexual, and national identities in turn holds the potential of rippling out beyond his own devotional erotics and provoking a reconsideration of other habitual enclosures of desire's manifold potential.

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134 Early Modern Metaphysical Literature

Conscience and Hagiology in Early Stuart England 135

Much of my discussion of hagiology thus far has involved a consideration of the cultural fabrication of public identities. By way of drawing this chapter to a close I would like to examine hagiology in a more concretely political setting. Revisiting the issue with which I opened the chapter, I propose that the Metaphysical treatment of hagiology can shed new light on the execution of King Charles I and his translation into a martyr by some and into a tyrannical despot by others. To date, literary scholars have addressed these remarkable phenomena largely in terms of their aesthetic dynamics and the engendering of armed con¯ict. Taking into account the hagiological writings of Donne and Crashaw (Donne's own Pseudo-Martyr is in large measure a response to the spectre of regicide), however, facilitates a recognition of the ways in which the king's canonization and opposition to it also navigate relations between private conscience and public duty. In the context of the royal martyr-cult, the Metaphysical denaturalization of hagiology also enables us to see how private and public spheres of desire, belief, and behaviour are not clearly de®ned and separate but mutually contingent. One of the most important inaugural statements of the martyr-cult came from the king himself who, on the scaffold at Whitehall, is reputed to have said: `Sirs, It was for this, that now I Am come here: If I would have given way to an Arbitrary way, for to have all Laws changed according to the power of the Sword, I neede not to have come here; and therefore, I tell you, (and I pray God it be not laid to your charge) that I Am the Martyr of the People' (King Charles, Eikon Basilike, p. 10). Charles's steadfast refusal to bow to Parliamentary coercion earned him, amongst the Royalists, a hallowed place in the blessed pantheon of martyrs. Bishop Henry Leslie, for instance, was not alone in comparing the king's trial and execution to Christ's murder: `He was a most lively Image of Christ, so lively an Image of him, that amongst all the Martyrs who followed Christ unto Heaven, bearing his Crosse; never was there any, who expressed so great conformity with our Saviour in His sufferings as He did' (p. 14). Just as at the cruci®xion of Jesus, when the king died prodigious events swept the land, loudly testifying to the `unnatural murther' committed by the revolutionaries (Leslie, p. 19). The parallels between Christ and `C H A R L S T H E J V S T ' are also expounded in an anonymous tract, The Life and Death of King Charls the Martyr

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The afterglow of kings and martyrs

(1649).39 Here we ®nd a step-by-step correlation between events that transpired in mid-century England and a millennium-and-a-half earlier in Roman Palestine. Amongst other events, the pamphleteer notes the rejection of Christ and Charles by their people; the betrayal of Jesus and the king by their disciples and servants; the apprehension of both men at night; the mockery of them by their enemies; and, taking into account the six hours' difference between London and Jerusalem, their death at the same time of day (pp. 4±6). The engraved frontispiece to Robert Brown's published sermon The Subjects Sorrow: Or, Lamentations upon the Death of Britaines Iosiah King Charles (12 March 1649) provides visual con®rmation of the king's virtual canonization (Figure 3).40 Here we see the king's body laid out on a funeral bier which has been draped in sombre black velvet; Charles's earthly crown falls away and his right arm and gaze are drawn up out of the temple-like enclosure in the direction of a radiant heavenly crown ± the incorruptible one spoken of in the Bible at 1 Peter 5: 4 and elsewhere ± held aloft by two cherubs. In the six-line exegetical poem that appears on the facing page, we learn that this is a portrait of `a Monarch Martyr . . . / His Kingdomes and the Churches Sacri®ce'. An admonitory note concludes the verse by commenting that `good Subjects waile His losse'; readers' emotional response to the engraved corpse and the king's memory therefore carries real-world signi®cance because it establishes their af®liation with either the godly upholders of truth or the demonic perpetrators of evil. Drawing on hagiology's power to shape the political landscape, in the text of his sermon Brown astutely accuses the new Parliamentarian government of having removed Charles's remains to Windsor instead of interring them at Westminster, out of a fear that the emotional impact of the dead king's `sacred reliques' might inspire Londoners to `cast you down head-long from your new and wickedly acquired Dominion' (p. 25). Of course, in the absence of a ¯eshly corpse, Brown hopes that this paper one will do the counter-revolutionary trick. Public belief in the image of a saintly monarch received its strongest support from the oft-reprinted Eikon Basilike; The Povrtraictvre of His Sacred Maiestie in His Solitvdes and Svfferings (the `King's Book'), the `holy book of royalist politics' (Zwicker, Lines of Anthority, p. 37). This apologia (which is prefaced by an intricately-engraved frontispiece depicting Charles kneeling in prayer and receiving divine illumination) purports to offer the king's own re¯ections on the events leading

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137

Figure 3 Frontispiece from Robert Brown, The Subjects Sorrow: Or, Lamentations upon the Death of Britaines Iosiah King Charles (London, 1649)

up to his incarceration at Carisbrooke Castle on the Isle of Wight, various of his prayers and meditations, and advice to certain of his children. At several points Charles (and his collator/ventriloquist John Gauden41 ) notes the Christ-like suffering and martyrdom that has befallen England's king: `They [i.e., his enemies] knew my chiefest arms left me were those only which the ancient Christians were wont to use against their persecutors ± prayers and tears. These may serve a good man's turn, if not to conquer as a soldier, yet to suffer as a martyr' (p. 47). Engaging a classic Christian trope of humility and suffering, Charles, following a path established in the previous century by Protestant hagiologists like John Foxe, takes physical weakness, suffering, and loss to be a sign of spiritual triumph.42 Whereas the anonymous author of Eikon E Piste read the king's meditations as `Seraphick contemplations . . . distilled from the lymbeck of his princely soule' (p. 92), many others on the Parliamentarian side took a much dimmer view of these pro-monarchical utterances. Eikon Alethine's preface (entitled `To the Seduced People of England') roundly condemns the king's book for its `Hocus pocus' attempt to strip away hard-won freedom: `O shamefull spectacle! I found an Idol-worship crept in amongst you, and saw you adoring the counterfeit Pourtracture [sic] of one, you sometimes knew no Saint' (A3r ). Having no patience for `forgeries and fopperies' (A3r ) or the `allurements of effeminate Rhetorick' (A3v ) which have produced merely `an Apple of Sodom' (A4v ), the author of Eikon Alethine puts his ®nger on hagiology's representational dynamics when he enjoins his readers to credit instead the new government's competing `Pourtraiture of Truth' (A3v ). No less a ®gure than John Milton anxiously testi®ed to the potentially subversive power of martyrdom's textual limning. While he uses somewhat more measured terms than many other of his fellow Commonwealth defenders, Charles's most belligerent opponent agrees that the King's Book is blasphemous, seditious, and immoral, and he likewise homes in on its representational errors; in particular, those that fostered Charles's saintly aura and martyr-cult. Eikon Basilike's stirring frontispiece comes in for especially vehement censure; this `conceited portraiture' (Eikonoklastes, p. 342) is, Milton complains, merely a type of the `quaint Emblems and devices begg'd from the old Pageantry of some Twelf-nights entertainment at Whitehall, [and] will doe but ill to make a Saint or Martyr' (p. 343). Outing Charles as the

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138 Early Modern Metaphysical Literature

`Closet Companion' of William Shakespeare, Milton further debunks the king's heroic aura by claiming that he had learned to disguise his `Tyranny' from copying the `deep dissembler' Richard III as he had appeared in print and on the public stage (pp. 361±2). `The words are good', Milton later snorts, `the ®ction smooth and cleanly; there wanted onely Rime' (p. 406). Only the `blockish vulgar' (p. 339), `mad multitude' (p. 345), and `Image-doting rabble' could ever be seduced ± `stigmatiz'd and board [sic] through in witness' (p. 601) ± by such textual trickery.43 In an essay on the production, dissemination, and criticism of the saintly king, Marshall Grossman demonstrates that the Royalists fashioned a martyr who perpetuated a concept of monarchical authority which transcended the king's corporeal being. The Parliamentarians, meanwhile, strove to demystify the royal presence by countering that his iconic status was the function of discursive manipulation and even pastiche. On Richard Helgerson's account, the `extraordinary propaganda triumph' of Eikon Basilike and the attack by Eikonoklastes on its ®ction and the credulous multitude who believed it represents a struggle between `iconocentric' and `logocentric' approaches to cultural transmission and competing political ideologies (`Milton', pp. 1, 14). As Milton bluntly puts it: `to bad Kings, who without cause expect future glory from thir [sic] actions, it happ'ns as to bad Poets; who sit and starve themselves with a delusive hope to win immortality by thir bad lines' (p. 502). In Milton's view `lines' are `bad' when they cobble together an image that, upon close inspection, is merely a deceptive ®ction based not on truth but illegitimate imaginings. Following Helgerson, Grossman argues that the various supportive and antagonistic responses elicited by the King's Book constitute a discursive shift from `language as a set of relations between words and things . . . towards an understanding of language as a set of relations among words' (p. 263). This theorization of two distinct views of communication ± one that is transhistorical and another that sees the icon as an aesthetic production ± resonates with what we have encountered in Donne's Pseudo-Martyr explanation of the contingent and rhetorical dimension of martyrdom. I want to suggest, however, that Donne aids us in interpreting the maelstrom surrounding King Charles's apotheosis in another important way. While the politics of representation and aesthetics have been foremost in recent discussions

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Conscience and Hagiology in Early Stuart England 139

of Royalist and Parliamentarian attitudes, it seems to me that the centrality of the conscience to Eikon Basilike's case for the king's sancti®cation has largely been overlooked. Steven Zwicker observes that Eikon Basilike `was intended to transmute the king into an aesthetic object' (Lines of Anthority, p. 40). My goal is not to deny the justice of this claim, but to draw on what we have encountered in Donne and Crashaw and thereby expand our understanding of the hagiological controversy by taking into account the religiophilosophical dimension of both apology and resistance.44 In Eikon Basilike it is the conscience which grounds the king's claims to martyrdom; the text is suffused by references to the centrality of the conscience to the monarch's self-conception and reason for acting. Casting himself as the principle victim of ungodly calumny, the king represents the last decade as a `war upon my soul' (p. 53). The only defence for the `empire of my soul' (p. 26), Charles asserts, is a `good conscience' (p. 34). Despite a weakness in military arms, `I have a soul invincible through God's grace enabling me. Here I am sure to be conqueror if God will give me such a measure of constancy as to fear Him more than man and to love the inward peace of my conscience before any outward tranquility' (p. 38). This `inward' rectitude goes beyond personal legitimation and encompasses the fundamentals of spiritual insight: `Thou knowest the chief design of this war', he prays to God, `is either to destroy my person or force my judgment and to make me renege my conscience and Thy truth' (p. 45). Here the king assimilates his personal ordeal with a defence of holiness; his conscience has apprehended God's `truth.' Indeed, the conscience is for Charles the essence of his very self: `I shall never think myself less than myself while I am able thus to preserve the integrity of my conscience, the only jewel now left me which is worth keeping' (p. 136). Acceptance of Parliament's conditions for his physical freedom would, on Charles's understanding, involve a barbaric diminution of selfhood and a selling of `truth' for transitory comfort. By remaining ®rm in his conviction that he must defend his conscience at all costs (including his life), Charles inscribes his public persona with the signi®ers of heroic holy martyrdom; he is, according to Eikon Basilike's portrait, a living embodiment of God's `truth' soon to be cruelly extinguished. As the King's Book and its enthusiastic reception by a voracious readership testi®es, to be able to claim a defence of conscience greatly empowers individuals and their causes. In both the Anglican and

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Puritan schemas of salvation, the conscience was paramount in determining the justness of a government, a religion, or a struggle and one's support for or rejection of them; to claim access via the conscience to God's design was to render one's desires, politics, and actions supposedly irrefragable.45 It is not surprising, therefore, that posthumous attacks on Charles earnestly take up this aspect of his hagiological inscription. In Eikonoklastes, Milton echoes a point made by Donne when he argues that `Martyrs bear witness to the truth, not to themselves' (p. 575). This assertion is related to one that opens an issue of the Puritan news journal, The Moderate, coincident with the regicide: `Not death, but the cause, makes a Martyr' (p. 285). Investigating the `cause' (Donne's `wheeles') of Charles's demise, Milton and many others found that the king had borne witness not to the `truth' as discerned by an enlightened conscience, but to his own corrupt desires. `For if the conscience be ill edi®'d', Milton contends, `the resolution may more be®tt a foolish then a Christian King, to preferr [sic] a self-will'd conscience before a Kingdoms good' (p. 418). Charles's saintly posture is thus nothing more than a ®ckle violation of his people's well-being: It was not the inward use of his reason and his conscience that would content him, but to use them both as a Law over all his Subjects, in whatever he declar'd as a King to like or dislike. Which use of reason, most reasonless and unconscionable, is the utmost that any Tyrant ever pretended over his Vassals. (p. 412) The political point of Milton's animadversions is that such tyrannical misuse of the conscience `invade[s] the civil Liberties of a Nation' (p. 412); the `servitude and persecution' of `free born' English consciences was, for the king, of greater importance than `the consideration of any right belonging to the Subject' (p. 574).46 Milton does not dispute that the conscience is, fundamentally, a holy faculty. Maintaining that any `good principle not rightly understood, may prove as hurtfull as a bad' (p. 434), however, he forcefully drives a wedge between a properly edi®ed and righteous conscience and Charles's masquerading volition. In this sense the king is a demonic misuser of God's gifts much like Satan is in Paradise Lost. Earlier in 1649 an anonymous contributor to the Parliamentarian Perfect Occurrences news-sheet complained that `to subdue a Nation to

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Conscience and Hagiology in Early Stuart England 141

the will of one man is not warrantable' (p. 821). By personalizing Charles's conscience ± by transforming it into mere `will' or illicit desire ± Milton and other of the Royalists' opponents denied the justice of the king's contentions and thereby stripped him of any pretence to genuine martyrdom. Milton does allow Charles the `inward use of his reason and his conscience'. By way of drawing this discussion of the regicide to a close, I would like to suggest that this concession marks an ironic rehearsal of the liberty of conscience proposed earlier in the century by John Donne. The stability of King James's realm could be achieved, Donne contended, by allowing subjects the conscience as a private refuge of spiritual conviction. Forty years later, however, the Parliamentarians drew on the dissident potential inherent to such a formulation and argued that the conscience legitimated the destruction of James's own son and the very monarchy itself. Though several decades intervened between the Oath of Allegiance controversy and the dramatic unfolding of the Civil War's carnage, the case of the martyr Charles reawakened the struggle over personal commitment and political conformity that had plagued the ®rst decade of his father's reign in England. In Eikon Basilike, Charles makes an argument for the viable separation of personal belief and loyalty to the monarchy which strongly echoes King James's earlier defence: 'Tis strange that so wise men as they would be esteemed should not conceive that differences of persuasion in matters of religion may easily fall out where there is the sameness of duty, allegiance, and subjection. The ®rst they owe, as men and Christians, to God; the second they owe to me in common, as their king. Different professions in point of religion cannot, any more than in civil trades, take away the community of relations, either to parents or princes. (pp. 88±9) Here again we ®nd a British king advocating a peaceable `community of relations' founded upon the integrity of private conscience and duty to the sovereign. This time around, however, the king is speaking from beyond the grave and his forces have been scattered. Whereas Donne construed the conscience as a preserve of personal liberty within a frame of monarchical allegiance, the Parliamentarians turned the

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tables and used the conscience to oppose the king's authority and to explode his canonization. Milton signalled his awareness of the connections between 1605±10 and 1649 when he archly observed that `if to die for an establishment of Religion be Martyrdom, then Romish Priests executed for that, which had so many hundred yeares bin establisht in this Land, are no wors Martyrs then he' (pp. 575±6). Cast in the role of an executed `Romish Priest' from a previous era, King Charles and the other Royalist martyrs are subjected to the same evacuation of sanctity earlier levelled by Donne at James's opponents. Drawing directly in its title on Donne's treatise, a pamphlet entitled The Life and Reigne of King Charls, or the Pseudo-Martyr Discovered vehemently condemns `blind and unnaturall obedience' to illegitimate authority (A7v ). In this diatribe we read that Charles the pseudo-martyr is a fabrication of his `defeated partizans' who, `out of an old and inbred malice', have fashioned Eikon Basilike and its frontispiece `purposely to catch and amuse the people, magnifying all his misdeeds for pious actions, canonizing him for a Saint, and idolizing his memory for an innocent Martyr, an imposture without other parallell [sic] than that of Mahomet' (A8v ± a1r ). Unforeseen by Donne, his denaturalizing of hagiological discourse eventually contributed to the destruction of a social order that he had struggled to serve and defend.

The documents I have surveyed in this chapter illustrate that early modern martyrdom and canonization was a topic of profound importance for personal faith and political machination. In the writings of Donne and Crashaw, as well as the swirl of literature for and against the monarchical martyr-cult, hagiology appears as the staging ground for the formation of recognizably modern private and public spheres of interest, commitment, and action. The private conscience, however, is a faultline that belies the absolute separation of these two domains, for it only ever exists within a contested public sphere in which the individual is de®ned in relation to external norms of belief, identity and order. The inscrutability of the conscience meant, paradoxically, that it was also public in the sense that, like martyrdom, it could be construed to support a variety of antithetical political agendas.

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Conscience and Hagiology in Early Stuart England 143

Early modern hagiology underscores the fact that the conscience ± one of the bulwarks of our modern sense of personal independence ± is highly contingent on a web of public interests and powers. Examined in the light of hagiological discourses, the conscience reminds us of the power dynamics inherent in concepts of virtue, justice, rights, liberty, and naturalness. This claim is not intended to deny the possibility of oppositional thought and behaviour. For certain people in early modern England the conscience did provide both a language of resistance and a means to decode systems of authority and identi®cation; tactical reformulation was possible from within even the most rigid of ideological frames and inegalitarian settings. Hagiology provides an opportunity to see that the conscience, though often in the period (and today) accorded an irreducible element of mystery, actually has a political and ethical history and that, as the texts I have discussed suggest, our ideas, desires, speech, and actions are neither natural nor essential, but are the result of negotiation with a constantly shifting public domain.

Coda For those who are intrigued by the intersection of art and life, the example of John Donne's own post-mortem canonization demonstrates the mingling of authorial or personal intention and selffashioning with subsequent cultural manipulation. The English word  meaning `rule'. By the late `canonization' derives from the Greek !, sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, what was originally a strictly ecclesiastical term had come to signify any `law, rule, edict', `fundamental principle', or `standard of judgement or authority' (OED s.v. `canon' 2.a,b,c). As Michael Bristol observes, the canonization of certain laws, principles, texts and authors is a `religious power' that is `related to secular functions connected with the allocation of social status' (America, p. 99). The canonization of Donne and his texts clearly reveals the role `social status' played in forging his posthumous reputation. Soon after his death visual images of Donne were put into circulation as privileged signi®ers meant to sway responses to his life, writings, and the doctrines for which he was said to stand. The frontispiece to the fourth and ®fth editions of Donne's Devotions upon Emergent Occasions

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(1634, 1638) offered an iconographical feast for the eyes and mind (Figure 4).47 Here, surrounded by elaborate scroll-work, we ®nd a pictorial rendering of Donne's marble funeral monument perched in St Paul's Cathedral. Above his shrouded corpse hangs a laurel-wreathed skull, and to each side are two vertically arranged ovals depicting various biblical verses intended literally and ®guratively to frame Donne's identity and writings in pious coherence. In 1635 there appeared in London a octavo entitled Poems, By J.D. with Elegies on The Authors Death. More enigmatically even than the Devotions, this second edition of Donne's collected sacred and secular

Figure 4 Frontispiece from John Donne, Devotions (London, 1638)

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Conscience and Hagiology in Early Stuart England 145

146 Early Modern Metaphysical Literature

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verse contains a frontispiece portrait ± probably based on a miniature by Nicholas Hilliard or Isaac Oliver ± of a chivalric-looking young man dressed in a rather severe black doublet (Figure 5).48 The subject gazes forthrightly out at the viewer, clutching a sword hilt in his right hand;

Figure 5 Portrait from John Donne, Poems (London, 1635)

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an earring in the shape of a cross is suspended from his right ear lobe. Above the picture are inscriptions telling us that this likeness was taken in 1591 when Donne was eighteen years old; there is also a line of verse reading `Antes muerto que mudado', which is an adaptation of a line from Jorge de Montemayor's pastoral romance, La Diana. In English it translates best as `Sooner dead than changed'. Beneath the picture is an eight-line poem by Izaak Walton, Donne's friend and ®rst biographer, advancing a still-potent narrative of his subject's life as one of early license ± `youth, Strength, Mirth, and wit' ± followed by a settled state of religious sobriety in `those last, best Dayes'. Catherine Cresswell points out that, regarded in the context of early modern emblematics, Donne's youthful portrait draws attention to the contingent acts of `®guration' and interpretation that are involved in the production of meaning (p. 12). Walton's biographical fashioning of Donne into an Anglican saint highlights this process of manufacturing a pseudo-identity; in his hands, Donne becomes an esteemed representative of an ecclesiastical and political system under threat from opposing revolutionary factions. Countering Walton's Anglican hagiology, Dennis Flynn advances the claim that Donne's cross-shaped earring, Henrician collar, Spanish motto, and martial aura present the subject as a youthful exemplar of `swashbuckling' Welsh-Tudor Catholicism (`Portrait', p. 16, and passim). Uniting both accounts, however, is not what they see but how they read; each one begins with the premise that Donne's portrait possesses cultural and political meaning and proceeds to adumbrate it according to the cause to which Donne supposedly adhered. Walton even went so far as to mistranslate the portrait's fairly simple and relatively well-known line of Spanish poetry: instead of `Sooner dead than changed', Walton rendered it as `How much shall I be changed, / Before I am changed!' (p. 269), thereby further naturalizing Donne within an appealing hagiological conversion narrative.49 It is one of the marvellous coincidences of history that the frontispieces to the 1634 and 1638 Devotions, as well as the 1635 Poems, were executed by none other than William Marshall, the engraver who fashioned Eikon Basilike's saintly King Charles. In addition, the 1638 version of the Devotions was published by Richard Royston, the man who, eleven years later, would be responsible for the ®rst publication of both The Subjects Sorrow and Eikon Basilike. As these

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Conscience and Hagiology in Early Stuart England 147

connections testify, Donne was in excellent hagiological company. I can't help but think, however, that this man, whose writings (and the visual portraits commissioned during his life) so directly engage issues of representation, knowledge, and identi®cation, would have rather mischievously enjoyed witnessing the post-mortem public shaping of, and debates over, his own character and reputation. The real man, meanwhile, is undoubtedly a combination of swords, doublets, mottos, earrings, shrouds and a plethora of private thoughts and desires that remain silently and tantalizingly out of reach of hagiology's and literary criticism's inscriptive power. And so here I leave Donne, himself the strangest of all the Metaphysical texts yet known, to continue to delight and baf¯e the next millennium with his rich storehouse of personal and literary mysteries.

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It has been my central contention throughout this book that early modern Metaphysical literature cannot be fully comprehended unless one takes account of the relationship between nature, naturalness, and representation. I am fairly certain that there exists a concrete world of atoms, elms, boulders, and cats. As philosopher Kate Soper argues, however, physical nature `may recommend certain types of action, and it will always have its say in determining the effects of what we do, but it does not enforce a politics' (p. 33). In other words, while three-dimensional nature may limit what humans can accomplish in terms of medicine or architecture, our thoughts, desires, identities, and actions acquire ideological meaning and value when they are deemed to be natural or unnatural. Over the course of this book we have seen that several of the familiar and lesser-known Metaphysical writers denaturalized many of English society's most important organizing and identifying ®ctions. Herbert, Marvell, Lanyer, Donne, and Crashaw introduced marvellous strangenesses into multiple ®elds of cultural reproduction. By way of wrapping up I would like to suggest that their modes of seeing provide us with an interpretative legacy that continues to be meaningful in the context of our own encounters with customary nature and its attendant politics. Bringing forward the issues explored in the previous chapter, one of the most curious of contemporary phenomena is a resurgence of both popular and ecclesiastical saint-making. Stage director Richard Eyre recently noted that `In Britain, Shakespeare is our icon, our emblem, our logo, our talisman, our secular saint, our patriarch, our 149

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Afterword: Saints and Sinners for a New Millennium

sage, our national poet, our Bard of Britannia, our Man of the Millennium, the heart of Great Britain plc' (p. 5). As Eyre's identity catalogue makes clear, St William of Stratford satis®es a plethora of interests, from the theatrical to the ®scal and beyond. Not unrelated to the Bard's talismanic power, over the last few years interest in England's traditional patron saint has also expanded exponentially. During my youth in Northern Ontario, good old St George was merely a name I associated with a springtime rummage sale and tea party at our local Anglican church. Over the last few years, though, this scourge of dragons and princess-rescuer extraordinaire has been taken off the curio shelf and given a PR scrub. In 1999, Clinton Cards in the UK sold 60,000 greeting cards to commemorate St George's feast day on 23 April (which, not coincidentally, is also celebrated as Shakespeare's birthday). Four years ago such a card did not even exist. The remarkable proliferation along high streets and in tourist information centres of T-shirts, hats, and ¯ags emblazoned with St George's cross further con®rms this burst of patriotism and savvy marketing of an ancient national star. What The Times refers to as an example of a new `pseudo-Anglophilia' is probably the result of English people yearning for a public symbology akin to that which has recently been discovered and devised by their river-dancing and bagpipeplaying Celtic neighbours (`Dragon Slayer'). While England's Redcrosse Knight has been considered a saint longer than memory or history serve, the (to use Donne's term) `wheeles' of the canonization process itself have become much clearer in recent years. With their deaths in 1997, Mother Teresa and Linda McCartney transcended the bounds of garden-variety respect and acquired vast public recognition and honour. For Mother Teresa, the Vatican has pulled out all the stops and has waived the standard ®ve-year waiting period before proceeding with the of®cial inquiry into her candidacy for sainthood (`Mother Teresa'). This innovation is undoubtedly part and parcel of Pope John Paul II's canonization of more saints than any other pontiff in history (`Saints go marching in'), a practice that bears a strong resemblance to the Counter-Reformation surge in saintgeneration as a way to shore up the Roman Catholic Church's prestige and in¯uence. Even old saints are today ripe candidates for renovation, with Rome now pondering whether to make Isidore of Seville (the sixth-century encyclopaedist) the patron of the Internet and, as Richard Woods puts it, `the religious saviour of harassed computer

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users' (`Catholics want saint'). (St Clare, by the way, already watches over our television sets.) Meanwhile, commenting on Lady McCartney's secular canonization, reporter Cal McCrystal notes that the reaction to the death of this beloved vegetarian and animal-rights activist marks a sea-change in public mourning practices and the role of celebrities in mass culture: `The criteria for sainthood have changed. And so have we. . . . Since few today are familiar with the occupants of the hallowed calendar, they pray publicly to saints of their own making' (`Fans demand'). The most spectacular canonization of late has, undoubtedly, been the hagiological elevation of Princess Diana. For many people in Western Europe and North America, the turbulent life and sad end of the People's Princess has become a topic for both cocktail-party chatter as well as books and television specials which run the gamut of sensationalist ¯uff to sober analysis. Her death has emerged as a crucial `where were you when you heard the news?' event along the lines of JFK's assassination and his son's recent demise off Martha's Vineyard. As columnist Margaret Wente observed a few days after the Paris crash: In her death, Diana has triumphed in ways that she never would have by merely living. She and her causes at last achieved the seriousness and respect she craved. . . . . she became the people's Queen of Hearts, just as she had longed to be, on a scale that neither she nor anyone else could possibly have imagined. Diana's transit from loose cannon to canonization has been swifter than her transit from the wreck to the grave. (`Who killed her?') Whether one is positively impressed by the ¯ood of money into the Princess of Wales Memorial Fund or horri®ed by the explosion of kitsch memorabilia, it seems true that by `merely living' Diana would never have become the icon of heavenly grace, compassion, and suffering into which she has been transformed. Support for this mythologizing has, for various reasons, come under scrutiny by a dissident minority. For instance, Diana's canonization so unsettled the Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland that, not long after her extraordinary Westminster Abbey funeral (which was watched by the largest television audience in history), it issued a terse condemnation of those people who over-mourned her

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Afterword: Saints and Sinners 151

passing. In the Reverend Neil Ross's words, `To show proper civil respect at the death of those of high status is one thing, to speak of them as if they were to be worshipped is deplorable' (`England'). Aside from the disturbance that Diana's apotheosis caused to Calvinist scruples, Martyn Gregory has recently illuminated some of the lessthan-savoury politics of the Princess's canonization. In Diana: The Last Days, Gregory argues, for example, that Mohammed Fayed (the father of Diana's boyfriend Dodi, who also perished under the Pont d'Alma) quickly harnessed her saintly aura in order to advance his own quite earth-bound interests. Two years after the tragedy, Margaret Wente has also revised her initial evaluation: `Today, the world has moved on. Diana wasn't a saint after all; she was a soapopera star. The show is over, and we've seen all the reruns several times' (`Fifth Column'). If this is true, then perhaps in a decade or so this unlucky woman will be left alone to rest in a green and tranquil corner of England. What now stands out as clear is the fact that through the agency of the Vatican, vegans, or celebrity-watchers and the paparazzi, hagiology remains, as Donne and Crashaw recognized centuries ago, a matter of making things mean in particular ways. Where canonization is concerned, neither merely living nor merely dying are enough. However intriguing it may be for cultural studies conferences and weekend newspapers, the question of whether or not a member of the British aristocracy inspires widespread adoration in rituals that are indebted to religious traditions is, in the ®nal analysis, of relatively small importance to how most people live their lives. Metaphysical denaturalization has, meanwhile, a much more urgent role to play in analysing and resisting the political regulation of gender and sexuality. In our own period, this phenomenon is particularly implicated in discourses of nature and the unnatural that have their roots in early modern debates and transformations. When an American pastor named Fred Phelps sends his followers to Ottawa to torch the Canadian ¯ag because he deems the Supreme Court's protection of lesbian and gay rights to be an act of demonic perversity (Pritchett), this is a vivid manifestation of a long-standing opposition toward supposedly unnatural ± and therefore unholy ± homosexuality. Delving further into the history of sexual morality, as I argued earlier it was at roughly the same time as the Metaphysicals were writing that

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same-gender desire and eroticism began to be subjected to a marked increase in cultural and juridical demonization that is still disturbingly familiar to many people. We have already encountered Andrew Marvell's mid-seventeenth-century dissident regard for singular, `streight' accounts of desire and destiny. Marvell's Metaphysical insights, it is important to note, were not the peculiar fantasies of a village eccentric. In the contemporaneous writings of Thomas Hobbes we ®nd evidence that what I have been calling the Metaphysical perspective was more widely shared and has been of greater importance to subsequent developments in Western culture than has hitherto been acknowledged. Based on his study of Leviathan, R. S. White argues that Hobbes initiated a radical inversion of received Natural Law precepts and a consequent reduction of their importance to both law and literature (pp. 243±50). In a related manner, Hobbes's The Elements of Law offers an analysis of sexual ethics that can prove corrosive to normative views because it illuminates the culturally contingent basis of prejudice.1 Hobbes argues that `in them who have sovereign authority: not to forbid such copulations as are against the use of nature' (as well as promiscuity, polygamy, and incest) is `against the law of nature' (p. 173). Like the most recent editor of the Elements, I believe that Hobbes's reference to `copulations as are against the use of nature' refers primarily to same-gender sexual interaction (Gaskin, p. 278).2 Despite his harsh rhetoric, though, Hobbes quali®es his point by observing that it is `not evident, that a private man living under the law of natural reason only, doth break the same, by doing any of these things aforesaid.' Hobbes makes clear that an act only becomes a crime ± that is, `against nature' ± when a public authority intervenes on behalf of speci®c objectives such as the `increase of mankind' (p. 173). A `private' person's erotic desires and activities signify no moral ¯aw and are well within the limits of `natural reason'; it takes some form of public proscription and strategic representation in order to create shame, disgrace, and reasons for punishment.3 Earlier in his treatise, Hobbes reveals that he fully comprehends the non-essential quality of the values that he is propagating as natural. In his discussion of love, he initially argues that the affection Socrates felt for Alcibiades was entirely orientated towards furthering his handsome

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154 Early Modern Metaphysical Literature

There is something in it savouring of the use of that time: in which matter though Socrates be acknowledged for continent, yet continent men have the passion they contain, as much or more than they that satiate the appetite; which maketh me suspect this platonic love for merely sensual; but with an honourable pretence for the old to haunt the company of the young and beautiful. (p. 57) With a wink and a nod, Hobbes informs us that in ancient Greece, according to `the use of that time', male±male love fell well within the bounds of nature. Socrates could at one and the same time become the most important ®gure in Western philosophy, educate Alcibiades, and satisfy his erotic appetite for `the young and beautiful'.4 In midseventeenth-century England, however, standards had metamorphosed and new values had been naturalized in an ethical system engineered according to revised de®nitions of what constitutes `temporal good' and human `improvement' (p. 173). Hobbes does not comment directly on why this change in values came about, but he does recognize that while `Custom of itself maketh no law', it may through a series of erroneous interpretations and decisions come to be `numbered amongst the written laws of the commonwealth' (p. 182). His observation makes one suspect that homophobic laws are, in large part, the result of the failure of judicial reason and historical knowledge.5 Not unlike the Metaphysicals, Hobbes recognized that customs, traditions, and laws abridge the liberty of human desire, at the same time as desire itself has the power to resist and confound those ordering principles. Twentieth-century Western cultures have inherited the normative sexual values that Hobbes and others propounded over 300 years ago, yet we have also received from the past an array of denaturalizing perspectives. The recent brouhaha over and defeats of Age of Consent legislation in the British House of Lords testi®es to the frightening continuance of reprehensible attitudes towards homosexuality.6 Cultural theorists and social activists are, meanwhile, engaged in a struggle to defeat homophobic norms by demonstrating their origins in particular economic and political circumstances. Julia Epstein, Eve Sedgwick, Michael Warner, Simon Watney, and numerous others have shown that

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young friend's education. Yet, near the end of his commentary, Hobbes shifts gears and enters a more realistic frame, admitting that

explanatory narratives of the natural course of desire are created in order to contain people within recognized and sanctioned emotional and behavioural patterns. Epstein, for instance, clari®es the manner in which the habitual linkage between AIDS and homosexuality in medico-legal discourses has come about largely through efforts to shore up traditional notions of transgressive sexuality and desire that AIDS has radically undermined (pp. 165±9). Operating along similar lines, for the last decade academic and political practitioners of queer theory have endeavoured to `ambiguate' identities and to demonstrate how, in the `political environments of sexuality', the private and the public intermingle (Berlant and Warner, pp. 345±7). While early modern Metaphysical literature uses different language and addresses now-dusty political contexts, one of the main reasons I continue to ®nd it so fascinating is because its denaturalizing interests provocatively overlap with those of many cultural materialist, lesbian and gay, and queer theorists and creative writers. In his condemnation of his fellow Peers' stand against the Age of Consent amendment, Lord Williams of Mostyn pointed out that `There is a world outside, it is inhabited by the young, and the different live there' (quoted in Gill). It seems to me that our new-millennial world, vigorously and vividly inhabited by `the different', is in many ways in sympathetic alignment with the Metaphysical passion for strangeness that circulated in England almost four centuries ago. This book has been written out of the belief that old texts can have an impact on how we see our world. They hold the potential to make us ask questions about why we read as we do, as well as to challenge our assumptions with new perspectives on how life might be lived. One would be hard pressed, for instance, to deny that Marvell's admonition that `The Grave's a ®ne and private place, / But none I think do there embrace' (`To his Coy Mistress', ll. 31±2) still possesses the ability to shake one out of life's too-frequent somnambulist phases. In addition, because it focuses so intently on the operations of desire as it encounters naturalized precepts, Metaphysical literature gets to the heart of moral differences and how they are formed. As a group, these ®ve authors who so strongly capture my interest reveal that whether in love, religion, or politics, meaning and identities are communally engendered, contested, and transformed by people whose desires often run wonderfully contrary to normative de®nitions and representations of truth and virtue. Early modern Metaphysical literature therefore

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Afterword: Saints and Sinners 155

holds out hope for the survival of critical distance, dissidence, and reformulation in highly determined cultural and political settings. Perhaps this prospect of the survival of strangeness most quali®es it as a timely body of texts for our own contemporary societies as they undergo heated debates over the respective rights and responsibilities of public authorities and private citizens.

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Notes to the Introduction 1. In the interest of readability, following this note I will cease my use of scare-quotes around `nature' and related terms; I hope that the ideological weight of these concepts will, nevertheless, remain apparent. 2. Yachnin's suggestion that courtly literature and non-literary prose were probably more `volatile' than dramatic texts tallies with my own understanding of non-dramatic writing (see Yachnin, pp. 54±6). 3. George Held's discussion of the relationship between the Herbert siblings is a good example of the traditional valorization of the pious vicar of Bemerton against the supposedly brash and somewhat nasty courtier/ dilettante/gay blade. 4. My deployment of quotation marks around this ®rst use of the term `lesbian' signi®es a recognition that, though critically useful today, the word would not have carried the same meaning in early modern England; the term will go unmarked throughout the rest of the book. 5. A sampling of the scholarly ®eld indicates the prevalence of the usual group. Joan Bennett's Four Metaphysical Poets (1934) includes Crashaw, Donne, George Herbert, and Vaughan; her revised edition, Five Metaphysical Poets (1964), adds Marvell to the mix. Barbara Lewalski and Andrew Sabol's anthology Major Poets of the Earlier Seventeenth Century (1973) reiterates the group of ®ve, as does Donald Mackenzie's more recent study The Metaphysical Poets (1990). Richard Willmott's collection, Four Metaphysical Poets (1985), drops Crashaw. The Modern Language Association of America's pedagogical guidebook, Approaches to Teaching the Metaphysical Poets (1990), includes essays which usefully illuminate the connections between Metaphysical authors and, amongst others, Ben Jonson, Tottel's poets, and seventeenth-century emblematists; however, in the `Approaches to Speci®c Poets' section of the text, the ®ve canonical Metaphysicals are again selected for in-depth scrutiny. Frances Austin's The Language of the Metaphysical Poets (1992) substitutes Thomas Traherne for Marvell, while Janis Lull's The Metaphysical Poets: A Chronology (1994), includes Donne, George Herbert, Crashaw, Marvell, Vaughan, and Traherne. 6. On Gardner's canonizing and critical in¯uence, see Nigel Smith's essay `The Metaphysical Penguin'. While I agree with Smith that Gardner's Introduction and selection need to be reconsidered, I am dismayed by his view that Metaphysical literature is mere `distraction' for young writers (p. 112). 7. Helgerson, for instance, remarks that `in early modern England the language of politics was most often the language of religion' (Nationhood, p. 252); see also Shuger, Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance.

157

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Notes

8. Konrad Eisenbichler discusses mystical sublimation in Michelangelo's religious poetry, usefully adding an awareness of how homoeroticism complicates the picture. For correlative commentary, see James Saslow's introduction and notes to his translation of Michelangelo's poems. 9. See, for instance, George Herbert's condemnation of `this world of sug'red lies' in `The Rose' and `Dullness'. Richard Rambuss, Michael Schoenfeldt, and Richard Strier challenge entirely spiritualized readings of many of Herbert's lyrics, notably `The Pearl', `Sinnes Round', `The Flower', `Love (III)', and `Perirrhanterium'. 10. Mark Breitenberg's study Anxious Masculinity is a rare and welcome exception to the practice of separating homo- and heteroerotic matters. 11. For more on Natural Law, see Heinrich Rommen's The Natural Law: A Study in Legal and Social History and Philosophy and the papers gathered together in Natural Law Theory: Contemporary Essays (ed. Robert George). Especially in terms of sexuality (a concern that White acknowledges as the most vexed for Natural Law [p. 11]) I have also bene®ted from Richard McCabe's Incest, Drama and Nature's Law, 1550±1700. 12. This illustration of Emblem LXXX from Alciati's Emblemata has been supplied courtesy of Glasgow University Library, Department of Special Collections. 13. For an in-depth discussion of the Christian injunction against `unnatural' (especially female±female) sexual relations, see Bernadette Brooten's exemplary analysis of St Paul's Epistle to the Romans 1: 18±32 (pp. 215±66). Brooten argues that accusations of homoerotic unnaturalness in the ancient Roman/early Christian world were rooted in culturally contrived gender asymmetry (pp. 216, 234±7, 256, 264, 281, 301). Her ®ndings on the connections between gender and sexuality help to illuminate manifestations of negative evaluations in later times and other places. While the topic is beyond the scope of my study, early modern conceptualizations of gender and sexual nature and disorder are also deeply indebted to mediaeval precursors. Jeffrey Richards's wide-ranging study is an excellent introduction to this subject. More speci®cally, one might also consider Dame Nature's pronouncements in Alan of Lille's The Plaint of Nature (e.g., Metre 1, Prose 4, and Prose 5) and the learned tradition of moralized interpretations of Ovid (the so-called ovide moralise ). On the former, see Jan Ziolkowski's book and a rather different reading by Mark Jordan (pp. 67±91). On the latter, Fausto Ghisalberti provides a good introduction. 14. The classic debunking of Jonson's myth-making is found in Raymond Williams's The Country and the City. 15. The secondary literature on the misogynist exemplars of the querelle des femmes is now relatively vast. The question of the naturalization of gender inequality is, however, discussed with particular depth by Merry Wiesner, Linda Woodbridge, and Anthony Fletcher (who offers a comparative analysis of masculinity and femininity; on women's supposed natural inferiority, see esp. his chapter entitled `The Weaker Vessel' [pp. 60±82]). 16. Knox bases his misogynist rhetoric principally on the authority of Aristotle and St Paul. The immediate inspiration for his blast was the

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158 Notes

17. 18.

19. 20. 21.

22.

objectionable rule of the two queens of Scotland and England, `our mischeuous Maryes' (p. 41v ). His comments are also spiced with antiCatholic prejudice (see p. 30r�v ). R. S. White situates More and his text within a Natural Law framework, with particular regard to the political considerations of the early sixteenthcentury struggle between Natural Law and positive law (pp. 107±33). In a letter to Sir Henry Goodyer (May±June 1609), Donne employs similar imagery to make an analogy between `the Primitive diet and custome' of eating `Akornes' and `such formes, and dressings of Religion, as would distemper and misbecome us, and make us corrupt towards God' (Letters, p. 101). Donne's point here is not to disparage religious practices that do not conform to his own, but to posit the culturally determined nature of devotional habits. While it is less vehemently stated, Donne's position shares much in common with his earlier `Paradox IV'. Helgerson's discussion of the symbolic opposition between the barbarity and naturalness of acorns and the civility of wheat bread in early modern cultural debates (Nationhood, pp. 29±33) provides a context for Donne's declarations which align him, at least provisionally, with men like Roger Ascham, Sidney, and Spenser, who advocated an `active model of self-fashioning' based on a knowledge of historical difference (Nationhood, p. 29). Arthur Marotti brie¯y addresses how, in his unpublished treatise Biathanatos, Donne steers a discussion of the cultural basis of morality in ways that subvert King James's political prerogative (pp. 189±90). Jonathan Dollimore explores the Montaignean `decentring of man' in relation to early modern English drama and cultural materialist theory (Radical Tragedy, pp. 14±21, 173±4). Early modern courtesy literature is replete with testimonies to the instability of nature and the hegemony of culture. One of the most trenchant examples of this is found in Galateo, a mid-sixteenth-century dialogue written by the Italian archbishop and papal nuncio, Giovanni Della Casa, and ®rst translated into English by Robert Peterson in 1576. Della Casa credits the humanist belief in social and intellectual improvement, at the same time as he takes a sceptical attitude towards custom and the emptiness of courtesy rituals. `Ceremonies', he sighs, are not only lies, `but also Treacheries and Treasons' which too often lead people to ruin (p. 42; cf. pp. 43±4). For an exploration of courtesy books in the English context which pays attention to the highly scripted and strategic dimension of aristocratic conduct, see Frank Whigham's excellent study. See also Traherne's poem `Innocence'.

Notes to Chapter 1: Strangeness and Desire 1. Despite Johnson's importance in the history of employing `Metaphysical' as a literary term, in his Dictionary of the English Language he only de®nes the word and its cognates according to their philosophical/scienti®c senses.

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Notes 159

2. Other cognates for Metaphysical that one ®nds in the early seventeenth century include `transnatural' and `preternatural'. The de®nitions by Bullokar and Cockeram remained the standard models for Thomas Blount's Glossographia (1656), Elisha Coles's An English Dictionary (1676), John Kersey's A New English Dictionary (1702) and Dictionarium Anglo-Britannicum (1708), and James Buchanan's Linguae Britannicae Vera Pronunciatio (1757). Florio tinkers with these de®nitions but leaves their core meanings intact in his Vocabolario (1611; rev. edn 1659) and Queen Anna's New World of Wordes (1611). 3. John Partridge writes in a related manner in his mid-sixteenth-century pamphlet, The Great Wonders That Are Chaunced in the Realme of Naples. In the preface he notes that monsters, natural disasters, and other eerie phenomena are `signes and tokens, and things more than naturall' (preface; quoted in Brammall, p. 7, n.12). 4. On the debate over literature's moral legitimacy, see Peter Herman's excellent study. 5. Sidney directly confronts the principal Puritan and Platonic complaints in his Apology; note especially how he deftly transforms Plato from a foe into an ally (pp. 55±68). 6. See W. Rossky for an account of the mixed early modern appreciations of the imagination. 7. Outside of Britain, the ®rst recorded use of the term `Metaphysical' in conjunction with literature is the Italian poet Fulvio Ludovico Testi's (1593±1646) notice of `concetti metaphysici ed ideali' in the work of Giambattista Marino and related poets (Nethercot, p. 13). 8. On the relevant mid-sixteenth-century shift in the discourse of monstrosity from signifying outward deformity to inward unnaturalness, see Kathryn Brammall's discussion. 9. Arthur H. Nethercot records a number of uses between Dryden and Johnson of the term `Metaphysical' in relation to poetry. Comments by John Oldmixon, Elijah Fenton, Alexander Pope, Joseph Warton, and others, show that Johnson's deployment was a public and elaborate expression of a longstanding critical heritage (Nethercot, pp. 13±17). 10. The values Johnson expresses in his life of Cowley are not so far removed from ones held by many sixteenth- and seventeenth-century people. Lodowick Bryskett's Discourse of Civill Life (1606) is but one example of a widely credited theory of self-knowledge (stretching back at least as far as the early modern `rediscovery' of Plato) that placed great emphasis on a man's rational control of the self as the foundation for `the well gouerning of himselfe, of families, and Common-wealths' and of `the making of lawes and ordinances for the maintaining of vertue and beating downe of vice' (p. 166). Bryskett, Sidney, Dr Johnson, and many others agreed that the representation of this rational and natural order was the correct subject of good writing. 11. On the eighteenth-century ideology of sentiment, see Robert Markley's discussion of it as `a subtly coercive strategy of defusing class con¯ict', a subordination endeavour that `explicitly promotes narrowly conservative and essentialist views of class relations' (p. 212).

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160 Notes

12. Edward Young provides a classic and in¯uential account of literary originality in his Conjectures on Original Composition (1759), a text surely known to Johnson before he wrote the ®rst volume of Lives (1779). In this treatise, Young explicitly associates good literature with those who bring `their Imprimatur from sound Understanding, and the Public Good' (p. 4). A notion of the `public good' underwrites centuries of critical statements on the social function of art and the possibilities of original expression. See Joel Weinsheimer on Young's relation to neoclassical aesthetic principles. 13. Despite his general admiration, on occasion Johnson admits that even Shakespeare was susceptible to literary misdemeanours: `A quibble is to Shakespeare, what luminous vapours are to the traveller: he follows it at all adventures; it is sure to lead him out of his way, and sure to engulf him in the mire. It has some malignant power over his mind, and its fascinations are irresistible' (Preface, p. 19; cf. pp. 15±20). Shakespeare's blunders of aesthetic decorum entangle him in pursuits that resemble the sort which Johnson would later label Metaphysical. Not long after Johnson's Preface appeared, William Richardson defended England's bard as a `genuine and original Poet, peculiarly favoured by nature', and one who knew the human mind by `immediate intuition', not by `a long train of Metaphysical deductions' (p. 5; cf. pp. 18, 29). One wonders to what extent these comments are the result of a Johnsonian in¯uence. See also Nethercot's quotation from an anonymous Dialogue on Taste (1762), which asserts that with the disappearance of Metaphysical literature, nature can be revealed in poetry that `re¯ect[s] the things that are' (p. 16). 14. Closer to our own time, Eliot's continuing in¯uence ± particularly his emphasis on the unifying aspirations and perspectives of Metaphysical writers ± is also evident in, for example, Donald Mackenzie's general handbook to the Metaphysicals and Gregory Dime's dismissal of the relevance of `countercultural' criticism to Metaphysical studies (p. 14). Rather surprisingly, Eliot's shadow looms even over studies of Donne by John Carey and Jonathan Goldberg. The historian Blair Worden rehearses an Eliotian understanding of seventeenth-century poetry when he aligns Metaphysical and Cavalier poetry with the Royalist cause (p. 178). In what follows, it will become clear that critics who discuss literary Metaphysicality often devote most of their attention to Donne, the author who is frequently characterized as a `father' of other writers or the leader of a `school' of poetry. On Donne's popularity and his overshadowing of other authors in Metaphysical studies, see Gary Waller (p. 224) and Annabel Patterson (`Tradition', p. 39). While Donne's work receives the most attention in the present chapter, I hope that my comments will provide a useful orientation to writings by other Metaphysicals. 15. Smith's perspective on religion in conjunction with Metaphysical literature is also based on that of White's predecessor, S. L. Bethell; on Bethell's work, see Smith's discussion (pp. 5, 67±8).

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Notes 161

16. Gary Waller argues that Donne's reputation soared in the twentieth century because the narrative of his transformation from Jack Donne into Doctor Donne appealed to twentieth-century liberal values (p. 224). On the topic of Donne's idealized life history, Haskin notes that for numerous late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century critics (such as Grosart and Gosse) who chose to read Donne's poems as entirely self-referential, the poet's life revealed an attractive Augustinian conversion from moral dissolution to spiritual redemption (pp. 880±1). Smith's reiteration of the story appears to derive from both the liberal and Augustinian perspectives. 17. David Norbrook also shares Strier's perspective on Donne's work; he discusses the `genuine radical impulse' in the Songs and Sonnets (pp. 13, 17) and Donne's anti-classical interests in medieval and Spanish literature and theology (p. 6). 18. Strier explicates the Empson±Tuve debate carried out in letters and published essays (pp. 13±26). See also John Haffenden's introduction to his edition of Empson's essays (pp. 5±7); Haffenden also offers numerous insights into Empson's related opposition to Gardner's `imaginative limitations' (pp. 9±15, 17±19, 21, 23±5, 47, 50±61). 19. The impact of Tuve's approach can still be felt today, for instance in Frances Austin's The Language of the Metaphysical Poets, in which the author presents style as re¯ective of an apolitical universe of thought, a supposition that is underscored by her consistent resolution of each writer's concerns to a quest for religious security free from worldly care. 20. Empson was not entirely alone in his evaluations; for instance, at about the same time, the language historian Richard Foster Jones noted that seventeenth-century linguistic borrowing possessed `a different spirit [than the Elizabethan habit], something akin to the Metaphysical, a seeking for the strange and out of the way' (p. 272). 21. Nashe's editor points out that this Latin epigram belongs to St Augustine (`The habit of sinning takes away the sense of sin') (p. 117, n.305). 22. See also Maggie Kilgour's related discussion of the creation of the modern, uni®ed subject in terms of a Protestant internalization of religion that led to `the replacement of God by the individual, both person and author, as source and guarantee of meaning' (p. 167). 23. See Kevin Sharpe for an analysis of the largely condemnatory reception of Machiavelli in England, as well as Machiavellianism's contribution to the destabilization of of®cial state ideology (Politics and Ideas, pp. 25±8). See also Hobbes's Machiavellian comments on pagan religion and its social utility (Leviathan, p. 177). Sin®eld quotes Robert Burton and Louis Althusser in order to make a similar point (Faultlines, p. 165). 24. Foucault explains his theory of the mutual implication of power and resistance in The History of Sexuality, vol. 1 (pp. 92±102). See Ryan's related discussion of how liberalism provides `levers' and `instruments of struggle' that can be used against the system itself (p. 150). Like Sin®eld, Ryan also uses the metaphor of `fault lines' (sic) to explain the place where `material desire and cultural representation intersect' and out of which dissidence can emerge (p. 133; cf. p. 141). See also Giddens's analysis of how

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162 Notes

`competent' social agents can interrogate and potentially undermine the systems within which they exist (pp. 70±1). 25. Chambers's view of change is supported by what Giddens notes of the contingency of social systems; even a minor change, Giddens argues, `implicates the totality' (p. 114). My understanding of cultural change has also been in¯uenced by Clifford Geertz's anthropological approach to an `ethnography of thinking' (see pp. 45±9, 102±9, 154). 26. The Augustinian relation of desire to morality ®nds its most trenchant articulation in relation to sexuality and the shame with which it is associated. See John M. Bowers's comments on Augustine, shame, and sexuality (pp. 404±5). On Augustine's formative in¯uence on postclassical Western sexual mores, see the work by Peter Brown and as well as that by Elaine Pagels; Mark Jordan discusses Augustine's concept of `disordered desire' (libido) in relation to the mediaeval `invention' of sodomy (pp. 35, 63, 148±9). 27. The representation of `The Author being caried by his horse Will to the palace of disordered liuers', found in Stephen Bateman's The Travayled Pylgrime (a text on which Spenser draws in Book I of The Faerie Queene) provides a clear visual and verbal example of desire's long-standing association with moral disorder (G1r ).

Notes to Chapter 2: Edward Herbert 1. For Walpole's other epistolary references to Herbert's text, see his Correspondence (2:139±40; 30:175; 35:342). 2. In his introduction to Herbert's Autobiography, Sir Sidney Lee points out that Dr John Leland (1691±1766) `christened' Herbert as the arch-Deist in his View of the Principal Deistical Writers (p. lv). Herbert's status as a Deist primarily rests on his treatise De Religione Gentilium (1663). John Butler illuminates the relations between Herbert and Deism, basically arguing that while the label does not exactly ®t, Herbert's dissatisfaction with seventeenth-century Christianity and his support of private reason and intuition do align him with numerous Deist sentiments and principles (Lord Herbert, pp. 209±25). As Butler comments elsewhere, De Religione Gentilium (translated by Butler as Pagan Religion) is `certainly not another Christian apology, but a real polemic, a call for religious rethinking if not for complete reorganisation' (`Introduction', Pagan, p. 22). My own study does not take up Herbert's Deistic thread, though I do consider his dissident philosophy of religion to be part and parcel of his denaturalizing orientation generally. 3. Jonson is referring to Donne's elegy on Prince Henry who died in 1612. Both poets' laments appeared in the third edition of Joshua Sylvester's elegiac collection, Lachrymñ Lachrymarum (1613). 4. Although I would not want to rule out the possibility, I am not claiming here that De Veritate is the direct source of inspiration for later Metaphysical writings. My point is merely that Herbert's text makes

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Notes 163

5. 6. 7.

8.

9. 10.

11.

12. 13.

explicit certain epistemological and cultural tenets which inform to varying degrees the work of others studied in this book. On the sceptical or Pyrrhonian background to Herbert's thought, see Bedford (pp. 35±62). Herbert discusses the Common Notions in De Veritate (pp. 289±303) and again in his later treatise, De Religione Gentilium (pp. 52, 59; all DRG citations are to Butler's translation of the text under the title Pagan Religion). Butler provides an excellent discussion of the philosophical background to, and content of, De Veritate (Lord Herbert, pp. 123±237); see especially his concise explication of the Common Notions (pp. 154±7, 168±9). My understanding of Herbert's eirenicism has bene®ted from Butler's introduction to Pagan Religion (see esp. pp. 11±16). Andrew Tadie also draws connections between Herbert's religious tolerance and William Davenant's deployment of the tenets of natural religion in his 1656 opera The Siege of Rhodes. Herbert's defence of free will also possesses a moral dimension; countering the Calvinist doctrine of predestination, he asks in the same part of the treatise, `How could anyone be good who is incapable of wickedness?' (DV, p. 164). In his essay on Cowley, Johnson de®nes Metaphysical discordia concors as `a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike' (p. 11). Herbert's odoriferousness associates him with no less a ®gure than Alexander the Great. Plutarch recounts that the Macedonian's `skin had a maruelous good sauor, & . . . his breath was very swete, insomuch, that his body had so swete a smell of it selfe, that all the apparell he wore next vnto his body, tooke thereof a passing delightful sauor, as if it had bene perfumed' (p. 723). As Lawrence Stone notes, aristocratic self-regard was not all sunshine and erudition; it could lead to unpleasant demonstrations of inhumanity, as it did when Herbert and his friend Sir Thomas Lucy abandoned a sinking ship and its plebeian crew by commandeering (at sword-point) the only rescue boat (Autobiography, pp. 109±10; see Stone, Crisis, p. 18). Sidney Lee provides an account of these events in his continuation of Herbert's life appended to the Autobiography (pp. 251±302); see also Butler (pp. 455±62). Rossi prints the principal documents relating to Herbert's surrender of Montgomery Castle to Sir Thomas Middleton (pp. 521±6); except for seven beds, some `hangings', and bits of furniture, Herbert kept most of his possessions. In addition, all the occupants of the castle were guaranteed the `free liberty to goe out of the said castle, and carry away their goods and money whensoever they will' (Rossi, p. 523); these and other documents relating to the `capitulation' to `Parliament's protection' and Herbert's attendant ®nancial losses (amounting to thousands of pounds) can also be found in W. J. Smith's Herbert Correspondence (pp. 115±31). Sidney Lee narrates King Charles's pecuniary neglect and mistreatment of Herbert and the latter's unsuccessful bids to gain royal favour (pp. 257±71).

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164 Notes

14. See Mervyn James's discussion of this aspect of aristocratic dissidence (p. 410) and McCoy's full account of Essex's arrogant, `dangerous' chivalry (pp. 79±102). See also Herbert's manuscript ruminations on the limits of the nobility's duty to defend an `ill governor', yet another re¯ection of, as Mario Rossi notes, `lo spirito feudale' (pp. 493±5). James points out that Tudor monarchs had sought to deploy the symbol of a godly prince's providential rule in large part to contain the potential dissidence provoked by a chivalric honour system (pp. 310±38). 15. This discussion of chivalry's potentially dissident orientation ought to be balanced by a recognition that, as J. S. A. Adamson notes, `In early Stuart England, chivalry was a rhetoric of ideals and values, not a precise political or moral code' (p. 164). Thus, amongst the social e lite in Caroline England, Adamson shows, various models drawn from `a diverse and pluralistic chivalric culture' (p. 193) were successfully recon®gured to support not only the king and his policies, but eventually the Parliamentarians as well. 16. Herbert's autobiography is chock-a-block with the cult of duelling; see, for instance, pp. 116±26. Using French examples, Jorge Arditi analyses early modern duelling in terms of aristocratic honour and symbolic capital. Arditi notes that duelling occupied a ®ne line between reaf®rming noble self-worth and imperilling both the aristocracy and the monarch through chaotic departures from a harmonious ideal of a `collective self' (pp. 129±32). Sidney Lee appends to Herbert's biography a useful account of duelling during the early seventeenth century, again emphasizing the perceived danger `private quarrels' posed to social stability (pp. 321±5). For more on duelling in the period, see V. G. Kiernan. 17. Masuch locates the fully-¯edged development of the `individualist self' in eighteenth-century England, particularly (and no doubt controversially) with the appearance in 1791 of the popular autobiography, Memoirs of the First Forty-Five Years of the Life of James Lackington. 18. Cole's comment may have been sparked by Walpole's own intriguing prefatory claim that readers of Herbert's autobiography `will ®nd, that the History of Don Quixote was the Life of Plato' (Life A3v ). 19. Oliver's portrait of Herbert has been supplied courtesy of the Earl of Powis and the National Trust Photographic Library (photographer: John Hammond). Alas, Herbert does not mention this portrait in his memoirs. He does, however, discuss the rather racy history of another Oliver miniature (copied from an original by William Larkin) that, in 1611, seems to have engendered some very bad blood between himself and Sir John Ayres. Their blood feud arose because Lady Ayres `caused it [i.e., Herbert's portrait] to be set in gold and enamelled, and so wore it about her neck so low that she hid it under her breasts' (p. 128). Sir John's jealousy ultimately erupted in a `bloody history' between the two men (pp. 129±40). It seems likely to me that this trouble, sparked by Oliver's reproduction of another painter's work, led to Herbert's commissioning of the chivalric cabinet miniature to be executed by Oliver himself; the recent history of hand-to-hand combat with Sir John would, in part, explain the sitter's selection of the tournament motif. The gothicism of

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Notes 165

20.

21.

22. 23.

24. 25.

26.

27. 28.

this martial imagery is probably also indebted to the importance of tournaments and related functions at the court (and in portraits) of Prince Henry who had died unexpectedly in 1612; on Henry's imagery and the related `chivalric heyday of the tournament,' see Adamson (pp. 162±3, 165±6). It should also be noted that Isaac Oliver was frequently employed in Henry's courtly demimonde. Tabitha Barber notes that the `traditionalism' of the subject is `offset by the innovatory and Dutch-inspired realism of the landscape setting' (p. 139). Katherine Coombs's chapter on English miniature painting from the midsixteenth to the early seventeenth centuries provides excellent background information on the styles, techniques, and social importance of portraits such as the one considered here (pp. 28±45). In this chapter she also discusses Oliver and his refreshing endeavours. Strong's examination of Oliver's life and work is also essential to grasping the cultural importance of the Herbert miniature (pp. 142±85). Strong provides a parallel example of a winged heart from George Wither's 1635 collection, Emblemes; there, it signi®es an ascent to `sublime' knowledge and `Heavenly wisedome' (p. 184). While Wither's book postdates Oliver's painting by about twenty years, the highly traditional nature of European emblematics makes it likely that Herbert and his artist intended some sort of related meaning by their devices. I am indebted to Elizabeth Sauer for sharing with me her thoughts on Herbert's Cavalier traits. Herbert's Autobiography offers an entertaining account of his participation in the siege. If one believes him, his time was principally spent performing reckless feats of derring-do and searching out opportunities to ®ght duels (pp. 112±24). This behaviour was repeated at the second siege of Juliers in 1614 (pp. 142±51). Among his own writings, the tone and content of Donne's epistle resembles most closely `Metempsycosis' and the socially-mocking satires. Herbert's editor provides a useful pre cis of `The State-progress', one of the poet's most recondite texts (pp. 142±4). While Smith frequently translates `ill' as `evil', I prefer to retain Herbert's word because it conveys a sense of inward rottenness that is a major aspect of the poem's vitriol. Herbert's antipathy towards normative religious practices and forms remained with him for the rest of his life. De Religione Gentilium, for instance, is replete with dissident commentaries on the ill-effects of priestly `inventions'; i.e., adulterations of true belief and worship in pre- and nonChristian societies (see pp. 52, 60, 63, 199, 284±5, 297, 299, 339, 344, 346). Towards the end of this text Herbert glanced at similar practices amongst Christians (pp. 347±50), a topic to which he returned in A Dialogue between a Tutor and his Pupil. Other highly Platonic poems by Herbert include `A Meditation upon his Wax-Candle burning out', and `The Idea, Made of Alnwick in his Expedition to Scotland with the Army, 1639'. Herbert's short `Epitaph on Sir Philip Sidney' testi®es to the younger poet's deep admiration for the Elizabethan poet-warrior.

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166 Notes

29. Hall very brie¯y situates Herbert's `blackness' poems as part of what she identi®es as a post-Petrarchan `subgenre' indebted to his brother George's Latin poem, `Aethiopissa ambit Cestum' (p. 120). While the younger Herbert's poem is remarkable for its defence of multiracial eroticism and is thus a good example of Metaphysical cultural dissidence, except for Edward's Herbert's `La Gialletta Gallante, or, The Sun-burn'd Exotique Beauty' I remain unconvinced by Hall's assertion that her selection of his poems shares this lineage and topical referentiality. If any relation does exist between the brothers' work, it seems more probable that inspirational priority be given to the elder's philosophical sonnets; `Aethiopissa' was probably written c. 1620 (Hutchinson, pp. 551, 596±8), a date that leaves ample time for a prior composition of Edward's texts. 30. G. C. Moore Smith offers `irradiated' as a probable gloss on `diapred' (p. 153). 31. These ®ve poems on blackness also appear in the same sequence as a group in the most important Herbert poetry manuscript (corrected in the author's hand), Add. MS 37157, now at the British Library. 32. See St John's `En una noche obscura' (`Once in the dark of night'). 33. Mary Norton supposes that the poem rejects typical Christian consolation for a `reassurance of the symbiotic relationship between life and earth' (p. 168). Although Herbert does speak of the dead person as having `enrich'd' the earth as well as heaven with her/his beauty, the ®nal stanza reveals that this is only one possibility and not a certainty. 34. Arthur Marotti also labels Herbert as Donne's `poetic disciple' (p. 199). I am not, though, altogether comfortable with discipleship as a way of conceiving of their relationship. While it is clear that the younger man at times did look to the elder poet for a model and inspiration, to call Herbert a `disciple' of Donne too easily contributes to a traditional marginalization of Herbert's work in the English literature canon by rendering his voice and insights at best secondary and derivative. Herbert's inclusion in this book reveals other aims on my part. 35. Butler is probably correct to read Herbert's focus on linguistic insuf®ciency as a complaint directed at Charles I for not patronizing true poets (Lord Herbert, p. 468); however, I believe that the philosophical considerations engulf any speci®c historical references. Herbert may also be echoing the opening of Donne's own poem, `An Elegy upon the Death of Mistress Boulstred': `Language thou art too narrow, and too weake/To ease us now; great sorrow cannot speake' (ll. 1±2). 36. Butler notes the similarities between Herbert's commentary on detractors and part of Donne's funeral sermon for his friend's mother, which condemns `aspersions' against the living and `calumnies' and `whisperings' against the dead (Lord Herbert, pp. 469; 6±7).

Notes to Chapter 3: Green Desires 1. Some of the more notable sex-gender researchers in the ®elds of early modern English history and literature are Alan Bray (a pioneer in this

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Notes 167

2. 3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8. 9.

area), Jonathan Goldberg, Bruce Smith, Claude Summers, and Valerie Traub. In a subsequent essay (`Perversion'), Traub elaborates on seventeenthcentury lesbian invisibility (in particular the `femme' role) and relates it to heteronormative strategies of abjection. Although it discusses the cultural and political history of same-gender female desire at a later date than the poems I examine, Emma Donoghue's Passions between Women: British Lesbian Culture, 1668±1801 complements my own work by dispelling `the myth that seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury lesbian culture was rarely registered in language' (p. 3). Similarly, in her study of same-gender female desire in history and literature from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, Terry Castle effectively rebuts what she calls `the no-lesbians-before-1900 myth' (p. 96). George Klawitter offers the most sustained reading of male homoeroticism in Donne's poetry; though generally insightful (see especially his chapter on Donne's verse correspondence with `T.W.'), Klawitter proposes many readings that are unwarranted by the texts, including one which maintains that `Sapho to Philñnis' is about love between two men. My common practice is to speak of gender rather than sex; however, it seems to me that the latter is more appropriate in the case of Aristophanes' quite embodied (indeed genital-focused) account of human desire and destiny. Empson claims further that once Marvell had sex with his supposed wife (it is unclear how Empson knows that they copulated), he would have been `much relieved' to ®nd that his `reactions' were `entirely normal; . . . [s]o he now felt equipped to get drunk with men, and thus coax them into doing what he wanted' (p. 87). Although the language of his essay is extremely ambiguous, it sounds as though Empson is implying a coercive, predatory sort of homosexuality, a conclusion that resembles the ad hominem Restoration vili®cations of Marvell. Paul Hammond has recently published a superb account of these pamphlet attacks which portray Marvell as sexually bizarre, `a ®gure of incoherence and excess' who illicitly and sodomitically departs from a heteronormative version of masculinity (p. 99). Paul Hammond's interpretations of Marvell's poetry in the light of Restoration calumnies discovers a number of homoerotic elements (largely routed through the ®gure of Narcissus) in the texts; his observations and suggestions support and, at times, coincide with my own attempt to understand erotic complexity in Marvell's work. Same-gender female sexuality, though, does not enter into Hammond's discussion. Not unlike Crewe, Hammond posits a `suave misogyny' in the narrator's yearning; he does discern, though, evidence of a `homoerotic subtext' in certain other lines (pp. 110±11). In his survey of pastoral precursors for Marvell's poems, Wilcher neglects to mention the genre's ancient homoerotic tradition (pp. 29±31). On homoeroticism in pastoral writings from the Greeks to the twentieth century, see my essay in The Gay and Lesbian Literary Heritage.

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168 Notes

10. Bruce Smith's discussion of male friendship in classical and Renaissance moral philosophy and culture illuminates Montaigne's and Marvell's thoughts on homoerotic male bonds (pp. 33±42). See also Jeffrey Masten's exploration of early modern male friendship and similitude in the context of literary production (pp. 28±37). Smith also provides a clear outline of early modern legal and ethical condemnations and proscriptions of samegender male erotic interaction (pp. 42±53); his account of a `narrowing' of focus in sodomy laws from religious to personal life provides a background for Marvell's probable disquiet over being prohibited to love whomever he pleased. 11. Informative political readings which have furthered my understanding of the poem include Don Cameron Allen's Image and Meaning (pp. 201±12); Michael Wilding's contextualization with regard to the 1650 Scots campaign, Royalism, threats from the Levellers, and the possibility that Fairfax might switch sides (pp. 138±72); Thomas Healy's poetically orientated interpretation of social and political anxiety; and Derek Hirst and Steven Zwicker's discussion of the poem's historical topicality vis-a -vis Lord Fairfax's controversial position during the summer of 1651. 12. Between 1650 and the autumn of 1652 Marvell resided at Fairfax's Nun Appleton House, tutoring his patron's daughter Mary (Maria in the poem) and writing some of his best-known poetry, including his panegyric on the estate. See Hunt and Pierre Legouis for more biographical details. 13. Surveying the many shapes Nun Appleton House took over the years, Hunt points out that when Marvell sojourned with them the Fairfaxes were `living ``in a modest house cobbled up out of part of the nunnery'' ' (p. 83). 14. As Marvell no doubt knew, he was writing in the context (and against the grain) of a widespread European habit of regarding conventual homoeroticism as a sign of iniquity. See, for example, Erasmus's colloquy `The Girl with No Interest in Marriage' (Virgo o o) and Cle ment Marot's lively French translation, `La vierge mesprisant mariage'. For literary contextualizations of these men's opinions, see Graciella Daichman's Wayward Nuns and Lillian Faderman's Surpassing the Love of Men. Judith Brown's study of the sixteenth-century lesbian nun, Sister Benedetta Carlini, provides useful historical information on the topic. 15. Despite her numerous insights, Nardo exceeds textual evidence when she claims that Marvell shows cloistered life to be `a narcissist's paradise, where infantile fantasies of grandiosity can come true' (p. 125). Her reading derives from a psychoanalytic telos of personality `maturity' that informs virtually her entire study, and which she bases strictly on cross-gender paradigms of erotic desire (see, e.g., pp. 119, 130). 16. As Jonathan Goldberg observes, in the early modern period the meanings attached to sodomy always related to perceived disturbances of social alliances ± in particular, marriage (Sodometries, p. 19). Focusing on women's relationships, Traub similarly remarks that they were only considered to be oppositional when they were imagined to threaten reproduction within a conjugal union (`(In)signi®cance', p. 164).

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Notes 169

17. Marvell telescopes history by merging together the dates of Isabel's marriage (1518) and the convent's dissolution (1542). In its unreality, Marvell's mythic description of the dissolution (ll. 269±72) resembles most a Spenserian fairy-tale moment. Wilding remarks that this temporal collapsing represents `an anxious need to defend the land-grab' (p. 148), though I would argue for an additional dissident reading of this legitimation tactic. 18. Erickson points out that Lord Fairfax's entailment provoked considerable controversy within the family (p. 161). He also notes the `hard historical irony' that Mary and her husband George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham ± a `scheming dissolute philanderer, and the epitome of the Restoration rake' ± were miserable together, lost a great deal of money, and died childless (p. 163). 19. Crewe's point gains additional support from the narrator's later observation, made as he enters the surrounding meadow, that `now to the Abbyss I pass' (l. 369). Particularly if read aloud, this statement potentially embeds a homophonic association between `abyss' and `abbess' that helps to af®rm the similarities between the narrator and the of®cially demonized nuns.

Notes to Chapter 4: Rich Chains of Love 1. Salve Deus Rex Judñorum is a composite book made up of nine dedicatory poems, two dedicatory epistles, a long central verse meditation bearing the same name as the volume, a ®nal poem entitled `The Description of Cooke-ham' (the ®rst country-house poem published in England), and a brief prose coda. 2. See Arlene Stiebel for a discussion of Philips's homoeroticism. 3. Merry E. Wiesner's international and interdisciplinary survey of women and gender in early modern Europe discusses at length women's opportunities to achieve self-expression and to question prevailing norms. See especially her chapters on `Women and the Creation of Culture' (pp. 146±75), and `Gender and Power' (pp. 239±58). Hilda Smith's Reason's Disciples usefully complements Wiesner's work. 4. Lanyer provides dedicatory poems to Queen Anne; Princess Elizabeth; Lady Arbella Stuart; Lady Susan, Countess Dowager of Kent; Lady Mary, Countess of Pembroke; Lady Lucy, Countess of Bedford; Lady Margaret, Countess Dowager of Cumberland; Lady Katherine, Countess of Suffolk; and Lady Anne, Countess of Dorset. These dedications should not be construed as unproblematic assertions of the middle-class poet's comfort with a hereditary social hierarchy. As Ann Baynes Coiro shows, Lanyer numerous times questions the privileges and authority of a matriarchy that she, in part, resents (pp. 365, 369±73). Coiro overstates the case, though, when she claims that because of Lanyer's criticisms Salve Deus is a `subversive' (p. 372; cf. p. 369) `radical manifesto' (p. 370; cf. p. 365).

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170 Notes

5. Susanne Woods argues that through Salve Deus Lanyer attempted `to make a bid for restoration of her place, however peripheral, among the great' (p. xxvii). Woods's introduction to her edition of Salve Deus outlines fully what is known of Lanyer's life and the virtually unnoticed publication of her book (see especially pp. xxv±xxvii). See also Woods's account of Lanyer's understanding of her role as a public poet within the con®nes of a patronage system (`Vocation and Authority'). 6. Henricus Cornelius Agrippa's allusion to this biblical warrant for equality in the conclusion to his Declamation on the Nobility and Preeminence of the Female Sex (p. 96) highlights the importance of St Paul's promise to generations of defenders of women's rights. 7. On religion's special role in women's lives, see McGrath (p. 341), Mueller (`Feminist Poetics', pp. 222±3, 228), Roper (passim), Warnicke (140), and Woods (Introduction, p. xxxi). 8. If it is unclear from the context which of Lanyer's poems I am quoting, I parenthetically give before the line numbers either SD for `Salve Deus Rex Judñorum', CH for `The Description of Cooke-ham', or a shortened title, such as `To the Ladie Lucie'. 9. Minerva, the goddess of wisdom, is an apt guide for women who seek other women's love through contemplation, study, and art. In Jorge de Montemayor's romance La Diana, for instance, the temple of Minerva near the river Duerus is the site of a yearly celebration in which young `Shepherdesses' and `faire Nymphes' from the neighbourhood gather, free from men, `to celebrate the feast, and to make merry with one another' (p. 33). De Montemayor's depiction of the complicated relations between Selvagia and Ismenia, which involve `mutuall imbracings' and `loving speeches to one another', brings to the fore the homoeroticism of Minerva's shrine and festival. 10. In his continuation of Christopher Marlowe's epyllion Hero and Leander, George Chapman makes a similar distinction between the two goddesses (see IV. 315±44). I am indebted to Claude Summers for this observation. 11. Wiesner discusses at length the appeal of convents (as well as lessstructured religious communities and anchoritic conditions) for women during and after the Reformation and the Tridentine reforms (pp. 192±201; see also Roper passim). Because, as Wiesner points out, the relative openness to women's writings and political involvement during the early years of the Protestant Reformation contrasted with a rapid vanishing of opportunities to publish and speak (pp. 186±9), it is not surprising that Lanyer turned to Catholic-inspired imagery as a way to express women's solidarity and power. 12. The fact that Lanyer's father, Baptist Bassano, was a Venetian (Woods, `Introduction', p. xv) and her husband, Alfonso Lanyer, a Roman Catholic (Coiro, p. 362), might suggest Lanyer's awareness of, and interest in, Catholic devotion. Lanyer's portrayal of the Virgin Mary ± a ®gure who possesses particular resonance in Roman Catholicism ± in the polyvalent roles of mother, wife, daughter, subject, servant, and nurse (SD, ll. 1023, 1087) may also indicate a fascination with opportunities to use religion in

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Notes 171

13. 14.

15.

16. 17.

18.

19.

order to unsettle women's traditional, unitary identi®cations and desires. It is clear from `Salve Deus' that Mary's lack of `desire' for `any man' symbolized for Lanyer the coupling of perfect virtue with absolute freedom from male tyranny (see SD, ll. 107±78). On Lanyer's Christ as feminine, see McGrath (pp. 342±3) and Mueller (`Feminist Poetics', p. 222). Richard Rambuss explores a similar bifurcation in critical responses to the poetry of seventeenth-century men such as John Donne, Richard Crashaw, and George Herbert. My reading of Lanyer's work accords with Rambuss's contention that readers should not `turn away from regarding the body as always at least potentially sexualized, as a truly polysemous surface where various signi®cances and expressions ± including a variety of erotic ones ± compete and collude with each other in making the body meaningful' (p. 268). Although Michael C. Schoenfeldt reads all eroticism in Donne and Herbert as heteroerotic, he also contributes to an understanding of the ways in which these poets meld the erotic and the religious. Christ, of course, also appears in Salve Deus as a humanized `man' (e.g., the `good old man', l. 1347). I am not arguing for the exclusivity of Christ's femininity or women's homoerotic appreciation; Lanyer's spiritual homoeroticism is but one vital way for women to love God and other women. Lanyer's feminization of the ungendered biblical raven (Song 5: 11) also contributes to her portrayal of Christ. See, for example, `To the Ladie Susan' (l. 42), `To the Ladie Lucie' (passim), and `To the Ladie Anne' (ll. 118±20, 143). Though she does not note its erotic component, Mueller points to internalization as fundamental to Lanyer's religious devotion (`Feminist Poetics', p. 222). Achsah Guibbory's discussion of Donne's use of memory in The Anniversaries to `counter... the degenerative process of time' (see pp. 88±95) helps one to understand Lanyer's own use of memory as an important restorative and, paradoxically, future-orientated faculty. Margaret's taking of Lanyer's hand when she guides her to the tree may echo Mary Sidney's offer to take Diana's hand in `The Authors Dreame', a parallel that, by turning the poet into a Dianic ®gure herself, would similarly make her an eroticized protector of women.

Notes to Chapter 5: The Science of Possession 1. For notice of the manuscript appearance of `Mary', see the McDonald and Brown edition of Southwell's poetry (p. 143, n.14). McDonald and Brown note that the poem is `traditionally associated' with the Scottish queen; in his recent printing of the poem, Emrys Jones provides the `Mary' version of the text and identi®es the speaker as the beheaded monarch (p. 398, n.14). The encomiastic `cult' surrounding Queen Elizabeth I also invokes hagiology; for instance, in Walter Ralegh's poetic observation, `For knowing that I sue to serue / A Saint of such Perfection . . .' (`Sir Walter Ralegh to the Qveen', ll. 15±16).

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172 Notes

2. In a related but more literary use of ®gures from the early days of Christianity, Thomas Dekker and Philip Massinger's play The Virgin Martyr (1621±2) is a spirited allegory of early seventeenth-century religious antagonisms. The courageous martyrdom of Dorothea and the ability of her purity and steadfastness to convert several pagans, including the vile persecutor Theophilus ± he ultimately acknowledges her as `the holy Virgin Martyr' (V.i.146) ± strongly suggests the triumph of Protestantism over wicked and heathen Roman Catholicism. 3. Knott discusses the ways in which Bale shaped Askew's voice to conform to a paradigm of victorious Protestantism. The published record of Askew's tribulations helped to consolidate the martyr `role' and the importance of resistance under interrogation for later English reformers (see Knott, pp. 55±9). For more on Askew's importance to Protestant hagiology, see Elaine Beilin's introduction to The Examinations of Anne Askew (esp. pp. xxxiii±xlii). See also Boyd Berry's discussion of the gender politics of Askew's turbulent encounters with male authority. 4. Pseudo-Martyr was widely disseminated in its day. It was printed only once during Donne's lifetime, but survives in a remarkable eighty-two known copies (Raspa, pp. lv±lvi). Today, however, it is a sadly marginalized text, even in the ®eld of Donne studies. P. G. Stanwood, for instance, describes it as `unapprochable' (an honour he also confers on Biathanatos) and one of the `most tedious works of the English Renaissance' (pp. 44, 47). I hope that my discussion can help to erase such unwonted attitudes. 5. Richard Tuck (pp. 260±2) helpfully discusses the ways in which the furore over the Oath of Allegiance embroiled legislators, clergymen, and pamphleteers in a war over the very nature of the British monarchy. For an historical summary of the anti-Catholic penal laws and their relation to the Gunpowder Plot and the Oath controversy, see Lockyer (pp. 281±8). 6. The 1608 edition of Triplici Nodo appeared anonymously (though everyone knew who its author was), while the expanded 1609 version bore the king's name. Donne's theological de®nition of martyrdom is similarly conventional (see Pseudo-Martyr, p. 150). 7. David Jones addresses the relations between allegiance and the law of nature in his study of Sir Edward Coke's pronouncements on loyalty and their rami®cations through the century's various constitutional crises. 8. On a similar, albeit less Machiavellian understanding, Jonathan Goldberg takes Pseudo-Martyr as proof that Donne was wholly indebted to James as an originary font of wisdom, preferment, and even language: `A single metaphor ± the metaphor of the hand, sustaining, leading ± describes James's role in Donne's life and works, recreating him, giving him words to write' (James, p. 213). David Norbrook, too, contends that Pseudo-Martyr is clear evidence of Donne's `insatiable ambition' and strategic `¯attery and ingratiation in his attempts to gain royal favor' (p. 16). 9. My understanding of Donne's endeavour is related to Dennis Flynn's characterization of him as a `survivor'. For Flynn, the term replaces Carey's notion of apostasy and signi®es Donne's psychological response to the persecution of Roman Catholics (`Survivor', p. 17 and passim). While I

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Notes 173

10.

11.

12.

13.

agree with Flynn on several points, the texts I examine in this chapter show survival for Donne to have been both an interior and a political phenomenon. A few pages later in his study, Marotti brie¯y notes that Donne incorporated `certain subversive material' into Pseudo-Martyr and Ignatius His Conclave (p. 190). Instead of commenting on the presence of these critical elements in Pseudo-Martyr, however, Marotti addresses one of Donne's private letters on the Oath of Allegiance controversy (which I also discuss below) and then moves on to a page-long analysis of Ignatius (pp. 191±2). On James's self-identi®cation as the ancient Hebrew king, see Boehrer (p. 92) and Maurice Lee (pp. 146, 153), whose excellent recent biography is entitled Great Britain's Solomon. In his funeral sermon for the dead king, Donne movingly expounds on the associations between Solomon and James ± `an abridgement of that Solomon in the [biblical] Text' (Sermons, VI.290). Here too he includes a brief allusion to the political contentions of over ®fteen years earlier: `you cannot devest your allegiance to the Church, though you would; no more then you can to the State, to whom you cannot say, I will be no subject' (p. 283). See also William Tate's discussion of James's Solomonic self-image and the story of the Queen of Sheba's visit as it ®gured in a lost 1606 masque and Francis Bacon's New Atlantis. Tate notes that in a 1609 sermon on Sheba's journey, Richard Crakanthorpe cited the Oath of Allegiance as evidence of James's Solomonic wisdom (p. 569). King James's vision of himself as an absolute and godly monarch is clear in writings that appeared both before and after he assumed the English throne. See, for instance, his 1598 treatise The Trew Law of Free Monarchies (pp. 54±5, 64) which was intended to quell seditious opposition by Calvinist clerics and their supporters, as well as his ®rst speech to the English Parliament on 19 March 1603, and the one he made following the Gunpowder Plot's discovery in 1605. Stephen Greenblatt observes that James's self-presentation as husband, father, monarch, and deity was politically expedient because `No one who actually loved and feared God would allow himself to rebel against an anointed ruler' (Negotiations, p. 25). On Hooker's vision of ecclesiastical-political order and unity, see Helgerson (Nationhood, pp. 269±83) and Peter Lake (pp. 146±51). A more directly political and jural context is provided by, principally, Sir Edward Coke's reformulations of English law, changes that engendered the growth of a new emphasis on political participation for quali®ed male subjects; Norbrook refers to this as `civic humanism' (p. 5). While King James supported the tradition of rex est lex loquens, Coke and his followers upheld the common law and placed juridical power in the hands of a professional coterie of lawyers and judges trained in the `arti®cial reason' of legal administration. By ensuring that the king was as bound to history as were the people, Coke produced what Helgerson calls an `ideological weapon' that could be used to combat absolutist suzerainty (see Helgerson,

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174 Notes

Nationhood, pp. 84±5, 99±100). Coke's endeavours so disturbed James's sense of inviolable authority that, in 1616, after Coke had served for ten years as England's Chief Justice, he was sacked from the bench (the only judge the king ever dismissed). See Maurice Lee on the anxieties Coke sparked in James (pp. 87±9). See also Richard Tuck's comments on Coke's ideal of a `non-sceptical science' of law (p. 207). 14. While Strier initially associates Donne's advocacy of intellectual `promiscuity' in Pseudo-Martyr with the author's stance in `Satire III' (p. 122), he thereafter distances Pseudo-Martyr from any deep commitment to the `autonomy and autarchy of the individual' (p. 155), preferring instead Biathanatos as the `best guide to the satire'. I agree with Strier that PseudoMartyr is less forthright than Biathanatos in its arguments for the authority of the individual conscience; however, I believe that the two texts ± probably written within one or two years of each other ± are more similar than Strier suggests and that their differences are attributable more to conditions of reception than authorial transformation. Pseudo-Martyr is a published text intended, in large part, to engage the sympathies and patronage of the king, while Biathanatos is a more private document that, during Donne's lifetime at least, was only circulated in manuscript form amongst a circle of friendly readers. Patterson also recognizes a `libertarian' strain connecting Biathanatos and Pseudo-Martyr (`Kingsman', pp. 255±62). 15. Early on in the Reformation, Thomas Starkey had advocated a similar spiritual and temporal distinction. Starkey writes that people should `in amite and mekenes euer be obedient to all such thinges as shall be thought by our polytyke hede to the common quietnes conuenient'; in religious matters, however, Starkey hopes that, despite any doctrinal differences, all Christians `shall of our spirituall hede onely loke for our felycitie', thus making themselves `as membres of one body coupled to gether [sic] with the heuenly knotte of charytie' (87r [i.e., 89r ]). Starkey's approach to the nature and function of saints is similarly ¯exible and tolerant (see sig. 76v [i.e., 78v ]). 16. The king's arguments seem to have hit a nerve with English Catholics who, Maurice Lee notes, became `decidedly depoliticized' during the Jacobean period (pp. 175±7). Rather ironically, before James became king of England he had experienced heated con¯icts with Scottish Calvinists who believed in the separation of church and state (Lee, p. 66). In addition, from at least the 1604 Hampton Court conference onwards, James made a similar distinction between the `quiet, ``doctrinal'' variety and the politically minded' Puritans (Lee, p. 113). An indication of the perceived danger of separating the king's secular and sacred authority appears in a little volume published two years after Pseudo-Martyr. In his rather panicky tract, Eclogarivus, John Panke, a Protestant divine from Salisbury, urges that just because the current controversy concerns the Oath of Allegiance, `his Maiesties supremacie in spirituall matters should neither lie forgotte[n], as though it were not, nor be mistaken through ignorance by those who vnderstand it not' (p. 3).

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Notes 175

17. By invoking the heart as the seat of allegiance or rebellion, James drew upon imagery that Parliament had put forth in the Oath itself (see Kenyon, pp. 458±60). 18. It was out of a similar, frank admission that men and women can and do break their word that Thomas Hobbes concluded that oaths were only effective control mechanisms if oath takers feared supernatural or juridical punishment (Leviathan, p. 200). 19. In his discussion of King James's writings on private conscience and public duty, Kevin Sharpe points out that the Oath's separation between inward belief and political allegiance re¯ects the king's pragmatic approach to maintaining public peace. In many other texts, Sharpe observes, James advances the union of religious and civic commitment and the intersection of the king's beliefs and those of his subjects; see Sharpe's `Private Conscience and Public Duty in the Writings of James VI and I' (passim). In Pseudo-Martyr, Donne does quietly note that both the church and the state are best governed (as they are in England) by the same person (p. 143). 20. In Pseudo-Martyr's `An Advertisement to the Reader' Donne defends himself against rumoured charges of criticizing Catholic martyrs because he overvalues life and material comforts. He grounds the morality of his convictions upon familial history: `I have been ever kept awake in a meditation of Martyrdome, by being derived from such a stocke and race, as, I beleeve, no family hath endured and suffered more in their persons and fortunes, for obeying the Teachers of Romane Doctrine, then it hath done' (p. 8). 21. Donne clari®ed his thoughts on the self-preservation aspect of allegiance fourteen years later in the Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions: `this contribution of assistance of all to the Soveraigne, of all parts to the Heart, is from the very ®rst dictates of Nature; which is in the ®rst place, to have care of our owne Preservation, to looke ®rst to our selves' (11 Meditation, p. 57). Donne's belief that safeguarding civil peace should motivate political allegiance found a blunter echo forty years later in Hobbes's modi®ed natural law tenet that the `end of Obedience is Protection' (Leviathan, p. 27). 22. Donne earlier addressed the denial of one's desires as a type of martyrdom in his Easter sermon preached at St Paul's in 1627 (Sermons, VI.391). 23. Earlier on, Donne employs a related bestial metaphor when he calls the pope's `unjust usurpation' of minds a `Weasell, which crept in at a little hole, and since is growne so full and pamperd, that men will rather die, then beleeve that he got in at so little an entrance' (p. 23). On the absurdity of blind Roman obedience, see especially pp. 134±7. 24. David Jones also notes the intimate connection between political allegiance, the conscience, and casuistry in seventeenth-century England (pp. 322, 322 n.4). See also Keith Thomas's account of the conscience and casuistical debate, especially his comments on religious and political allegiance (pp. 42±6). 25. In Pseudo-Martyr the image of `wheeles' signi®es the construction and ordering of human morality and ideology (see pp. 144, 251).

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176 Notes

26. Donne here echoes Christ's instructions (which he had quoted two paragraphs earlier [p. 151]) to his followers not to `suffer as a busie body in other mens matters' but only as a Christian (1 Pet. 4: 15±16). 27. Scholars have noted several veiled references in `The Canonization' that place its composition in the early years of James's reign (see Marotti, pp. 157, 160±1, 165). In my discussion of the poem, I will tack back and forth between referring to Donne and an anonymous speaker; this rhetorical strategy is intended to convey my sense of Donne's personal, though not transparently biographical, investment in the issues this text raises. 28. The politics of canonization as Donne represents it in his poem accords with Catherine Martin's general point that Donne's love poems often `enlarge the private sphere of human relations in order to critique hegemonic ®ctions of social order and privilege' (pp. 99, 87). 29. George Williams notes the importance of Crashaw's early Latin epigrams for setting out the concerns and images of his later poetry (pp. 258±9). While I identify these epigrams by their Latin titles, I quote from Williams's English translations; his edition of Crashaw's poems provides a facing-page bilingual text. 30. Perhaps the fact that Donne rather oddly avoided any attack in PseudoMartyr on St Teresa ± an important Counter-Reformation apologist and icon ± gave added impetus to Crashaw's meditations. 31. Cf. Crashaw's similar Latin epigram, `In cicatrices quas Christus habet in se adhuc superstites' (p. 401). 32. Crashaw's three poems clearly addressing Teresa's spiritual signi®cance are: `A Hymn to the Name and Honor of the Admirable Sainte Teresa' (1646), `An Apologie: For the Fore-going Hymne' (1646), and `The Flaming Heart' (1648, rev. edn. 1652); Williams also associates the sixteen-line `Song of Divine Love' with the Teresa group; it follows them in the 1648 and 1652 editions (p. 52). Sabine notes that Crashaw based the title for his third poem on Sir Toby Mathew's 1642 English translation of Saint Teresa's Vida, The Flaming Hart or the Life of the Glorious S. Teresa (p. 225). 33. In his edition of the poems, Williams reproduces two of the conventional images of St Teresa that would have been familiar to Crashaw and his readers (see pp. 53, 61). 34. Crashaw's sensitivity to the importance of imagery in religious experience would have been heightened by his experience of the Laudian refurbishment of Peterhouse and its 1643 destruction by Cromwell's Parliamentary Commissioners. Sabine comments on the effects of these events on Crashaw's devotion to the Virgin Mary (pp. 199±202). 35. Earlier in his writing career Crashaw had ruminated on a similar paradox by which the soldier and his weapons which hurt Jesus's body at the cruci®xion were, in fact, `Love' (i.e., Christ) himself (cf. `In cicatrices Domini adhuc superstites'). In this same collection of sacred epigrams Crashaw also criticizes a `Painter' who foolishly depicts `unadorned love [i.e., Christ] merely by showing him without a garment' (`Mat. 9', 1). 36. Corinne Blackmer regards Crashaw as possessing a `protolesbian-identi®ed temperament' and, not unlike Rambuss, similarly places Crashaw at the

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Notes 177

37.

38. 39.

40.

41.

42.

43.

®rst in a `long line of queer devotees con amore at the shrine of Santa Teresa', the ®gure Blackmer calls a `stellar diva [a] larger-than-life operatic heroine' (p. 310). We again ®nd in his sacred epigrams a pre®guration of this attitude towards the paradoxical power and barely subdued eroticism of animate wounds: Christ's `foot has its own mouths, to give your kisses back: / This clearly is the eye by which it returns your tears' (`In vulnera pendentis Domini', ll. 7±8). Sabine adds that this BCP echo underscores Crashaw's conviction that Christ speaks impartially to all people (p. 231). This pamphlet, which appeared about three months after Leslie's sermon, quotes verbatim a number of the Bishop's expressions and reiterates the parallels between the passions of Christ and Charles. This imitative aspect is a hallmark of polemicists on both sides of the issue and attests to the rapid discursive regularization which characterized the debate. This engraving of King Charles has been supplied courtesy of McGill University Libraries, Rare Books and Special Collections Division. Like most other Royalist endorsements of Charles, The Subjects Sorrow appeared anonymously. In his copy (TT E546 [16]), the seventeenth-century bibliophile George Thomason added a MS note attributing authorship to Dr Juxon, Bishop of London (the priest who attended the king on the scaffold at Westminster). To Thomason's copy has been added another MS note, `for R. Royston', indicating that this work was printed for the same publisher as the earliest editions (original and reprints) of the more famous Eikon Basilike (more on this text below). On Richard Royston and his involvement with the `King's Book' and other Royalist texts, see Francis Madan (pp. 164±7). The authorship controversy preoccupied many seventeenth-century minds; even now it has not been de®nitively settled. For an overview of the controversy and a likely explanation of Eikon Basilike's co-creation by both the king and Dr Gauden, see Philip Knachel's introduction to the text (esp. pp. xxiv±xxxii) which largely draws upon Madan's bibliographical research and suppositions concerning the book's authorship (pp. 126±63). For some of the other references in Eikon Basilike to Charles as martyr, see pp. 163, 179, and 194. Knott observes Charles's appropriation of Foxian hagiological discourse, pointing out as well that this required an inversionary recasting of roles, whereby the `established' Church and its leader became the victims in the drama of persecution and martyrdom (pp. 161±62). Knott provides a lucid commentary on Milton's attitude towards martyrdom, not just in Eikonoklastes but also in many other works including Of Reformation in England, the antiprelatical tracts, Areopagitica, `On the Late Massacre in Piemont', Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes (pp. 151±78). Knott ®nds that Milton extols the virtue of a de®ant defence of God's truth far more than he does meek suffering at the hands of unholy persecutors.

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178 Notes

44. Along lines similar to those taken by Grossman, Helgerson, and Zwicker, Nancy Maguire discusses the Royalist inscription of the regicide as a `tragedy', a generic identi®cation which `chang[ed] political defeat into theatrical (and ultimately political) success' (p. 11); see also Derek Hirst on the execution's spectacular dramatizing, and Patricia Fumerton's comparison between Caroline masques and Charles's scaffold performance (pp. 3±10, 13±18). Laura McKnight discusses Milton's exposure of the real Charles beneath a ®ctional mask (pp. 150±1) and Lois Potter illuminates Milton's endeavour to `take Charles out of mythology and into history' (p. 182). Milton seized on the Royalists' aestheticization of martyrdom, Zwicker contends, in order to situate Eikon Basilike in `the realms of fancy and ®ction' and thereby undermine its claims for moral legitimacy (Lines of Anthority, p. 51). 45. J. Sears McGee discusses the political rami®cations of Anglican and Puritan understandings of the conscience and `inward peace' as expressed during the time of the Civil War and the Interregnum (pp. 114±70). 46. Milton claims further that, properly exercised, the king's conscience ought to have instructed him to `be subject to Parliament, both his natural and his legal superior' (p. 502). 47. This engraved frontispiece appears by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library. Another pictorial representation of Donne in his shroud (from the chest up) prefaced the 1632 edition of his last sermon, Deaths Duell. Throughout this discussion, my knowledge of the publication history and material details of Donne's works is indebted to Geoffrey Keynes's A Bibliography of Dr John Donne. 48. This engraved frontispiece appears by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library. 49. Walton's biographical reconstruction of Donne's life has received excellent attention by David Novarr and, most recently, Kevin Pask, whose work elucidates as well the changing fortunes of Donne's poetical reputation as, ®rst, sage priest (Walton's version) and, later, libertine rake (see pp. 113±40).

Notes to the Afterword: Saints and Sinners 1. Known at the time of its publication in 1650 as two separate books ± Human Nature and De Corpore Politico ± the Elements is considered by its recent editor, J. C. A. Gaskin, to epitomize the central tenets of Hobbes's philosophy (p. xiii). 2. In addition to homosexual interaction, copulations `against the law of nature' may refer to polygamy and bestiality. The view that, in the Elements, Hobbes primarily has same-gender relations in mind is reinforced by his posthumous work, A Dialogue between a Philosopher and a Student, of the Common Laws of England (1681), in which he exhibits a rare harmony with the jurist Sir Edward Coke. Discussing the felonies of sodomy and rape in the `Crimes Capital' section of the work, the `philosopher' (a `composite of Bacon and Hobbes' [Cropsey, p. 15]) asserts

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Notes 179

3.

4.

5. 6.

that sodomy is `detestable, being in a manner an Apostacie from Humane Nature' (p. 120). Gregory Kavka sheds light on this division when he explains that in Hobbes's moral schema individuals who exist outside of civil society or who ®nd themselves in a situation in which `public standards' have not been established, freely employ a `second-order rule' that derives from and legitimates their own desires (pp. 294±5; also pp. 338±57). Meanwhile, in Hobbes's contingent formulation of natural and civil law and reason, a subjective standard of virtue triumphs over individuals' rights to use their bodies as they please. Earlier in the Elements, Hobbes articulates an understanding of sensuality that potentially naturalizes male±male sexual interaction by envisioning a continuum of pleasure. One of the two `sorts' of pleasure, `sensual' enjoyment involves the `corporeal organ of sense'; its `greatest' expressions are through `continuance' of the species and self-preservation through eating meat (p. 45). Yet, if the satisfaction Socrates derives from physical relations with young men is also, according to Hobbes, `sensual', then we must consider it to be as natural (though in Hobbes's terms less `great') an expression of pleasure as heterosexual relations. See Kavka on tradition's role in a Hobbesian establishment of social standards (p. 294). Although overwhelmingly passed by the House of Commons, the Age of Consent legislation ± which would have brought Britain's age of consent for homosexual acts in line with European standards ± was defeated in 1998 and 1999. For more on this issue, visit the excellent Stonewall website at <www.stonewall.org.uk>.

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180 Notes

Adamson, J. S. A., `Chivalry and Political Culture in Caroline England', Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England, ed. Kevin Sharpe and Peter Lake (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), pp. 161±97, 349±57. Agrippa, Henricus Cornelius, Declamation on the Nobility and Preeminence of the Female Sex, trans. and ed. Albert Rabil, Jr (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). Alan of Lille, The Plaint of Nature, trans. James J. Sheridan (Toronto: Ponti®cal Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1980). Alciatus, Andreas, Andreas Alciatus, vol. 1: The Latin Emblems, Indexes and Lists, ed. Peter M. Daly (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985). ÐÐ, Emblemata (Padua, 1623). Alighieri, Dante, De vulgari eloquentia, trans. Sally Purcell (Manchester: Carcanet, 1981). Allen, Don Cameron, Image and Meaning: Metaphoric Traditions in Renaissance Poetry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1960). Alvarez, A., `Introduction', The Complete Poems by Andrew Marvell, ed. George deF. Lord (New York: Knopf±Everyman, 1993), pp. ix±xxiii. Anon., The Wisdom of Doctor Dodypoll (1600), facsimile rpt. 1912, Tudor Facsimile Texts (New York: AMS Press, 1970). Approaches to Teaching the Metaphysical Poets, ed. Sidney Gottlieb (New York: MLA, 1990). Arditi, Jorge, A Genealogy of Manners: Transformations of Social Relations in France and England from the Fourteenth to the Eighteenth Century (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998). Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics in Aristotle: Selected Works, 2nd edn, trans. Hippocrates G. Apostle and Lloyd P. Gerson (Grinnell, IA: Peripatetic Press, 1986) pp. 415±543. ÐÐ, On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse, trans. George A. Kennedy (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). Askew, Anne, The Examinations of Anne Askew, ed. Elaine V. Beilin (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). Aubrey, John, Aubrey's Brief Lives, ed. Oliver Lawson Dick (London: Secker and Warburg, 1949). Augustine, Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-Cof®n (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961). Austin, Frances, The Language of the Metaphysical Poets (New York: St Martin's, 1992). Bacon, Francis, A Selection of His Works, ed. Sidney Warhaft (New York: Macmillan, 1985). Bald, R. C., John Donne: A Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970). Baldwin, William, A Treatise of Morall Philosophie Containing the Sayings of the Wise (London: Thomas Este, 1605). 181

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198 Bibliography

Illustrations are indicated in bold. Page references for notes are indicated in italics. Adamson, J. S. A., 165, 166 Age of Consent, 154, 155, 180 Alciatus, Andreas, 10, 11 Alvarez, A., 73 Andrewes, Lancelot, 7, 30 Aristotle, 4, 34 Askew, Anne, 111±12, 173 Bacon, Francis, 20 Baldwin, William, 115 Bale, John, 111±12, 173 Bede, 109 Bedford, R. D., 47, 164 Beilin, Elaine, 103, 173 Bellarmine, Robert, 113 Blackwell, George, 118 Bray, Alan, 69±70, 167 Bristol, Michael, 47, 52, 144 Brooten, Bernadette, 10, 90±1, 158 Brown, Meg Lota, 121, 123 Brown, Robert, 136, 178 Bullokar, John, 20 Burke, Peter, 110 Butler, John, 163, 167 Bynum, Caroline Walker, 98 Carey, John, 46, 113, 114, 125, 161 Castiglione, Baldassare, 16 casuistry, 121, 123 Cawdrey, Robert, 20 Charles I, King, 6, 52, 53, 76, 106, 137, 164, 167 Eikon Basilike, 135, 136, 138, 139±40, 142, 147, 178, 179 martyrdom of, 6, 106±7, 135±43, 137, 147 Cherbury, Lord, see Herbert, Sir Edward

Chirbury, Lord, see Herbert, Sir Edward chivalry, 51, 53±8, 164, 165 Cicero, 9, 47 Clifford, Anne, 101, 102 Cockeram, Henry, 21, 109, 130 Coke, Sir Edward, 173, 174±5, 179 Common Notions, 47, 164 conscience, 4, 17, 143±4, 176, 179 and King Charles's martyrdom, 140±3 Donne on, 115±16, 117, 119, 120±1, 122, 124 liberty of, 6, 53, 107±8, 113, 115±16, 117, 120±1, 122, 130 see also Herbert, Edward, and freedom Cousins, A. D., 81, 87 Cowley, Abraham, 7, 20 Crashaw, Richard, 1, 6, 97, 107, 108, 109, 152, 172, 177 and anti-sectarianism, 129, 133±4 `Apologie', 133, 177 and Donne, 129 `In felices Martyres', 128 and feminine spirituality, 129, 131 `The Flaming Heart', 131±4, 177 `A Hymn to the Name and Honor', 130±1, 177 and interpretation, 129±30, 131±4 and liberty of conscience and desire, 130, 134 `On the still surviving markes', 129 suffering and exile of, 128, 134 and unconventional gender/ sexuality, 129, 131±4 `In vulnera pendentis Domini', 178 Crewe, Jonathan, 75, 84, 170

199

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Index

cultural theory, 36±8 custom and desire, 34±43 passim Donne on, 14±15, 121 Montaigne on, 15±18 and morality, 34±43 passim and nature, 9±18, 35±6 Deism and Edward Herbert, 45, 65, 163 desire and custom, 34±43 passim and denaturalization, 4±5, 6, 18 and dissidence, 18, 35, 38±43, 79±82, 85, 97±8, 154, 163 and identity, 39±43 and morality, 34±43 passim Diana/Phoebe/Cynthia (goddess), 95, 96, 102, 172 Diana, Princess, 151±2 dissidence, 36±8, 90, 144, 162±3 and chivalry, 52±5 and dangers of poetry, 22±5, 160 and desire, 18, 38±43, 79±82, 85, 97±8, 154, 163 inward, 3±4, 121±2 and Protestantism, 36±7, 92 Dollimore, Jonathan, 3, 40, 72, 121, 159 Donne, John, 1, 5, 8, 89, 92, 107, 108, 109, 112±28, 139±40, 141, 145, 146, 152, 161 Anniversaries, 32±4, 123, 127, 129 Biathanatos, 66, 114, 159, 173, 175 `The Canonization', 117, 124±8, 131, 177 canonization of, 144±8 and Crashaw, 129 on custom, 15, 120±1, 159 Deaths Duell, 115 Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, 144±5, 147, 176 and Dryden, 25 and Edward Herbert, 45, 58±9, 61, 66±8 `An Elegy upon the Death of Mistress Boulstred', 167

Essays in Divinity, 121 `The Extasie', 61, 66 `Holy Sonnet 19', 17 and King James, 113±14, 120, 122, 142, 159, 173, 174 letter from France (1612), 33±4 letters from prison (1601), 123 letters to Sir Henry Goodyer, 15, 108, 116, 159 on liberty of conscience, 115±16, 117, 119, 120±1, 122, 124, 142 `Paradox IV', 14±15, 20±1, 108 Poems (1635), 145±6, 147 Pseudo-Martyr, 112±22, 125, 126, 135, 139, 143, 173±4, 175, 176, 177 `The Relique', 123±4 `Sapho to Philñnis', 69, 71±2, 95 `Satire III', 31, 117, 175 Sermons: 29 February 1628, 119±20; Easter 1627, 176; King James's funeral, 174 `To Sir Edward Herbert', 58±9, 166 `The Sunne Rising', 122±3 `A Valediction of my name', 25 Drummond, William, 24±5, 32±3, 45 Dryden, John, 8, 25 duelling, 54±5, 165, 166 Eliot, T. S., 28, 30, 161 Elizabeth I, Queen, 172 Empson, William, 162, 168 on Donne, 31±3 on Marvell, 73 Erasmus, Desiderius, 169 Adages, 10 De pueris, 35 Erickson, Lee, 82, 83, 170 Estrin, Barbara, 75, 81, 85 Fairfax, Mary, 83, 86±8, 169, 170 Fairfax, Thomas, 79, 82, 169, 170 Foxe, John, 111, 115, 138 Florio, John, 2, 21, 160 Flynn, Dennis, 147, 173 Foucault, Michel, 37, 162 Fumerton, Patricia, 57, 179

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200 Index

Gardner, Helen, 7, 24, 157, 162 Gauden, John, 138, 178 gay and lesbian studies, see homoeroticism Gilman, Ernest, 29 Goldberg, Jonathan, 161, 168, 169, 173 Gosson, Stephen, 3, 22 Greenblatt, Stephen, 45, 174 Grierson, Sir Herbert, 7, 8 habit, see custom hagiology, 6, 106±48 passim, 149±52, 172±9 passim Protestant, 111±12, 115, 117, 138, 173, 178 Roman Catholic, 110±11, 117, 150±1 twentieth-century, 149±52 Hall, Joseph, 33 Hall, Kim, 62, 167 Hammond, Paul, 76, 77, 168 Haskin, Dayton, 28, 162 Helgerson, Richard, 7, 139, 157, 159, 174 Herbert, Sir Edward, 1, 5, 44±68, 55, 121, 128, 163±7 `Another Sonnet to Black it self', 63±4 Autobiography, 34±5, 37, 50±8 and blackness, 62±4, 167 and chivalry, 51±8, 65, 164, 165, 166 and death, 64±5 and Deism, 45, 65, 163 and duelling, 44, 54±5, 165, 166 `Elegy for Doctor Dunn', 66±8 `Elegy for the Prince', 45 `Elegy over a Tomb', 64±5 and freedom, 52±8, 60, 164 and George Herbert, 5, 45, 157, 167 `To her Eyes', 62 `To her Hair', 62, 65 `To his Mistress for her true Picture', 65

and John Donne, 45, 58±9, 61,

66±8, 163, 167

letter to King James, 54

`To Mrs Diana Cecyll', 62

`Ode upon a Question moved', 61 Oliver's portrait of, 55±7 on perception and truth, 47±50 De Religione Gentilium, 47, 57, 64, 163, 164, 166 `Sonnet of Black Beauty', 63 `The State-progress of Ill', 59±61, 166 De Veritate, 46±50, 52, 53, 54, 57, 64, 65, 163, 164 Herbert, George, 7, 8, 158, 172 Herz, Judith, 19, 125 Hilliard, Nicholas, 57, 146 Hobbes, Thomas, 36, 153±4, 162, 180 A Dialogue, 179±80 Elements of Law, 153±4, 179, 180 Leviathan, 18, 41±2, 153, 176 Holinshed, Raphael, 110 Holstun, James, 71, 79 homoeroticism and Crashaw, 132±3, 177±8 and Donne, 71±2, 168 female, 5, 10, 69±88 passim, 89±105 passim, 157, 168, 169, 171, 177±8 and Hobbes, 153±4, 179±80 and Lanyer, 89±105 passim, 170±2 male, 72±8, 158 and Marvell: female, 72, 78±88 passim, 169; male, 72±8, 168 and Montaigne, 77, 92, 105 and religion, 5±6, 78±83, 92±3, 97±101, 103, 132 study of, 9, 69±70, 154±5, 158, 167±8, 169 see also sexual deviance Hunt, John Dixon, 78, 83, 91, 169 Invita Minerva, 10 James VI and I, King, 52, 174, and Oath of Allegiance, 112, 115±16, 117±19, 173±176 as King Solomon, 114±15, 174 and liberty of conscience, 115, 118 Triplici Nodo, 113, 115, 117±18 see also Donne and King James

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Index 201

James, Mervyn, 37, 165 John Paul II, Pope, 150 Johnson, Samuel, 8, 20, 159±60, 161, 164 on Metaphysical literature, 26±8, 159±60

on Shakespeare, 28, 161

Jonson, Ben, 158 on Donne, 32±3 on Edward Herbert, 45 `To Penshurst', 12 Jordan, Mark, 109±10, 158, 163 Knott, John, 111, 115, 173, 178 Knox, John, 13, 158±9 Lanyer, Aemilia, 1, 5±6, 70, 88, 89±105 `To all vertuous Ladies', 95 `The Authors Dreame', 94±5, 96, 104, 172 use of Classical imagery, 94±6, 102 `The Description of Cooke±ham', 101±4, 172 `To the doubtfull Reader', 96 and gender inequality, 90, 93±4, 97, 101, 104±5 use of Christian imagery, 92±3, 97±101, 103 Salve Deus Rex Judñorum, 89±105, 170±2 and social hierarchy, 89±90, 91, 92, 102, 103, 104, 170 Lee, Sir Sidney, 53, 66, 163, 164, 165 lesbian, see homoeroticism, female Leslie, Henry, 135 Lewalski, Barbara, 87, 89, 90, 92, 102, 103, 157 Lodge, Thomas, 13±14  37, 162 Machiavelli, Niccolo, Mackenzie, Donald, 157, 161 Marlowe, Christopher, 70, 171 Marotti, Arthur, 15, 59, 66, 107, 113±14, 124, 159, 167, 174, 177 Marshall, William, 147 martyrdom, see hagiology

Marvell, Andrew, 1, 5, 69±88, 89, 91, 92, 97, 153 and autoeroticism, 74, 84 `Damon the Mower', 43 `The De®nition of Love', 77±8 `The Fair Singer', 40 and the Fairfax dynasty, 78, 79, 82±3, 86, 87 and female homoeroticism, 72, 78±88, 169 `The Garden', 74±5 `To his Coy Mistress', 155 and male homoeroticism, 72±8 `The unfortunate Lover', 75±6 Upon Appleton House, 69, 78±88, 169 sexuality of, 73, 76, 77, 168 Mary, Queen of Scots, 110±11, 172 Maus, Katharine, 3, 121±2 McCartney, Linda, 150, 151 McCoy, Richard, 51, 53±4 McGrath, Lynette, 89, 93, 95±6, 98, 99, 172 Metaphysical denaturalization and estrangement, 2, 4 history of the term, 19, 20±2, 159±60 Metaphysical literature authors and texts, 1, 6±9, 157 conventional modern understanding of, 1, 8, 28±30, 160, 161, 162 early modern reception of, 24±28, 160, 161, 164

secular orientation, 7±8

unconventional modern

understanding of, 31±2 unnaturalness of, 2, 24±8 Michelangelo, 8, 158 Milton, John Eikonoklastes, 131, 138±9, 141±3 Paradise Lost, 24, 38±9, 141 Minerva, 94, 95, 171 Montaigne, Michel de, 2, 6, 15±18, 41, 46, 49, 77, 92, 94, 105 More, Ann, 114, 123 More, Sir Thomas, 13, 119

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202 Index

Mother Teresa, 150 Mueller, Janel, 71, 89, 172 Nashe, Thomas, 35, 162 Natural Law, 9±10, 153, 158, 159, 176 nature and custom, 9±18, 35±6 and desire, 10 Donne on, 14±15 and gender, 13±14 as God's law, 12 and identity, 37 as ideological construct, 2, 37, 109, 149 Montaigne on, 15±18 and morality, 34, 40±1 and sexuality, 10 naturalness, see nature non-dramatic literature, 3 Norbrook, David, 173, 174 Northbrooke, John, 35±6 Oath of Allegiance, 6, 112±13, 115±16, 117±19, 122, 173, 174, 175, 176 Oliver, Isaac, 55±7, 146, 165±6 oppositionality, 38; see also dissidence Ovid, 13 ovide moralise , 158 Parrish, Paul, 130, 133 Parsons, Robert, 113, 115, 118±19 Patterson, Annabel, 76, 107, 114, 161, 175 Philips, Katherine, 89, 170 Pius V, Pope, 112±3 Plato, 22, 72 poetry dangers of, 22±5, 160 and persuasion, 29, 30±1 Pope, Alexander, 26, 27 Protestantism and hagiology, 111±12, 115, 117, 138, 173, 178 and secular morality, 36±7 and dissidence, 36±7, 92 Puttenham, George, 23, 30±1

Ralegh, Sir Walter, 41, 172 Rambuss, Richard, 132, 158, 172 Raspa, Anthony, 116, 122 Richards, Jeffrey, 10, 158 Rossi, Mario, 164, 165 Royston, Richard, 147, 178 Russell, Margaret, 100, 101, 102±4, 172 Sabine, Maureen, 129, 134, 177, 178 Sackville-West, Vita, 73, 75 sacred and secular, 6±7, 36, 157 St Alban, 109 St Augustine, 39±41, 163 St Clare, 151 St George, 150 St John of the Cross, 64, 167 St Paul, 10, 92, 133, 158, 171 St Pelagius, 109±10 Â vila, 6, 128±34, 177±8 St Teresa of A sainthood, see hagiology Sappho, 70±1 sexual deviance, 5, 10±11, 69, 77±8, 79±82, 83, 85±6, 90±2, 93, 152±5, 158, 168, 169, 179±80 Shakespeare, William, 139, 149±50, 161 Dr Johnson on, 28 As You Like It, 13 Macbeth, 22 Othello, 29 Richard III, 40, 139 Sonnets, 76 Sharpe, Kevin, 162, 176 Sheba, Queen of, 93, 114, 115 Shepherd, Simon, 5 Shuger, Debora, 7, 157 Sidney, Mary, 94, 95, 96, 104, 172 Sidney, Sir Philip, 166 Apology for Poetry, 22, 23, 25, 160 Astrophel and Stella, 41, 62, 101 Simons, Patricia, 96 Sin®eld, Alan, 22, 36±7, 90, 117, 162 Smith, A. J., 29±30, 161, 162 Smith, Bruce, 10, 69±70, 168, 169 sodomy, see sexual deviance Solomon, King, 93, 114, 174 Southwell, Robert, 110±11, 172

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Index 203

Spenser, Edmund Shepheardes Calender, 22 Faerie Queene, 23±4, 163 Stone, Lawrence, 54, 164 Strier, Richard, 31, 117, 158, 162, 175 Strong, Sir Roy, 57, 166 tradition, see custom Traherne, Thomas, 7, 17, 159 Traub, Valerie, 70, 91±2, 96, 101, 168, 169 Tuve, Rosemond, 31±2, 33, 162 Vaughan, Henry, 7 Viret, Pierre, 12

Waller, Gary, 161, 162 Walpole, Horace, 44, 55, 57, 163, 165 Walton, Izaak, 30, 147, 179 White, R. S., 9±10, 153, 159 Wilding, Michael, 81, 85, 86, 170 Williams, George, 128, 134, 177 Williams, Raymond, 36, 37, 108, 158 Wilson, Thomas, 12, 29 Wisdom of Doctor Dodypoll, The, 21 Woods, Susanne, 99, 100, 171 Wrightson, Keith, 90 Yachnin, Paul, 3, 157 Zwicker, Steven, 81, 85, 136, 140, 179

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204 Index